White Mughals (5 page)

It was only after several weeks of reading that I finally came to the files that contained the Khair un-Nissa letters, and some of these, it turned out, were not encoded. One day, as I opened yet another India Office cardboard folder, my eyes fell on the following paragraph written in a small, firm, sloping hand:

Soon after this I found some pages of cipher which had been overwritten with a ‘translation’, and the code turned out to be a simple one-letter/one-number correspondence. Once this was solved, the whole story quickly began to come together.

I had one more major break when I stumbled across a secret East India Company Enquiry into the affair, with sworn testimony taken from witnesses and detailed, explicit questions getting astonishingly frank and uninhibited answers; as I held the Enquiry in my hands any lingering doubts I had disappeared: there was wonderful material here for a book.

For four years I beavered away in the India Office Library, returning to Delhi and Hyderabad occasionally to examine the archives there. Inevitably, in India there were problems. In Delhi, in the vaults of the Indian National Archives, someone installing a new air-conditioning system had absent-mindedly left out in the open all six hundred volumes of the Hyderabad Residency Records. It was the monsoon. By the time I came back for a second look at the records the following year, most were irretrievably wrecked, and those that were not waterlogged were covered with thick green mould. After a couple of days a decision was taken that the mould was dangerous, and all six hundred volumes were sent off ‘for fumigation’. I never saw them again.

That same monsoon, the River Musi flooded in Hyderabad and the BBC showed scenes of archivists in the old city hanging up to dry on washing lines what remained of their fine collection of manuscripts.

Gradually, despite such setbacks, the love story began to take shape. It was like watching a Polaroid develop, as the outlines slowly established themselves and the colour began to fill in the remaining white spaces.

There were some moments of pure revelation too. On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. It was a Sunday, and the Chowk was half-closed. But I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours’ time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad’s great speciality: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where he promised I would find ‘booxies booxies’.

The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies’, as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom-cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the
Kitab Tuhfat al-’Alam,
by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick’s letters. The book turned out to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa’s first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the
Gulzar i-Asafiya.
I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner, and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources. Their contents completely transformed what follows.
^b

By 2001, four years into the research, I thought I knew Kirkpatrick so well I imagined that I heard his voice in my head as I read and reread his letters. Yet there still remained important gaps. In particular, the documents in the India Office gave no more hint than the original article in the 1893
Blackwood’s Magazine
as to what had happened to Khair un-Nissa after Kirkpatrick’s death. It took another nine months of searching before I stumbled across the heartbreaking answer to that, in the Henry Russell papers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The tale—which had never been told, and seemed to be unknown even to Kirkpatrick’s contemporaries—bore a striking resemblance to
Madame Butterfly.
Day after day, under the armorial shields and dark oak bookcases of the Duke Humfrey’s Library, I tore as quickly as I could through the faded pages of Russell’s often illegible copperplate correspondence, the tragic love story slowly unfolding fully-formed before me.

Finally, only a few months before I began writing, family papers belonging to the great-great-great-grandson of Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa turned up a couple of miles from my home in West London. This extended the story through to the no less remarkable tale of Khair un-Nissa’s daughter, Kitty Kirkpatrick. She had initially been brought up as Sahib Begum, a Muslim noblewoman in Hyderabad, before being shipped off to England at four years old, baptised on her arrival in London and thenceforth completely cut off from her maternal relations. Instead she had been absorbed into the upper echelons of Victorian literary society, where she had fascinated her cousins’ tutor, the young Thomas Carlyle, and formed the basis for the heroine Blumine, ‘a many tinted radiant Aurora … the fairest of Oriental light-bringers’, in Carlyle’s novel
Sartor Resartus.

This last set of family papers told the story of the series of remarkable coincidences which brought Kitty, as an adult, back into contact with her Hyderabadi grandmother, and the emotional correspondence which reunited the two women after a gap of nearly forty years. They were letters of great beauty and intense sadness as the story emerged of lives divided by prejudice and misunderstanding, politics and fate. One wrote in English from a seaside villa in Torquay; the other replied from a Hyderabadi harem, dictating in Persian to a scribe who wrote on paper sprinkled with gold dust and enclosed the letter in a Mughal
kharita,
a sealed gold brocade bag. Her grandmother’s letters revealed to Kitty the secret of how her parents had met and fallen in love, and led to her discovering for herself the sad truth of Khair un-Nissa’s fate.

The story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and
salvars,
Mughal Hyderabad and Regency London, seemed to raise huge questions: about Britishness and the nature of Empire, about faith, and about personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these mattered, and were fixed and immutable—or how far they were in fact flexible, tractable, negotiable. For once it seemed that the normal steely dualism of Empire—between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and the colonised—had broken down. The easy labels of religion and ethnicity and nationalism, slapped on by generations of historians, turned out, at the very least, to be surprisingly unstable. Yet clearly—and this was what really fascinated me—while the documentation surrounding Kirkpatrick’s story was uniquely well-preserved, giving a window into a world that few realise ever existed, the situation itself was far from unusual, something the participants were themselves well aware of.

The deeper I went in my research the more I became convinced that the picture of the British of the East India Company as a small alien minority locked away in their Presidency towns, forts and cantonments needed to be revised. The tone of this early period of British life in India seemed instead to be about intermixing and impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas.

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.