The Times Literary Supplement
Review of White Mughals
by Francis Robinson
Friday October 11, 2002

In February 1799, the women of the household of Baqar Ali Khan, first cousin of the prime minister of Hyderabad and of distinguished Iranian descent, took the extraordinary action for Muslim women of staying two nights in the house of James Kirkpatrick, recently appointed the East India Company's Resident. The women had quarrelled with Baqar Ali over the marriage he had arranged for his granddaughter Khair un-Nissa, aged fourteen. They were taking advantage of the absence of their menfolk at war to set events in motion. Khair, it seems, had fallen passionately in love with Kirkpatrick, whom she had glimpsed at her sister's wedding. The women enabled Kirkpatrick to see Khair sleeping, and then permitted her to meet him. "She declared to me again and again", Kirkpatrick explained to his brother, "that her affections had been irrevocably fixed on me . . . that her fate was linked to mine . . . I contrived to command myself so far as to abstain from the tempting feast I was manifestly invited to . . . ." But he did not abstain for long.

The moving story which follows forms the central thread which runs through William Dalrymple's wide-ranging and richly textured narrative. Kirkpatrick fell in love with Khair; the relationship developed. The risks were great: for the women there was the danger of violent death at the hands of their male relations, whose honour had been sullied; for Kirkpatrick there was the danger of dismissal for the stupidity of an intrigue with a noblewoman, whose family was centrally placed at the Nizam's court, and for concealing key political intelligence, which the relationship represented, from his masters. In 1800 Khair became pregnant, which brought matters to a head. Once more, the women showed their mettle. Sharaf un-Nissa, Khair's mother, so managed the politics of the household and the citythat her father was willing to permit his granddaughter to break her engagement and be handed over to the Resident. Kirkpatrick for his part became a Muslim and secretly married Khair, with the Nizam himself standing in for his father.

Of course, such matters are rarely concealed, and certainly not in the highly politicized environment of the Hyderabad court. Kirkpatrick's conduct was subject to a Company inquiry. He was exonerated of a charge of rape and of putting improper pressure on Khair's family. But he was only rescued from the charge of concealing political intelligence by a selfless act on the part of his half-brother, William, who explained to Governor-General Wellesley that Kirkpatrick had told him all -which he had not -and that it was his fault not to have passed on the information.

For three years, Khair and Kirkpatrick lived openly at the Residency with their two children, whose English names came to be William and Kitty. Then tragedy befell them. The beginning was the great sadness which afflicted all Anglo Indian families. In 1805, Kirkpatrick decided that his children must go to England to be educated. "My mother has never had any rival in my affections", declared Kitty forty years later, "I can well recollect her cries when we left her & I can now see the place in w(hich) she sat when we parted -her tearing her long hair . . . ." Just one thing was left behind to soften the blow: a portrait of the children commissioned from James Chinnery.

At the same time, Kirkpatrick was summoned to Calcutta to brief the incoming Governor-General. Already ill when he set out, he died there, aged forty-one. His will spoke of his "unbounded love" for Khair. The following year Khair and her mother went to Calcutta to mourn at his grave. In Calcutta, Henry Russell, who had been Kirkpatrick's chief assistant in Hyderabad, along with his brother, Charles, played a major part in looking after Khair. We are given the picture of "a beautiful, charismatic Mughal noblewoman behaving according to her rank, with a pair of senior British officials running around to do her bidding". Then Russell became Khair's lover.

The authorities in both Calcutta and Hyderabad made it clear that, when Russell returned to take up his post in the Residency, Khair would have to live outside the state. Russell was not prepared to take the risks for love taken by Kirkpatrick. After a dawdling journey in which he enjoyed Khair to the full, he dumped her and her mother in the decaying seaport of Masulipatam. Here, they heard through Charles Russell (for Henry was too much of a coward to tell them himself) that he had married. Eventually the women made their way back to Hyderabad, where, aged twenty-seven, Khair died of a broken heart. Despite desperate letters to England, there is no evidence that she had a word about her two children while she was alive, although six weeks after she died, two portraits came.

The story does not quite end there. Khair's son died a young man in England. Her daughter Kitty, however, made both her mark and the connection back to Hyderabad. A striking redhead, she greatly impressed Thomas Carlyle, who fashioned her into Blumine, in Sartor Resartus, and whose enthusiasm for the "Hindoo Princess" brought acid comment from Jane, whom he was wooing. Kitty married an army captain, had four children, and delighted in a loving marriage. One day, she was taken by a friend to tea in a great country house in Surrey, whose owner she did not know. On entering the house she burst into tears; on the stairs was the portrait of her and her brother by Chinnery. The owner of the house was Henry Russell. Through Russell, she was able to make contact with Sharaf un-Nissa in Hyderabad. Six years of joyful correspondence ensued, until in July 1847 her grandmother died.

Other strands are woven through the central story. There are the doings of the family of General Palmer, whose family portrait by
Francesco Renaldi, suffused with love and affection, forms the jacket of the book. Palmer's wife was Princess Fyze Bakhsh of the Mughal royal family. Her husband, the Company's Resident at Poona, was a close political ally of Kirkpatrick. Her son, William, made and lost his fortune in business in Hyderabad. She was a close friend of Khair in the happy days in Hyderabad, in mourning in Calcutta, and in the last days in Hyderabad.

Colourful characters make their appearance: Ochterlony, the Company's Resident in Delhi, whose thirteen wives would process every eveninground the city behind their husband, each on the back of an elephant; General Hindoo Stuart, a convert to Hinduism (though that is not strictly possible), would take a week off to bathe at the Kumbh Mela, and campaigned in the press for European women to adopt the sari. We are given a well-drawn picture of the politics of the Hyderabad court and the ways in which they interacted with the Resident's love affair, and the struggle for power in central India between the British, Tipu Sultan and the Marathas. Kirkpatrick was a successful Resident because he lived as Hyderabadis did, and was popular both in the city and with the Nizam, whom he referred to affectionately as "Old Nizzy".

Dalrymple celebrates Kirkpatrick, Ochterlony et al with the title White Mughals. Their era was the time when Europeans lived like Indians, spoke Indian languages, wore Indian dress, and loved Indian women. It was a time when civilizations fused rather than clashed. Another strand in the story is Kirkpatrick's opposition to Governor-General Wellesley's newly arrogant attitude to Indian states. It was followed by arrogance towards Indian civilization, the practice of living separately from Indians, and the arrival of growing numbers of European women, all of which in the early nineteenth century brought an end to the era of the White Mughals.

In his introduction, Dalrymple berates historians for concealing what he reveals, for imperialist or nationalist reasons. This may be true, but he fails to do justice to those, from Percival Spear to Christopher Bayly, who have shown the extent to which there was an Indo-British partnership in eighteenth-century India. Through massive research blessed with serendipity, and through imagination and empathy, Dalrymple has evoked the world of the British in late eighteenth century India as no one has before. He is sometimes self-indulgent, when he cannot bring himself to prune facts he has compiled on a religious ceremony or on abortion. But this does not mar a wonderful book, its story of love or its celebration of the humanity we share. "The Begum and I", wrote William Gardner, who had married the daughter of the Nawab of Cambay, from 22 years of constant contact, have smoothed off each other's asperities and rollon peaceably and contentedly . . . . The house is filled with Brats and the very thinking of them, from blue eyes and fair hair, to ebony and wool make me quite anxious to get back to them again.

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