Commercial warfare
Well-travelled Jaipur Literature Festival co-director William Dalrymple knows how to tell a great story himself
Award-winning writer, historian and Jaipur Literature Festival co-founder William Dalrymple's latest book, his ninth, is , an account of the British invasion of the country informed by multiple Afghan sources.
"Although I had never been in the country before 2009, it felt very familiar because I'd been reading about it, dealing with it as a journalist, circling it," Dalrymple says from his home on a farm outside New Delhi, where he spends nine months of the year.
The East India Company was an extraordinary thing and a very alarming beast. The modern equivalent would be Microsoft with nuclear submarines
"It was the East India Company invading Afghanistan - the First Afghan War - which is extraordinary because people talk about the British invading Afghanistan. It was a company. The East India Company was an extraordinary thing and a very alarming beast. The modern equivalent would be Microsoft with nuclear submarines or Pepsi Cola with F16 jets.
"It was the East India Company that conquered India, not the British government. It was a company with shareholders, an office, with annual general meetings - all the things that a company had. But it also had the largest standing army in Asia. So this was a commercial enterprise, knocks down India, and then goes in for the kill in Afghanistan. Good story, I thought."
The research for resulted in a number of adventures. "It was a very different thing from doing your usual research in the British Library in London and getting on the Tube. Some of it in 2009 was perfectly safe. Kabul felt really very safe. There was the odd attack, but you had to be very unlucky to get caught up in anything in Kabul in 2009. It's certainly more hairy now.
"I only got into real trouble in Kandahar. I got a sniper bullet in the back of my car as I was leaving the airport, having just arrived."
That was not his only brush with death while researching the book. "I nearly got shot going from the route of the retreat," he says. "We got stopped four-fifths of the way from the destination, Gandamak, where the British last stand was, and we had this amazing Afghan feast with the tribal chieftain I was travelling with. They put down carpets in an apricot grove, kebabs, mountains of rice, huge flaps of naan that looked like a tent. It went on for four hours and by the end it was clear we weren't going to get to the village we were trying to get to. It was too late.
