For the record
She has a popular podcast, Empire, with William Dalrymple; three books on India’s entwined history with Britain and a fourth one in the works. For too long, colonisers depicted themselves as heroes and Indians were in the backdrop of their own story, says
“Iam driven into that space between Britain and India because I exist in that space,” says journalistturned-historian Anita Anand, 50. She was born to firstgeneration Punjabi immigrants to the UK. Her late father Dr Chaitenya Anand, a general practitioner, raised her with a sense of how vital it was to know who you are. “He encouraged me to examine our history,” she says. Her mother Shashi Anand, a retired teacher, “is the best storyteller, a fabulous mimic. I think my desire to tell stories comes from her.”
An inquisitive child, Anand wanted from an early age to be a journalist. She edited her school newspaper, won prizes for her writing, then graduated in English literature from King’s College London, and found her way into television. “Initially, I thought I might be a war correspondent.”
Covering the Bhuj earthquake for Zee TV in 2001, she realised this could not be. She cried as she stood on a pile of rubble, amid “photographs of children and pages of school books and a shoe.” She segued into political journalism instead, which is close kin to history.
“Journalism and history are curious cousins, because it means that the mind has to ask similar questions such as: What happened? Why did it happen? And in some cases: How can one stop this from happening again?”
These questions have yielded three books so far, and the popular ongoing podcast Empire, which Anand co-hosts with the historian William Dalrymple.
The turn to history, for Anand, began in 2009, with an old, black-and-white photograph reprinted in a local newspaper. It showed a young Indian woman handing out copies of a newspaper called The Suffragette in London, in the early 1900s, campaigning for the British woman’s right to vote.
Anand was then on maternity leave for the first of her two children (Hari, 12 and Ravi, 8) with husband Simon Singh, a scientist and science writer. She became intrigued by the rare and forgotten Indian suffragette in this old photo.
“Sophia Duleep Singh had this fascinating story, as the daughter of the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, Maharajah Duleep Singh — also the man who was compelled to hand over the Kohinoor to British forces. As a Punjabi myself, I felt I had to tell this story.”
It turned out to not be very hard to dig up unusual information on Singh. “People didn’t know anything about her. Everything was new. And I was very happy to find people who were still alive who had known her,” Anand says. “Those people brought to life what I was learning in dusty files and once-classified documents in British archives. Those people made her real.” drew attention around the world. In February this year, the British charity English Heritage announced that it will officially take note of Singh’s contribution, dedicating one of its iconic blue plaques to her, so that she can be remembered among England’s most iconic suffragettes.
This is Anand’s mission, as she sees it: To serve as a record-keeper and record-corrector. It’s a role she plays in her two other books, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (2019; released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar), and Koh-i-noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (2017; co-authored with Dalrymple); and in her fourth, an upcoming work on Olive Christian Malvery (1871-1914), known as the world’s first woman undercover journalist.
“She was also of Indian origin. She exposed the terrible practices in work offices, factories, markets and anywhere women were employed and exploited. She was brave, intrepid and everything I like in a character,” Anand says.
While there are several things about being British that one can be proud of, “for me it is vital to bring the other side of the story into the bright sunlight,” she says. “Historically, the ugly parts of colonialism aren’t mentioned. The British are shown as the heroes and the Indians were in the backdrop like furniture.”
Anand works to tell the stories of some of those people in the backdrop, and to look at all the people in the scene anew, to examine what motivated them, what made them who they were.
This is what makes Koh-i-noor such a compelling read. One sees a different side to Shah Jahan, the great emperor so distraught over the death of his wife Mumtaz Mahal that he spends a fortune making a unique pair of emerald-lensed spectacles, believing they might bring him better fortune and protect his health.
“History isn’t just about dates and events. It’s about human beings doing things to other human beings and I am completely compelled by this,” Anand says.
What’s a detail that people would be surprised to know about her?
“I have a second career acting in movies and TV dramas,” she says, laughing. “I feature as a newsreader in the 2018 Hollywood movie The Spy Who Dumped Me and in a 2019 episode of Black Mirror. I play myself in the 2022 drama series Slow Horses, about the British secret service.”
Who is her pick for most compelling personality in contemporary history? “[Swedish climate activist] Greta Thunberg, for how she has mobilised young people since she was 15,” Anand says. “This fight is not easy. She is treated so badly by her critics and yet she keeps going.”
When historians of the future look back, she adds, “I think they will not forgive us for being such poor custodians of the planet. I think they will also be astonished about this era of disinformation in a time when information is so readily available. Nobody trusts anybody at the moment and that is such a dangerous place to be. I think history books will be written about how the essential truths of our times were so easily subverted.”