White Mughals

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
White Mughals

“William Dalrymple is that rarity, a scholar of history who can really write. His story of cultural collisions is beautifully told, and brings British India vividly back to life; but it is also a tale with many contemporary echoes. This is a brilliant and compulsively readable book.”

—Salman Rushdie

“
White Mughals
is destined to become an instant classic. William Dalrymple has crafted a tale of romance and nostalgia that echoes in the ears like exotic birdsong. The history of India courses through his veins; the humanity of the past flows from his heart.”

—Amanda Foreman, author of
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

“At the end of the eighteenth century, James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the promising young British Resident at the Shia court of Hyderabad , fell in love with Khair un-Nissa, an adolescent noblewoman and a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. The story of their romance and semi-secret marriage endured in local legend and family lore but was otherwise forgotten. After five years’ work with a trove of documents in several languages, Dalrymple has emerged not only with a gripping tale of politics and power but also with evidence of the surprising extent of cultural exchange in pre-Victorian India, before the arrogance of empire set in. His book, ambitious in scope and rich in detail, demonstrates that a century before Kipling’s ‘never the twain’—and two centuries before neocons and radical Islamists trumpeted the clash of civilizations—the story of the Westerner in Muslim India was not one of conquest but of appreciation, adaptation, and seduction.”

—
The New Yorker

“A gorgeous, spellbinding and important book . . . A tapestry of magnificent set pieces and a moving romance. William Dalrymple’s story of a colonial love affair will change our views about British India.”

—
Sunday Times
(London)

“Imaginatively 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 the Arab world in
Orientalism.
Destroying the centuries-old stereotype depiction of the British in India and the myth of the British stiff upper lip, Dalrymple shows that the British did not merely conquer India, they were seduced by it (and Indian women). Despite its setting in the eighteenth 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. It is also beautifully written.”

—Ahmed Rashid, author of
Taliban
and
Jihad

“The cross-cultural romance between Khair un-Nissa and James Achilles Kirkpatrick—the gripping central narrative of this book—is an extraordinary tale. . . . Mr. Dalrymple first began exploring the mingling of East and West as a travel writer, and his sensitive memoir of a year in Delhi,
City of Djinns,
established him as Britain’s premier author on South Asia. In
White Mughals
he has pulled off a tour de force of scholarly research. Academics rarely let themselves get so close and the result is a veritable travelogue through the past, packed with detail and sense of place. The book breathes. You can almost smell the spiced meats in the Hyderabad biryanis or the flowering fruit trees Kirkpatrick planted in the Residency garden. Mr. Dalrymple researches like a historian, thinks like an anthropologist and writes like a novelist. It is a winning combination.”

—
New York Sun

“Masterfully demonstrating that truth can trump fiction, English travel writer Dalrymple relates a wrenching tale of love’s labours lost on the Indian subcontinent. Dalrymple argues that the Brits ‘went native’ a lot more than is commonly thought and that West can meet East when love is the lingua franca. Rigorously researched, intelligent, compassionate. A tour de force.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Anyone who fails to read William Dalrymple’s
White Mughals
owing to a lack of interest in India will be losing a rich reward. By following the love story of a British Resident in Hyderabad and a Muslim noblewoman, he goes deep into the relationship of East and West in the late eighteenth century when the twain did most certainly meet. A devoted and—in this case—uncannily lucky researcher, Dalrymple offers a feast of often astonishing information and a cast of men and women ranging from the comic to the heartrending, but above all he writes in a way that draws you into his own enthusiasm for the subject. This is an irresistible book.”

—
Guardian Books of the Year

“Dalrymple’s subject is the unlovely term ‘transculturation,’ but his book has some lovely stuff about race, diplomacy, warfare and, especially, sex . . . A witches’ brew of deviousness, desire, ambition and astonishment.”

—
The Financial Times

“A masterpiece.”

—
New Statesman
Books of the Year

“Fascinating and enthralling . . . William Dalrymple unscrolls a wide panorama: a vivid and often turbulent panorama of India during the eighteenth century. Impressively researched, and written with vigor and panache, Dalrymple is a gifted narrator who brings vividly to life the dealings between the Indian princes and the East India Company. He brilliantly depicts some of the leading characters.”

—
Daily Mail

“Brilliant, poignant, and compassionate,
White Mughals
is not only a compelling love story but it is also an important reminder, at this perilous moment of history, that Europeans once found Muslim society both congenial and attractive, and that it has always been possible to build bridges between Islam and the West.”

—Karen Armstrong, author of
Buddha
and
A History of God

“A spellbinding story with massive scholarship, captivating flair and obvious empathy. This is history at its very best, at its most engaging and relevant . . . A superlative, groundbreaking story that fully justifies all the effort, all the costs, all the risks [it took to write].... At a time when Islamophobia is rising to danger levels in the West we need this reminder more than ever that once, however briefly, East and West met in tolerance and peace—and love.”

—
The Scotsman

PENGUIN BOOKS WHITE MUGHALS

William Dalrymple wrote the highly acclaimed British best-seller
In Xanadu
when he was twenty-two. It won the 1990
Yorkshire Post
Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Books Award; it was also shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize. 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.
From the Holy Mountain
was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997; it was also shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook Award, the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize. A collection of his essays on India,
The Age of Kali
, was published in 1998.
White Mughals
won the 2003 Wolfson History Prize and the 2003 Scottish Book of the Year award.

Dalrymple is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society and in 2002 was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographic Society for his “outstanding contribution to travel literature.” He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi.

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group
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South Africa

 

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2002
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of
Penguin Putnam Inc. 2003
Published in Penguin Books 2004

 

Copyright © William Dalrymple, 2002

Map and other illustrations copyright © Olivia Fraser, 2002
All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-09812-7

1. British—India. 2. India—Social life and customs—18th century.

3. India—Race relations. 4. Kirkpatrick, James Achilles, 1764-1805. I. Title.
DS428 .D33 2003
954’.840311’092—dc21 2002191082

 

 

 

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John Wombwell, a Yorkshire chartered accountant, smokes his hookah on a Lucknow terrace
c
.1790.
(Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Néerlandais, Paris)

Sir David Ochterlony relaxes with his
nautch
girls at the Delhi Residency,
c
.1820.
(Reproduced courtesy of the Oriental and Indian Office Collection, British Library—OIOC, BL Add. Or 2)

Antoine Polier admires his troupe in Lucknow some thirty years earlier.
(From the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan)

A Lucknow dinner party
c
.1820.
(Author’s collection)

Bengali
bibi
, 1787, by Francesco Renaldi.
(OIOC, BL)

Boulone Elise, the
bibi
of Claude Martin.
(La Martinière School, Lucknow)

Jemdanee, the companion of William Hickey, 1787, by Thomas Hickey.
(Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland)

Khair un-Nissa, painted in Calcutta
c
.1806-7.
(Private collection)

A begum listens to music under a
chattri
in her garden while her attendants look on. Hyderabad,
c
.1760.
(OIOC, BL Johnson Album 37, no. 9, 426 ix)

A love-sick Hyderabadi begum consults an
aseel
while waiting in the moonlight for the arrival of her lover,
c
.1750.
(OIOC, BL Johnson Album 50, no. 4, 422)