Best-selling Dalrymple talks writing history

After putting in years of research into books, like his latest The Last Mughal, he’s a little touchy about the slightly condescending tag ‘popular historian’.

“I bristle at the term ‘popular history’. I think the central issue of how good or not a work of history is, how important, how scholarly a work of history, does not depend on the style in which it’s written. Whether it’s enclosed in a cocoon of post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, foucaultian, post-saidian jargon but the quality of its primary research,” says Dalrymple.

While the author prefers the term ‘narrative historian’, what seems to be the flip side of being a best-selling author, is that he is largely disowned by the country’s academic historians.

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