White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  Even today, despite all the progress that has been made, we still have rhetoric about ‘clashing civilisations’, and almost daily generalisations 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.

  As the story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa shows, 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.

  Glossary

  Akhbar ✷ Indian court newsletter

  Alam ✷ Standard used by Shi’as as a focus for their Muharram (qv) venerations. Usually tear-shaped or fashioned into the shape of a hand, they are stylised representations of the standards carried by Imam Hussain at the Battle of Kerbala in AD 680. Often highly ornate and beautiful objects, the best of them are among the greatest masterpieces of medieval Indian metalwork

  Amir ✷ Nobleman

  Angia ✷ A sensuous, halter-neck version of the choli (qv) bodice, usually transparent or semi-transparent, that became very fashionable in Muslim courts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fyze Palmer is wearing one under her peshwaz (qv) in her famous portrait by Zoffany

  Apsaras ✷ The courtesans and dancing girls of the Hindu gods; heavenly dispensers of erotic bliss

  Arrack ✷ Indian absinthe

  Arzee ✷ Persian petition

  Aseels ✷ Key figures in a zenana (qv). Usually slave girls by origin, they performed a number of essential administrative and domestic tasks within the women’s quarters, including that of wetnurse. In the Nizam’s zenana the senior aseels were important figures of state

  Ashur khana ✷ Mourning hall for use during Muharram (qv)

  Avatar ✷ An incarnation

  Baksheesh ✷ Tip for services rendered

  Banka ✷ Mughal gallant

  Baradari ✷ A Mughal-style open pavilion with three arches on each side (lit. ‘twelve doors’)

  Begum ✷ Indian Muslim noblewoman. A title of rank and respect: ‘Madam’

  Betel ✷ Nut used as a mild narcotic in India, and eaten as paan

  Bhand ✷ Buffoon, mummer or mimic

  Bhisti ✷ Water carrier

  Bibi ✷ An Indian wife or mistress

  Bibi ghar ✷ ‘Women’s house’ or zenana (qv)

  Bidri ✷ The adjectival form of the place-name Bidar, the capital city of the Islamic Deccan in the fifteenth century. It is normally used to designate metalwork produced in Bidar from an alloy in which zinc predominates, usually decorated with silver or brass inlays in floral patterns against a blackened metal background

  Biryani ✷ The rice and meat dish which is the particular speciality of Hyderabadi cuisine

  Brahmin ✷ The Hindu priestly caste and the top rung of the caste pyramid

  Chamars ✷ Untouchables of the sweeper caste

  Char bagh ✷ A formal Mughal garden, named after its division into four (char) squares by a cross of runnels and fountains

  Chattri ✷ A domed kiosk supported on pillars, often used as a decorative feature to top turrets and minarets (lit. ‘umbrella’)

  Choli ✷ Short (and at this period usually transparent) Indian bodice

  Chunam ✷ Polished lime plaster

  Coss ✷ Mughal measurement of distance amounting to just over two miles

  Daftar ✷ Office, or in the Nizam’s palace, chancellery

  Dak ✷ Post (sometimes spelt ‘dawke’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries)

  Deorhi ✷ Courtyard house or haveli

  Derzi ✷ Tailor

  Devadasi ✷ Temple dancers, prostitutes and courtesans who were given to the great Hindu temples, usually in infancy by their parents (lit. ‘slave girls of the gods’)

  Dharamasala ✷ Rest house

  Dhobi ✷ Laundryman

  Dhoolie ✷ Covered litter

  Dhoti ✷ Loincloth

  Divan ✷ Book of collected poetry

  Diwan ✷ Prime minister, or the vizier in charge of administrative finance

  Dragoman ✷ Interpreter or guide in the Ottoman or Persian Empires

  Dubash ✷ Interpreter

  Dupatta ✷ Shawl or scarf, usually worn with a salvar kemise (lit. ‘two leaves or widths’). Also known as a chunni

  Durbar ✷ Court

  Fakir ✷ Sufi holy man, dervish or wandering Muslim ascetic (lit. ‘poor’)

  Fatiha ✷ The short opening chapter of the Koran, read at ceremonial occasions as an invocation

