The Company is not one thing for 250 years, it’s many different things. It’s not a bad thing that history continues to be looked at from the changing perspectives of the present… but it has to be anchored in the facts found in the primary sources and not just be an expression of religious bigotry There are concerns that the archive may be pruned and its contents more closely supervised… I’m no fan of this government but the early reports of the whole Central Vista project were far more alarming than the reality has turned out to be. So it’s not impossible to move an archive.

They moved from Calcutta to here at the time of the building of Lutyens’ Delhi, which is a far bigger move. In principle, it shouldn’t be an impossible job to move an archive. The archives are open at the moment, it hasn’t been moved yet. Kaushik Das Gupta: There’s been a concern about the National Archives as it’s being shifted to another building. Historian William Dalrymple at the Indian Express Noida office. And together, we worked around archive bases such as Tonk, the National Archives and the British Library, and found hundreds of unused and untranslated Mughal biographies and narratives. I was very lucky to work, on all four of my East India Company books, with the extraordinary Bruce Wannell, who had this extraordinary linguistic gift of fluently reading late-Mughal Persian and Urdu, and producing exquisite translations. The reason is possibly linguistic virtually no one here can read scribal Persian anymore.

There were unused archives: The entire Mutiny Papers, these extraordinary records in the National Archives, the country’s leading archive, and no one had worked on them or translated them into English. And the whole question of a corporation taking over a country and controlling an army. I was fascinated by the 18th century, by what was going on among Mughals, Marathas, Tipu’s Mysore, Hyderabad, and the post-Mughal successor states and the East India Company. Kaushik Das Gupta: What is it that drew you to transition?

The last mughal by william dalrymple