Just Started Reading The Last Mughal

The Naipaul book — Literary Occasions — that I was reading mysteriously disappeared from my table just when I had set a rhythm. It was the first time I had read VS Naipaul and I really liked the way he writes, or at least the way he has written Literary Occasions. I think my 17-month-old daughter threw the book from our balcony and from there someone took it.

Anyway, consequently I’ve started reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal. I read his previous book too — The White Mughals — and I think he does a brilliant job chronicling the history of India in the middle ages. It’s just that, he focuses more on melancholic romanticism of the Mughals and sidesteps the unparalleled brutality the Mughals unleashed upon the Indian sub-continent. This could be because both the books deal with the times when the influence of the Mughals was whittling away under the strong winds of the European imperialism, mainly the British.