INTERPRETER OF EMPIRE

William Dalrymple, the most followed British historian, revisits the story of ancient India.

- CHE KURRIEN

RIGHT UNTIL THE pandemic struck, most Indians' engagement with history was through anodyne school text books, mostly as a series of distant dates. In other words, history was boring.

One of the unexpected side-effects of the lockdown has been a surge of interest in India's provenance—enabled by platforms like YouTube and podcasts. These long-form formats have helped his-torians and scholars breathe life, detail and nuance into stories of India's past, drawing in millions of viewers and listeners across the country and the world.

Over the past four decades, Delhi-based Scottish historian William Dalrymple, has been one of the chief storytellers of India's recent history, focused on the Mughals and the British colonial period. His 12th book The Golden Road, published this September, is his first crack at ancient India. Dalrymple's argument is that ancient India's influence—religious, economic, scholarly and cultural—has been vastly underplayed and under-sold, and that India was in fact the ancient Greece of Asia.

It's no surprise, therefore, that The Golden Road has become an immediate bestseller. It is a skilfully written and researched national confidence boost.

Dalrymple first arrived in Delhi in 1984, and has had a ring-side view of the tectonic shifts that have taken place across India and its polity since then. Instinctively ahead of the curve, Dalrymple is energetic, entrepreneurial and skilled at harness-ing new technologies to draw in new readers and audiences. This includes the popular