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William Dalrymple
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Le koh-i-noor ; l'histoire funeste du diamant le plus célèbre du monde
William Dalrymple, Anita Anand
- Libretto
- Litterature Etrangere
- 9 Janvier 2025
- 9782369149606
Le 29 mars 1849, un garçon de dix ans est introduit dans la salle des miroirs du fort de Lahore. Malgré ses craintes, il avance avec dignité : il est le maharajah du Pendjab. Au cours d'une cérémonie aussi fastueuse qu'humiliante, l'enfant va devoir reconnaître sa soumission à la Couronne britannique et céder à la reine Victoria non seulement l'un des territoires les plus riches de l'Inde, mais aussi l'objet le plus précieux du sous-continent, le célèbre diamant Koh-i-Noor, la Montagne de Lumière.
Soucieux de lui établir un pedigree, les Anglais passent aussitôt commande d'une "biographie" de la pierre précieuse. Pour s'acquitter de sa tâche, le jeune fonctionnaire désigné par la Compagnie des Indes orientales a visiblement couru les bazars de Delhi, réunissant toutes les légendes et sornettes que colportait la tradition.
L'histoire du Koh-i-Noor de William Dalrymple et Anita Anand dissipe les brumes de la mythologie, mais ce qu'elle révèle au lecteur d'aujourd'hui n'en est pas moins romanesque, avec son lot de meurtres et de trahisons : une archéologie de la cupidité, où se rejoignent les passions privées des maharajahs et la folie collective de l'impérialisme occidental. -
Anarchie : L'implacable ascension de l'East Indian Compagny
William Dalrymple
- Libretto
- 5 Septembre 2024
- 9782369148159
En 1765, l'East India Company force le jeune empereur moghol à établir, dans ses riches provinces, une nouvelle administration composée de marchands anglais, s'appuyant sur une armée privée pour collecter des taxes : l'Inde subit une véritable privatisation. Dès lors, l'East India Company, cette entreprise conventionnelle spécialisée dans la soie et les épices, devient une entité tout à fait inhabituelle - un pouvoir colonial agressif, qui étend son emprise sous couvert d'une activité commerciale et qui en moins de quarante ans, va lever une armée de près de 200 000 hommes, conquérir le Bengale, et Delhi.
Anarchie raconte comment l'un des plus puissants empires du monde s'est désintégré, tombant entre les mains d'une compagnie privée basée dans un petit bureau à des milliers de kilomètres. -
Partant sur les traces du moine Jean Moschos, dont la chronique datée du VIe siècle lui sert de guide, William Dalrymple entreprend en 1994 un voyage du mont Athos aux déserts d'Egypte.
Au cours de ce périple mêlant quête spirituelle, témoignages et rappels historiques, il retrace le destin des chrétiens d'Orient. Séjournant tout aussi bien en des coins reculés qu'en des villes comme Alexandrie, Istanbul, Jérusalem ou Beyrouth, Dalrymple pose un regard bienveillant sur ce que fut la réalité d'un Empire byzantin placé à la croisée des mondes d'Europe, d'Orient et d'Afrique...
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THE GOLDEN ROAD ; HOW ANCIENT INDIA TRANSFORMED THE WORLD
William Dalrymple
- Bloomsbury
- 14 Février 2025
- 9781408864432
FROM THE AWARD-WINNING, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE CHART-TOPPING EMPIRE PODCAST - A REVOLUTIONARY NEW HISTORY OF THE DIFFUSION OF INDIAN IDEAS
''A master storyteller'' Sunday Times
''Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve'' Spectator
''A more masterful and accessible survey ... would be hard to find ... Enthralling'' Literary Review
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.
William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India''s oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world - and our world today as we know it.
Praise for William Dalrymple and The Anarchy
''A superb historian with a visceral understanding of India'' The Times
''Magnificently readable, deeply researched and richly atmospheric'' Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday -
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India . A book of beauty ' - Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army - what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The East India Company's founding charter authorised it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
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Le livre D´après l´ancienne cosmologie hindoue l´Inde serait aujourd´hui dans les affres de l´âge de Kali, une époque de conflits et de ténèbres durant laquelle toutes les règles s´effondrent et où tout devient possible...
Pendant dix ans, William Dalrymple a sillonné le sous-continent indien, de l´État du Bihar, en pleine déliquescence politique, au Rajasthan, en proie à une guerre des castes endémique ; des palais délabrés de Lucknow, ancien fleuron des maharadjahs, à un temple du Kerala où se pratique l´exorcisme. Il a rencontré des barons de la drogue, s´est entretenu avec des Tigres tamouls, a interviewé Benazir Bhutto et Imran Khan, ou encore Baba Sehgal, la première rock star indienne. L´Âge de Kali est une analyse et un témoignage édifiant sur un pays en plein bouleversement, tiraillé entre modernité et résistance au changement.
