East India Company was about corporate greed: Dalrymple

History book ‘The Anarchy’ will soon be a web series. Author William Dalrymple tells Showtime how the British dressed up plunderers as imperial heroes

Last week, immediately after Siddharth Roy Kapoor announced a mega project to turn William Dalrymple’s history book ‘Anarchy’ into a web series, the excited historian picked a dream cast.

It includes Brendon Gleeson as Robert Clive, Daniel Day-Lewis as Warren Hastings, Christian Bale as General Outram, Hugh Laurie as Eyre Coote, Amitabh Bachchan as Ranjit Singh, Manoj Bajpai as Tipu Sultan, and R Madhavan as Mir Qasim.

If even a part of his dream team comes true, the series will mark the biggest collaboration of the Indian and British film industries since the advent of OTT. In a conversation with Showtime, Dalrymple said ‘Anarchy’ had taken him six years to write, when his earlier books had taken just four or five.

“This is my fourth book involving the East India Company. The earlier three were micro-histories; this one takes a panoramic view,” Dalrymple said.

No national project

For the Scottish historian living in Delhi, the East India Company is a ‘corporate project’ rather than a national one. “It is no more British than Google or Facebook is American. These corporations have their own drive; their own greed,” he said, sipping coffee at a Residency Road cafe in Bengaluru.

“The British government didn’t get involved till the very end. The charter of the company was applied for in 1599. The government didn’t start overseeing the company till 1774, which is about 175 years later,” he explained.

The company continued completely unregulated even after that. Between 1774 and 1857, the year of the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ when India was brought under the crown, the trading company had remained its own beast, with little government oversight. And because of this, Dalrymple argues, it is wrong to use ‘British’ as shorthand for the company’s unmitigated reign. The blurring of lines was deliberate: the Victorians wanted to portray the empire as a benign civilisational project to fix poor, broken India.

“Grubby plundering, asset-stripping and looting were the commercial beginnings of a story that was an embarrassment. So Robert Clive was turned into a national hero and the trading story was quietened down,” Dalrymple said.

Even a hundred years into the East India Company’s presence in India, its headquarters in London had just 35 employees. Dalrymple finds many of the company’s actions morally reprehensible. It invented corporate lobbying and corporate corruption. In 1697, its officers were caught red-handed offering bribes to British parliamentarians, he said.

In ‘Anarchy,’ Dalrymple is interested in the grey shades of characters otherwise portrayed as heroes or villains, and that is also a reason the web series is something to look forward to.

“Clive, who in my country was turned into an imperial hero, is a street punk. Hastings, on the other hand, is a scholarly guy who we would have liked to have dinner with. He would have sung some interesting songs and played the guitar and spoken perfect Hindustani, Bengali and Persian,” Dalrymple said.

Tipu: Hero or villain?

In ‘Anarchy,’ Tipu Sultan (1750-99) gets a more flattering portrayal than Clive, who comes across as thuggish. There is reason to portray the Mysuru warrior in a good light, especially when it comes to his strategies against the East India Company, says Dalrymple.

“Tipu was the main adversary of the company. He never made an alliance with it. The Marathas made three alliances with them. And twice the Marathas went to war against Tipu with the company,” he says.

Tipu, on the other hand, understood the power of the company and tried to make it his own. He traded with the Gulf. He understood the way foreign trade works.

Dalrymple understands the Tipu Jayanti controversy in the context of the political battles of the 18th century continuing into our times. Tipu is a contentious figure in Karnataka, with the Siddaramaiah government celebrating his birth anniversary, and the Yeddyurappa government cancelling it.

“Within his dominion, Tipu was undoubtedly a patron of Hindu temples. But that did not stop him from being brutishly savage to his enemies,” he says. It is true, Dalyrmple says, that Tipu forcibly converted people to Islam in his enemy territories.

In Dalrymple’s view, religion, by and large, played a less prominent role then than it does in modern politics as none of the kingdoms had subjects of just one ethnicity. “The Marathas had hundreds of Muslims working with them. A majority of Tipu’s soldiers were Hindu. Most of his senior advisors were Hindus and he had Brahmin astrologers follow him around,” he explained.

Dalrymple asserts that evidence exists to show Tipu’s faith incorporated aspects of Hinduism. “He believed in Hindu gods. He had dreams where Hindu gods spoke to him. He was a great believer in bathing in sacred rivers. He even made his army bathe in these rivers,” he said.

About the book

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company is about what happened in India in the second half of the 18th century. It has won appreciative reviews, with The Guardian calling it ‘an energetic page-turner.’ Published by Bloomsbury, the hardcover is priced starting at Rs 479.

Making history fun

Dalrymple believes history can be written in an accessible style. “In India, there is a huge gaping gulf between academia and popular writing. There are brilliant historians who write only for themselves. And they sort of entrench themselves against an enemy horde they regard as populists. That is not the case anywhere else in the world,” he says.

He sees encouraging signs from younger writers such as Ira Mukhoty, Parvati Sharma, Manu S Pillai and Ruby Lal. “They are all producing good, scholarly history. It looks like things are beginning to change,” Dalrymple says.