Isegoria

When I started listening to the audiobook version of Sharpe’s Tiger, the first novel of the series that inspired the show starring Sean Bean (Boromir), I was surprised — and a bit embarrassed — to learn that “loot” was one of many words the British plundered from India. How did I not know that?

I recently read William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, which offers a nonfiction account of “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire,” and it opens with just this fact:

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

It certainly seems appropriate. Sharpe’s Tiger felt quite a bit like an old-school pulp swords-and-sorcery novel or an early Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and The Anarchy had some of that feel, too.

Powis Castle in Wales houses a treasure horde worthy of a dragon:

There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi.

The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s heads set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour.

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