Of Mughals and White Mughals

The first of his books that I read, The Age of Kali is compiled from a series of previously published travel articles written for newspapers and magazines about his travels to several regions of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Unfortunately, the individuals he chooses to profile are eccentric characters such as the Sikh rock star who pretends to be Madonna's friend, a woman writer of risqué novels and the fierce gun-toting tribesmen of the frontier of Pakistan, to mention just a few. The best piece is about the Tamil Tigers, getting access to whom was quite daring and courageous, but it is marred by his portrayal of the guerrillas one-dimensionally as ranting, ruthless and fanatical and repeatedly referring to the physical attributes of the female members of the group, which offended my feminine sensibilities considerably!

The City of Djinns is a tribute to Delhi, where he lived for four years and altogether a better book because it succeeds in capturing the quintessential spirit of the city. The adventures he and his wife, who has illustrated the book with humor and charm, had as newcomers to Indian society are well told and provide some interesting insights.

Although these past experiences made me wary of plunging into White Mughals, I was well rewarded because it is one of the more captivating books that I have read recently.

It tells of the eighteenth century romance between James Kirkpatrick, who was a young man in the service of the East India Company, and the even younger Khairunnessa a noblewoman under the protection of the Hyderabad royal family.

Writing about one of the least well known, but unexpectedly well documented periods of the history of the British in India, Dalrymple has unearthed a classic -- a story that all true romantics will enjoy and cherish. It is doubly satisfying because it is indubitably both true and poignant and ends as all great romantic tragedies do in betrayal and death. (Could we enjoy Romeo and Juliet as much if all ended happily ever after? It would be much too difficult to accept coming unexpectedly across a matronly Juliet and a gross, hard-drinking Romeo enduring, unloved and unloving, into old age!)

Dalrymple describes the intriguing world where East and West meet with meticulous research as he reconstructs the story of James and Khair and the seduction and betrayal that follows. Indeed there are so many unexpected twists to the tale that the seduction is as much on the part of the demure, fifteen year old Muslim "princess" as it is on the part of the idealistic, Indophile James.

Underlying the familiar tale of love and loss there is a far more intriguing story of the Indian conquest of the British imagination. A conquest that was soon to be relegated only to poetry ( remember "Pale Hands along the Shalimar" etc.,) and deliberately excised from the British public consciousness after the advent of the "memsahibs" in India and the Victorian prudishness that was soon to overcome a more liberal approach to the cultures of the east.

As Dalrymple describes it, in the early years of the British presence in India it was common for the colonists to adopt eastern dress which was certainly more suited to the climate. Many of them took to the eastern way of life with gusto even converting to Indian religions, eating local food and of course marrying local women. These "White Mughals" responded to their sojourn in India by slowly shedding their Britishness like unwanted skin and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class that they came to replace. That this was a fairly common, even widespread practice, is borne out by the fact that almost a third of the wills of the period show the Sahebs leaving all their possessions to their Indian wives.

Kirkpatrick himself didn't have it easy because he chose, it seems from Dalrymple's account, the wrong time to go native, when the imperial conquerors and administrators from Britain, who increasingly replaced the old-style traders and soldiers, were seeking a new, hard basis for British power in India. The old close relations with Indians were supplanted by a policy of racial exclusion and arrogance whereas the earlier time had been far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders.

When asked why he chose this particular subject to write about, during a recent interview, Dalrymple said," You have at the moment in both Pakistan and India an astonishing outpouring of fiction. It will be looked on as the most fertile period of South Asian writing, but it's always fiction. There's no comparable renaissance in non-fiction in either country. There are no great biographies being written. In Britain at the moment, serious, well researched non-fiction books such as Anthony Beaver's book on Stalingrad -- now coming on for two million copies -- are doing every bit as well as any fiction.

"It would be very difficult now as a 'gora' to be writing a novel set in Pakistan or in India, because there's so much fabulous staff coming out from the people who are closer to the material. There's no Paul Scotts any more or Ruth Prawer Jhabvalas, all the fiction coming out of India is by Indians.

"I think fiction has now been reclaimed by the 'desis', but there still is room in non-fiction, it is wide open. The book I'm writing right now is about Bahadur Shah Zafar and the end of Mughal Delhi. This is one of the great turning points in Indian history, but there's an astonishing absence about this major theme in Indian history and it's lovely for me. It's nowhere in European history that you would be able to take a major theme of the history of the last two centuries and find that you are the first person to be working on it in half a century."

After the delight of White Mughals I am sure that readers of this genre will look forward eagerly to the publication of Dalrymple's next book.

Yasmeen Murshed is a full-time bookworn and a part-time educationist. She is also the founder of Scholastica School.