In "White Mughals", William Dalrymple once more delves into the history of India, his adopted home, and place he clearly loves deeply. He has spent decades exploring the cultural, religious, economic, political and military history of that vast and infinitely complex country. I say "once more", in that I have previously written here about the way that Dalrymple's books have been a gateway for me into the unknown world of Indian history, in books such as The Last Mughal. However White Mughals was written before most of the Dalrymple books I have reviewed on this blog.
Dalrymple sets out in this book to celebrate a lost world of pluralism and tolerance, in which the people of India, and the incoming waves of British settlers, intermingled, intermarried and moved freely between cultures, religions, languages, dress, customs and so forth. This book is set in the late 18th Century, when attitudes were yet to harden into the sort of religious and cultural fundamentalisms which later divided India. India itself in this period was not a united country, but a series of 'kingdoms', which jostled for power. Alongside this, were foreign armies, such as the French vying for colonial influence, along with "the Company". The Company in question, of course, was The East India Company, one of the strangest organisations ever to pass through the pages of history. While formally a private company, it had tradesmen, diplomats, governors, and standing armies through which it negotiated with governments and acted more like a state than a business. From Calcutta to Hyderabad, the cities were ruled by two authorities, the King and the "resident", the Company chief, in a governmental palace.
The central story in this enormous book is of the romance between the company resident in Hyderabad, Major James Kilpatrick and Khair un-Nissa, a teenage beauty, reputedly a direct descendant of Mohammad. Dalrymple goes to inordinate length to set the political and cultural scene before he gets to this main storyline. At times, in the opening chapters, the detail becomes overwhelming, with little structure to hang it on. I pressed on with reading it on the strength of his other books, and was glad I did, because it gets better as it progresses.
The Kilpatrick-affair was a major scandal at the time, because while many British people in India lived their whole lives there, and took on facets of culture; Kilpatrick seemed to reject many aspects of his heritage and thoroughly embrace Indian life. He was accused of seducing, of even raping the girl; charges of which he was cleared; the truth is that he so loved her that he actually risked his entire career in order to marry her; even formally converting to Islam in order for the wedding to go ahead.
While the Kilpatrick family are the central spine running through the book, across several generations; the narrative exposes and explores an amazing array of facets of Indian and British life in this period such as; relations between the sexes, religious views, festivals and practices, trade, travel and transport, politics and colonialism, health, medicine, agriculture, architecture and language. Of course, as it comes from the meticulous research and wonderful writing of William Dalrymple, all this serves as a remarkable window into another world.
The story of the children of Kilpatrick and Khair un-Nissa is traced through a remarkable archive trail of letters and documents in England where they grew up and lived, married and flourished. This intergenerational story, full of heartbreaks and tragedies, is a remarkable one worth telling. The book though ends with a lament for the lost age of tolerance in which English settlers would learn the languages, smoke the hookah's, ride elephants and keep harems of local women (!). By 1860, says Dalrymple, harder forms of trade, colonial aggression, and closed cultures would drive wedges between cultures, races, religions and people which would set a trajectory which would culminate in the violence of the post-Colonial partition of India.
Of all Dalrymple's book, I think this one might be the one I have enjoyed least. It's still a very, very good book from which I have learnt huge amounts. However, it isn't as gripping as The Return of The King or The Last Mughal, and does get bogged down in unmanageable detail in the first few chapters. Wading though that is worth it, though, for the hugely insightful wealth of things which follow. I am very much looking forward to Dalrymple's forthcoming history of the East India Company, which he is currently researching.
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