Indeed, I wondered if Dalrymple even empathised with the tragic and often bloody end of many of the people his magical pen brought to pitiful life, such was his tone of breathtaking excitement and colourful descriptions of bloody battles and glittering loot: The book features three sets of coloured reproductions of paintings and Indian miniatures, mostly portraits of the heroes and villains (or rather a complex mix of these two types, as Dalrymple often gave justified assessments of both good and bad features of all characters). This wasn’t a chess game of two powers pitting officials or courtiers and soldiers against each other – a colonising corporation versus a state defending itself – but a much more dynamic theatre of stratagems, flattery, and treachery. I didn’t appreciate this list until I was in the middle of reading the book, when it became challenging to keep track of the political, mercantile and military players vying for wealth, power or survival. post-Partition nation-state of India that we see on contemporary maps) and before the Introduction, the historian presents a ten-page list of Dramatis Personae as in a play. And the historical figures indeed look like actors in Dalrymple’s “creative history”: after preliminary pages featuring ink-and-pen maps showing the major warring powers – the Rajputs, Marathas, Mughals, and others – of eighteenth century India (it did not yet have the relatively fixed borders of the 20th c.
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