  Firangi ✷ Foreigner

  Firman ✷ An order of the emperor or sultan in a written document

  Ghazal ✷ Urdu or Persian love lyric

  Hakim ✷ Physician

  Halwa ✷ Carrot pudding

  Hamam ✷ Turkish-style steam bath

  Haram ✷ Forbidden

  Harkarra ✷ Runner, messenger, newswriter or spy (lit: ‘all-do-er’). In eighteenth-century sources the word is sometimes spelt hircarrah

  Havildar ✷ A sepoy (qv) non-commissioned officer, corresponding to a sergeant

  Holi ✷ The Hindu spring festival in which participants sprinkle red and yellow powder on one another

  Hookah ✷ Waterpipe or hubble bubble

  Id ✷ The two greatest Muslim festivals: Id ul-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, and Id ul-Zuha commemorates the delivery of Isaac. To celebrate the latter a ram or goat is slaughtered, as on the original occasion recorded in both the Old Testament and the Koran

  Iftar ✷ The evening meal to break the Ramadan fast

  Jagir ✷ Landed estate, granted for service rendered to the state and whose revenues could be treated as income by the jagirdar

  Jali ✷ A latticed stone or wooden screen

  Jashn ✷ Party or marriage feast

  Karkhana ✷ Workshop or factory

  Khanazad ✷ Palace-born princes

  Khansaman ✷ In the eighteenth century the word meant butler. Today it more usually means cook

  Khanum ✷ A junior wife or concubine

  Kharita ✷ Sealed Mughal brocade bag used to send letters as an alternative to an envelope

  Khilat ✷ Symbolic court dress

  Kotwal ✷ The police chief, chief magistrate or city administrator in a Mughal town

  Lakh ✷ One hundred thousand

  Langar ✷ Free distribution of food during a religious festival

  Lathi ✷ Truncheon or stick

  Lota ✷ Water pot

  Lungi ✷ Indian-type sarong, longer version of the dhoti (qv)

  Mahal ✷ Lit. ‘palace’, but often used to refer to sleeping apartments or the zenana wing of a palace or residence

  Maistry ✷ (modern Hindi: mistri) A highly skilled foreman or master craftsman. According to Hobson Jobson the word, ‘a corruption of of the Portuguese mestre has spread into the vernaculars all over India and is in constant Anglo-Indian use’

  Majlis ✷ Assembly, especially the gatherings during Muharram (qv)

  Mansabdar ✷ A Mughal nobleman and office-holder, whose rank was decided by the number of cavalry he would supply for battle—for example, a mansabdar of 2500 would be expected to provide 2500 horsemen when the Nizam went to war

  Marqana ✷ Stalactite-type decoration over a mosque or palace gateway

  Marsiya ✷ Urdu or Persian lament or dirge for the martyrdom of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet, sung in the ashur khana (qv) mourning halls during the festival of Muharram (qv)

  Masnavi ✷ Persian or Urdu love lyric

  Maula ✷ ‘My Lord’

  Mehfil ✷ An evening of courtly Mughal entertainment, normally including dancing, the recitation of poetry and the singing of ghazals (qv)

  Mihrab ✷ The niche in a mosque pointing in the direction of Mecca />
  Mir ✷ Title given before a name usually signifying that the holder is a sayyed (qv)

  Mirza ✷ Prince or gentleman

  Mohalla ✷ A distinct quarter of a Mughal city—i.e. a group of residential lanes, usually entered through a single gate

  Muharram ✷ The great Shi’a Muslim festival commemorating the defeat and death of Imam Hussain, the Prophet’s grandson. Celebrated with particular gusto in Hyderabad and Lucknow

  Mujtahid ✷ A cleric; one who does ijtehad, the interpretation of religious texts

  Munshi ✷ Indian private secretary or language teacher

  Mushaira ✷ Poetic symposium

  Musnud ✷ The low arrangement of cushions and bolsters which formed the throne of Indian rulers at this period

  Nabob ✷ English corruption of the Hindustani nawab, literally ‘deputy’, which was the title given by the Mughal emperors to their regional governors and viceroys. In England it became a term of abuse directed at returned ‘old India hands’, especially after Samuel Foote’s 1779 play The Nabob brought the term into general circulation

