This opinion of one disenchanted elite is reinforced, in Dalrymple’s view, by travellers who came to India in this period: apparently the arrival of anarchy was a truth widely acknowledged. His reasons are that a "disconsolate Mughal gentleman", Fakir Khan, described India during Mughal decline as "the abode of Anarchy". No serious historian of 18th century India doubts the significance of this interpretation.ĭalrymple, however, believes that this revisionist view of the eighteenth century has gone a little too far. The most notable of these areas were Bengal, Awadh, Mysore, the Maratha Confederacy and Haiderabad. On the contrary in large parts of India - the former subahs (provinces) of the Empire - trade and economic activity continued to flourish under strong rulers. Bayly - have argued that, popular perception notwithstanding, after the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate as a centralising force, India did not descend into anarchy and economic decline. He says that certain eminent historians, among them - Muzaffar Alam, C.A. Yet one is left with the title of the book.ĭalrymple is not unaware of this and therefore offers a justification. There was nothing anarchic about the plunder that Dalrymple’s book reveals with riveting detail. It will remain a puzzle why William Dalrymple chose to call his book The Anarchy when it so successfully describes the most comprehensive act of organised plunder of a country by an English merchant company with the full backing of the English government. Catchy titles are the serious writers’ fatal attraction.
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