White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India, or for that matter by the post-colonial work coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow the path opened up by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering Orientalism.3 It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

  This was something I became increasingly sensitive to when, in the course of my research, I discovered that I was myself the product of a similar interracial liaison from this period, and that I thus had Indian blood in my veins. No one in my family seemed to know about this, though it should not have been a surprise: we had all heard the stories of how our beautiful, dark-eyed Calcutta-born great-great-grandmother Sophia Pattle, with whom Burne-Jones had fallen in love, used to speak Hindustani with her sisters and was painted by Watts with a rakhi—a Hindu sacred thread—tied around her wrist. But it was only when I poked around in the archives that I discovered she was descended from a Hindu Bengali woman from Chandernagore who converted to Catholicism and married a French officer in Pondicherry in the 1780s.

  It also became increasingly clear to me that the relationship between India and Britain was a symbiotic one. Just as individual Britons in India could learn to appreciate and wish to emulate different aspects of Indian culture, and choose to take on Indian manners and languages, so many Indians at this period began to travel to Britain, intermarrying with the locals there and picking up Western ways.

  The Mughal travel writer Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who published in Persian an account of his journeys in Asia, Africa and Europe in 1810, described meeting in London several completely Anglicised Indian women who had accompanied their husbands and children to Britain, one of whom had completed the cultural transformation so perfectly that he ‘was some time in her company before I could be convinced that she was a native of India’.4 He also met the extraordinary Dean Mahomet, a Muslim landowner from Patna who had followed his British patron to Ireland.

  There he soon eloped with, and later married, Jane Daly, from a leading Anglo-Irish family. In 1794 he confirmed his unique—and clearly surprisingly prominent—place in Cork society by publishing his Travels, the first book ever published by an Indian writing in English, to which half of Ireland’s gentry became subscribers. In 1807 Dean Mahomet moved to London where he opened the country’s first Indian-owned curry restaurant, Dean Mahomet’s Hindostanee Coffee House: ‘here the gentry may enjoy the Hooakha, with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England’. He finally decamped to Brighton where he opened what can only be described as Britain’s first Oriental massage parlour, and became ‘Shampooing Surgeon’ to Kings George IV and William IV. As Dean Mahomet’s biographer, Michael Fisher, has rightly noted, ‘Mahomet’s marriage and degree of success as a professional medical man stand as warnings against simple projections backward of later English racial categories or attitudes.’5 c

  This seemed to be exactly the problem with so much of the history written about eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century India: the temptation felt by so many historians to interpret their evidence according to the stereotypes of Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes with which we are so familiar. Yet these attitudes were clearly entirely at odds with the actual fears and hopes, anxieties and aspirations of the Company officials and their Indian wives whose voluminous letters can be read with the greatest of ease in the fifty miles of East India Company documents stored in the India Office Library. It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo-British encounter.

  Since the late-twentieth-century implosion of Empire and the arrival in the West of large numbers of Indians, most of whom have, as a matter of course, assumed Western clothes and Western manners, this East-to-West cross-fertilisation of cultures does not surprise us. But, perhaps bizarrely, the reverse still does: that a European should voluntarily choose to cross over—and ‘turn Turk’ as the Elizabethans put it, or ‘go native’ or ‘Tropo’, to use the Victorian phrases—is still something which has the capacity to take us aback.

  Only seventy-five years after the death of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and indeed within the lifetime of his Anglo-Indian, Torquay-Hyderabadi, Islamo-Christian daughter, it was possible for Kipling to write that ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’. There is a tendency to laugh at Kipling today; but at a time when respectable academics talk of a Clash of Civilisations, and when East and West, Islam and Christianity appear to be engaged in another major confrontation, this unlikely group of expatriates provides a timely reminder that it is indeed very possible—and has always been possible—to reconcile the two worlds.

  I

  On 7 November 1801, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, two figures were discreetly admitted to the gardens of Government House in Madras.

  Outside, amid clouds of dust, squadrons of red-coated sepoys tramped along the hot, broad military road which led from the coast towards the cantonments at St Thomas’s Mount. Waiting in the shade of the gates, shoals of hawkers circled around the crowds of petitioners and groups of onlookers who always collect in such places in India, besieging them with trays full of rice cakes and bananas, sweetmeats, oranges and paan.

  Inside the gates, beyond the sentries, lay another world: seventy-five acres of green tropical parkland shaded by banana palms and tall tamarind trees, flamboya, gulmohar and scented Raat-ki-Rani, the Queen of the Night. Here there was no dust, no crowds and no noise but for birdsong—the inevitable chatter of mynahs and the occasional long, querulous, woody call of the koel—and the distant suck and crash of the breakers on the beach half a mile away.

