White Mughals

Title: White Mughals
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 495
Pages: 580

Does the 'Basic Instinct' that Hollywood's archetypal femme fatale, Sharon Stone, portrays in the film of eponymous name subsume traits contrary to nature? Stone's high voltage sexuality is matched only by her exploits with an ice pick, her favorite tool for bumping off exhausted lovers. A sexy Stone crossing and uncrossing her legs, juxtaposed to murderous Stone on rampage with an ice pick! In films and in stories, danger being handmaiden to love is such a hackneyed idea, but isn't that because life itself is chock-a-block with instances of it.

A sword and libido have no problem cozying up in the same sheath. Both being the concomitants of the same basic instinct, one yearns to conquer by brawn, the other through love and ravishment. So love is also a tool to conquer, to make one's own, but the sword might as well be the means to annihilate what is unattainable through love or lust. The rampaging stalwarts of Victorian England could not have won for their queen an empire where the sun won't ever set, if they used only their sword. Murder and mayhem, love and lust, affection and enterprise, all contributed copiously towards building the empire. Where the spilling of blood didn't work, the stalwarts spilled their seed!

The book under review, White Mughals, by William Dalrymple, is essentially the story of the two individuals, who are brought together by historical forces churning through their times, and when they fall in love, the same historical forces conspire to rive them apart. James Achilles Kirkpatrick lands on the shores of eighteenth-century India as an ambitious solider, eager to work towards furthering British interests. But before he knows it, he is ensnared into the love of a bewitching Hyderabadi princess, Khair-un-Nisa, who is barely half his age.

Khair-un-Nissa's picture, dated 1806, reproduced in the book, depicts her as a haunting beauty, 'she still looks, a little more than a child: a graceful, delicate shy creature with porcelain skin, an oval face and dark brown eyes'. Kirkpatrick is lost the moment he espies her at royal weeding, where she is standing behind a curtain, in accordance to the purdah norms of that era. As their love blossoms, it rattles quite a few feathers on both sides of the divide. Male members of Khair's family are dead against her marrying someone, who in their eyes is an infidel, and Kirkpatrick faces stern reprimands from his superiors. But as true love knows no impediments, Kirkpatrick converts to Islam (adopting local clothes and enduring circumcision) and marries his ladylove.

However, the book is not quite a love story, nor is it a historical representation of a bygone era, nor an anthology of events, it is in fact a hotchpotch of all three. Loaded with frequent digressions that have nothing at all to do with the focal theme, White Mughals is quite cumbersome to read. In his infantile exuberance to showoff the depth of his historical research Dalrymple, quotes pages after pages from irrelevant documents, but he fails to include in his novel the most imperative aspect, fictionalized accounts of the meeting and mating of the two central dramatis personae. But isn't that what this historical fiction should be most replete with?

Dalrymple has lived in India for more than six years and for that reason he expects to be taken as an expert on every aspect of the country. The problem is his six years in India were spent cocooned inside havelis, palaces, five star hotels and other islands of Westernized society. That isn't real India, that is just Great Britain masquerading as India. If anything, the White Mughals exposes Dalrymple's lack of knowledge of India and the myriad facets of its culture and history.