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Begums, Thugs, and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes
Fanny Parkes, who lived in India between 1822 and 1846, was the ideal travel writer - courageous, indefatigably curious and determinedly independent. Her delightful journal traces her journey from prim memsahib, married to a minor civil servant of the Raj, to eccentric, sitar-playing Indophile, fluent in Urdu, critical of British rule and passionate in her appreciation of Indian culture. Fanny is fascinated by everything, from the trial of the thugs and the efficacy of opium on headaches to the adorning of a Hindu bride. To read her is to get as close as one can to a true picture of early colonial India - the sacred and the profane, the violent and the beautiful, the straight-laced sahibs and the more eccentric "White Mughals" who fell in love with India and did their best, like Fanny, to build bridges across cultures.
392 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
August 23, 2013
This is a good read in itself. I wanted 1st hand accounts of that particular area of India as research for a book but was charmed by Fanny Parks's outlook on life and the Raj.
This is a collection of Fanny's diaries edited by William Dalrymple and he's made a good job of leaving Fanny's voice and attitude alone. He's simply selected and put together her writing.
She was an enthusiastic traveller and nosy enough to see as much as she could at a time when other English women lay on their sofas and complained of the heat. She writes about what she sees without too much 19thC comment and she has a keen eye for the ridiculous.
I've found the diaries/journals invaluable for my research but have enjoyed them as a well written, thoroughly enjoyable traveller's tale.
Well worth a read for those who enjoy armchair travelling or who want a taste of history.
This is a collection of Fanny's diaries edited by William Dalrymple and he's made a good job of leaving Fanny's voice and attitude alone. He's simply selected and put together her writing.
She was an enthusiastic traveller and nosy enough to see as much as she could at a time when other English women lay on their sofas and complained of the heat. She writes about what she sees without too much 19thC comment and she has a keen eye for the ridiculous.
I've found the diaries/journals invaluable for my research but have enjoyed them as a well written, thoroughly enjoyable traveller's tale.
Well worth a read for those who enjoy armchair travelling or who want a taste of history.
July 22, 2011
This is a wonderful book for anyone interested in British India before the Mutiny. Fanny Parkes was a real enthusiast for India (she was viewed with suspicion by the authorities who considered she had 'gone native') andd her account of life is fascinating and vivid. As a woman, she saw much of Indian court life that was inaccessible to European men and she writes with sympathy and imagination.
Why only four stars? Because the introduction, though interesting, does not justify claiming copyright and the editing, which consists of removing large chunks of the very long text, doesn't either. The whole of the original work (which clearly IS out of copyright) is available on Google Books for free and I would point anyone who wants to read it in that direction.
Why only four stars? Because the introduction, though interesting, does not justify claiming copyright and the editing, which consists of removing large chunks of the very long text, doesn't either. The whole of the original work (which clearly IS out of copyright) is available on Google Books for free and I would point anyone who wants to read it in that direction.
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February 8, 2012Fascinating diary excerpts from an Englishwoman who lived in India in the early 1800's and loved every minute of it. Wonderfully refreshing given all the nose-in-the-air biographies.
September 12, 2024
This wonderful book is a diary that Fanny Parkes kept of her 25 years travelling around India. Edited by the renowned William Dalrymple, it is a unique insight into life in colonial India from an amazing woman born well before her time. Loved it.
January 18, 2014
Beautifully written book by a British Civil Services officer's wife. Her description of Indian society of the early 19th century with eyes and soul of an India lover. She has narrated the times, traditions, climate the culture so minutely and vividly. She had been impartial when it came to recording her observations unlike many others who wrote with British perspective only. She has been sensitive to India like one who is born in Indian home. Worth every penny and hours spent in buying and reading this remarkable book. It is notable that this edition has been edited by William Dalerymple appropriately otherwise actual book is of two big volumes.
wish-list
June 1, 2014Wee Willie Dalrymple in the mix, fab!
March 22, 2015
A very interesting book. Quite pleasant. Fanny had a very modern outlook, despite having colonial overtones. A nature lover, travel enthusiast and she also had a taste for adventures.