  Naqqar khana ✷ Ceremonial drum house

  Nautch ✷ Indian dance display

  Nazr ✷ Symbolic gift given in Indian courts to a feudal superior

  Nizam ✷ Part of the title of the first Subedar of the Deccan, Asaf Jah, Nizam ul-Mulk. In the fashion of the time, Asaf Jah became effectively independent of the Mughal government in Delhi, and at his death in 1748 his title was claimed as hereditary by his dynastic successors, starting with his illegitimate younger son and eventual successor, Nizam Ali Khan

  Omrah ✷ Nobleman

  Palanquin ✷ Indian litter

  Peshkash ✷ An offering or present given by a subordinate to a superior. The term was used more specifically by the Marathas as the money paid to them by ‘subordinate’ powers such as the Nizam

  Peshwaz ✷ Long, high-waisted gown

  Pikdan ✷ Spittoon

  Pir ✷ Sufi holy man

  Pirzada ✷ Official at a Sufi shrine, often a descendant of the founding saint

  Prasad ✷ Temple sweets given to devotees in exchange for offerings—a tradition transferred from Hindu to Islamic practice at the Sufi shrines of the Deccan

  Pukka ✷ Proper, correct

  Purdah ✷ Lit. ‘a curtain’; used to signify the concealment of women within the zenana (qv)

  Qawal ✷ A singer of qawalis (qv)

  Qawalis ✷ Rousing hymns sung at Sufi shrines

  Qiladar ✷ Fort keeper

  Qizilbash ✷ Lit. ‘redheads’. Name given to Saffavid soldiers (and later traders) due to the tall red cap worn under their turbans

  Rakhi ✷ Band worn around the wrist as a sign of brotherhood, solidarity or protection

  Salatin ✷ Palace-born princes

  Sanyasi ✷ Hindu ascetic

  Sarpeche ✷ Turban jewel or ornament

  Sati ✷ The practice of widow-burning, or the burned widow herself

  Sawaree ✷ Elephant stables (and the whole establishment and paraphernalia related to the keeping of elephants)

  Sayyed (or f. Sayyida) ✷ A lineal descendant of the Prophet Mohammed. Sayyeds often have the title ‘Mir’

  Sepoy ✷ Indian soldier in the service of the East India Company

  Shadi ✷ Marriage feast or party

  Shamiana ✷ Indian marquee, or the screen formed around the perimeter of a tented area

  Shi’a ✷ One of the two principal divisions of Islam, dating back to a split immediately after the death of the Prophet, between those who recognised the authority of the Medinian caliphs and those who followed the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali (Shi’at Ali means ‘the party of Ali’ in Arabic). Though most Shi’ites live in Iran, there have always been a large number in the Indian Deccan, and Hyderabad was for much of its history a centre of Shi’ite culture

  Shikar ✷ Hunting

  Sirdar ✷ Nobleman

  Surahi ✷ Traditional tall, elegant north Indian water and wine cooler/flask

  Tawaif ✷ The cultivated and urbane dancing girls and courtesans who were such a feature of late Mughal society and culture

  Thali ✷ Tray

  ’Umbara ✷ Covered elephant howdah

  Unani ✷ Ionian (or Byzantine Greek) medicine, originally passed to the Islamic world through Byzantine exiles in Persia and still practised in India today

  ’Urs ✷ Festival day

  Vakil ✷ Ambassador or representative (though in modern usage the word means merely lawyer)

  Vilayat ✷ Province, homeland

  Yakshi ✷ Female Hindu fertility nymphs, often associated with sacred trees and pools

  Zamindar ✷ Landholder or local ruler

  Zenana ✷ Harem, or women’s quarters

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Mark Zebrowski, Gold, Silver and Bronze from Mughal India (London, 1997)

  2 Edward Strachey, ‘The Romantic Marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Sometime British Resident at the Court of Hyderabad’, in Blackwood’s Magazine, July 1893.

