i haven’t yet read this book, so unable to make any personal comments regarding it. A brief review of this book by Ahmed Rashid, followed by a synopsis from the author’s website is in this post - and lastly a Guardian article by the book’s author, William Dalrymple. Incidentally, the author wrote and presented the television series ‘Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys’, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. He is the author of In Xanadau (which he wrote when he was 22), which became a bestseller. His second book, ‘City of Djinns’, won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award.
Enuf of that; here’s Ahmed Rashid’s review: “Imaginitively conceived, beautifully written, intellectually challenging and a passionate love story - this is Dalrymple’s lifetime achievement and the best book he has ever written. He has done for India and the British what Edward Said did for the meeting between the West and Arab world in ‘Orientalism’. Despite its setting in the 18th century, this is a hugely important contemporary book. Dalrymple has broken new ground in the current debate about racism, colonialism and globalization. The history of the British in India will never be the same after this book.”
Synopsis: White Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time. James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Khair un-Nissa - ‘Most Excellent among Women’ - the great niece of Nizam’s Prime Minister, and a direct descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair, and overcame many obstacles to marry her - not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company.
It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious disputes and espionage. But such things were not unknown; from the sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian Mutiny, the ‘white Mughals’ who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of difficulty and embarrassment to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as ‘Hindoo Stuart’, who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his templeful of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick’s counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his Indian wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of her own elephant. In White Mughals, William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of love, seduction and betrayal. It possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon. White Mughals, the product of five years’ writing and research from a variety of previously unused Indian and British primary sources, will undoubtedly be regarded as Dalrymple’s masterpiece.
White mischief, The Guardian, William Dalrymple, 9 December 2002
…] I first came across [James Achilles] Kirkpatrick’s [a British resident at the court of Hyderabad, early 1800s] story on a visit to Hyderabad in February 1997. I thought it was most extraordinary, and by the time I left the city I was captivated. It seemed so different from what one expected of the British in India. Little did I know then that it was to be the start of an obsession that would take over my life for the next five years.
…] As I progressed in my research, it was not long before I discovered that I had a direct Indian ancestor, was the product of a similar interracial liaison from this period, and had Indian blood in my veins. No one in my family seemed to know about this, though it should not have been a surprise: we had all heard the stories of how our beautiful, dark-eyed, Calcutta-born great-great-grandmother, Sophia Pattle, with whom the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones had fallen in love, used to speak Hindustani with her sisters and was painted by Frederick Watts with a rakhi - a Hindu sacred thread - tied around her wrist. But it was only when I poked around in the archives that I discovered that she was descended from a Hindu Bengali woman from Chandernagore, who had converted to Catholicism, taken the name Marie Monica, and married a French officer.
…] I am sure that I am hardly alone in making this sort of discovery. The wills of East India Company officials, now in the India Office library, clearly show that in the 1780s, more than one-third of the British men in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives, or to Anglo-Indian children - a degree of cross-cultural mixing which has never made it into the history books. It suggests that, 200 years before Zadie Smith made it on to the telly and multiculturalism became a buzzword politically correct enough to wake Norman Tebbit and the Tory undead from their coffins at party conferences, the India of the East India Company was an infinitely more culturally, racially and religiously mixed place than modern Britain can even dream of being.
…] This period of intermixing did not last: the rise of the Victorian Evangelicals in the 1830s and 40s slowly killed off the intermingling of Indian and British ideas, religions and ways of life. The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly began to decline: from turning up in one-in-three wills between 1780 and 1785, they are present in only one-in-four between 1805 and 1810. By 1830, it is one-in-six; by the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared.
Biographies and memoirs of prominent 18th-century British Indian worthies that mentioned their Indian wives were re-edited in the mid-19th century so that the consorts were removed from later editions. The mutiny of 1857 merely finished off the process. Afterwards, nothing could ever be as it was. With the British victory, and the genocidal spate of hangings and executions that followed, the entire top rank of the Mughal elite was swept away and British culture was unapologetically imposed on India.
The story of mixed-race families such as my own and the Kirkpatricks seems to raise huge questions about Britishness and the nature of empire, faith and personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these matter, are fixed and immutable - and to what extent they were flexible, tractable and negotiable. It is significant, moreover, that all this surprises us as much as it does: it is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not just India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter. Yet at a time when east and west, Islam and Christianity, appear to be engaged in another major confrontation, this unlikely group of expatriates provides a timely reminder that it is very possible - and has always been possible - to reconcile the two worlds and build bridges across cultures. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again.