Mystical odyssey of a man on a mission:

William Dalrymple and the affair of the White Mughals

By Kendall Hill

At the precocious age of 21, William Dalrymple travelled 19,000 kilometres in the footsteps of Marco Polo, from Jerusalem to the fabled land of Xanadu in eastern China. On completion he published the best-selling and universally lauded In Xanadu: A Quest.

The dazzling young Cambridge graduate then based himself in Delhi for six years, where he summoned the ghostly spirits of the ancient capital with the assistance of Sufi mystics, a gaggle of eunuchs and the great grand-daughter of the last Mughal emperor. The resulting City of Djinnsgarnered Dalrymple the Thomas Cook Travel Book award and The Sunday Times’s Young Writer of the Year prize.

Then, in perhaps his most ambitious journey, he retraced the path of the sixth-century monk John Moschos from Mt Athos in Greece to the deserts of Egypt, rediscovering remnants of the Christian Levant and “stumbling by accident” across an ancient form of Byzantine plainsong in Syria that appears to “represent one of the principal roots of the entire Western tradition of sacred music”.

Clearly, Dalrymple, now 38, is no ordinary travel writer. It’s tempting to try to dismiss him as some uncommonly gifted bore on a winning streak. But the reality is his work is mesmerising, both for its extraordinary scholarship and his facility for language. He also has a wonderful sense of humour, a BAFTA award for his Indian Journeys television series, a fellowship with the Royal Society of Literature (the society’s youngest ever fellow), and he has just completed what he reckons is his best story.

“I can’t imagine I am ever going to get as good a story as this again,” Dalrymple says – by phone from New York. “I sometimes lie awake and think: ‘How on earth?’ It’s such a fabulous, fabulous story.”

White Mughals is another stunning piece of erudition, this time reconstructing the love affair between an 18th-century British general and a Muslim princess in colonial India. In the five-year process of researching and writing it, Dalrymple managed to debunk the Victorian notion of a subcontinent strictly bisected into the rulers and the ruled. Using rare, forgotten or otherwise ignored texts from British and Indian sources, he reveals the lengths to which the colonisers and their subjects loved, lived and prospered together.

Not the least “fabulous” element of the story is Dalrymple’s own charmed discoveries in the British Library’s India Office Library, his chance find of a crucial 1600-page autobiography buried in a dusty bookshop at the back of a Hyderabadi bazaar, and the unearthing of some obscure letters in an Oxford library that revealed the conclusion to the love affair.

To reveal too much of the plot here would be an injustice to Dalrymple’s denouement. But the strength of the story can be judged from the fact its hardback sales are already more than three times those of his previous books, from his receipt of England’s major history prize, and from the academic acclaim it is attracting.

But you get the sense Dalrymple is hoping his efforts might have a more profound influence. “White Mughals, when I started it, was about as relevant as Dad’s Army,” he concedes. “But suddenly, when Islam is being perceived as the new enemy … this book in a sense is a sort of trumpet call against the notion of the clash of civilisations.”

He stresses this point in the book’s introduction: “… at a time when … Islam and Christianity appear to be engaged in another major confrontation, this unlikely group of expatriates provides a timely reminder that it is indeed very possible – and has always been possible – to reconcile the two worlds.”

Religion, particularly Islam, has been central to all of Dalrymple’s work. “[Islam] is something I have fallen very much in love with,” he says (though, he hastens to add, he has no love for the perverted doctrines of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states). “I love the music, I love the food, I love the architecture. It is the thing in life which has most fascinated me.”

But now here he is, in Bush’s America where, he confesses, he was nervous about what the reaction might be to his overtly pro-Islam book. He needn’t have worried. “It [White Mughals] is against everything that the current administration is for. But the people who come to my lectures feel even more strongly than I do that this is the very worst government they have ever had.”

While he dismisses the suggestion of an agenda running through his books, Dalrymple did make a decision with White Mughals to redress the “massive misrepresentation of Islam in the media”.

“I am certainly trying to change perceptions about Islam,” he says. “Some people like trainspotting; I am interested in Islam.”

His coming two books will provide ample scope to further indulge his interests. The first is a sequel of sorts to White Mughals, chronicling the Great (Indian) Mutiny of 1857. It is a period that has been tackled repeatedly, but not in the way Dalrymple intends to approach it.

