White Mughals

White Mughals is a 2002 work of narrative history by Scottish historian, art curator, and writer William Dalrymple. Utilizing a variety of primary and secondary sources as well as a wealth of historical knowledge about the social and artistic context of nineteenth-century Europe, it examines a love affair that took place between British Resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick and an Indian woman Khair-un-Nissa Begum. While certain interracial relationships have historically led to social alienation, and even criminal conviction, British-Indian relations of this time were strangely cordial. Dalrymple uses the story of Kirkpatrick and Begum as a proxy for discussing the intersectional relationships between race, gender, status, religion, and social norms during this century in Europe, exploring the odd, sometimes even progressive, attitudes that emerged.

Dalrymple begins by contextualizing British-Indian relations in the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries. During this time of colonialist imperialism, roughly one-third of the British men who occupied India married an Indian woman. One of the more famous of these relationships was that of Major-General Charles Stewart, who went on to fully embrace Hindu culture, incorporating it into his own life and those of his children. Here, Dalrymple meditates on the intellectual and cultural harmonies that emerged from the combination of Christianity and Islam despite rampant pre-modern intolerance elsewhere.

Dalrymple focuses primarily on Captain James Achilles Kirkpatrick during his introduction and later conversion to the tenets of Islam, as well as his marriage to Khair-un-Nissa. His wife was a noblewoman of the Hyderabadi caste, meaning that she was descended from a line of royals called the Mughals. Kirkpatrick leveraged his political power as the British Resident of India’s Hyderabad to improve the conditions under which both the British (via the East India Trading Company) and the Indians, represented by Nizam of Hyderabad, executed business deals.



Outside of his coverage of these two historical figures, Dalrymple covers a few of the vast number of social arrangements that arose out of Britain and India’s ideological intermixing. He uses a number of diaries, reports, encrypted military dispatches, and letters between British and Indian nationals. Despite its ostensible tolerance, out of this tapestry of narratives there emerges a somewhat condemning account of the treatment of and attitudes about mixed-race offspring of British-Indian families, especially after Evangelical Christianity took its hold in Europe. He also touches on the tragedy that befell Kirkpatrick: after having his arm amputated in 1812 after falling into a pot of boiling water, he went on to have two children with his wife, but died at the young age of twenty-seven. His daughter, Kitty, sent to England at age five, became a friend of the famous Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle. She married Captain James Winslow Phillips, birthing seven children, and outliving her husband by six decades.

Dalrymple’s account of the Kirkpatrick family ends on an optimistic note, leaving off with evidence that the two children came into their own and moved to Britain with the blessings of their mother. Kitty goes on to reclaim her Indian roots by beginning a correspondence with her Indian grandmother. White Mughals is about cultural reclamation just as much as it is about the new possibilities afforded by hybrid identities in a world on the cusp of rapid globalization.