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William Darlymple

Portrait of William   Darlymple

William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple (b. 20 March 1965, Scotland, UK) is an acclaimed historian and art historian, a curator and broadcaster, and a co-founder and co-director of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival (Jaipur, Rajasthan, India). He lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.

A Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, since 2021- after holding visiting fellowships at US Universities of Princeton and Brown, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Darlymple has extensively written on the history of Ancient India, the political and cultural tensions in the Indian subcontinent, the social history of pre-modern and modern India, Eastern Orthodox Christians, the infamous East India Company, and, in latest book, The Golden Road (2024), on the Indian cultural influence over Ancient Southeast Asia.

Dalrymple was the curator of Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707 – 1857, a major show of the late Mughal painting for the Asia Society in New York (February-May 2012). In 2019, he curated the exhibition of Company style painting, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, at the Wallace Collection, London.

He wrote and presented the BBC television documentary on his pilgrimage to the source of the river Ganges, ​“Shiva’s Matted Locks”, one of three episodes of his Indian Journeys series, which won him the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. He is also the co-host of the acclaimed podcast Empire with Anita Anand. In 2018, he was awarded the President’s Medal of the British Academy for ​“outstanding service to the cause of the humanities and social sciences.” He contributes to various newspapers and magazines.

About The Golden Road, Fara Dabhoiwala noted in The Guardian (7 September 2024):

Dalrymple is a born storyteller, with a wonderful facility for expounding complex events with verve and clarity. Like any successful synthesis, his text draws on vast reading as well as a keen eye for telling details. Yet it’s also a deeply personal work. Before writing a string of acclaimed books about British imperial adventures in south Asia, he was already renowned as a chronicler of its esoteric religious traditions. The Golden Road, teeming with his own evocative descriptions of far-flung cave and forest temples, sculptures and wall paintings, is not just a historical study but also a love letter – to a lost syncretic world of interacting and evolving religious creeds and intellectual movements, when Indian ideas transformed the world. 

Publications

  1. In Xanadu: A Quest, Penguin Books, 1989. ISBN 0−00−654415−0
  2. City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN 978 – 0002157254.
  3. From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, 1997. ISBN 978 – 0143031086.
  4. The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters, Vintage Books, New York, 1998; repub. by Lonely Planet USA, 2000. Kindle edition: eISBN: 978−0−307−94893−9.
  5. [ed.] Lonely Planet Sacred India, Lonely Planet Publications, 1999. ISBN 1740593669.
  6. White Mughals, Penguin Books, 2002.
  7. Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, Eland Books, 2002. ISBN 0−907871−88−7.
  8. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006. ISBN 978 – 0670999255.
  9. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London, Bloomsbury, 2009. ISBN 978−1−4088−0061−4.
  10. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 2012. ISBN 978−1−4088−1830−5.
  11. Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707 – 1857 [with Yuthika Sharma], Penguin Books India, 2012. ISBN 978−0−1434−1906−8.
  12. “The great divide : the violent legacy of Indian Partition”, The Critics (Books), The New Yorker 91 (18): p 65 – 70, 29 June 2015.
  13. The Writer’s Eye, HarperCollins India, 2016. ISBN 978−9−3517−7925−4.
  14. Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond [with Anita Anand], Juggernaut Books, 2017. ISBN 978−1−63557−076−2.
  15. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire, Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN 978−1−40886−437−1.
  16. Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2020. ISBN 978 – 1781301012.
  17. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024) ISBN 978 – 1639734146.