William Dalrymple

From the bestselling author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country.

The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

The Anarchy

A Year in Delhi

City of Djinns

In 1839 18,000 British troops marched into Afghanistan. Three years later, only one man emerged to tell the tale...... A towering history of the first Afghan war by bestselling historian William Dalrymple.

The Battle for Afghanistan

The Return of a King

Delhi, 1857

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty

The author describes his year spent in Delhi, India, reflecting on the city's history and culture, including religious practices, industry, the arts, festivals and entertainment, and social customs

From the Dust Jacket: A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet-then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand printing the best prayer flags in India. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve to death. A woman leaves her middle-class family in Calcutta, and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfillment living as a Tantric skull feeder in a remote cremation ground. A prison warden from Kerala becomes, for two months of the year, a temple dancer and is worshipped as an incarnate deity; then, at the end of February each year, he returns to prison. An illiterate goat herd from Rajasthan keeps alive an ancient 4,000-line sacred epic that he, virtually alone, still knows by heart. A devadasi-or temple prostitute-initially resists her own initiation into sex work, yet pushes both her daughters into a trade she now regards as a sacred calling. Nine people, nine lives. Each one taking a different religious path, each one an unforgettable story. Exquisite and mesmerizing, and told with an almost biblical simplicity, William Dalrymple's first travel book in over a decade explores how traditional forms of religious life in South Asia have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid change. A distillation of twenty-five years of exploring India and writing about its religious traditions, Nine Lives is a modern Indian Canterbury Tales.

In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

Nine Lives

Traces the practice by British colonizers in India to assume local customs and religious practices, offering a particular focus on James Kirkpatrick, who converted to Islam and spied on the East India Company while having an affair with the great-niece of the region's prime minister. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India

White Mughals

While waiting for the results of his college exams, William Dalrymple decides to fill in his summer break with a trip. But the vacation he plans is no light-hearted student jaunt - he decides to retrace the epic journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the ruined palace of Kubla Kahn, north of Peking. For the first half of the trip he is accompanied by Laura, whom he met at a dinner party two weeks before he left; for the second half he is accompanied by Louisa, his very recently ex-girlfriend. Intelligent and funny, In Xanaduis travel writing at its best.

A Quest

In Xanadu

In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes "an evensong for a dying civilization" --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East

From the Holy Mountain

Anita Anand

This riveting tale of the Kohinoor, the worldÕs most coveted gem, unearths fascinating new information as it moves from the Mughal court to Persia to Afghanistan; from Maharaja Ranjit Singh's durbar in Punjab to the Queen of England's Crown. A thrilling tale, full of violence, drama and intrigue.

The Story of the WorldÕs Most Infamous Diamond

Kohinoor

A portrait of Mughal emperor, poet, and mystic Bahadur Shah Zafar II relates the 1857 armed uprising against British rule, the fall of the Mughal capital of Delhi and its subsequent destruction, and Zafar's final days as an exile in Burma.

The Fall of a Dynasty : Delhi, 1857

The Last Mughal

From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, arguably the most celebrated jewel in the world. On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old leader of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the center of the British fort in Lahore, India. There, in a formal Act of Submission, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company swathes of the richest land in India and the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, otherwise known as the Mountain of Light. To celebrate the acquisition, the British East India Company commissioned a history of the diamond woven together from the gossip of the Delhi Bazaars. From that moment forward, the Koh-i-Noor became the most famous and mythological diamond in history, with thousands of people coming to see it at the 1851 Great Exhibition and still more thousands repeating the largely fictitious account of its passage through history. Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English, Dalrymple and Anand trace the true history of the diamond and disperse the myths and fantastic tales that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel. The resulting history of south and central Asia tells a true tale of greed, conquest, murder, torture, colonialism, and appropriation that shaped a continent and the Koh-i-Noor itself.

The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond

Koh-i-Noor

The Age of Kali is a panorama of the Indian subcontinent, poised between chaos, westernization and immemorial tradition& It is like Dalrymple s previous books, erudite, engaging and entertaining Martin Gayford, Spectator Books of the Year

Indian Travels and Encounters

The Age of Kali

Deväť životov

In his third book William Dalrymple has dug deep to present the case of the Middle East s downtrodden Christians. More hard-hitting than either of his previous books, From the Holy Mountain is driven by indignation. While leavened with his characteristic jauntiness and humour, it is also profoundly shocking. Time and time again in the details of Dalrymple s discoveries I found myself asking: why do we not know this? The sense of unsung tragedy accumulates throughout the chapters of this book&From the Holy Mountain is the most rewarding sort of travel book, combining flashes of lightly-worn scholarship with a powerful sense of place and the immediacy of the best journalism. But more than that it is a passionate cri de coeur for a forgotten people which few readers will be able to resist Philip Marsden, Spectator

From The Holy Mountain : A Jou

Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

Raghu Rai

Raghu Rai is Indias most famous and most lauded photographer. Here, he lends his creative genius to capturing the changing face of Delhi, the place of his birth and Indias capital city, over the last forty years.William Dalrymple says in his introduction to the book that [this is] the work of a sympathetic insider and has a tender and knowing intimacy that no outsider like myself can come close to. That quality is displayed to stunning effect in this spectacular, large format book, which will be prized by anyone with an interest in modern India or photography.

Raghu Rai's Delhi

Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India

Deadly Triangle, a

Fanny Parkes Parlby

Fanny Parkes

To read Fanny Parkes is to go as close as one can to early colonial India, in all its violence and beauty.

William Dalrymple

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