This is a depressing book. I read it expecting tales of deep traditional faith in remote places. I found stories of lone decrepit survivors waiting to die and then end the two-thousand-year history of Christianity in their region. Dalrymple seems to view them as historical relics, a strange tr...
William Dalrymple sets out with his backpack, pen and paper and a copy of the book 'The Spiritual Meadow' to travel to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt over six months in 1994, to take a look at the Christian communities that live there and to see what has become of them and their heritag...
In keeping with my recent resolve to read the first book of my favourite authors, I finished In Xanadu this weekend. Unlike my usual method of finishing books in long stretches, usually over a weekend, this one took much longer but the interruptions did not bother me. In a strange way, the breaks...
This is a scholarly work of Indian history, extensively researched and written with a passion and a nostalgia for a not so distant past when there was wholesale interracial sexual exploration and substantial cultural assimilation between Indians and the British in India. Author Dalrymple says tha...
I must say I had to reset my expectations while reading this book. I started reading what I thought would be an unprejudiced holistic third-person view of India, unaffected by patriotic sentiments, yet aided by a depth of understanding of the subcontinent and its culture. For William Dalrymple is...
Around the middle of January, several thousand saffron-clad wandering minstrels or Bauls – the word means simply ‘mad’ or ‘possessed’ in Bengali – begin to gather at Kenduli, in the flat floodplains near Tagore’s old home of Shantiniketan. As they have done on this site for at least 500 years, th...
Flanked on one side by the marshes leading down to the River Tigris and on the other by the dry and rocky Zagros mountains, Shushtar clings to the edge of a narrow plateau, just below the confluence of the Karun River with one of its tributaries. The town was of great importance during the classi...
By the light of burning splints, the raiders roused all the men from their beds and marched them out in to the fields. Then, one after another, they slit their throats with a rusty harvesting sickle. Few of my Delhi friends were surprised when I pointed out the brief press report of the massacre,...
We decided that we could prepare the ground for the assault on the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Islamabad by telephone from Lahore. A couple of phone calls, we hoped, and the field could be open for us to flash our letters, collect the permits and set off up the Karakoram Highway to China. But we ha...
. and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day'. He warned that further massacres were an ever-present danger; and his prophecy was proved horribly accurate only two years later. During the First W...