Most Bengalis know, and even take a certain conspiratorial pleasure in repeating, that Virginia Woolf was “a little bit ours” — born of a Chandannagore line in which a Bengali woman married a Frenchman and slyly smuggled a thin vein of Bengali blood into the canon of English modernism. What delights Bengal even more, though, is that this same family tree branches towards William Dalrymple, the contemporary historian and writer who now feels familiar on Calcutta bookshelves and literature festival stages, less like a Scottish intellectual and more like an direct, overachieving cousin we can’t help but include in our conversations about family and history. The Dalrymples have become some of our favourite long-distance relatives, close enough to be claimed “basically Bangali”, yet distant enough to be discussed, debated, and occasionally idolised. The fact that they are “ours” makes conversation with and about them all the more endearing, even if you are a little bit intimidated by the vastness of their intellectual capabilities.
William babu, is, of course, no stranger to Calcutta stages, but what pleasantly surprised me on my recent visit to the seventh Dehradun Literature Festival is the fact that his son Sam, the young 28-year-old who many of Gen-Z will recognise from Instagram and Substack as @travelsofsamwise (explicit Lord of the Rings fan, he tells us later) also seems to be as attached to his Bengali roots as the rest of us. Sam, who came out with his first book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, in June this year, seems to reciprocate the sentiment we bear him and his family, returning to Bengal and its stories and landmarks as someone intent on walking its borders and folding its forgotten cities back into the maps of our shared imagination. His work on the book, rooted in thorough archival research and enriched by journeys across forgotten towns and monuments across the country, reflects a historian’s dedication towards the atrocities that were meted out to South Asia during and after the Raj, and blends government documents, personal memoirs, oral histories, and on-the-ground interactions. This allows him to weave together a rich, comparative narrative of the “Five Partitions” that shaped the continent, and brings to light the complex human stories behind geopolitical transformations that are often overlooked in mainstream histories.
Post his panel at the DDLF, I managed to speak to Sam about his work and projects, and somehow ended up talking about Bengal. Excerpts from our chat, in which we discussed fragmented identities and why Murshidabadi mangoes are the stuff of living legend.
It’s quite evident that you don’t care for armchair writing at all!
(Laughs) Yes, I’m not someone who believes that all of history is sitting in archives. I find that some of the most important revelations that I’ve had, which have formed the crux of this book, came from visiting places. And it was only through actually going to these places, interacting with different communities, that I was able to put this book together at all.
What was the driving force? I’m assuming you must have had an early interest in the subject…
Well, I had originally wanted to become a particle physicist! I had applied for physics and philosophy as my degree, but I didn’t get in, so I decided I was going to be stubborn, and I was going to reapply next year, and I wasn’t going to go to my second choice university. And so, instead, I worked in a bookshop and then studied Farsi in Purani Dilli for a few months. Then a few of my friends ended up travelling around, and so I joined them and we went on a trip, overland down to Kanyakumari. It was amazing and changed my perception of the country, and then about halfway through that year, when it came to reapplying, I decided that, you know what, I want to do languages instead!
I began my work on this book essentially as a filmmaker. I was doing a documentary, and we were doing this Partition project where we were reconnecting partitioned families across the India-Pakistan border with their childhood homes, communities, whatever. So, you know, 95-year-olds who haven’t seen their haveli or mandir or gurdwara or masjid, in whichever direction. We were working with the Partition Museum in Amritsar and the National Museum of History in Lahore.
And it was through this project that I began coming across all these small, often forgotten places of worship that had been abandoned in 1947. So, you’ve got the great Hanuman Mandir of Lahore, but you’ve also got across East Punjab hundreds of extraordinary mosques that are lying derelict, many of them converted into new religious places of worship during Partition. And it began to open my eyes to how much of India’s heritage lies often undocumented in small towns, and yet is world-class.
And it’s through that that I began writing about monuments and art history, which was always just a line before, but has now transformed into my Substack, where I now do a weekly write-up of any historical monuments that I’ve come across. None of that would have been possible without travel.
Could you give us a few specific examples of the places you went to?
So, for example, you’re from Calcutta — one just needs to go travel around rural Bengal and see the incredible temples that are now in Bangladesh or the mosques that are now in India.
In Bengal, I travelled to Gour, one of the great medieval capitals of Bengal. The border gate is this great medieval gateway, which was the gateway of the palace and is now the border post between India and Bangladesh. And in some sense, the great medieval capital of Bengal has itself now been divided between India and Bangladesh, which is a metaphor if ever there was one.
Gour was one of the early Hindu capitals, followed by a sultanate capital throughout the colonial period, one of the great places that British and Indian painters would paint. It was one of the great tourism sites in the sense of the subcontinent, and yet has fallen off the map since Partition because half of it now falls in India and the other half in Bangladesh. And for the longest time, it was under the border security forces. So no one could even visit many of the tourist sites.
I also think Murshidabad is one of the most extraordinary towns in the subcontinent. It is one of the great Mughal and post-Mughal cities, up there with Lucknow, and yet largely forgotten and neglected despite having once been one of the richest cities on planet Earth.
It was the richest capital of the richest province of the richest empire on earth. And there was more wealth in that city in the early 1700s than there was in the entire British aristocracy. It’s got these extraordinary palaces, these extraordinary temples, these extraordinary mosques, and just the most amazing landscape. And like Venice, it’s all connected by rivers, and so you have to take boats. You only really experience it when you go to the boat and you see all these massive palaces facing onto the water.
It’s also got some of the best mangoes in India, to the point that Bari Kothi, the new heritage hotel that’s opened up there, has one of the most wonderful rooms I’ve ever seen, which is a room filled with different historical figures thanking people from Murshidabad for their mangoes, including Queen Victoria’s letter saying thank you for the mangoes, Marilyn Monroe saying thank you for the mangoes, JFK saying thank you for the mangoes, and on and on, I can’t quite remember who. But it’s this extraordinary room. You’d never realise that so many historical figures ate Murshidabadi mangoes!
I think that it’s still largely off the beaten track, but I hope that will begin to change. Bengal, for far too long, like so many other Indian states, has completely failed to invest in its huge, enormous tourism potential. I think that’s, of course, something that could be said for many cities. It’s a problem that plagues much of India, but I think Murshidabad is a particularly good spot.
You’re pretty big on experiential travel, it seems….
Yeah, like you said, I’m not a believer at all in armchair writing. I visited 12 different countries in the process of writing this book. I think slow travel, actually interacting with the communities you write about, is key. You can’t experience a place without stopping to breathe. Meeting the people who actually live there, seeing what’s unique about the city, seeing what architectural masterpieces lie in the city, what the culinary world is like…. Once you begin actually mingling and visiting different sites and places, if you take your time, you will gradually be introduced from one person to the other. And then a chain of meetings will happen, and your entire image of a place will be transformed.