Imposing values at the end of a gun barrel

NEW YORK: The projector hummed cheerfully as the American audience soaked in colourful images of Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s gifted court and bustling street life in the Mughal capital, Delhi. Then, there was sudden stillness as William Dalrymple author of The Last Mughal vividly described the British savagery that snuffed out Zafar’s court and an expansive way of life in Delhi following the great uprising of 1857.

“The Siege of Delhi was a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. Finally, on September 14, 1857, the British assaulted and took the city, sacking the Mughal capital and massacring swathes of the population. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old British officer. “It was literally murder . . . The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful,” Dalrymple recounted grimly at the Asia Society in New York during his US book tour to promote The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. 

The acclaimed British author and historian told DNA his book chronicled the clash of civilisations and the arrogance shown by the 19th Century Raj. He said America as the only remaining superpower could cultivate easy inter-racial and inter-religious relationships evident in tracts of Indian history. Instead, the US was showing shades of the same undisguised imperial arrogance displayed by British rulers. 

“There are very distinct parallels. Both powers thought they were generously showing the way forward to poor benighted heathen, and both tried to impose their vision of goodness at the end of a barrel of a gun,” Dalrymple, who has anchored himself in India, told DNA.

“For the Victorians, it was Christian values they were trying to export. For the current neocons, it is liberal democracy. But both have tried to spread these values by force and both have brought about terrible violence by acting insensitively and often brutally,” added Dalrymple taking aim at the unipolar world of George W Bush and Dick Cheney.

Dalrymple pointed out that nothing so easily “undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the east: the histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined.”

Dalrymple is planning to write a Moghul quartet and has inked a deal with a publisher. “But my immediate project is a book called The Blind Men and the Elephant, a collection of essays about Hinduism, Islam and Christianity in India, and how they inter-relate.”

Born in Edinburgh to “Scottish provincial landowning sorts,” Dalrymple is the great-nephew of English novelist Virginia Woolf.