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EXCLUSIVE: Siddharth Roy Kapur, former Managing Director of the Walt Disney Company India and current President of the Producers Guild of India, has acquired the exclusive film rights for Anarchy: The unstoppable rise of the East India Company, The historical bestselling epic by William Dalrymple.
Published in 2019, the book spans more than 200 years and describes how the infamous East India Company rose to prominence despite the decline and fall of the famous Mughal Empire. It provides a remarkable account of how a provincial trading start-up, run by thirty people in a five-window-wide office in a nondescript London building, became ruler of an entire subcontinent, building the richest and most powerful empire in world history in the process.
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The book received rave reviews, including from Barack Obama, who named it one of his best books of 2019.
Kapur is planning a major television adaptation of the text and is currently assembling an international creative team to begin developing the script. Kapur’s credits include DangalIndia’s most successful film of all time, starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas The sky is pinkand Netflix Originals Yes, ballet.
Speaking to Deadline from his base in Mumbai, Kapur said the next step will be putting together a writers’ room, which he envisions as a cross-cultural group with professionals from India and the West. The show will be produced in multiple languages, but English will also play a big role.
“When I read the book, I was so blown away by the potential of the material. This is an important story that needs to be told around the world,” he said. “It should be done the right way, I’m in no rush to get involved in it. I want to attract the right creative talent to the project to give it the weight it needs for a global platform.”
“We are open to discussions on all fronts, but my instinct tells me that I should get a great showrunner at the beginning, someone with the experience to run a show of this magnitude. Both because of the size of the production and because of the intimate, interesting, intense and dramatic characters that are inherent in the narrative and need to be brought out,” Kapur said.
“It would be great to create a collaborative, cross-cultural writers’ space that brings together talent from the US, the UK and India,” he continued. “The Indian writers can bring their very local perspective, flavour, structure and character, and when it comes to structure, writers from the West who are trained in it can provide a lot of help.”
Given the epic nature of the project, is it likely that he will seek a production deal with a streaming service? “At this point, you want to keep your options open. Yes, a streaming service is an obvious possibility for that, but I’m also looking at cable,” Kapur added.
The producer has another, as-yet-unannounced Netflix series that was supposed to shoot in April but has now been pushed back to October because he needs to be on location for it, he noted. He also has three other series in the works with streamers, but those will now likely be pushed back to next year.
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