A Tragical History of Fusion and Hybridity

Barely out of Cambridge, William Dalrymple shot to fame with an unusual travel book, In Xanadu (1990: Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award, and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award), and followed it up with other equally lauded explorations of things eastern: a book on Delhi, City of Djinns (1994: Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award); From the Holy Mountain, about the disappearance of Christianity from its region of origin (1997: Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award); and another book on India, The Age of Kali (1998). With his new book he attains new heights; it has won the prestigious Wolfson Prize for History and has been unanimously hailed as his masterpiece. One reviewer, overeager to be original in praising the book, has lapsed (or should I say collapsed?) into oxymoron: "Destined to become an instant classic.' (It hardly needs explaining that something 'instant' does not need to go through the process of 'becoming.')

Reviewers' howlers aside, the book is indeed a splendid achievement. Here is historical writing at its best, unputdownable as a thriller, and at the same time scholarly, urbane and, most significantly, humane. As for its theoretical bearings, 'White Mughals' distances itself critically from both imperialist and nationalist Indian historiography, from a particular kind of postcolonial criticism (exemplified par excellence by Edward Said's Orientalism), and from the more recent rhetoric of the 'clash of civilizations.' This makes for the virtue of timeliness.

We all know about the Nabobs, the early colonizers who acquired a taste for Oriental luxuries and often lived with Indian women, but they are remote figures in a historical limbo. We know about them, but we do not know them. They are generally seen as aberrant characters in a world where identity is conceived in clear-cut, stereotypical terms. But since Percival Spear's pioneering study The Nabobs (1963), a host of studies, nearly all of them published in the last few years have explored the phenomenon of cultural hybridization in fascinating detail. 'White Mughals' is perhaps the most writerly addition to the list. Almost simultaneously with it, Linda Colley's Captives has made available a comprehensive account of Europeans who were taken prisoner by Orientals and either by choice or under pressure adopted the religion and lifestyle of their captors.

Dalrymple points out that the period during which a hybrid lifestyle was common among Europeans in the East lasted three hundred years. It ended with the eighteenth century, as Western imperialism began to take shape. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was a thing of the past; and soon it was expunged from history.

Serendipity played a crucial role in the making of 'White Mughals.' On a visit to Hyderabad during Mohurrum in 1997 Dalrymple heard of Lt. Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick (a Scotsman like Dalrymple) who during his tenure as British Resident between 1797 and 1805 fell in love with, and married, Khair un-Nissa, a young upper-class Hyderabadi lady of Persian extraction, by whom he had a son and a daughter, whose descendants are still around in Britain.

Dalrymple fell in love with Hyderabad and spent five years uncovering the traces left by the couple. He sets the stage for their story by giving a comprehensive account of the extent of 'fusion and hybridity' in pre-Raj India and elsewhere. There were numerous Europeans who had 'turned Turk.' In India, the Portuguese, who arrived sixteen years before the Mughals (a piece of information that startled me), went native with great enthusiasm; when the Inquisition came after them they fled Goa and took service with Indian rulers. In 1565 there were at least two thousand Portuguese soldiers in Indian armies. There were so many Europeans in the Mughal army in the Empire's heyday 'that a special suburb was built for them outside Delhi called Firingi Pura.' In the late eighteenth century there were Frenchmen fighting for three rival powers, Tipu's Mysore, the Nizam's Hyderabad and the Marathas. A number of Europeans, including Britons, adopted Islam or Hinduism.

Against this background Kirkpatrick's relationship with Khair un-Nissa would not have been particularly remarkable if it weren't a case of the course of true love not running smooth. Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at Hyderabad at a particularly crucial point in Indian history, when the East India Company had to contend with Tipu Sultan and the Marathas. As a result of court intrigue an anonymous complaint reached the Governor General, charging that Kirkpatrick had raped Khair un-Nissa. He was cleared, thanks to the deposition of the chief minister of Hyderabad. Not long after, corrupt British army officers, whom Kirkpatrick had censured, anonymously reported to the Governor General that he was living with Khair un-Nissa, by whom he had had a child. This time his crime was concealment: while denying the first charge he hadn't come clean on his relationship with Khair un-Nissa. This time he was saved by his half-brother William, who was on the Governor General's staff, and reported that Kirkpatrick had informed him of the relationship, 'expecting him to pass it on discreetly to the Governor General,' but that he had neglected to do so.

Though Kirkpatrick did not lose his job, his friend General William Palmer, British Resident at Pune, who had married a Mughal lady and raised a family, was sacked, obviously because men like him were no longer considered desirable. The Kirkpatricks (or rather, Colonel Kirkpatrick) decided that their son and daughter should be sent to England to be educated, as this was the only way to save them from the stigma they would face as Anglo-Indians in India under new racist laws.

