Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON
A love story - scandalous, passionate, tragic - sits at the centre of this sprawling, marvellous exploration of the British experience in India at the turn of the 19th century.
Dalrymple has been famous since he was 22, when his first book In Xanadu won numerous prizes and launched his career as a travel writer extraordinaire. He's known for rendering non-fiction with all the flair of jolly good novelist, and with White Mughals he has outdone himself. "Dalrymple manages the incredible feat of outpointing most historians and novelists in one go," as Britain's Independent put it.
This is his fifth book, which took five years of ground-breaking research to produce, after he first stumbled across the whisper of its pivotal story while on holiday in the central Indian city of Hyderabad.
The story: James Kirkpatrick, born in India, educated in England, returned to the land of his birth for a career first in the military and then as a diplomat, in 1797 becoming Resident (effectively the ambassador) at Hyderabad.
Attending a wedding the following year, he somehow caught a glimpse of the eyes of beautiful, veiled Khair un-Nissa, granddaughter of a rich and powerful Mughal nobleman, and the pair fell instantly in love. Khair was then only around 14, and Kirkpatrick was 36, but that doesn't seem to have bothered anyone. What did bother almost everyone was that Khair was a Muslim, a high-born Mughal descended directly from the Prophet and therefore unable to marry outside her faith - and she was already engaged to someone else.
Many obstacles were put in the couple's way, including false rumours of rape and murder, blackmail and two investigations by the East India Company, which was worried Kirkpatrick would favour the interests of his Mughal in-laws.
Eventually, however, and with Khair already seven months pregnant and Kirkpatrick converted, the couple married in a secret Islamic ceremony. Khair, her mother and an entourage of female servants moved into the Residency and Kirkpatrick built his love a magnificent xanana, or harem. They had two children, a son, Sahib Allum and a daughter, Sahib Begum.
Tragedy begins to unfold when the children are packed off to England for their education, where they are known as William and Kitty, and are never to be seen again by their mother. Kirkpatrick succumbs to stress and climate, and Khair's sad fate is eventually unearthed by Dalrymple at the very last moment of his research (at which point he also discovers what happened to Kitty).
This is all captivating enough, but around this heart Dalrymple constructs a fuller-bodied story of the cultural and social encounter between India and Britain. "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet," Rudyard Kipling famously wrote in the late Victorian era, when the damage was already done, but back in the late 18th century such crosscultural exchanges were, apparently, far from rare.
As he trawled through literally thousands of letters and official documents of the time (many of his sources previously untapped), Dalrymple became convinced that we needed to revise the picture of the British of the East India Company as a small alien minority locked away in their towns, forts and cantonments. "The tone of this early period of British life in India seemed instead to be about intermixing and impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas," he writes. "The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders than we have been conditioned to expect."
The picture that emerges of these earlier empire-builders is very different from the bullying, racist and bloody policies that hardened especially after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Those Victorians colonised not only India but our imaginations, Dalrymple suggests, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter. Later, post-colonialist analysts also chose to see things in black and white.
Kirkpatrick, however, not only spoke Persian, Hindustani, Tamil and Telegu, wore "Hindoostany dress" and henna-ed his hands, but loved to sit on the floor to eat, while discussing philosophy and the arts with his Mughal friends, and burping after eating.
While his story comes at the end of this open-minded, curious age, as a far more arrogant breed of Briton was gaining influence, he was not unusual, and Dalrymple tells many fascinating stories of other British people who lived in a multi-ethnic style. Some of the images are hilarious, such as that of General Sir David Ochterlony, who took the evening air in Delhi along with his 13 wives, each of them on the back of her own elephant.
Today, as East and West engage in further confrontation, Dalrymple's story, he says, "provides a timely reminder that it is indeed very possible - and has always been possible - to reconcile the two worlds".
HarperCollins, $24.99
William Dalrymple will be at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.
Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, May 15-18, 2003
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