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A return to the days of Mughal India
Kolkata, Nov 17: Beneath the familiar stories of British conquest and rule of the sub-continent, William Dalrymple`s latest fiction `White Mughals` narrates a more intriguing and still largely unwritten story about the Indian conquest of the British imagination.
Kolkata, Nov 17: Beneath the familiar stories of British conquest and rule of the sub-continent, William Dalrymple`s latest fiction `White Mughals` narrates a more intriguing and still largely unwritten story about the Indian conquest of the British
imagination.
`White Mughals`, released here last evening at the British Council of India, is a story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salwars, Mughal Hyderabad and Victorian London, about Britishness and the nature of the empire, about faith and personal identity, about how far all of those mattered, and were fixed and immutable - or how far they were in fact flexible, tactable and negotiable, as Dalrymple puts it.
`White Mughal` is the story of Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a British resident at the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805 and his passionate, untimely and tragic love affair with a Hyderabadi noblewoman Khair un-Nissa that transcends cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.
After falling in love with Khair, Kirkpatrick not only married her according to Muslim law, but also adopted Mughal clothes and ways of living, converted to Islam and became a double agent working against the East India company and for the Hyderabadis.
``During the 18th and 19th century, it was as common for the westerners to take on the custom, and even religions, of India, as the reverse,`` Dalrymple says adding, ``these White Mughals had responded to their travels in India by slowly shedding off their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philosophy, taking harems and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class they slowly came to replace what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculuralism, has called `chutnification`.``
``The wills of the period show that in the 1780s, over one-third of the Britishmen in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives,`` the author says.
Bureau Report
`White Mughals`, released here last evening at the British Council of India, is a story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salwars, Mughal Hyderabad and Victorian London, about Britishness and the nature of the empire, about faith and personal identity, about how far all of those mattered, and were fixed and immutable - or how far they were in fact flexible, tactable and negotiable, as Dalrymple puts it.
`White Mughal` is the story of Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a British resident at the court of Hyderabad between 1797 and 1805 and his passionate, untimely and tragic love affair with a Hyderabadi noblewoman Khair un-Nissa that transcends cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.
After falling in love with Khair, Kirkpatrick not only married her according to Muslim law, but also adopted Mughal clothes and ways of living, converted to Islam and became a double agent working against the East India company and for the Hyderabadis.
``During the 18th and 19th century, it was as common for the westerners to take on the custom, and even religions, of India, as the reverse,`` Dalrymple says adding, ``these White Mughals had responded to their travels in India by slowly shedding off their Britishness like an unwanted skin and adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philosophy, taking harems and adopting the ways of the Mughal governing class they slowly came to replace what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculuralism, has called `chutnification`.``
``The wills of the period show that in the 1780s, over one-third of the Britishmen in India were leaving all their possessions to one or more Indian wives,`` the author says.
Bureau Report