Sam Dalrymple wants to discover a lost city.
He was at a literature festival when he met Anirudh Kanisetti and that was the "pipe dream" the two young historians bonded over. "There's one in particular in the Deccan, which we both agreed on. We [wondered] if we could find any lost city in history and we both said the same thing, made eye contact," he guffaws away.
It's oddly believable for a public personality whose Instagram is a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Imposing colonial-era edifices, derelict medieval temples, palaces of Indian maharajas in Britain, the works.
If his dad, the author William Dalrymple, was the first accessible raconteur of narrative history in public memory in this part of the world, Sam has come even closer to those who are supposed to read it.
“All across the world, you’re beginning to see academics embrace social media. More historians need to get on social media because the lack of academic historians on social media is allowing this new information ecospace to be dominated by people who’ve never studied history,” Dalrymple Jr tells me over a Zoom call.
The 28-year-old is freshly out with Shattered Lands, his first book that was born from the initial fieldwork from his work on Project Dastaan, and the years of research that followed his education at the University of Oxford. A comprehensive account of five partitions in the past one hundred years or so that transformed modern South Asia, the book is written with the flair that you’ll often find in the captions that accompany his Instagram posts.
Partition is a trenchant subject to be writing about. It’s stayed relevant in the context of South Asia, where cross-border conflict, political instability, and linguistic and cultural fissures continue to dictate life even today. Through the pained exhortations of a book like Shattered Lands, one is driven to wonder about the experience of a Scot raised in Delhi. How far did the splinters fall inside the protected confines of an expat household?
“I grew up in Delhi, went to primary school there. I lived there for 22 years. It’s a city where partition lingers behind everything, as I’m sure you know. Any dinner table that you sit around, there is a conversation that can be had, and someone will end up having a partition story,” Sam says.
“So, it was very much there, but it was never something that was ever front and centre of my life. I visited Lahore for the first time in 2016 and, you know, you could drop me in any Lahori street—and I’d be physically unable to tell you whether it was Delhi or Lahore. So, I was always fascinated by that.”
Partition made a more compelling appearance when Sam was at university. “My friends Sparsh, Amina and Sadia, who basically set up Project Dastaan, with me, said that they wanted to start trying to reconnect partition survivors across the border using virtual reality,” he recalls.
“We were in final year of university, and I thought this was rather fascinating. And, frankly, I saw it with the seriousness that I saw joining a university club. I didn’t expect it to still be part of my career seven years later—but gradually, I think we all got pulled into the vortex.”
And then, it showed up in his own family.
“At the end, whilst working on the partition, I discovered that my family has its own partition history in the sense that my grandfather, who never came out to visit us in the 40 years of my parents living out here. My grandparents never visited my dad’s parents.”
That, says Sam, always left the Dalrymple family puzzled. "They always made excuses. And it was the day before his funeral that we discovered images of him as an 18-year-old soldier who joined after World War Two. Being posted in Delhi and Rajasthan, basically, the story seems to be that he never came out because all of his friends were put on a train on one side of the border and never made it out the other side. But of course, you know, I don't know the full story because I never was able to ask him. And I think with all of my friends in Delhi, that became an increasing thing as well."
Such stories are everywhere. “I urge people to speak to their grandparents because these stories are disappearing. And very soon—you won’t know where your ancestors came from,” says the 28-year-old, who studied Philosophy and Theology, before switching to Sanskrit and Persian after his first year at Oxford.
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“The thing about displacement—and such violent displacement—is you don’t ask now, say, ‘Which village did we come from?’ Tomorrow, India and Pakistan suddenly have a massive peace treaty. Kashmir is resolved. Everything goes back to how we all hope it would be. Suddenly, you would be able to go back to your ancestral home. And it’s important to know where you come from, just in case that ever does happen.”
But how does he envision a work like this to go beyond academia or scholarship and attain the sort of everyday universality that, say, a City of Djinns might have? Who is history intended for?
“It’s interesting that you bring that up because at least in the last five years, I’ve always wondered who modern history is intended for,” Sam muses.
His experiments with history fall in a similar ballpark of narrative innovation that William, his father, has been so successful with, right from his second book, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, and more recent ones such as Koh-i-Noor, The Anarchy and The Golden Road.
“I hope [it is intended] for a much more general audience. I very much had both my Delhi friends and my cousins in Scotland in mind. People in Delhi will know one story and in London will know a completely different story.”
And trying to speak to both groups of readers, Sam finds, is a “rather interesting exercise”. “I don’t think academic and narrative histories are mutually complementary. It’s about applying the techniques of storytelling and narrativization to a history book in just the way that good documentary films do,” says Sam, whose first film, a VR docudrama named Child of Empire, detailed the horrors of forced migration.
