http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_27-11-2002_pg4_20
White Mughals proved Kipling wrong, West went East
By Sugita Katyal
NEW DELHI: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” said Rudyard Kipling — but even as he wrote that at the end of the 19th century, he was wrong.
British writer William Dalrymple’s new book “White Mughals” shatters the stereotype of the stiff upper-lipped English sahib in a sun helmet who kept his distance from Indian subjects, uncovering a hidden tribe of colonial settlers who “went native”.
He explores a little-known chapter of history when India was under Mughal, or Muslim, rule and the British consorted with Indian women, often kept a “bibi” or mistress, and swapped their coats and breeches for turbans and pyjamas.
In some cases, they converted to Islam or Hinduism.
“At all times up to the 19th century…there was wholesale inter-racial sexual exploration and surprisingly widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity: what Salman Rushdie…has called ‘chutnification’,” Dalrymple says in his preface.
Dalrymple uses an 18th-century romance between a British official, James Kirkpatrick, and a Muslim noblewoman, Khair un-Nissa, or Most Excellent among Women, to paint a portrait of a tartan-clad Englishman in India who took to local habits, including smoking through a hookah water-pipe.
Kirkpatrick, the British resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, converted to Islam to marry Khair and adopted a lifestyle that perhaps made him more Indian than the Indians.
He spoke Persian and Hindustani, wore traditional clothes, dyed his fingers with henna and built a separate zenana, or women’s quarters, for his wife who lived her life behind a veil, or purdah.
“We’d just bought the Victorian version of this period which had airbrushed all this as Oriental fantasies,” Dalrymple, 37, told Reuters. “But these are real people with real lives. I hope this book will open a new chapter in the history of this period.”
Colonised colonisers: As Dalrymple recounts, one of the best-known conquerors to be conquered was Job Charnock, the founder of the eastern city of Calcutta who married a Hindu girl whom he allegedly stopped from committing suicide on the funeral pyre of her first husband, as was the custom in parts of India.
Charnock adopted Indian attire, wearing the Bengali lungi or sarong.
Another was George Thomas, an Irishman known as “Jehaz Sahib” in India and the “Rajah from Tipperary” at home. He set up his own kingdom near Delhi where he built a palace, minted his own coins and had a harem, and in the process forgot his English.
When Thomas was asked to dictate his autobiography, he said he would only do so if he could speak in Persian because he was more familiar with that language than his native tongue.
Major General Charles “Hindoo” Stuart — who travelled the country with his Indian bibi — was so Indianised he wrote a series of newspaper articles urging European women to adopt the flowing Indian sari costume if they wanted to compete with the beauty of Indian women. .
Perhaps one of the most extreme examples was Thomas Legge, from Donaghadee in Northern Ireland, who developed an interest in Indian alchemy and divination and ended his days as a naked fakir, or hermit, living in an empty tomb in the desert state of Rajasthan.
“Even today…we still have rhetoric about ‘clashing civilisations’, and almost daily generalisations in the press about East and West, Islam and Christianity,” says Dalrymple.
“The White Mughals — with their unexpected minglings and fusions and above all their efforts at promoting tolerance and understanding — attempted to bridge these two worlds, and to some extent they succeeded in doing so.” ”
But the mingling slowed down by the late 18th century as ideas of racial separation came into vogue and the British introduced legislation excluding the children of British men by Indian wives from employment in the powerful East India Company.
The practice of taking Indian wives virtually died out after the British “fishing fleets” began arriving in India — carrying young women and hopeful spinsters looking for husbands.
Film plans: Dalrymple, who spent about five years trawling through archives in India and England for “White Mughals”, shot to fame with his first travel book “In Xanadu” 15 years ago and then another award-winning book on Delhi titled “The City of Djinns”.
In many ways, Dalrymple is much like a character in his latest book: he often wears a traditional Indian kurta-pyjama, speaks a bit of Hindi and plans to move to India for his next project, a sequel to both “Djinns” and “White Mughals”. He’s also talking to Shekhar Kapur, director of the award-winning film “Elizabeth”, to make a film based on the book. During his research, Dalrymple discovered that he had Indian blood running in his veins. His great-grandmother Sophia was descended from a Hindu Bengali woman who converted to the Catholic church and married a French officer in the 1780s.
“As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa shows, East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been,” says Dalrymple.
“Only bigotry and prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again.” —Reuters