  The two figures were led through the Government Gardens towards the white classical garden house that the new Governor of Madras, Lord Clive, was in the process of rebuilding and enlarging. Here one of the two men was made to wait, while the other was led to a patch of shade in the parkland, where three chairs had been arranged around a table. Before long, Lord Clive himself appeared, attended by his Private Secretary, Mark Wilks. It was a measure of the sensitivity of the gathering that, unusually for a period where nothing could be done without a great retinue of servants, all three men were unaccompanied. As Clive administered an oath, Wilks began to jot down a detailed record of the proceedings which still survives in the India Office Library:The Rt. Hon. the Lord Clive having required the presence of Lieut. Col Bowser at the Government Garden for the purpose of being examined on a subject of a secret and important nature, and having directed Captain M Wilks to attend his Lordship for the purpose of taking down the minutes of the examination, addressed Lieut. Col Bowser in the following manner:

  The object of the inquiry which I am about to institute involves considerations of great importance to the national interest and character. I am therefore instructed by His Excellency the most Noble Governor General to impress this sentiment on your mind and to desire that you prepare yourself to give such information on the subject as you possess with that accuracy which is becoming [to] the solemnity of the occasion … 1

  The oath taken, Clive proceeded to explain to Bowser why he and his colleague, Major Orr, had been summoned four hundred and fifty miles from their regiments in Hyderabad to Madras, and why it was important that no one in Hyderabad should know the real reason for their journey. Clive needed to know t
he truth about the East India Company’s Resident at the court of Hyderabad, James Achilles Kirkpatrick. For two years now rumours had been in circulation, rumours which two previous inquiries—more informal, and far less searching—had failed to quash.

  Some of the stories circulating about Kirkpatrick, though perhaps enough to raise an eyebrow or two in Calcutta, were harmless enough. It was said that he had given up wearing English clothes for all but the most formal occasions, and now habitually swanned around the British Residency in what one surprised visitor had described as ‘a Musselman’s dress of the finest texture’. Another noted that Kirkpatrick had hennaed his hands in the manner of a Mughal nobleman, and wore Indian ‘mustachios … though in most other respects he is like an Englishman’.2

  These eccentricities were, in themselves, hardly a matter for alarm. The British in India—particularly those at some distance from the main presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay—had long adapted themselves to Mughal dress and customs, and although this had lately become a little unfashionable it was hardly something which on its own could affect a man’s career. It was certainly not enough to give rise to a major inquiry. But other charges against Kirkpatrick were of a much more serious nature.

  Firstly, there were consistent reports that Kirkpatrick had, as Clive put it, ‘connected himself with a female’ of one of Hyderabad’s leading noble families. The girl in question was never named in the official inquiry report, but was said to be no more than fourteen years old at the time. Moreover she was a Sayyeda, a descendant of the Prophet, and thus, like all her clan, kept in the very strictest purdah. Sayyeds—especially Indian Sayyeds—were particularly sensitive about the purity of their race and the chastity of their women. Not only were they strictly endogamous—in other words they could never marry except with other Sayyeds—in many cases Sayyed girls would refuse even to mix with pregnant women from outside, lest the unborn child in the stranger’s womb were to turn out to be male and thus unwittingly contaminate their purity.3 Despite these powerful taboos, and the precautions of her clan, the girl had somehow managed to become pregnant by Kirkpatrick and was recently said to have given birth to his child.

  Early reports in scurrilous Hyderabadi newsletters had claimed that Kirkpatrick had raped the girl, who was called Khair un-Nissa, then murdered a brother who had tried to stand in his way. There seemed to be a consensus that these accounts were malicious and inaccurate, but what was certain—and much more alarming for the Company—was that news of the pregnancy had leaked out and had caused widespread unrest in Hyderabad. Worse still, the girl’s grandfather was said to have ‘expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and had declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city)’.4 There he promised to raise the Muslims of the Deccan against the British, thus imperilling the British hold on southern and central India at that most sensitive period when a Napoleonic army was still at large in Egypt and feared to be contemplating an audacious attack on the British possessions of the subcontinent.

  Finally, and perhaps most shockingly for the authorities in Bengal, some said that Kirkpatrick had actually, formally, married the girl, which meant embracing Islam, and had become a practising Shi’a Muslim. These rumours about Kirkpatrick’s alleged new religious affiliation, combined with his undisguised sympathy for, and delight in, the Hyderabadi culture of his bride, had led some of his colleagues to wonder whether his political loyalties could still be depended on at all. More than a year earlier, the young Colonel Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, had written to his elder brother Richard, the Governor General in Calcutta, expressing exactly this concern. As Commander in the neighbouring state of Mysore, Colonel Wellesley had heard reliable reports that Kirkpatrick now seemed to be so solidly ‘under the influence’ of the Hyderabadis that ‘it was to be expected that he would attend more to the objects of the Nizam’s court than those of his own government’—that Kirkpatrick might, in other words, have ‘gone over’ to the other side, to have become, to some extent, a double-agent.5

  The question of how to respond to these allegations was one that the Governor General, Lord Wellesley,d had agonised over for some time. There were several complicating factors. Firstly, despite all the stories in circulation, Kirkpatrick had an exceptional record in the East India Company’s Political [diplomatic] Service. Without a drop of blood being shed, he had succeeded in expelling the last serious French force from southern India and had successfully negotiated an important treaty with the Nizam of Hyderabad. This had, for the first time, brought the Nizam’s vast dominions firmly into alliance with the British, so tipping the delicate balance of power in India firmly in Britain’s favour. For this work Wellesley had, only a few months earlier, recommended Kirkpatrick to London for a baronetcy.

