The Historian’s Eye

While researching for his forthcoming book, The Anarchy, which tells the story of how a militarized multinational destroyed and replaced the mighty and supremely elegant empire of the Great Mughals, William Dalrymple visited all the places in the Indian subcontinent where this history took place — the battlefields and ruins, the mosques, Sufi shrines and temples, the paradise gardens and pleasure grounds, the barrack blocks and townhouses, the crumbling Mughal havelis and the palaces and forts. This collection is a record of that journey. Shot on his Samsung Edge, the striking black-and-white images in this collection convey the immediacy and lack of pretension that a cellphone offers in recording the world around us. For, as Dalrymple himself says, ‘Photography should always be about the eye, not the equipment.’