"Everybody has their own India and I think it’s a nonsense construction, “a real India”. The real India might be the India of the villages and certainly there’s a lot to be said of the fact that India’s heart lies in its villages. But I live 5 miles down the road from Gurgaon with kyscrapers and software companies and backoffice projects and call-centers. And that’s a very real India too, so I think “real India” doesn’t make much sense-- anymore than the real US with apple pie and Thanksgiving and family around campfires; is that anymore real than Manhattan?"

“It is true that the early Nehruvian textbooks were written by Romila Thapar and so on, many of whom were Marxists and it is true that those textbooks did sort of emphasize a slightly rose-tinted vision of Hindu-Muslim unity ... which left room for the right to say this isn't history. ... I'd say that the Nehruvian history books written in the 1950s were sufficiently rose-tinted to leave room for complaint.”

“I am writing definitely primarily for an audience who don’t know India.”

“Dalrymple is British—Scottish, to be exact—but his controversial statements are more likely to concern the country's Mughal or British past. He is today India's most famous narrative historian.”

“His fluent and moving presentations of big subjects—India's first war of independence in "The Last Mughal ", for example — sometimes irritate native historians who feel they have been scooped by a powerful foreign interest, but this is a little unfair:..Dalrymple's success has shown that there is a market for well-written history in India. This is itself an achievement.”

“In the past twenty years, he has rigorously pursued fascination for , writing one brilliant travel book , two vivid histories , and one anthology of acute acute journalism about South Asia. He came to India before it had achieved its status as a frontier boomland for computer programmers and writers alike, and he has lived there, on and off, since 1989... he has become something of a godfather to a generation of writers who are producing nonfiction about the country. The fact that Dalrymple looks like a sunnier version of the actor James Gandolfini and loves to party no doubt helps with this reputation.”

“He is one of Britain’s most successful travel writers, whose highly entertaining books elegantly combine scholarship and story-telling, trans-cultural investigations and romance.”