January 3, 2025
What an amazing, fascinating read! Fanny Parkes must be one of the most intriguing historical figures in history, without her even knowing she would be. A British woman completely enamored with India where she lived with her husband, an officer of the East India Company back in the 19th century. Forgotten along with the generations of British who became entangled with Indian culture before her, Fanny lets herself be completely, or almost completely absorbed by it. She learns Hindustani languages, learns about religion, customs, etc., and as her book, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque says, Fanny wanders in search of quenching her thirst for India. What strikes me, apart from her eccentric and comical character, is the casual way she describes her encounters with important figures of her time. She meets Raja Ram Mohan Roy, one of Tipu Sultan's captive sons, the former queen Baiza Bai, Mughal with whom she became a close friend, Mughal nobility, the Napoleonic French turned Sikh François Henri Mouton, and more!
And she speaks of all these encounters so lightly.
Well versed in the world she lived in, she speaks knowledgeably about burning epic issues such as Sati, caste, etc.
In the end she reluctantly returns to England after 24 years living in India, a place she would miss all her life, living in a place ignorant of her adventures and the culture she loved so much.
She was, as Dalrymple says in the introduction, an eccentric woman who was out of place in her time, when Victorian society was distancing itself from the Indian culture it governed.
Everyone should know about Fanny Parkes.
And she speaks of all these encounters so lightly.
Well versed in the world she lived in, she speaks knowledgeably about burning epic issues such as Sati, caste, etc.
In the end she reluctantly returns to England after 24 years living in India, a place she would miss all her life, living in a place ignorant of her adventures and the culture she loved so much.
She was, as Dalrymple says in the introduction, an eccentric woman who was out of place in her time, when Victorian society was distancing itself from the Indian culture it governed.
Everyone should know about Fanny Parkes.
August 7, 2018
Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: Fanny Parkes
Written in the early 1830s, Fanny Parkes memories of her life in India as the wife of a Civil Servant working for the native Indian government during the decade of the 1830s.
Fanny recounts fascinating episodes in her life involving the extraordinary experiences that we as Westerners find almost beyond belief. However, the Indian people seem quite bemused, according to Fanny, by her reactions to certain of these practices that to them is everyday life. Read her section on Sati and the chapter regarding the Thugs and the chapter about a lavish Indian wedding with the slave girls.
In other chapters, Fanny mentions her encounters with Indian wildlife; I was particularly interested in her memory of well-off Whites using wild cats as trained hunters: not trained hawks but captured and trained hunters doing the same thing.
I was also fascinated by reading her accounts of her beautiful wooden boat sailing up and down the Ganges River at various times to meet her husband.
Dear potential readers, you probably can tell I loved this book for many reasons; these are only a small few of her insights into her magical life in India. I was afraid to read too quickly because I would miss some of her thoughts about her life in India. It is a fabulous read on Kindle, and I highly recommend it.
Written in the early 1830s, Fanny Parkes memories of her life in India as the wife of a Civil Servant working for the native Indian government during the decade of the 1830s.
Fanny recounts fascinating episodes in her life involving the extraordinary experiences that we as Westerners find almost beyond belief. However, the Indian people seem quite bemused, according to Fanny, by her reactions to certain of these practices that to them is everyday life. Read her section on Sati and the chapter regarding the Thugs and the chapter about a lavish Indian wedding with the slave girls.
In other chapters, Fanny mentions her encounters with Indian wildlife; I was particularly interested in her memory of well-off Whites using wild cats as trained hunters: not trained hawks but captured and trained hunters doing the same thing.
I was also fascinated by reading her accounts of her beautiful wooden boat sailing up and down the Ganges River at various times to meet her husband.
