William Dalrymple (historian)
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[edit] Life
William Dalrymple (b. 1965 in Scotland) is a historian, travel writer and journalist. His interests include Asia, India, the Middle East, Mughal rule as well as the world of Islam and early eastern Christianity. All of his six books have won prizes. His first three books were travel books based on his travels in the Middle East, India and Central Asia. Dalrymple has also published a book of essays about South Asia, and two books about the interaction between the British and the Mughals between the eighteenth and mid nineteenth century. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The New Yorker.
Dalrymple was born William Hamilton-Dalrymple, the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple Bt., and was educated at Ampleforth College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was first a history exhibitioner then senior history scholar. Dalrymple is married to the artist Olivia Fraser and has three children. He is a fellow of many literary societies, and he has been involved in the making of three television series and a prize-winning radio history.
Dalrymple spends most of the year in New Delhi, India, but moves back to London and Edinburgh during the summer.
[edit] Books
[edit] In Xanadu
Dalrymple's first book, In Xanadu (1989), was the result of his journey from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the site of Shangdu, famed as Xanadu in English literature, in Outer Mongolia. This was an account of Dalrymple's journey from London to Shangdu following the route of Marco Polo. The book, which was written when the author was 22, received good press reviews, was a major bestseller and won several awards. Patrick Leigh Fermor chose In Xanadu as his Book of the Year in The Spectator.
[edit] City of Djinns
Dalrymple's second book City of Djinns followed in 1994. The book was the result of a six-year stay in Delhi. Dalrymple examined the traumatic events of the Partition of India, the 1984 riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the world of the first British inhabitants of the city who "went native", the Mughals, the Tughluks, and ending with ancient Hindu origins of the city as described in the Mahabharata. The book followed his established style of historical digressions, tied in with contemporary events and a multitude of anecdotes:
[edit] From the Holy Mountain
Dalrymple's third book From the Holy Mountain (1997) saw him attempt to trace the ties of Eastern Orthodox congregations scattered in the Middle East to their ancient origins; it also deals with the question of how they have fared over centuries of Islamic rule and the complex relationship of Islam and Christianity in the Middle East.
[edit] The Age of Kali
Dalrymple's fourth book, The Age of Kali (1998), saw him return to the subject of India. The book is a collection of essays collected through almost a decade of travel around the Sub-Continent. It deals with many controversial subjects such as Sati, the caste wars in India, political corruption and terrorism. It was released in India renamed as At the Court of the Fish-Eyed Goddess (ISBN: 8172233329). The fish eyed goddess being the literal translation of the Goddess Meenakshi of Madurai.
The book starts with the author's meetings with Benazir Bhutto when she was Prime Minister of Pakistan, and cricketer Imran Khan (former Captain of the Pakistani cricket team) when he was standing for elections in Pakistan. He then comes to Rajasthan to cover a rape case, and investigates the Roop Kanwar sati case. He covers the state of Bihar, cities of Lucknow, Madurai, and Hyderabad among others. In each place he describes the various changes that these places have undergone since independence and the also the cultural heritage being retained by the people since ancient times.He covers Sri Lanka just as the IPKF is pulling out of the country. Lastly he covers Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean which is an overseas département of France.
[edit] White Mughals
Dalrymple's fifth major book White Mughals (2002) is a work of social history about the warm relations that existed between the British and some Indians, usually women, in the 18th and early 19th century, when one in three British men was married to an Indian woman. At the heart of the book is the story of a marriage, which saw a British dignitary convert to Islam and marry a woman of royal Mughal descent. Like From the Holy Mountain, the book deals with the relationship of Christianity and Islam and emphasises the surprisingly porous relationship between the two in pre-modern times.
[edit] Begums Thugs And White Mughals
Dalrymple's Begums Thugs And White Mughals - The Journals Of Fanny Parkes (2002) followed the same year. This is an edited edition of the travel journals of the traveller, Fanny Parkes who was in India from 1822 to 1846. Dalrymple edited Parkes's book, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, and wrote the introduction in which he challenged some of the preconceptions of academic studies of travel writing, which attempt to fit all English views on India into the 'Orientalist' template laid down by Edward Said. "Fanny was a passionate lover of India and though a woman of her time, in her writing and her travels did her best to understand and build bridges across the colonial divide," he writes. "As Colin Thubron has pointed out, ‘To define the genre [of travel writing] as an act of domination – rather than of understanding, respect or even catharsis – is simplistic. If even the attempt to understand is seen as aggression or appropriation, then all human contact declines into paranoia.’ The attacks made on Fanny highlight the problem with so much that has been written about 18th- and early 19th-century India: the temptation felt by so many critics to project back onto it the stereotypes of Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes with which we are so familiar."
[edit] The Last Mughal
Dalrymple recently published his sixth book The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. The book won praise for its use of "The Mutiny Papers", previously ignored Indian accounts of the events of 1857, which he worked on in association with the Urdu scholar Mahmood Farooqui (Last Mughal, xxv; TLS, 24 Nov 2005; The Guardian, 11 Nov 2006; Hindustan Times, 5 Nov 2006.)
In addition, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has written that "William Dalrymple's captivating book is not only great reading, it contributes very substantially to our understanding of the remarkable history of the Mughal empire in its dying days … It is rare indeed that a work of such consummate scholarship and insight could also be so accessible and such fun to read."
The historian David Gilmour wrote in The Spectator of this "brilliant new book... a magnificent, multi-dimensional book which shames the simplistic efforts of previous writers… Dalrymple used to be a fine travel writer with a sense of history and has now become a fine historian with a sense of place."
He is now said to be engaged in an extended four-volume history of the Mughal Empire.
[edit] Achievements
- In Xanadu - 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award; Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award; shortlisted for John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize
- City of Djinns - 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award
- From the Holy Mountain - Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997; shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize.
- The Age of Kali - 1998, won the French Prix d'Astrolabe in 2005.
- White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002) won the Wolfson Prize for History (2002) and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize (2003); also shortlisted for the Kiryama Prize, the PEN History Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.)
- Awarded the Mungo Park Medal in 2002 by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his outstanding contribution to travel literature.
- The television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which he wrote and presented, won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002
- The Long Search, his BBC Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as "thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio."
- In December 2005 his article on the madrasas of Pakistan was awarded the prize for Best Print Article of the Year at the 2005 FPA Media Awards.
- Received the Percy Sykes Medal in 2005 from the Royal Society of Asian Affairs for his contribution "to understanding contemporary Islam."
- Received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of St Andrews (2006) "for his services to literature and international relations, to broadcasting and understanding."(2006)
- On 20 February 2007 The Last Mughal won the prestigious Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for History and Biography.