Soon after, Kirkpatrick died. Khair un-Nissa lived for another eight years, in harrowing circumstances whose details I will not go into. We know that 'both she and her mother wrote desperate letters to England, begging and pleading for the children to be sent back to her.' To no avail.

In England the children were baptized and brought up by their grandfather. The son, Sahib Allun, became William George Kirkpatrick; the daughter Sahib Begum became Katherine Aurora Kirkpatrick (or Kitty). Carlyle was for a time their private tutor and quite smitten with Kitty, whom he immortalized as Blumine, the heroin of his famous (albeit unreadable) novel 'Santor Resartus': 'a many-tinted radiant aurora... this fairest of Oriental Light bringers.' William George became a minor poet who died young, leaving behind three daughters. As children they were not allowed to communicate with their mother or Indian grandmother. The latter however continued in her attempts to get in touch with them and on somehow learning of William George's death sent a condolence to Kitty. Years later Kitty, now married with children, re-established contact with her grandmother and kept up a moving correspondence till the latter's death six years later, 'one writing in English from Torquay, the other from Hyderabad dictating in Persian to a scribe who wrote on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed in a Kharita, a sealed bag of gold Mughal brocade.' The death of people like Kitty Kirkpatrick, writes Dalrymple, 'effectively brought to a conclusion three hundred years of fusion and hybridity, all memory of which was erased from embarrassed Victorian history books... we still have rhetoric about "clashing civilizations," and almost daily generalizations in the press about East and West, Islam and Christianity, and the vast differences and fundamental gulfs that are said to separate the two. The White Mughals--with their unexpected minglings and fusions, their hybridity and above all their efforts at promoting tolerance and understanding--attempted to bridge these two worlds, and to some extent they succeeded in doing so.... East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again.'

Such words warm the cockles of my heart. But the sceptic in me points out that 'White Mughals' is a self-deconstructing account. Fusion and hybridity of the kind described here had their day when the balance of power between the Europeans and the Indians was not overwhelmingly in favour of the former. As the disparity in strength between them increased, illiberal, racist, colonialist ideas gained momentum. What chance do liberal ideas have in a world where the disparity in power between the most powerful and the rest is ever greater than in the days of Empire? To this the only answer I can think of is that history, mercifully, is open-ended. We can perhaps change.

I have it from the cyber-grapevine (by which of course I mean the Internet) that Dalrymple is at work on a book on the Mutiny, with the primary focus on Bahadur Shah Zafar. It's a book for which our intizar will be eager indeed.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.

Kitty Kirkpatrick's First Letter to Her Grandmother Sharaf un-Nissa

My dear Grandmother,

I received many years ago, your kind letter of condolence with me on the death of my beloved brother. I was very grateful to you for it, tho' by my not having answered it, I am afraid that you may have thought that I little regarded it. But indeed I did, & the more so, because I felt that you too mourned for him I loved so well & that you too were connected with him by the binding ties of blood.

Two years after his death I was married to a nephew of Sir John Kennaway's. My husband is of my own age & is a Captain in the English army.

I have four children living, my eldest daughter is 11 years old. She is exactly like my husband. I have a boy of 8 years & a half, then another girl of 7 and a half who is exactly like my mothers picture & one darling infant of 19 months. I have had seven living children 1 sweet boy and two sweet girls are gone, but I am blest in those that survive. My boy is so striking an image of my father that a picture that was drawn of my father as a little boy is always taken for my boy. They have a good intellect & are blest with fair skin. I live in a nice pretty house in the midst of a garden on the sea coast. My dear husband is very kind to me & I love him greatly.

I often think of you and remember you and my dear mother. I often dream that I am with you in India and that I see you both in the room you used to sit in. No day of my life has ever passed without my thinking of my dear mother. I can remember the verandah and the place where the tailors worked and a place on the house top where my mother used to let me sit down and slide.

When I dream of my mother I am in such joy to have found her again that I awake, or else am pained in finding that she cannot understand the English I speak. I can well recollect her cries when we left her and I can now see the place where she sat when we parted, and her tearing her long hair what worlds would I give to possess one lock of that beautiful and much loved hair! How dreadful to think that so many, many years have passed when it would have done my heart such good to think that you loved me & when I longed to write to you & tell you these feelings that I was never able to express, a letter which I was sure would have been detained & now how wonderful it is that after 35 years I am able for the first time to hear that you think of me, and love me, and have perhaps wondered why I did not write to you, and that you have thought me cold and insensible to such near dear ties. I thank God that he has opened for me a way of making the feelings of my heart known to you.

Will this reach you & will you care for the letter of your grandchild? My own heart tells me you will. May God bless you my own dear Grandmother.