Dear potential readers, you probably can tell I loved this book for many reasons; these are only a small few of her insights into her magical life in India. I was afraid to read too quickly because I would miss some of her thoughts about her life in India. It is a fabulous read on Kindle, and I highly recommend it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 27, 2020
A very enjoyable and breezy read. It’s hard to comprehend that this book was written almost 200 years ago. Funny and quirky, several passages made me smile. Coming from India myself, I couldn’t help but giggle at the absurdities of my own country’s customs and religions seen from the point of view of an European lady at the time..for eg the passage where she describes the Hindu goddess Durga on seeing a statue of the goddess for the first time: "she had 4 arms with one clutching the tail of a serpent..“ You know exactly what she was probably thinking observing a completely alien culture being sometimes mesmerized and sometimes disgusted by the customs and superstitions with she herself being influenced by the various caste divisions of the country (" she had the face of a low caste woman..").. at the same time one is able to appreciate the shifting Zeitgeist and compare the present India to the past and appreciate how much India has changed. A very enjoyable read indeed..!
November 18, 2022
Ms. Parkes' love of India comes through strongly from her journal entries. She wholeheartedly imbibed the culture and all that India had to offer. Learned the language(s), intermingled freely with the "natives" respecting local traditions, sketched locales and buildings that caught her eye, loved the food and even enjoyed playing the sitar!
Deserves a higher rating but for the fact that - as is likely to be the case when reproducing jottings from a daily diary - that entries start to get repetitive. One gets to see India through an Englishwoman's eyes and perspective. It is novel but becomes tedious after a while.
Deserves a higher rating but for the fact that - as is likely to be the case when reproducing jottings from a daily diary - that entries start to get repetitive. One gets to see India through an Englishwoman's eyes and perspective. It is novel but becomes tedious after a while.
June 20, 2023
Fascinating reading. Fanny Parkes was an exceptional English woman who wanted to learn all she could about her world in 18th century India - the country she lived in and loved for many years. Fluent in local languages, she was friends with Indian royal women, visiting them in their private quarters. She also mingled with ordinary Indian people. She collected Indian artifacts as well as plant and animal specimens - all with meticulous attention to detail. She was truly an amazing women who was at least a century ahead of her time.
January 16, 2018
The book was a collection of events taken from her diary, and because of this it may tend to get boring. However, it gives the reader a good picture of colonial India and its various customs. For those who have the patience to read the entire book, it demonstrates the transformation of thinking in Mrs Parkes. The book begins with a general racist attitude towards the natives, but slowly changes into one of admiration and curiosity for a different culture.
January 28, 2024
I loved the book for it gave a brilliant picture of how life was from someone living in the Era.. their daily lives etc. We have heard a lot from an indian perspective but this one was all from the perspective of an English woman whose husband was in the service of the East India company
May 22, 2017
Unexpectedly excellent insight into the time which she spent in India, thanks to Dalrymple.
August 27, 2018
Since the book is based on a diary of Fanny Parkes, it became a bit boring for me.
September 1, 2019
3.5 stars
to-buy
January 3, 2021By eland publishing which does out of date travel books
Published mark Shand
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Chapter 2
Chapter 2
October 28, 2013
In high school, I was captivated by the adventures of Jim Corbett in the Indian jungles tracking man-eating tigers. Corbett was quite 'Indianized' for an early 20th century Englishman. The phrase describing people like Corbett used to be 'he had gone native in India' but Salman Rushdie coined the more delightfully colorful term 'Chutnified' for the same phenomenon (to quote Dalrymple)! This book by Fanny Parkes is about her gradual chutnification in India from 1822 to 1846, as seen through her travel diaries. William Dalrymple, who has selected excerpts from her diaries to bring out this book, has also written a beautiful introduction which succinctly sums up the book in ten pages!
