apropos Dalrymple

Take off from a review of malayalam colonial era movie, Pazhassi Raja - a royal nemesis of East India Company from the erstwhile kingdom of Kottayam.

...18th century Kottayam, a royal house otherwise renowned for producing Sanskritists and Kathakali playwrights. On the map, it’s approximately where William Dalrymple was doing his research at approximately the same time. Why, if he had wandered on to the sets of this multi-culti Company-era epic, there surely would have been a walk-on part for a cherubic Scotsman. And by offering to impale himself on a quivering Kurichiya (tribal) spear, he could have atoned for the sins of his ancestors at one stroke and spared himself the rigours of ethnography!