Siddharth Roy Kapur’s production house, Roy Kapur Films (RKF), has acquired the rights to The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company by award-winning historian and best-selling author William Dalrymple, to be adapted into a global series. The banner is set to mount one of the biggest international productions on the duplicitous rise of the British Empire in India.
The Anarchy was listed by former US President Barack Obama as amongst his Top 10 Recommended Books of 2019. Encompassing a period from 1599 to 1802, it traces the relentless rise of The East India Company against the decline and fall of the storied Mughal Empire. It provides a remarkable account of how a provincial trading start-up, run by thirty people from an office only five windows wide in a nondescript London building, became rulers of an entire sub-continent; in the process, establishing the richest and most powerful empire in the history of the world. With colonialism being discussed globally, recounting the history of the British rule in India is now of paramount importance.
Siddharth Roy Kapur intends to put together a diverse international team of writers and show-runners to create a series that will be pathbreaking in scale and quality. The author, William Dalrymple, who is also on board as a consultant for the project, says, “I don’t think, I have ever written a book more obviously crying out to be adapted than The Anarchy, and I can’t think of anyone in India better to adapt it than Siddharth Roy Kapur. I’m very excited, looking at the initial treatment note, talking about the various ways to bring this book alive and to bring the characters I’ve been living with over the last six years onto the screen, so that everyone else can see them in flesh and blood. It’s an incredibly exciting moment and I have high expectations of this project!”
