52 Quotes by William Dalrymple

On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

Ultimately it was the East India Company, not the Marathas or the Sultans of Mysore, that the financiers across India decided to back.

Mongols were uneducated tribesmen who believed in enjoying life’s simpler pleasures. Ghengis Khan expressed their philosophy most succinctly. ‘Happiness,’ he is recorded to have said, ’lies in conquering one’s enemies, driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.

On another occasion, when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at ‘Id, Zafar told them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Musalmen did not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.

The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

This? I thought, after a twenty-year civil war: This? Armageddon I expected; but Armani I did not.