In the struggle by the East India Company to gain full and unfettered access to the wealth of the Mughal Empire, alliances and treaties with the Mughal rulers proved essential. Once the French influence in India had been effectively terminated, the British saw India as it's sole asset to be exploited to the full. It had it's representatives in each of the Mughal courts, and their influence upon them and vice versa, was key. Company representatives and regional Governors, offered rulers their military backing and support against hostile neighbours.
All this entailed a vast investment in its own army. Huge numbers of army recruits drawn from Britain landed in this extraordinarily rich and exotic Mughal culture. Many of them did become completely besotted with it. Lower ranks might change their affiliations and join the Mughal army, because it paid better, offered them unfettered opportunities for financial improvement, more status, and importantly, sex on demand. Sexual fraternisation within the host culture was in the 18th century quietly turned a blind eye to, and indulged in at all levels within the Company. Certainly in the officer rank and governors it could prove advantageous to be more Mughal, and enraptured by the culture. And just occasionally if that dalliance went too far, in fully adopting the daily dress and Islamic beliefs of the culture, the man could easily be removed and sent home. The danger of a Company official becoming a double agent and batting in opposition to the Company's mission, was never far away from their minds.
In White Mughals, the historian William Dalrymple investigates the love stricken, but turbulent life of one such officer. The superbly named Robert Achilles Kirkpatrick. A man we first encounter struggling to climb the Company's ranks, to forge his career and fortune. A mixture of his reputation for good judgement, his abilities as a negotiator being recognised, and using his own family network connections, helped him eventually rise to be the Company's Governor in Hyderabad. Advisor and adjunct to it's revered ruler the Nizam Khan. Kirkpatrick had already started dressing and behaving as a native, as he dived further into Mughal culture. This itself had begun to ring alarm bells.
Nestled as an integral part of The Nizam's court were the Begums, a line of the Sayyeda descended from Mohamed's family. This lineage was kept pure by only marrying other Sayyeda, adopting strict purdah, and in the case of their women, chastity. At a court gathering Kirkpatrick spotted a beautiful eye looking intently at him from behind a curtain. He was intrigued, and asked if her might meet her. That attractive eye belonged to Khair un Nissa, a fifteen year old Sayyeda girl. Even Kirkpatrick meeting this girl was fraught with potential upset. At the time he was ten years her senior. However, he would not have been the first British officer to have had an 'Indian wife'.
He began to have 'private' assignations. with Khair. These were held with the full encouragement of the matriarchs in her family. Hence the relationship developed rather rapidly, as did the gossip. Rumours began circulating that he had raped her. We might want to balk at this 'age gap' relationship today, which might be seen as inherently an abusive one. What the truth of the matter was, was hard to ascertain, even at the time, let alone over two centuries later. The slander did continue to dog his reputation. What made the issue a whole lot worse for him was his concealing the true nature of it, from his own family and the Company. He actively lied about his relationship, denied he'd had sex with her.,that he hadn't married and sired a child with her, when all of these things he knew he had done.
However, from letters written by him and others present at the time, we learn that Kirkpatrick and Khair were notably deeply devoted to each other. Another, less principled officer, who had got caught out in such a contentious position, would just have dumped the woman, and wiped the slate clean in pastures new. And not let it imperil his whole career. But Kirkpatrick remained steadfastly loyal to Khair and his Anglo Indian son and daughter. He ended up weathering four subsequent rehashes of these scandalous accusations, which were being used by other people within the Mughal court or the Company army, to tarnish his reputation. Their aim being to get him publicly shamed and removed. Kirkpatrick might have been an idiot for even considering such a marriage, that would require him to convert to Islam. However, Kirkpatrick had a certain nobility to him. He was much liked. perceptive and an effective person in his job. These qualities counted for a lot within the Company.
This love affair would never be completely clean of ambiguities and questionable actions being taken, through all the complications of their love struck lives. Dalrymple reveals how this affair and Company responses were shot through with assumptions, prejudices and awkward compromises between affairs of the heart and affairs of state. This time of the White Mughals, where the British sought to productively interact with their host culture, was a short lived one. As more hardline leaders of the Company, such as Richard Wellesley arrived, they moved the dial of its relationship with Mughal India from coercive cooperation towards a combative domination. This eventually would lead to the Indian Mutiny.
What happens to Khair and her family after Kirkpatrick suddenly dies? We discover the shameful way Indian wives and mixed race children were treated, as it takes an unbearably bleak turn. Kirkpatrick had tried his best to leave sufficient money to support all his surviving family, which others then mercilessly betrayed and robbed them of.
This is a hugely tragic tale that Dalrymple recounts here, where elements of exotic romanticism sit side by side with the very worst of avariciousness. It's certainly a gripping investigation, researched by following the trail of letters. And when sources dry up, to look to other people of the time, to perhaps glean what happened. It is a detailed and extraordinarily well told story.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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