Dr William Jekyll Vs Mr Dalrymple Hyde: Admiring India, undermining the Hindu spirit behind it
Utpal Kumar • November 23, 2024, 16:24:33 IST
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Scottish author William Dalrymple acknowledges India’s contribution but doesn’t seem to be quite enthusiastic about the Hindu roots of the same. He wants to safeguard its physical infrastructure, but is working hard to tamper with its soul
Dalrymple’s love for India is obvious, but without its cultural moorings
William Dalrymple is suddenly the darling of a section of the Right. One prominent Right-wing think tank has even invited him for a talk on his new book,
The Golden Road. The book highlights “how ancient India transformed the world” — a subject close to those whose heart is in the ‘Right’ place.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong in engaging in a dialogue over a book — in fact, this culture of dialogue with contrarian views should be encouraged. The problem, however, could be when this intellectual exercise leads to legitimisation of the other viewpoint without due deliberation and critical enquiry. What one fears is that
The Golden Road, which has already become a bestseller soon after hitting the bookstores, might become a cover to push blatant historical lies.
At the very outset, it must be clarified that this is a good book, pushing forward India’s narrative. Dalrymple cannot claim — and he doesn’t either — that what is written in the book hasn’t been told in the past. Where the author scores is the style of his writing: A history book is better written when the author thinks like a historian but writes like a novelist. History, after all, is about stories and the lessons one can learn from them.
Dalrymple is undoubtedly a “gifted historian” who writes engaging prose. His research work for his books is almost impeccable. And one finds affinity and warmth in him for his
karmabhoomi, which is India.
But, then, Dalrymple is a double-edged sword, often cutting both ways. This 59-year-old British author, born in Scotland, is an unapologetic admirer of Delhi, but his love gets confined to the era of “Djinns”; the other, non-Islamic characteristics of the city rarely get his attention. The same partisanship is evident in his writings on the Mughals, especially the late Mughals. The decadence of the late Mughals, about which Sir Jadunath Sarkar bemoans in his extensive studies and regards as among the dominant causes of the Mughal decline, is what excites Dalrymple the most.
In
The Last Mughal, for instance, Dalrymple writes: “…while Zauq led a quiet and simple life, composing verse from dusk until dawn, rarely straying from the tiny courtyard where he worked, Ghalib was very proud of his reputation as a rake. Only five years before the wedding, Ghalib had been imprisoned for gambling and subsequently wore the affair—deeply embarrassing at the time—as a badge of honour. When someone once praised the poetry of the pious Sheikh Sahbai in his presence, Ghalib shot back, ‘How can Sahbai be a poet? He has never tasted wine, nor has he ever gambled; he has not been beaten with slippers by lovers, nor has he once seen the inside of a jail.’ Elsewhere in his letters he makes great play of his reputation as a ladies’ man.”
Similarly, in
The Anarchy, Dalrymple writes about the unabashed loot and plunder by the East India Company. He begins this book by saying how “one of the first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot”. He then takes the readers to Powis Castle, “a craggy fort” built during the 13th century in the Welsh Marches. According to him, Powis “is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company (EIC) in the 18th century”.
Yet, the same Dalrymple had made a public appeal last year asking Britain not to return the loot to India! According to him, Mughal treasures looted by the British might never be displayed if they are returned to India, which is currently run by “a Hindu nationalist government that does not display Mughal items”. (Dalrymple’s prejudiced mind stopped him from seeing what was obvious: That the wealth stolen was not Mughal’s but India’s.) He said, “You can go to Delhi and not see a display, at the moment, of Mughal art at all. But it’s there, beautifully displayed, in the British Library, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum.”
Dalrymple’s propensity to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds is evident in the narration of his 2009 book,
Nine Lives, too. In one of the stories, he recounts with empathy the story of “The Dancer of Kannur”, in which Hari Das, a Dalit from Kerala, is a “part-time prison warden for 10 months of the year”, but during the Theyyam dancing season between January and March, he is “transformed into an omnipotent deity” to be worshipped even by the high-caste Brahmins. However, in the same book, his reverence for the sacred goes missing as he invokes Romila Thapar’s idea of “syndicated Hinduism” to intellectually discredit Hindu resurgence in India. Dalrymple, quite mischievously, calls it “Rama-fication of Hinduism”.