Fanny Parkes was the wife of a minor civil servant of the Raj and came to live in India in 1822 with her husband in Allahabad. Unlike other 'memsahib's, she soon starts out exploring northern India on her own, observing and documenting the culture, customs and practices, learning to play the sitar, learning the Urdu language which was spoken in much of the parts where she lived and travelled, trying opium and inevitably ending up getting totally Indianized. Her accounts of India and Indians are intimate, full of understanding and devoid of the tone that speaks of India as mainly 'heat and dust'. How else can one come up with a statement like "...thus far, I have borne everything with the patience of a Hindu..."? In short, her transformational journey is captured by a few sentences at both ends of her own journals. In 1831, she writes: " ...next to the Chinese, the Indians are the most dexterous thieves in the world....the idleness of the natives is excessive...the bearers do nothing but eat and sleep, when they are not pulling the punkhas...". Whereas, towards the end of her time in India in the 1840s, she writes about the pleasure of 'vagabondizing in India' and even more, as she lands back in London later, "...it was bitterly cold walking up from the boat - rain, wind and sleet, mingled together, beat on my face. Everything on landing was so wretchedly mean, especially the houses, which are built of slate stone; it was cold and gloomy . . . I felt a little disgusted."
For me, it was also interesting to see a glimpse of India as it was in early 19th century. It seems there was an abundance of wildlife in India then. She writes as she journeys along the river valleys , as follows: " ...I saw ten crocodiles basking in the sun, all close together; some turtle and great white birds were on a rock near them; on the river's edge, were three enormous alligators..." .
On the other hand, in the Kingdom of Oude (Audh), she writes about 'entertainment with animals', which to say the least, sounds cruel and horrible today. Two rhinos are made to fight and they charge the onlooking crowd fiercely. Parkes, however, writes that 'it was beautiful to see the mass of people flying before them!" Tigers are made to fight a group of buffaloes with the buffaloes mauling the docile tigers with their horns. Elsewhere, she says, "... I saw three deer yesterday..what a pity I am not a shot!" .
Poverty in India also was evident in her accounts when she says that the poor cannot afford enough wood to burn their dead and so one regularly sees half-burnt dead bodies floating in rivers, ravaged by birds, stray dogs and other animals.
I would have thought that rivers in India may have been quite clean and without much pollution in the 1830s. The sacred Jamuna river in today's Delhi and Agra is just a sewer. In the 1830s, Parkes writes, "... the waters of the Jumna is considered unwholesome, and in some parts, ...it is absolutely poisonous.." Perhaps, one has to go back a millennium to discover the Jumna referred to in Hindu scriptures! Her description of the Chambal river says, "..the Chambal is a beautiful river; never was a stream more brilliant or more clear; the water, where it unites with the Jumna, is of a bright pellucid green..."
She describes the horrible practice of 'Sati' by Hindus, where the dead man's wife is burnt alive in the funeral pyre. She writes that her servants invariably wanted leave of absence to go watch 'the fun' and that often the woman was unwilling but the dead man's family forced her into the pyre because they can then lay claim to his property.
In his introduction, Dalrymple quotes Colin Thubron as saying, "...a good travel book catches the moment on the wing and stops it in Time..". Fanny Parkes' diaries record the transitory moments of her Indian travels in that spirit.
Fanny Parkes was the wife of a minor civil servant of the Raj and came to live in India in 1822 with her husband in Allahabad. Unlike other 'memsahib's, she soon starts out exploring northern India on her own, observing and documenting the culture, customs and practices, learning to play the sitar, learning the Urdu language which was spoken in much of the parts where she lived and travelled, trying opium and inevitably ending up getting totally Indianized. Her accounts of India and Indians are intimate, full of understanding and devoid of the tone that speaks of India as mainly 'heat and dust'. How else can one come up with a statement like "...thus far, I have borne everything with the patience of a Hindu..."? In short, her transformational journey is captured by a few sentences at both ends of her own journals. In 1831, she writes: " ...next to the Chinese, the Indians are the most dexterous thieves in the world....the idleness of the natives is excessive...the bearers do nothing but eat and sleep, when they are not pulling the punkhas...". Whereas, towards the end of her time in India in the 1840s, she writes about the pleasure of 'vagabondizing in India' and even more, as she lands back in London later, "...it was bitterly cold walking up from the boat - rain, wind and sleet, mingled together, beat on my face. Everything on landing was so wretchedly mean, especially the houses, which are built of slate stone; it was cold and gloomy . . . I felt a little disgusted."
