White Mughals: Love And Betrayal In 18th Century India

William Dalrymple

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Review

This stupendous book is a detailed portrait of culture-crossing in India before the Victorian racial shutters came down; of a complex, fluid world in which an East India Company official could be deeply sympathetic towards his host culture – fluent in Persian and Urdu, at ease with Indian ideas about architecture, design, gardens, food, dress, even religion.  You name it, Dalrymple has considered every cultural aspect of assimilation, and he writes about each with confidence and with his usual remarkable ability to communicate the passion that he feels for his subject.

The focus of the book is the late Mughal court at Hyderabad, where James Kirkpatrick was East India Company Resident for a few years around 1800.  The story of his marriage to a Muslim princess was already quite well-known – up to the point when the two children were sent off to England to be educated (aged about 4 & 5), and Kirkpatrick promptly died.  But when already deep into his research, Dalrymple stumbled across a cache of letters which revealed the heart-rending sequels: what happened to the children, and to the mother – and eventually, the renewed contact between the old grandmother (who had spent her life in a harem) and her grand-daughter (now a respectable Victorian lady).  In itself it is a very moving story, but it is made much more so by the care and love with which Dalrymple has portrayed the hybrid world of late Mughal India.

As with his previous book, From The Holy Mountain: A Journey In The Shadow Of Byzantium pbk £8.99, what raises White Mughals from the level of a brilliant chronicle of curiosities into a book of real significance, is its contemporary resonance.  Although Dalrymple does not make the connection explicit until the end, the present conflict between the Muslim world and the West can never be far from the reader’s mind – and with it, the implication that the impasse is of our own making.  This book is a profound gesture of cultural reaching out. - review by Johnny de Falbe