INDIA TODAY

Triumph of the Will
With his historical Hyderabadi love epic, Dalrymple shows the best
non-fiction about India is still written by sympathetic outsiders
By Ashok Malik

At the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries, India had intrigue written all over it. The Mughal empire was dead, though the children of Babar still ruled the vast realm between Delhi and Palam. Tipu Sultan had just been killed, ending the greatest military challenge to the British in the Deccan. The scramble for India had begun. The John Company, once trader and then friend, was on its way to becoming master. In half a century, following the quelling of the Mutiny, the Raj would be in place.

In terms of human emotions, what toll did this great churning take? In White
Mughals, a rigorously researched historical narrative, William Dalrymple tries to answer the question with his trademark combo of felicity, grim humour and storytelling skills. To call this book readable would be to do it a great injustice; the author's honesty and sheer passion would necessitate more wondrous adjectives.

UNRESTRAINED ROMANTIC: Dalrymple
At one level-almost superficially-White Mughals is the tragic love ballad of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa. The Englishman was the East India Company's resident in the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad. He fell in love with India-and, it would appear, into bed with more than one Indian-went native with a vengeance and converted to Islam to marry Khair. It was Dodi and Diana in reverse. Khair was born into Indo-Persian aristocracy, a Shia of Sayyid stock, said to be descended from the Prophet himself. Kirkpatrick, like so many other Europeans who came to India to make their fortune, was a social nobody. He was just the English ambassador who got a teenaged girl pregnant even while she was engaged to be married elsewhere.

Indo-Anglian intercourse-and the word is used advisedly-was scarcely unknown in that period. If Kirkpatrick and Khair had lived 50 years before they did, they may not have made news nor, indeed, inspired a book. As it happened, they lived at a time when the Company was converting itself into a proto-empire, playing ducks and drakes and worse with Indian kings, bullying them into surrendering authority, moving gradually from racial mingling to a sort of apartheid.

It was an excruciatingly long divorce and would take the better part of the new century. Kirkpatrick though had only one life to live. He fell between multiple stools. The court politics of Hyderabad consumed him. He was not immune to its seductive charms and young Khair-she was only 14 when they met-was the bait. He did fall in love with her but may also have become, as Dalrymple puts it, "some sort of double agent-a late 18th century (Kim) Philby".

This is where Dalrymple draws his reader into the larger picture. There was the waning influence of the old Company officials-who saw India as a place to do business in and Indians, broadly speaking, as allies. In competition were the assertive new ideas of Lord Richard Wellesley-the governor general whose "forward policy" was a plain and simple hunt for territory, damn the Indians. In these circumstances, any Company official who had invested his heart in India was going to suffer. Like the Greek hero he was named after, James Achilles Kirkpatrick was not fortune's favourite.

It is not individuals who embellish Dalrymple's story. As is apparent to anybody who has read his previous books, the author is an unrestrained-if sometimes unrealistic-romantic, completely obsessed with the Indo-Islamic civilisation. The period the book is set in marks Mughalia imperium's glorious decadence, in not just Hyderabad but Lucknow and Delhi as well. There was, as Dalrymple writes, "an explosion of unrestrainedly sensual art and literary experimentation". Likewise White Mughals is a celebration of the wonder, plunder and blunder that was India, those long 200 years ago.

In describing the courtesans of the age, the iftar parties-and they had as much political import as will the ones in Lutyens' Delhi later this month-Muharram and the Shia festival of Maula Ali, even techniques of abortion in Islamic medical practice, White Mughals adds to any contemporry reader's-and not necessarily a western, non-Indian reader's-knowledge of the period. Travel writing and popular history are two different though not entirely unconnected genres. At Dalrymple's writing desk, they consummate the perfect marriage.

Rumour has it Shekhar Kapur is already considering making a film of White Mughals. While that prospect may worry anybody who values intelligent cinema-and would not want dear Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick becoming playthings of a silly faddist-Dalrymple himself is more keen to make a larger point. As he told India Today, "This book seeks to break two stereotypes." The first is
that of the "Englishman in his sola topee", the supercilious fellow who talked down to the natives.

Dalrymple writes of how Christians married Muslims, with the children choosing their faith when they came of age. If British men "wore pyjamas" even outside the narrow space between the bedroom and the bathroom, their Indian wives succumbed to "European porcelain and furniture". It was, as Dalrymple sees it, "a crazy fusion ... multi-culturalism on a scale simply not acknowledged since".

At that stage "one in three British men in India was cohabiting with an Indian woman or women". As an informal rule, only the fair-skinned children were sent home and brought up as "proper" British boys and girls. They were, of course, half-Indian.

Dalrymple writes of his own ancestors, brothers who went to England to study, and their sister, darker-skinned and therefore left behind lest she stand out "at home". Christian brother and Muslim sister carried out a perfectly everyday correspondence. Neither was embarrassed by the other. Race was a pigment of the imagination. In a generation or two, it would all change. Second and third cousins would, in effect, see each other as superior and inferior people.

Yet in thousands of British veins, there still flow trickles of Indian blood, if not specifically the blood of Khair then that of the thousands of her brothers and sisters who ventured into "mixed marriages". Dalrymple sounds almost excited as he tells you of the "genetic link on a massive scale between India and Britain". Gandhi is the Father of the Nation but, in a sense, Clive is almost the grandfather of the dual nation the bylanes and byblows of which White Mughals takes you through.

Dalrymple's Indophilia doesn't come in the way of him making a second political statement, one of even broader sweep. The second stereotype he wants to demolish is of a perennial clash of civilisations, of Islam and Christianity being in conflict from, as Khair's mother puts it, the time when "distinctions introduced by Moosa (Moses), Issa (Jesus) and Mahomed were known in the world".

White Mughals is primarily about the meeting of Indo-Islamic and European societies. Despite instances of (H)indo-phile British generals going to the Kumbh Mela for a holy dip, the Hindu world appears peripheral to the whole drama. Admittedly, Dalrymple doesn't see it that way. "Mughal culture was hybrid anyway. British society was only the new element to the mix." Without taking away from the merit of his work, Dalrymple's reasoning would not satisfy every interrogator. Maybe it will trigger a whole new book.

Dalrymple's last word-literally, it's the final paragraph of the book-is his worldview in a nutshell: "As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa shows, East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past and they will do so again."

It seems a trifle maudlin but-what the hell-it's a beautiful thought. Good show Janaab Dalrymple, looking forward to the next one.

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