“The great myth is that there are no Indian sources for the Great Mutiny,” he says. “There are great sources.” He has already managed to identify no fewer than 6000 Indian texts, which his translator is busily working on now in Dalrymple’s Delhi apartment. The author also has a contract to write a book of three pilgrimages (Hindu, Muslim and Christian) in India.

In the meantime, he is heading to Australia this month for the Sydney Writers’ festival. It will be his first visit to this country. Dalrymple can’t help thinking his name would have been better known here if only his ancestor Alexander Dalrymple, the East India Company’s original hydrographer and one of the first men to postulate the theory of a Great Southern Land, had not been overlooked for a certain exploratory expedition in 1770.

“They sent this fellow James Cook instead,” he says, laughing.

White Mughals, by William Dalrymple, is published by HarperCollins

Relevant links:

William Dalrymple’s website: www.williamdalrymple.com

William Dalrymple’s webpage on the Kirkpatrick Affair:

http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/book_details/white_mughals_details.html

White Mughals Amazon.co.uk page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006550967/williamdalruk-21

White Mughals Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Mughals

Penguin US’s page on White Mughals:

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780142004128,00.html

White Mughals Amazon.com page:

http://www.amazon.com/White-Mughals-Betrayal-Eighteenth-Century-India/dp/014200412X/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1346412829&sr=8-4&keywords=william+dalrymple

William Dalrymple author page:

http://www.amazon.com/William-Dalrymple/e/B000API5E8/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1346412829&sr=8-2-ent

 

Frank McLynn:  The Affair of Dalrymple’s White Mughals:

http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/book_details/IoS.html?xml=/arts/2002/09/29/bodal29.xml&sSheet=/arts/2002/09/29/bomain.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=508661

William Dalrymple’s brilliant account of an Indian Affair:

http://onlineprofilelisting.com/category/william-dalrymples-account-of-an-indian-affair/

 

Anthony Gardner on the writing of White Mughals:

http://www.anthonygardner.co.uk/interviews/william_dalrymple.html

 

William Dalrymple on discovering his own Indian blood:

http://onlineprofilelisting.com/category/william-dalrymples-account-of-an-indian-affair/

 

William Dalrymple video on the White Mughals of Delhi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66dmO6LeB9c

 

William Dalrymple on Kirkpatrick’s Affair:

http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/book_details/TLS.html?id=1075932002

 

White Mughals on Good Reads:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124432.White_Mughals

William Dalrymple in the Multiculturalist:

http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/the-multi-culturalist-william-dalrymple-in-interview-with-three-monkeys-online-magazine/

White Mughals in Google Books:

http://books.google.co.in/books/about/White_Mughals.html?id=A4_IeMMLgdkC&redir_esc=y

 
The Scotsman Profile: William Dalrymple and the White Mughal Affair

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/features/on-the-trail-of-a-lost-love-1-651036

 

David Robinson of Dalrymple and Kirkpatrick’s Affair:

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/features/history-s-mutineer-1-721044

 

Love and war are usually thought to inhabit different spheres and, except in Tolstoy, we do not expect them to mix. As Sir Walter Scott’ s couplet puts it: “Dreams of love and lady’s charms / give place to honour and to arms.” Part of the achievement ofthis magnificent book is the way William Dalrymple effortlessly melds the two motifs so that the public story of the British conquest of India and the poignant tale of a love affair interpenetrate, with each adding a dimension to the other.

In 1797 there were four major powers in India: the Marathas in the north and west, Tipu Sultan in the south, the Nizam of Hyderabad in the centre and the British East India Company in the east, controlling the coastline from Madras to Calcutta. TheCompany’s new Governor-General Richard Wellesley was determined to destroy his three rivals as part of a personal project to make the British the masters of all India. Using the military talent of his brother Arthur (later duke of Wellington), Wellesleyfirst destroyed Tipu at Seringapatam, then prepared for his second stage, war against the Marathas.

As for the princely state of Hyderabad, which had been heavily defeated by Tipu in 1795, Wellesley reckoned he could geld it by machiavellian diplomacy.For this reason a key figure at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad was the British Resident. In 1797 this was the 33-year-old James Achilles Kirkpatrick.

