Book review: William Dalrymple's The Anarchy is a thoroughly enjoyable read

Historians may find gaps in it, but William Dalrymple's ambitious history of the East India Company is worth investing in, finds Omkar Goswami

Only an audaciously brave person without formal training in history can dare to write a 557-page tome on the East India Company’s conquest of India from the second quarter of the 18th to the mid-19th century — a broken-up India contested by many rivals and accompanied by wanton lawlessness, anarchy and pillage. An India whose capital Delhi the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir described thus: “Where only ruined walls and doorways stand / Sikhs, Marathas, thieves, pickpockets, beggars, kings all prey on us / Happy he is who has no wealth, this is the one true wealth today” [quoted in