Mar 30, 2008 06:09 PM
1774 Views
It is to the credit of William Dalrymple that a book on whom
research was begun in 1997 and was published in 2002 as a book of close to 600
pages with innumerable foot notes, bibliography and other explanations did not
end up as a scholarly treatise gathering dust on library shelves but has made a
fascinating rendering of political history of the early to middle eighteenth
century Hyderabad as its intersects with the expanding political and commercial
interests of the East India Company.
At the heart of the story is an unheard of romance between
James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a long time resident of the Company at Hyderabad
and Khair –un –Nissa a Hyderabadi Deccani aristocratic woman in strict purdah. A large chunk of the story
concerns their rather unusual romance concerning their respective stations in
life – Kirkpatrick was the British Resident, akin to the ambassador of the East
India Company to the Nizam’s court and a Christian and Khair – Un – Nissa a
Muslim in *purdah. * Invariably their liaison had political as well
as well as religious connotations which could never be fully resolved. Caught
up between political and religious intrigue, calamity is never far and the
couple’s domestic life is marred with tragedy, and especially so the life of Khair –un –Nissa, who according to the
book married around sixteen and before her widowhood at the age of 21 had given
birth to two children, and had died by the age of 27.
However to reduce the book to a mere love story however
exotic the characters is to minimize the impact of the book. The larger canvas
of the book is its attempt to show that the “ White Mughals” through their
lives demonstrated in spite of their quaint eccentricities and even excesses
that it was possible for different cultures t co exist, learn from and live
together. And to do that, Dalrymple strings together characters like the Kirkpatrick
brothers, Sir David Ochterlony – He of the Kolkata monument, William Hickey,
the diarist, William Gardner- of the Gardner’s Horse regiment, army commanders like Hindoo Stuart to
demonstrate a way of life that was not uncommon in the early decades of the
nineteenth century before the jackboots of the imperialism which we so well
know and despise.
Sitting in the early decades of the twenty first century,
it looks fascinating to examine the
lives of the characters that populate the book and the twist and turns of their
life. The facts are presented matter of factly – it was considered “fast
travel” to get from Machalipatnam(near Vijaywada) to Kolkata in two weeks,
where mail traveled through runners called *harkaras
, stationed non stop so that the mail never got held up because it was
passed from hand to hand like relay race and where the travel options were
limited to traveling overland on bullock cart or elephant or wagons or choosing
a “fast ship”.
William Dalrymple’s exhaustive research ensures that one can
hardly fault him on fact. He in fact brings out once again, what has always
been known, that no people who engaged with India for any length of time can
not be affected by it- not even the imperious, aloof and class conscious
British. This is all fine and one can put the book down with just the simple
conclusion perfectly true that India
has a rich and composite culture that embraces any one. But Dalrymple’s own
conclusion and possible compulsion in
writing the book is important. In his own words “ *We still have rhetoric about clashing civilizations and almost daily
generalizations in the press about East and West, Islamic and Christianity, and
the vast differences and fundamental gulfs that are said to separate the
two…East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry,
prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met in the past. And
they will do so again.” * Perhaps if
we take nothing out of the book but these thoughts alone, we would have done
well.
