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White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India Paperback – April 27, 2004
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James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Kahir un-Nissa—'Most excellent among Women'—the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister and a descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair and overcame many obstacles to marry her—not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company.
It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious and family disputes. But such things were not unknown; from the early sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian mutiny, the 'white Mughals' who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassments to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as 'Hindoo Stuart', who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick's counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of their own elephant.
In White Mughals, William Dalrymple discovers a world almost entirely unexplored by history, and places at its centre a compelling tale of love, seduction and betrayal. It possesses all the sweep and resonance of a great nineteenth-century novel, set against a background of shifting alliances and the manoeuvring of the great powers, the mercantile ambitions of the British and the imperial dreams of Napoleon. White Mughals, the product of five years' writing and research, triumphantly confirms Dalrymple's reputation as one of the finest writers at work today.
- Print length544 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateApril 27, 2004
- Dimensions6.11 x 1.19 x 9.11 inches
- ISBN-10014200412X
- ISBN-13978-0142004128
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From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
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About the Author
William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in 2002 was awarded the Mungo Park Medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his ‘outstanding contribution to travel literature’. He wrote and presented the British television series Stones of the Raj and Indian Journeys, which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA in 2002. His Radio 4 series on the history of British spirituality and mysticism, The Long Search, recent won the 2002 Sandford St Martin Prize for Religious Broadcasting and was described by the judges as 'thrilling in its brilliance... near perfect radio.'He is married to the artist Olivia Fraser, and they have three children. They now divide their time between London and Delhi.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 27, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 544 pages
- ISBN-10 : 014200412X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0142004128
- Item Weight : 1.32 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.11 x 1.19 x 9.11 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #773,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,563 in Historical British & Irish Literature
- #8,405 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #53,720 in Historical Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

William Dalrymple FRSL, FRGS, FRAS (born William Hamilton-Dalrymple on 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic.
His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. He has been four times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
In 2012 he was appointed a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities by Princeton University. In the Spring of 2015 he was appointed the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Premkudva (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Superbly crafted like Persian calligraphy, the story takes us trough the love story between James A. Kirkpatrick, the British Resident stationed in the Hyderabad Court, and Khair un-Nissa, the uniquely beautiful daughter of a noble Persian-Indian family.
Dalrymple leads us in a magical tour of Mughal Hyderabad, in the center of India and in a sense in the center of that brief hybrid world of British Indian relations of mutual understanding and respect.
The love story is tenderly narrated and we follow it along as it survives court intrigues, diplomatic incidents and power struggles. The outcome of the story is tragic, but tempered with the fact that there ares still symbolic remains of their love standing like the Doll House James built for Khair in the Residency Gardens..
In essence, one of those books you just don’t want to be made into film….so the magic never goes.
I loved the style, tone, execution. In the end you can't help feeling a little in love with khair and James and the people who loved them most. I look forward to rereading this, it will be like catching up with old friends that you love dearly
The letters are excellent, and give insight into the lives of these individuals. This book would be of interest for someone who is already a student of this time, but the uninitiated needs to look elsewhere to understand the British involvement in India.
The story of Khairunissa, widowed at 19, her children at the ages of 5 and 3 snatched away from her, never to see them again and betrayed by the next man she learnt to love is played out in the background of more tolerant Englishmen who understood and assimilated the habits, culture and religions of India.
The next generation of English conquered India, but did not win its heart.
A page turner of a book impossible to put down.
Top reviews from other countries
While the book mainly focuses on the tragic romance between James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair Un Nissa, the former being a White Mughal (a European adapted to Indian culture) the book does provide, at least in its opening paragraph, a panorama of Europeans who "went native" and adapted to Indian ways, converting mainly to Islam, though in a few cases, Hinduism.
Through the course of the book, we learn that this was not unusual in the 18th and early 19th centuries, though it became much less prevalent as the arrogance of British colonial rule increased from the mid 19th century onward, culminating in the war of 1857.
While the opening chapter may be a panorama of European-Indian interactions, and the subsequent chapters a retelling of the relationship and fortunes of Kirkpatrick and Khair Un Nissa, Dalrymple is highly descriptive, and the insights (one must read the footnotes for the whole picture) coupled with Dalrymple's prose elegance, help transport the reader back to Georgian era British India, creating a sense of sentimental attachment that is rarely found in non-fiction.
A problem is that the characters do seem somewhat distant to the reader, in a sense that would not be found in a fictional novel, however, this is non-fiction and relies on documentary evidence, in this case letters, of which direct citations are often used.
If one approaches this expecting a Pride & Prejudice like novel, they may be disappointed, however, if one comes to this book with no pre-conceived expectations and simply allows Dalrymple to transport them back to early British India, then they will not be disappointed.
In all a unique work, both a factual work of historical biography, a panorama of 18th Century India, a touching love affair, and ultimately, a plea for understanding between cultures, showing that civilizations do not always clash, rather, they merge.
The leading characters in this story found something in each other across huge cultural barriers in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in India that is rarely found I today’s modern age. If you like India, it’s history, it’s people and it’s geography this is a must read.
Another well done for William Dalrymple.









