William Dalrymple is a habitual liar who suffers from a colonial mindset. He twists the story of a Hindu girl kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam as voluntary acceptance of Islam. In 2014, in Tehelka, I exposed his attempt to whitewash crimes against Hindus. Thread... https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/1284913803923259398

2. On 31 October, the Scotsman tweeted: “The Hindu Kush—the Tears of the Hindus—named after the Delhi craftsmen forcibly transported to Samarkand by Timur.” These are the words of a man who describes himself as a historian and Indophile.
https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/527817062068924417

3. First up, Hindu Kush does not mean tears of the Hindus. It means Hindu Killer, and is named so because of the numerous Hindu men, women, children who perished while crossing these mountains when they were being hauled off to the slave markets of Central Asia by Muslim invaders

4. Their numbers run into the millions going by the accounts of Muslim chroniclers who accompanied these invaders, in particular Mahmud Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori.

5. Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller, wrote in 1334 CE: “....in the middle of this route there is a mountain called Hindu Kush, meaning Hindu-killer, because many male and female slaves transported from India die in these mountains because of the violent cold and snow.”

6. Dalrymple is no Indophile. He just likes to play the gora sahib to his Indian sepoys. The Jaipur Lit Festival, which he runs, has become the watering hole where Indian leftists, liberals and anti-national elements congregate under the auspices of their gora master.

7. The Scotsman is upset at the rise of the nationalists because the anti-national forces are losing traction. Dalrymple’s neat little racket is in danger of coming unstuck. Perhaps he’s not getting any sleep and in his sleep-deprived state is prone to make nonsensical statements

8. In an April 2005 article in the New York Review of Books, he is all over the place, trashing Indian history and abusing Hindu nationalists, and just stops short of saying that India was better off under his ancestors.

9. He comes up with this gem: “The Nehru-era school textbooks were the work of the greatest historians of their day, among them Romila Thapar and R. S. Sharma, who tended to come from the left-leaning elite.” Basically, the two biggest con artists are his heroes.

10. Thanks to the reach of social media, Indians know that Thapar and Sharma have peddled the worst lies about Indian history. They are set to slide into the proverbial dustbin.

11. At the same time, Dalrymple never talks about the massive wealth his family has accumulated by plundering India. Arvind Kumar writes in India Facts that he suffers from an incurable colonial hangover.

12. “Here is info published in 1872 giving some clues about the size of this loot. Dalrymple’s direct ancestor, John Warrender Dalrymple, was a judge who was paid a huge sum of 37,992 silver rupees per year when every ounce of silver was worth a sixteenth of an ounce of gold."

13. "That is a whopping 27.69 kg of gold per year since each silver rupee weighed 11.66 gm. This amount does not include bribes he may have received to rig lawsuits. This particular Dalrymple was in India for 30 years."

14. "That is just one Dalrymple. There were other looters in the family, including a Dalrymple in Madras whose job was to kill Indians. Given this background, William’s massive sense of entitlement should surprise no one.”

15. It is because of this sense of entitlement that when Englishmen and women set foot in India, something goes off in their brain and they start believing they can be some sort of interlocutors between Indians.

16. It is not a coincidence that while Indians have for decades studied history concocted by European scholars to justify British rule in India, the modern-day British have airbrushed all colonial crimes from their own history books.

17. Dalrymple should, therefore, go back and reform his own country, where people are starving, sleeping on park benches and jehadis are going berserk. They have no business being in India, which anyway has enough brown sahibs who can perform the same role - for a lot less.
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