Coming to
The Golden Road, Dalrymple’s new-found love for ancient India may remind one of American Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock, who not very long ago was zeroed upon by a group of wealthy non-resident Indians (NRIs) in New York, along with the top administrative leaders of Sringeri Peetham in India and representatives of Sringeri Peetham in the US, to head a newly found American university chair in the name of Adi Shankara. They had, by 2014, collected $4 million for the chair, which was to be set up at the prestigious Columbia University. There was a lot of enthusiasm and support for Pollock, as he was seen to be an ardent advocate for the revival of Sanskrit. What these people didn’t realise was that Pollock’s idea of revival was, as Rajiv Malhotra writes in The Battle for Sanskrit, “the reinvigorated study of Sanskrit as if it were the embalmed, mummified remnant of a dead culture”.
Pollock sought to revive Sanskrit studies, but wanted no association with Sanskrit language and culture. He loved Sanskrit but without its sacred cultural (Hindu) identity. In the same way, Dalrymple acknowledges India’s contribution but doesn’t seem to be quite enthusiastic about the Hindu roots of the same. He would talk with gusto about Central Asia’s Buddhist connections, but the same enthusiasm is lacking vis-à-vis Hinduism. Dalrymple’s love for India is obvious, but without its cultural/civilisational moorings. He wants to safeguard the physical infrastructure but is working hard to tamper with its soul.
Dalrymple tells the story of the great Buddhist scholar Kumarajiva (344-413 AD). Born to a Kashmiri father, probably a minister in the Takshashila royal court, and a Kuchean mother, Kumarajiva learnt Buddhism in Kashmir, but to study
Vedas, he chose to go to Kashgar in the Xinjiang region. It’s pertinent to note that the land where Kumarajiva went to study
Vedas was the hub of Buddhism, disputing the predominant Hindu-Buddhist conflict narrative put forward by colonial-Leftist historiography. What further manifests the Hindu-Buddhist cultural continuum in the region is that “not very far” from a monastery in Miran, as Dalrymple himself writes in
The Golden Road, “some of the very earliest surviving fragments of the text of the
Mahabharata have recently been dug up”.
A couple of quotes from
The Golden Road should expose the real intent of the author. Dalrymple writes in the last chapter of the book, “The fate of Nalanda is much disputed: it had been in decline for centuries and archaeology shows that it was burned several times, with some of these conflagrations clearly dating to before the arrival of the Turks. Either way, the Tibetan monk Dharmaswami, who visited Nalanda in 1235, describes the Turushka soldiers prowling the ruins while he and his guru lay hidden in a deserted monastery. There is some evidence that Nalanda continued to function in a much-reduced form until the early fourteenth century, when the last Tibetan monks are described as coming to study philosophy in its ruins.”
Nalanda was “burnt several times” before the fury of Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193 AD! The ancient Indian university survived the Muslim assault to “function in a much-reduced form until the 14th century”! One, thus, gets two assessments from the above lines: That while Muslims burnt Nalanda once, Hindus had done it “several times” in the past; and also that the Muslim assault wasn’t bad enough as the university could survive for the next two centuries! How is Dalrymple’s assessment different from, say, Romila Thapar and DN Jha?
In the same chapter, Dalrymple provides another gem of assessment, exposing his state of mind. He writes, “During the days of Nehruvian rule in the 1950s and early 1960s, Indian school textbooks and most academic histories were written by left-leaning, Congress-supporting figures. These historians tended to underplay the violence and iconoclasm that came with the Turkish invasions, partially in the interests of what they saw as ‘nation building’ following the terrible inter-religious violence that had taken place during partition. Today, under the current right-wing BJP government, the reverse is true, and the destruction of Hindu temples is almost all that many in India seem to know of the complex but fascinating medieval period of Indo-Islamic history.”
Given this line of thinking being promoted in the book, where the Indian physical superstructure is admired but the innate Hindu spirit is denied and damned, it’s astounding to see a section of the Right getting excited with
The Golden Road. Maybe the excitement is the result of intellectual haziness and laziness: No one has bothered to read between the lines and instead got excited with the book’s tagline: “How ancient India transformed the world”. Maybe the colonial hangover is still going strong in India. A British historian highlighting the “greatness” of ancient India can still be a heady moment for some of us. Maybe the more things change in Indian history, the more they remain the same.
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