Quotes from William Dalrymple

Partition was a total catastrophe for Delhi,' she said. 'Those who were left behind are in misery. Those who were uprooted are in misery. The Peace of Delhi is gone. Now it is all gone.

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

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.

Finally, at two minutes to three, in the sweltering heat of a Mesopotamian summer afternoon, I crossed the no-man's land into Syria.

What matters it, O breeze, If now has come the spring When I have lost them both The garden and my nest?

After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena);

So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.

He is a thinker,' wrote Jacquemont in his memoir, 'who finds nothing but solitude in that exchange of words without ideas which is dignified by the name of conversation in the society of this land.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow

Then we were both lectured by our guruji. He told us clearly what was expected of us: never again to use a vehicle, to take food only once a day, not to use Western medicine, to abstain from emotion, never to hurt any living creature. He told us we must not react to attacks, must not beg, must not cry, must not complain, must not demand, must not feel superiority, must learn not to be disturbed by illusory things.

He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai. 'Chota hazari, sahib,' said Ladoo. Bed tea. 'What a nice gesture,' I said returning to Olivia. 'Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.' 'I wish she had sent it up two hours later,' said Olivia from beneath her sheets.

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

The body is the true temple, the true mosque, the true church.

But it was the great temple of Sringeri that always received his most generous patronage, as a stash of correspondence discovered within the temple in the 1950s bears witness. Tipu put on record his horror at the damage done to the temple by a Maratha Pindari raiding party during a Maratha invasion of Mysore: 'People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,' wrote Tipu. 'Those

There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.

What you say is true,' said Fr. Dioscuros with a smile. 'You can pray anywhere. After all, God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.' He gestured to the darkening sand dunes outside: 'But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself . And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?

But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most reationshps in life can survive - or not - without being put to any real crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times...At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her. That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.

the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones.

India's transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total

of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains.

Urdu is an aristocratic language. It was not the language of the working classes. Those who are left—the artisans—speak Karkhana [factory] Urdu. The Urdu of the poets is dead.

According to the Puranas, the Kali Yug is the last age before the world is destroyed by the 'fire of one thousand suns', after which the cycle reaches its conclusion and time momentarily stops, before the wheel turns again and a new cycle begins. Rather

particularly the deeply embedded heterodox, syncretic and pluralist religious and philosophical folk traditions which continue to defy the artificial boundaries of modern political identities.