“I came here aged 18, and spent my 19th birthday in Hampi, and I never left” — that’s how William Dalrymple described his stay in India to My Kolkata on a wintry evening in Kolkata.
William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple, globally acclaimed historian and bestselling author, came to Kolkata to speak at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival on January 10 on a panel titled ‘On a Golden Road’, talking about his journey as a writer.
Dalrymple is succinct when he speaks about India and Kolkata. He does not ponder about his stay in India anymore because it has become an intrinsic part of him. “I no longer think about it, in the sense, it is where I live and where I have always lived. My entire life has been in this country, and I don’t question it. It is how it has been for 40 years”, said the author whose latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024) explores how several core ideas that took shape in India influenced Eurasia.
Dalrymple has also been a television presenter, curator and critic. He is also a podcaster with a global audience. His current podcast, Empire, with journalist Anita Anand has almost a million downloads every week. “We finished recording The Death of Aurenzeb yesterday. The podcast has completely changed my life. I took it very casually, but it is actually now my main source of income and my main way of interacting with the wider world! I had no idea that the podcast will have this massive international reach”, reflected Dalrymple, about the podcast.
So popular is the podcast that Dalrymple broke the internet a couple of years ago with a photo of him with Indian skipper Rahul Dravid, who claimed to have ensured that his entire team listened to it.
Dalrymple, though, is not a cricket fan, and playfully attributes this to his brother, Jock Dalrymple, who was a first-class cricketer. “I remember being resentful as early as the age of five when he would sit hogging the television watching cricket when I wanted to watch cartoons”, shared William Dalrymple, laughing.
But books are still his main love. He is still an author first.
As soon as he entered the lit fest venue at Allen Park on Park Street, there was a scurry of movement among the audience. Bibliophiles of all age groups were eager to catch a glimpse. Many were seen reaching out to the author for signed copies of his books. He obliged all with the autographs, made it a point to ask the names of the readers, and signed them with a friendly smile.
Dalrymple’s family has literary lineage. He is the great nephew of author Virginia Woolf. He is an academic himself. He has just finished a fellowship with Windsor College at Oxford University. He has taught at Princeton University and Brown University, and graduated from Trinity College at Cambridge University.
‘India has been astonishingly accommodating of the different things I wanted to do at different times,’ says Dalrymple Soumyajit Dey
“I made a conscious decision at the beginning of my career that I wanted to be a writer and not a teacher,” said Dalrymple. He published his first book in 1989, The Xanadu. Till date, the author-historian has published 12 books, including The Age of Kali (1998), The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006), and The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019).
“Kolkata is a city where my family have lived for generations. In terms of my family and my career, this city has played a huge part”, shared Dalrymple, professing his love for the City of Joy.
Since 1989, he shares his time between India, London and Edinburgh. “I have a trickle of 5% Bengali blood in my veins,” said the historian, with a laugh.
Dalrymple, 59, has had an active and illustrious career and plans to keep moving forward in his journey, and India plays an important role.
“India has been astonishingly accommodating of the different things I wanted to do at different times. My first job was teaching history in Dehradun in 1984. I have been a teacher, a foreign correspondent, a festival director, a photographer, and India has accommodated all these”, said Dalrymple, before signing off.