  But this was not the only complication. Kirkpatrick’s elder brother William was one of the Governor General’s closest advisers in Calcutta, indeed was credited by Wellesley himself as being one of the principal architects of his policy. While Wellesley was determined to find out the truth about the younger Kirkpatrick, he wished to do so, if possible, without alienating the elder. Finally, he knew it was going to be difficult openly to investigate any of these sensitive stories without causing a major scandal, and possibly inflicting considerable damage on British interests not only in Hyderabad, but all over India. Yet the rumours were clearly too serious and too widespread to ignore.

  For all these reasons, Wellesley decided to fall back on the strategy of holding a secret inquiry in Madras, and there to solicit the sworn testimony of the two most senior British soldiers in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr, both of whom had come into close contact with Kirkpatrick, without either of them being close enough friends for their veracity to be compromised.

  It was not a perfect solution, especially as Wellesley did not much admire the new Governor of Madras, Edward, Lord Clive. He was son of the more famous Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey forty-four years earlier had begun the East India Company’s astonishing transformation from a trading company of often dubious solvency to a major imperial power with a standing army and territorial possessions far larger than those of the country which gave it birth. After their first meeting, Wellesley wrote that Clive was ‘a worthy, zealous, obedient & gentlemanlike man of excellent temper; but neither of talents, knowledge, habits of business, or firmness equal to his present situation. How the devil did he get here?’6 Yet Wellesley realised it would be impossible to conduct an inquiry in Calcutta without involving Kirkpatrick’s brother, and that there was little option but to delegate the job to Clive.

  Moreover, as the future of Britain’s relationship with the largest independent Muslim state in India now hinged at least partly on the exact details of Kirkpatrick’s relationship with the girl in question, it would clearly be necessary during the course of the inquest to ask a series of the most intimate and searching questions.

  The whole business, Wellesley concluded, would no doubt prove horribly embarrassing for all concerned, and be much better sorted out by Clive in Madras. So, on 30 September 1801, Wellesley formally wrote to Lord Clive telling him to prepare a secret inquiry into Kirkpatrick’s conduct, while simultaneously sending orders to Hyderabad for Bowser and Orr to be discreetly, and promptly, despatched to the coast.

  Over the course of the following few days Orr and Bowser answered, under oath, a series of questions of such intimate and explicit nature that the finished report must certainly be one of the most sexually revealing public documents to have survived from the East India Company’s India: to read it is to feel a slightly uneasy sensation akin to opening Kirkpatrick’s bedroom windows and peering in.

  The two witnesses, whose bright soldierly blushes are clearly visible through the formal lines of Captain Wilks’s perfect copperplate handwriting, were asked how Kirkpatrick had come to meet and have an affair with a teena
ge Muslim noblewoman who was kept in strict purdah, especially when she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it Kirkpatrick or the girl who had taken the initiative: who seduced whom? When did they first sleep together? How often? When did it become a matter of public record? How did the story get out? What was the reaction in Hyderabad? The way the document is written—exactly like a modern trial report or Parliamentary Inquiry—heightens this sense of immediacy and familiarity:Question: Do you understand that the young lady was seduced by the Resident, or do you rather believe that he became the dupe of the interested machinations of the females of her family?

  Answer: I cannot state to which of these suppositions the public opinion most inclines. It is said that the lady fell in love with the Resident, and that the free access very unusual in Mohammedan families which had been allowed to him by the females of that family may appear to confirm the opinion of design on their part.

  Question: What is the date of the first supposed intercourse between the Resident and the young lady?

  Answer: I first heard it whispered about the beginning of the year. Every day afterwards it became more publicly spoken of and universally believed until the period of the complaint.

  Parts of the story that unfolds through the pages of the examination are so strikingly modern that it is sometimes hard to believe it was written two hundred years ago. There is much talk of the embarrassing pregnancy, the family’s desperate attempts to procure an abortion, Kirkpatrick’s last-minute intervention to stop the termination, and the girl’s mother’s heartfelt cry that if only the sectarian religious divisions which had plagued the whole affair did not exist, this man could have had her daughter ‘in the same manner that he might have had her before the distinctions introduced by Musa [Moses], Isa [Jesus] and Mohamed were known to the world’. There is also Kirkpatrick’s unembarrassedly romantic declaration (relayed by Bowser) that ‘whatever might be the ultimate result of these investigations, he was determined never to desert the lady or her offspring’. The remoteness of history evaporates: these are immediately recognisable and familiar human situations.