L'auteur Né en 1965 en Écosse, William Dalrymple suit des études d´histoire et de journalisme à l´université de Cambridge. À vingt-deux ans, il publie le best-seller In Xanadu, qui raconte son voyage de Jérusalem à la Mongolie, et remporte le Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award et le Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. Après avoir vécu cinq ans en Inde, cet érudit, qui est aussi le plus jeune membre de la Royal Society of Literature, publie La Cité des djinns, lauréat du prestigieux Thomas Cook Travel Book Award en 1994 et du Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. Il est aujourd´hui considéré comme l´un des meilleurs écrivains voyageurs de sa génération et reçoit en 2002 la médaille Mungo Park de la Royal Scottish Geographical Society pour sa contribution à la littérature de voyage. Spécialiste de l´histoire de l´Inde et de l´Orient, William Dalrymple collabore à de nombreux journaux anglais et américains, comme The Guardian et The New Yorker. Il est également l´auteur de scénarios de séries télévisées et d´émissions de radio consacrées à l´Inde, ainsi qu´au mysticisme et à la spiritualité britanniques. Marié et père de trois enfants, il partage actuellement son temps entre Londres et New Delhi.
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In the course of 12 months in Delhi, Dalrymple peels back the successive layers of history, using material and human remains of each of the eight cities of Delhi, interlacing stories with the present and ending with the Delhi creation myth contained in the great Indian epic "The Mahabharata".
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THE AGE OF KALI - INDIAN TRAVELS AND ENCOUNTERS
William Dalrymple
- Flamingo
- 2 Juillet 1999
- 9780006547754
A collection of essays which resulted from the author's travels around India. The subjects range from the guerrilla fighters, and vegetarian terrorists that he met, to his encounters with celebrities such as Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto, and through to the anecdotes, myths and legends that characterize the continent.
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White mughals - love and betrayal in eighteenth-century india
William Dalrymple
- Harper Collins Uk
- 3 Avril 2003
- 9780006550969
From the early 16th century to the eve of the Indian Mutiny, the "white Mughals" who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassment to successive colonial administrations. This book uncovers a world unexplored by history, and places at its centre a tale of betrayal.
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KOH-I-NOOR ; THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD'S MOST INFAMOUS DIAMOND
William Dalrymple, Anita Anand
- Bloomsbury
- 17 Mai 2018
- 9781408888827
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world.
On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old maharaja of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over great swathes of the richest country in India in a formal Act of Submission to a private corporation, the East India Company. He was also compelled to hand over to the British monarch, Queen Victoria, perhaps the single most valuable object on the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i Noor diamond. The Mountain of Light.
The history of the Koh-i-Noor that was then commissioned by the British may have been one woven together from gossip of Delhi bazaars, but it was to become the accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged, freeing the diamond from the fog of mythology that has clung to it for so long. The resulting history is one of greed, murder, torture, colonialism and appropriation told through an impressive slice of south and central Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current controversial setting: in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Masterly, powerful and erudite, this is history at its most compelling and invigorating.
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In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on a journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. More than a thousand years later, using their writings as a guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their steps.
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THE LAST MUGHAL - THE FALL OF A DYNASTY: DELHI, 1857
William Dalrymple
- Vintage Usa
- 11 Mars 2008
- 9781400078332
In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history. The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar--a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment--created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.
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NINE LIVES - IN SEARCH OF THE SACRED IN MODERN INDIA
William Dalrymple
- Vintage Usa
- 14 Juin 2011
- 9780307474469
From the author of The Last Mughal , an enlightening book that explores with remarkable compassion and expansive insight nine varieties of religious devotion in India today. In portraits of people we might otherwise never know William Dalrymple distills his twenty-five years of travel in India to explore the challenges faced by practitioners of traditional forms of faith in contemporary India. For two months a year, a man in Kerala divides his time between jobs as a prison warden and a well-builder and his calling as an incarnate deity. A temple prostitute watches her two daughters die from AIDS after entering a trade she regards as a sacred calling. A Jain nun recalls the pain of watching her closest friend ritually starve herself to death. Together, these tales reveal the resilience of individuals in the face of the relentless onslaught of modernity, the enduring legacy of tradition, and the hope and honor that can be found even in the most unlikely places.