Copyright theage
“Politicians of the right at the moment are complaining about a liberal conspiracy to ‘do down’ the glories of empire. Often that comes with a great deal of political baggage,” he says. “What they’re actually saying is ‘we don’t want to give land back’, or ‘we don’t want to restore objects which were looted’, or ‘we want to keep all the stuff we got when we massacred everybody and took over their lands’.” Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road, tells of India’s contribution to the world, a chapter of history untold in part because of colonisation. “Those sorts of attitudes, that everything that’s important comes from the West, and that there’s exotica out there from the east, but nothing of any real substance. That attitude, bizarrely, despite everything, despite 70 years of decolonisation ... still lingers in our education systems.”
