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Tag: William Dalrymple

  • Speaking Volumes: Under construction-the great Delhi novel

    (Published in the Business Standard, March 22, 2010)Drawing a literary map of Bombay, or Calcutta, is a relatively straightforward exercise: writers fall into neat categories, and time periods, and claim their neighbourhoods easily. But as a recent collection of writings on Delhi indicates, this is the original Trickster City. In most of its centuries, Delhi…

  • The BS Column: Writing faith: alternative histories

    The BS Column: Writing faith: alternative histories

    (Published in the Business Standard, October 20, 2009. Dalrymple wrote in to tell me about the link between his book and Doniger’s: “I was the moderator at the infamous SOAS lecture at which the saffron egg was thrown at Wendy, and that it was my clumsy version of Kevin Costner’s Bodyguard routine, attempting to protect…

  • The writer-saheb among the Mughals

    (Business Standard, November 03, 2006) “Do you know the place where Bahadur Shah Zafar very nearly was buried?” asks William Dalrymple. The author of The Last Mughal, an account of “the fall of a dynasty, Delhi, 1857”, and I are walking—sprinting, actually, given the brisk pace Dalrymple sets—around Zafar Mahal, Bahadur Shah’s summer palace in…

  • Speaking Volumes: An insider’s history

    (October 23, Business Standard) At the Kitab festival earlier this year in the capital, William Dalrymple read an excerpt from The Last Mughal, his account of the sunset years of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s reign as the events of 1857 tore Delhi apart. He chose a passage that demonstrated the growing and implacable divide between the…