Where Wellesley was a man who had all the attitudes of the post-1857 Raj – racism, contempt for the “natives”, sexual anxieties about miscegenation and the purity of white memsahibs – Kirkpatrick harked back to an earlier 18th-century tradition ofcrossing cultures. He loved India and its people and in effect “went native” as part of a long and honourable tradition that Dalrymple carefully sketches. His sympathies were indeed more with Hyderabad (whose elderly ruler loved him like a son) than” John Company”, and Dalrymple speculates, plausibly, that he may have been a double agent or even put Hyderabad’s interest before that of Wellesley. It was not entirely surprising, then, that he fell in love with an Indian girl of oligarchic family(Dalrymple dislikes the word “princess”), Khair Un-Nissa, great niece of the Nizam’s prime minister, and she with him. Kirkpatrick wanted to marry her, but the obstacles were formidable.

The girl’s family claimed descent from the Prophet and belonged tothe endogamous Sayyed sect of Indian Muslims, for whom marriage outside the clan was the ultimate horror. Even though Khair was already promised to another man in an arranged marriage, her mother and the rest of the women in the family colluded topromote the liaison with the unbeliever. When she became pregnant, Khair’s grandfather and patriarch of the clan claimed that the Sayyed honour had been besmirched and that he would have to take to the roads as a wandering fakir. But Khair’s mother wasconvinced that Hyderabad was in danger and that only alliance with the British could save it; their daughter’ s marriage to the Resident would make the family supreme in the state once Wellesley’s plans were complete. Kirkpatrick saved the day byconverting to Islam and even having himself circumcised. A formal but secret marriage was concluded.

But the byzantine intrigues at the Nizam’s court meant that Kirkpatrick had many enemies, both those who favoured an alliance with the French and those who, for personal reasons, wished to discredit Kirkpatrick with Wellesley. It is worth rememberingthat Kirkpatrick’s affair with Khair began in 1798, when Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign seemed to portend a French invasion of India. The Resident’s enemies (deposed Indian politicians, corrupt British officers, even the chief of his personal bodyguard)denounced the secret marriage to Wellesley on the grounds that it would stir up anti-British sentiment in Hyderabad. Wellesley asked Kirkpatrick for an explanation for this “outrage”, intending to sack him but Kirkpatrick, with the help of his elderhalf-brother William (Wellesley’s right-hand man), successfully lied his way out of trouble. Much of Dalrymple’s narrative has the pace of a thriller as one narrow squeak succeeds another, and there are more twists in the story than would be deemedcredible if encountered in a novel. Finally, Wellesley sent his brother to destroy the Marathas in 1803, which he accomplished at Assaye. The East India Company, alarmed at this unauthorised expansionism, recalled Wellesley and sent out a Lord Cornwallisas governor. While travelling to meet his new boss, Kirkpatrick fell ill and died in Calcutta in 1805, leaving a 19-year- old widow and two small children.

The coda to the tale is sad, and all Dalrymple’s great gifts are on display as he makes us feel the pity and terror of the occasion. Khair hastened to Calcutta to honour her late husband, but then found herself barred from returning to Hyderabad, when achange of regime brought in a hostile prime minister. A womanising career official named Henry Russell, who had served Kirkpatrick in Hyderabad, then seduced Khair and lived with her for a while in Masulipatam. Unlike Kirkpatrick, who really loved herand had been prepared to sacrifice his career for her, Russell, who comes across as a conceited monster of selfishness, was just using her. When posted to Madras, he abandoned her and found himself a wealthy European wife. Crushed by the news, Khair wentinto decline. Despite her wealth and beauty, she never remarried and died grief-stricken at the age of 27.

Dalrymple’s story has several morals. East and West are not irreconcilable despite the Madame Butterfly scenario but, most of all, it seems thatthe Victorians in the Raj succeeded in colonising not just India but our very imagination and the way we think about British-Indian relations. Above all, this book is a bravura display of scholarship, writing and insight. No brief review can do justiceto its manifold excellence and all one can say is that Dalrymple manages the incredible feat of outpointing most historians and most novelists in one go. This is quite simply a stunning achievement.

 

Relevant links:

William Dalrymple White Mughals affair wikipedia page

William Dalrymple White Mughals affair wikipedia personal page

William Dalrymple White Mughals affair personal website

Amazon page