By Matt Wade
William Dalrymple has spent decades writing about history, but he’s discovered that an even bigger audience wants to hear him talk about it.
During the past fortnight, Dalrymple has spoken at packed venues across Australia about his latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.
William Dalrymple has found a huge audience for his work through his podcast Empire.Credit: Edwina Pickles
As a founder and co-director of the world’s largest literature talkfest, the Jaipur Literary Festival, Dalrymple regularly addresses even bigger audiences – about 350,000 people attended this year’s event and another 25 million watched online.
Then there’s his hit podcast, Empire, which explores the stories, personalities and events of empire over the course of history. The series, co-hosted by British broadcaster Anita Anand, started two years ago and already attracts 880,000 downloads a week.
Queen Camilla read Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s book.
“As a writer, if you sell 100,000 copies of a book you’re like a pig in mud and that’s five years of work, but with this podcast, we get eight times or nine times that audience every week,” Dalrymple says.
He says the story of empire has “not been properly told” despite its continuing influence.
“No one goes to school and actually learns much about the real history of empire,” he says. “And yet, it’s obviously a crucially important part of history, and one that’s increasingly contentious.”
While Dalrymple and I chat over coffee near the Sydney Opera House, he tells the story of an interaction with Queen Camilla that illustrates how the history of empire still has power to shape behaviour.
In the lead-up to the coronation of King Charles, there was speculation about whether his wife would wear a crown adorned by the Koh-i-Noor, perhaps the world’s most famous diamond.
Only a few years earlier, Dalrymple and his podcast co-host Anand had written a book about the controversial jewel. It detailed the Koh-i-Noor’s long, blood-drenched history as it passed to numerous owners across India, Afghanistan and Persia before being “gifted” to Queen Victoria in 1849 by the 10-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab.
The 105-carat diamond was used by Victoria as a brooch, and subsequently featured on crowns worn by Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. But ownership of the Koh-i-Noor has long been a diplomatic flash point – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran all lay claim to it.
Before last year’s coronation, Dalrymple gave Camilla a copy of his book Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond. In the end, Camilla used a modified version of a 1911 crown worn by Queen Mary with the Koh-i-Noor removed.
“She read the book, I know that for a fact,” Dalrymple says. “She wrote me a note after the coronation saying, ‘you will notice that I did not wear the [Koh-i-Noor] diamond’,” he says.
Dalrymple was raised in Scotland and educated at Cambridge but has spent much of his adult life in India, where his family lives in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the capital New Delhi.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla, wearing a modified crown on the day of the King’s coronation.Credit: Leon Neal
He was 22 years old when he won critical acclaim for his first book, a travelogue called In Xanadu: A Quest, which retraced the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the ruined palace of Kublai Khan north of Beijing.
A swag of award-winning books since then has helped to make Dalrymple, 59, one of the world’s best-known historians. His podcast, which explores the stories, personalities and events of empire over the course of history, has clocked up more than 30 million downloads; co-host Anand recently told The Economist she’s gained more fandom from the Empire podcast than as a radio and TV presenter.
“It’s a technology which you can cook up at home at a moment’s notice with a 10 quid microphone and a laptop – that is literally what it takes,” Dalrymple says. “And it goes out to every country in the world ... it properly crosses every national boundary the way that newspapers and television just don’t. And we’ve found our audience.”
Dalrymple was invited to start Empire by podcast firm Goalhanger after appearing as a guest on the hugely popular The Rest Is History podcast in 2021.
London’s Daily Telegraph reported last month that The Rest Is History hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are making $US1.2 million ($1.8 million) each a year from the program, which attracts 11 million downloads a month and has 45,000 paying subscribers.
“That made me realise I’ve got to up my game a little bit,” Dalrymple says. Although he does tell me that hosting the Empire podcast has allowed him to pay off his mortgage. “It’s the only time in my entire life I’ve ever been ahead of a curve rather than a million miles behind it, catching up.”
Dalrymple can’t explain why history podcasts have proved so popular. “If you were to be asked 10 years ago what subjects are going to really make a hit with podcasts, you wouldn’t have come up with true crime and history as the two answers. But those are the two most successful genres, other than news,” he says.
Among Empire’s regular listeners is former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who wrote in a 2022 social media post that it was the best history podcast he had ever heard.
Dalrymple’s latest book.Credit:
Dalrymple “genuinely looks forward” to Thursdays, when the two weekly podcasts are recorded, though he compares the experience to doing regular school assignments.
“It’s like you have an essay-writing crisis where you’ve suddenly got to Wednesday and you haven’t opened a book – so it’s a very late night when you’re catching up,” he says. “It literally reminds me of being 17 again, in the sense that you have fat books to read every week.”
Four of Dalrymple’s books written over a 20-year period – now dubbed the “Company Quartet” – chronicle the decline of the Mogul empire and the rise of the East India Company during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Dalrymple says writing about the colonial era draws a very different public response today than when the first instalment of his quartet, called White Moguls, was published in 2002.
“If you published exactly the same books now I think you’d find yourself in the middle of a vicious culture war, where there’d be a whole set of people longing to get their hands on the book to kill it,” he says. “At this year’s Tory Party conference, there were about five main speeches by ministers attacking disloyal, unpatriotic historians, teaching people to be ashamed of their history. It was largely an ignored topic 25 years ago … but now it’s become an extremely contentious topic at the centre of the culture wars, at least in Britain.”
Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, moves away from the Raj era. It traces how India’s art, religions, music, dance, literature and science influenced society and culture across much of the ancient world between about 250BC and 1200AD. This includes the spread of Buddhism from India to China, India’s lucrative trade with the Roman Empire and how the world’s biggest Hindu temple, Angkor Wat, came to be built in Cambodia.
“This wasn’t a conquest by the sword,” Dalrymple says, but a conquest of culture, learning and spirit.
The book describes how Indian innovations in mathematics travelled first to the Arab world, then eventually to Europe, giving us concepts such as zero and the very form of the numbers we use today.
The subcontinent’s transformative influence on religions and civilisations stretching from the Red Sea to the Pacific is well known in India. But most people living in Western countries such as Australia are unaware of the way ancient India’s ideas and insights helped to shape the world.
“Everyone knows the story about Ancient Greece, and most people know the story about Ancient China,” Dalrymple says. “No one knows the story of Ancient India, except those in India, and even they don’t know it very clearly. It’s a very odd thing – India just doesn’t figure in people’s image of the ancient world.”
Dalrymple spent five years researching and writing The Golden Road. Once finished, he asked family members to read it and give a frank assessment. They liked it, but predicted the book was too niche and academic to become a bestseller, like so many of his previous works.
So far, that hasn’t been the case – The Golden Road is his fastest selling book yet. “Some of that must be due to the podcast,” he says.
Matt Wade is a former South Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Delhi.
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