“For instance, when you watch Amy (2015) by Asif Kapadia, who puts together all this found footage of Amy Winehouse’s life, it doesn’t feel like watching David Attenborough. It’s got suspense, drama, complex relationship—it’s like you’re watching a blockbuster movie about her,” he explains.
One wonders if an increasingly volatile political climate, misinformation and disinformation rampant around the digital media ecosystem, the propaganda machinery fuelling diverse narratives—render each version of history complicated or believable. The path of the historian in this brave new world becomes fraught with ideological landmines.
“There’s never been a more important time to be kind of busting these myths. You know, obviously. I also have an Instagram and a sub stack that is kind of devoted to busting historical myths in some sense,” he agrees.
But the thing about technology and newer platforms of information dissemination—even cinema, these days—is that these things can empower those peddling myths or propagating fabricated histories. “Even I think every ecosystem can be taken over by fake histories and distortions if not protected. You see it across the world, like with freedom of academia in the US and the UK, not just India. Even academia is under a lot of pressure to toe political lines.”
With his films, Project Dastaan and his own Instagram page, the younger Dalrymple has taken on a certain ideological standing that promotes religious harmony and syncretism, purely on that widely maintained insistence that borders are not real things. And now, turning author with Shattered Lands will inevitably formalise his role as a public intellectual in an unprecedented way. But one wonders if he ever finds it complicated as a person of European ethnicity to be leading—even if collaboratively—a project that intends to address wounds of the Partition, among other things.
“Yes, is the answer. It’s very important to be careful. What I try to do in the book is put other people’s voices first. I try not to place too much of a stamp of my own voice so much as allow other people to speak,” he says, before adding that Delhi is his home. The place he’s lived since he was five years old.
“There is no other place that I can really write about in the sense that I’ve never lived in Scotland, where I’m ethnically from,” he adds, earnest as ever.
“But yes, it’s [a] very touchy [subject]. And, ultimately, my family, despite being on both sides of Anglo-Indian descent to some extent, is from the country that colonised India. And it’s not like something that India is a wonderful place to live because of the fact that it doesn’t hold a grudge and has allowed me to feel so welcome over the last 22 years.”
The key, he says, is “to know when to speak and know when to let others speak”.
And how does the awareness of being the son of a successful public intellectual interact with his own sense of identity?
“Inevitably, it’s hugely shaped me. I spent my entire childhood traveling around remote kind of Rajasthani hillforts and across the Bengal Delta in search of Baul musicians, and stuff like that.”
If he had to pick one event that changed his life, it was a family holiday when he was 16.
"It was a family holiday to Afghanistan when I started learning Farsi. I had been previously planning to learn physics. And then I switched to learning Farsi, got a job in Kabul, spent two summers studying in Iran and the rest is history. You know, like that's when I first got into this world," he recalls.
Growing in William Dalrymple's family, has "hugely shaped" him. "The work that I've ended up doing about the partition has evolved more from Project Dastaan. And Sadia and Sparsh have been equally shaping in terms of my own partition journey," he adds. "Ultimately, it's a different form of history than my dad's written, who tends to do ancient and medieval stuff. But I think, you know, I've grown up in a house of books."
His dad became especially instrumental when Project Dastaan's documentary fell through because of COVID-19. "Dad was like, 'You should rewrite the documentary you were writing as a book'. And that's ultimately what led here."
Where does he go from here? Probably to finding that lost city. He should probably make a film about it.
5 Books Sam Dalrymple wants you to read
India in the Persian Age by Richard Eaton. I’m currently also reading Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, which is about Indonesian independence and how it shapes the modern world. And it’s utterly, utterly, utterly fascinating.
I’ll also put A Spy Amongst Friends by Ben Macintyre in there, which is a brilliant history of spies and double agents in the Cold War. I think it’s brilliantly written.
I’d also say Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas by Anirudh Kanisetti was one of my recent favourites about early medieval India. And in terms of recent books that have completely shifted everything for me, Mr and Mrs Jinnah by Sheila Reddy, which looks at the early Jinnah, when he was the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, and his marriage. And he’s a very fascinating character in this book. He’s far more secular, far more handsome and brilliant than Gandhi, going around eating pork and drinking whiskey, and has an interfaith marriage, much to the chagrin of his family, etc. And how in just 20 years do you go from that to the Jinnah that we know from the 1940s? It’s one of the most fascinating things explored through him, his wife’s letters and, ultimately, her tragic suicide.