  3 That said, though it has yet to be pulled together into a single coherent thesis, there is a growing body of work which has begun to show the degree to which the East India Company officials of the eighteenth century, like the Portuguese before them, assimilated themselves to Mughal culture. Nearly thirty years ago, Percival Spear’s The Nabobs (Cambridge, 1963) painted a picture of hookah-smoking eighteenth-century Englishmen with Indian bibis living it up in Calcutta, while their counterparts in the backwoods mofussil towns and more distant centres of Mughal culture made a more profound transition, dressing in Mughal court dress, intermarrying with the Mughal aristocracy and generally attempting to cross cultural boundaries as part of their enjoyment of, and participation in, late Mughal society. Subsequent work has refined this picture. Much of this work has centred on Lucknow, where Desmond Young, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Seema Alavi, Muzaffar Alavi, Jean-Marie Lafont and Maya Jasanoff have between them painted a remarkably detailed picture of a hybrid and inclusive culture where men like Claude Martin, Antoine Polier, Benoît de Boigne, John Wombwell and General William Palmer all, to differing extents, embraced that city’s notably hedonistic take on late Mughlai civilisation. Desmond Young, Fountain of Elephants (London, 1959); Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow (New Delhi, 1982), A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (New Delhi, 1992) and Engaging Scoundrels: True Tales of Old Lucknow (New Delhi, 2000); Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I’jaz i-Arslani (Persian Letters, 1773-1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (New Delhi, 2001); Jean-Marie Lafont, ‘The French in Lucknow in the Eighteenth Century’, in Violette Graff (ed.), Lucknow: Memories of a City (New Delhi, 1997) and Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations 1630-1976 (New Delhi, 2000); Maya Jasanoff’s essay on art-collecting and hybridity in Lucknow will appear in 2002 in Past & Present. Toby Falk, Mildred Archer and myself have found evidence of a similar process of transculturation in Delhi, particularly in the circle of Sir David Ochterlony, William Fraser and James Skinner that formed around the British Residency from around 1805 until about the time of Fraser’s death in 1835: Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, India Revealed: The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser 1801-35 (London, 1989); William Dalrymple, City of Djinns (London, 1993). Seema Alavi has also shown the extent to which James Skinner, half-Scottish, half-Rajput, mixed both cultures to create an ‘amalgamation of Mughal and European military ethics’, as well as personally acculturating himself ‘in the manners of high class Muslim society[, adopting] many of the customs especially the hookah and Mughal cuisine’: Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India 1770-1830 (New Delhi, 1995), esp. Chapter 6. Skinner has also been the subject of study by Mildred Archer in Between Battles: The Album of Colonel James Skinner (London, 1982) and Christopher Hawes in Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1773-18
33 (London, 1996). Chris Bayly has shown how useful inter-racial sexual relationships were for gaining knowledge and information about the other side, while Durba Ghosh’s important work on the bibis has shown just how widespread this sort of cross-cultural sexual relationship was at this period: C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780-1870 (Cambridge, 1996); Durba Ghosh, ‘Colonial Companions: Bibis, Begums, and Concubines of the British in North India 1760-1830’ (unpublished Ph.D., Berkeley, 2000). Ghosh has also demonstrated the extent to which this assimilation was a two-way process, affecting the Indian women who came into close contact with Europeans as much as it did the Europeans themselves. Meanwhile, Amin Jaffer’s work has shown the degree to which the domestic material environment Company servants inhabited tended to be something of an Anglo-Mughal amalgam, while in a parallel study Lizzie Collingham has emphasised the assimilation of the British body to its Mughal environment. Linda Colley has demonstrated the degree to which English captives—particularly those imprisoned by Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam—embraced Islam by a combination of force and choice, and the degree to which they took on different aspects of Indian ways of living: Amin Jaffer, Furniture from British India and Ceylon (London, 2001); E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj (Cambridge, 2001); Linda Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire’, in Past & Present, No. 168, August 2000, p.172. Colley’s forthcoming work, Captives, will expand on this theme.

  4 Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (trans. C. Stewart), The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803 (London, 1810).

  5 Michael Fisher, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey Through India (Berkeley, 1997), p.xxi.

  CHAPTER 1

  1 ‘Report of an Examination instituted by the direction of his Excellency the most noble Governor General, Fort St. George 7th Nov 1801’ OIOC HM464. For Government House Madras see Sten Nilsson, European Architecture in India 1750-1850 (London, 1968) and Mark Bence-Jones, Palaces of the Raj (London, 1973).