For me, it was also interesting to see a glimpse of India as it was in early 19th century. It seems there was an abundance of wildlife in India then. She writes as she journeys along the river valleys , as follows: " ...I saw ten crocodiles basking in the sun, all close together; some turtle and great white birds were on a rock near them; on the river's edge, were three enormous alligators..." .
On the other hand, in the Kingdom of Oude (Audh), she writes about 'entertainment with animals', which to say the least, sounds cruel and horrible today. Two rhinos are made to fight and they charge the onlooking crowd fiercely. Parkes, however, writes that 'it was beautiful to see the mass of people flying before them!" Tigers are made to fight a group of buffaloes with the buffaloes mauling the docile tigers with their horns. Elsewhere, she says, "... I saw three deer yesterday..what a pity I am not a shot!" .
Poverty in India also was evident in her accounts when she says that the poor cannot afford enough wood to burn their dead and so one regularly sees half-burnt dead bodies floating in rivers, ravaged by birds, stray dogs and other animals.
I would have thought that rivers in India may have been quite clean and without much pollution in the 1830s. The sacred Jamuna river in today's Delhi and Agra is just a sewer. In the 1830s, Parkes writes, "... the waters of the Jumna is considered unwholesome, and in some parts, ...it is absolutely poisonous.." Perhaps, one has to go back a millennium to discover the Jumna referred to in Hindu scriptures! Her description of the Chambal river says, "..the Chambal is a beautiful river; never was a stream more brilliant or more clear; the water, where it unites with the Jumna, is of a bright pellucid green..."
She describes the horrible practice of 'Sati' by Hindus, where the dead man's wife is burnt alive in the funeral pyre. She writes that her servants invariably wanted leave of absence to go watch 'the fun' and that often the woman was unwilling but the dead man's family forced her into the pyre because they can then lay claim to his property.
In his introduction, Dalrymple quotes Colin Thubron as saying, "...a good travel book catches the moment on the wing and stops it in Time..". Fanny Parkes' diaries record the transitory moments of her Indian travels in that spirit.
August 20, 2022
Interesting, but very slow. More description than story much of the time. A travelogue from a different time.
January 12, 2015
An interesting glimpse into an India that is long gone through the lens of a bona fide adventuress and Indophile. Parkes tone gradually changes from one of condescension to engagement and admiration. A process described in the foreword as chuntification - though it sounds as if it should involve more mango and fewer descriptions of horseflesh (she's quite keen on riding).
As the wife of a low ranking East India Company official, Parkes provides a unique voice and view into history, not to mention a lively critique of both Indian and British practises alike, and despite her strong objections to certain cruelties - in particular the treatment of women, it's certainly not hard to understand why Parkes falls in love with India.
As the wife of a low ranking East India Company official, Parkes provides a unique voice and view into history, not to mention a lively critique of both Indian and British practises alike, and despite her strong objections to certain cruelties - in particular the treatment of women, it's certainly not hard to understand why Parkes falls in love with India.
May 18, 2018
For die hard fans of India only. This book deals with Fanny's travels and experiences through Northern India during the 1800s. Sometimes repetitive but still an interesting account of her years there. Her optimistic view of country and sheer enjoyment of everything she saw was not shared by most of the English at that time.
August 25, 2020
This book was written as a diary by Fanny Parks and presents an insight into the times when British were taking hold ofMughal India.
Read William’s preface at the end again it will make more sense and provides a context. Thoroughly enjoyed!
Read William’s preface at the end again it will make more sense and provides a context. Thoroughly enjoyed!
January 10, 2012
Entertaining account of Fanny Parkes, a proper englishwoman who came to India and in the forewords of Dalrymple got chutnified.
April 8, 2017
Good to have read it. Much good to have read many others. A well elaborated collection. Both Wonderful & Horrific narratives exclaimed. My reservations to some observations, probably formed by her on perception of people available to her. A tint of lie & falsehood when mixed with abundance of facts & truth, casts the mixture, of which it is difficult to distinguish the truth from the lie, the fact from the falsehood. A fine read overall.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews