White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

A grand, slow-moving procession through 18th-century India

Stately processions are a leit motif in William Dalrymple's epic account of a doomed love affair between James Kirkpatrick, a British East India Company resident, and Khair un-Nissa, great-niece of Hyderabad’s chief minister. Midway through the book, for example, he quotes a source describing the massive pilgrimage for the annual festival of Mawlah Ali:

“Some 3,000 elephants, as well as some 50,000 horses and load-bearing camels, with stal

A grand, slow-moving procession through 18th-century India

Stately processions are a leit motif in William Dalrymple's epic account of a doomed love affair between James Kirkpatrick, a British East India Company resident, and Khair un-Nissa, great-niece of Hyderabad’s chief minister. Midway through the book, for example, he quotes a source describing the massive pilgrimage for the annual festival of Mawlah Ali:

“Some 3,000 elephants, as well as some 50,000 horses and load-bearing camels, with stalls selling fresh and dried fruit, clothes and fine woolen pashmina shawls: as far as the eye can see, immense crowds appear, of buyers and sellers, riders and dancers, glorious tents and mountainous elephants, and with tall buildings erected continuously on either side from the Musi River to the foot of Koh-e Sharif…”

Elsewhere he describes the departure of William and Fyze Palmer, an East India Company official and his Muslim wife:

“Their convoy moved slowly down through the then thickly wooded foothills of the Western Ghats… even by the standards of the time the Palmers traveled heavily, and James was astonished by the sheer number of bullock carts, transport cattle, elephants, baggage camels, syces, sepoys, bearers and Fyze’s ‘dozen females’ (presumably her attendants)…”

In many ways, this book is just such an unwieldy procession. Encompassing a vast sweep of cultures and events, the book plods forward at an even, unhurried pace. This allows the reader to take in all the sights en route, but at times, I confess, I hankered for a swifter means of transportation through a terrain that became almost monotonous in its splendor.

Dalrymple’s account is ostensibly a story of the love affair between James and Khair, but their relationship unfolds before the great tapestry of politics and intrigue that was late 18th-century India. As such, there are dozens of major and minor personages to keep track of. Even with the help of an introductory eleven-page list of dramatis personae and two complete family trees, one for the Kirkpatrick’s and the other for Khair’s Shustari family, the reader may find keeping all the names and alliances straight to be a daunting task.

My chief complaint, however, is that Dalrymple seems to have been unable or unwilling to sufficiently distill four years of research to make his book more accessible. Almost every page is festooned with references (nearly a thousand all told) and copious footnotes. He introduces a subject, any subject, regardless of how trifling, and then rather than concisely summing up what the reader needs to know or skipping it altogether if it has no direct bearing on the tale, he hares off whatever line he was originally taking and expounds at length upon a new topic. Pages later, he returns to his original theme, but by that time the reader has forgotten what it was.

Thus the reader is treated to sometimes fascinating but often tedious treatises on the major Mughal festivals, methods of abortion in 18th-century India, Mughal gardening methods, rites of passage for Mughal children, pigeon-keeping, British colonial architecture, Islamic astronomy, and dozens of other topics of peripheral importance to the tale. Likewise, with the introduction of each new East India Company or Mughal court official, the author digresses to give a full account of that person’s life and character up to that point.

Dalrymple obviously loved researching the book, and as he makes it clear in his introduction, he was most fortunate to unearth previously unknown sources and in particular to find the key to deciphering encoded letters between James Kirkpatrick and his brother William. However, in his zeal for the chase, he too often makes his quest for the story part of the central narrative. It’s intrusive. He’s also much given to quoting at great length from his sources. Almost every other page seems to have a great chunk of correspondence inserted into it. I couldn’t help but wish a firmer editorial hand had been applied.

With all its faults, however, this is a beguiling book in many ways. Dalrymple’s central thesis is that before the 19th century, British and Indian cultures were more closely interwoven and more hybridized than previously thought. James Kirkpatrick was one of a number of notable “White Mughals,” British East India officials so sympathetic to local customs and Indian cultures that often they converted to Islam or Hinduism, usually before wedding Indian women. However, James and Khair were ultimately victims of a growing hardening stance of the British, who came to look upon India less in terms of a rich culture met on equal footing and more from the vantage point of an imperial power greedily exploiting a resource. As Dalrymple makes abundantly clear, the personalities and failings of certain East India Company officials, most notably Lord Wellesley, the Governor General from 1798-1905, were responsible for this hardening stance. In many ways the exploration of the complex workings of the British East India Company’s policies, military campaigns, and economics is just as central to the book as the similarly complex fate of James and Khair, the star-crossed lovers.