White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India - William Dalrymple
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India - William Dalrymple
Non-Fiction
Pages: 640
Oh, I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. I confess I know very little about the years before the Raj, before the British Crown took over India from the East India Company, so this book came as a delightful, entrancing revelation. During the years of the British Raj, the lines - social, political, religious, caste and class - dividing British from Indian were very clearly defined and adhered to, but this was not the case in the early years of the East India Company. Many officials had bibis, Indian courtesans or mistresses; many kept a zenana, a harem of sorts; and some, fewer it is true, married Indian wives and raised Anglo-Indian children.
This book is the story of those years when it was not deemed entirely unacceptable to embrace Indian culture - most particularly the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the Company Resident in Hyderabad, and Khair un-Nissa, a relative of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad. Their love affair was quite scandalous - there were no fewer than four enquiries into James' conduct by the Company, and he was more than prepared to resign his position and career to be with Khair, although it seems from the evidence that it was she who initially pursued him, and not the other way around!
Dalrymple's own summary serves quite well - "in a time, and a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives, Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion."
James Kirkpatrick represented the last gasp of the 'white mughals', the British officers and officials who whole-heartedly embraced the syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture of the Deccan of the time, performing and respecting the religious ceremonies, wearing the native costumes, falling in love with the women, often converting to Islam, and raising their Anglo-Indian children with feet in both worlds. Shortly after James' death, the world changed, not just with the Mutiny, and embracing the native culture was to become anathema - British ideals and mores were imposed from the top down, and the British hierarchy would no more associate with the Indian populations than the Hindu brahmins would with the untouchables. One cannot help feeling that something indescribably unique was lost; as Dalrymple argues, the years of the white mughals demonstrates there is nothing inevitable about the 'collision' between East and West, that these cultures are not irreconcilable, and that only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear hold them apart.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 640
Oh, I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. I confess I know very little about the years before the Raj, before the British Crown took over India from the East India Company, so this book came as a delightful, entrancing revelation. During the years of the British Raj, the lines - social, political, religious, caste and class - dividing British from Indian were very clearly defined and adhered to, but this was not the case in the early years of the East India Company. Many officials had bibis, Indian courtesans or mistresses; many kept a zenana, a harem of sorts; and some, fewer it is true, married Indian wives and raised Anglo-Indian children.
This book is the story of those years when it was not deemed entirely unacceptable to embrace Indian culture - most particularly the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the Company Resident in Hyderabad, and Khair un-Nissa, a relative of the Prime Minister of Hyderabad. Their love affair was quite scandalous - there were no fewer than four enquiries into James' conduct by the Company, and he was more than prepared to resign his position and career to be with Khair, although it seems from the evidence that it was she who initially pursued him, and not the other way around!
Dalrymple's own summary serves quite well - "in a time, and a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives, Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion."
James Kirkpatrick represented the last gasp of the 'white mughals', the British officers and officials who whole-heartedly embraced the syncretic Hindu-Muslim culture of the Deccan of the time, performing and respecting the religious ceremonies, wearing the native costumes, falling in love with the women, often converting to Islam, and raising their Anglo-Indian children with feet in both worlds. Shortly after James' death, the world changed, not just with the Mutiny, and embracing the native culture was to become anathema - British ideals and mores were imposed from the top down, and the British hierarchy would no more associate with the Indian populations than the Hindu brahmins would with the untouchables. One cannot help feeling that something indescribably unique was lost; as Dalrymple argues, the years of the white mughals demonstrates there is nothing inevitable about the 'collision' between East and West, that these cultures are not irreconcilable, and that only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear hold them apart.