East
Did Meet West - 5
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI, Chicago, IL
James Kirkpatrick was not
the first or the only White Mughal in the early
19th century India. Nor was he the only British
high official to have had relationships and families
with Indian women. The White Mughal culture (British
marriages with Nawab’s family members) first
appeared in Lucknow, and cultivated later in Hyderabad
(by James Kirkpatrick and others).
Besides James, some other White Mughals were mentioned
in the Parts I - IV, and here a few more:
Sir David Ochterlony (Resident at Delhi) was also
known by his Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula. He
had vowed never to return to his homeland, and
never did. He adopted Mughal attire, had 13 consorts.
It was him ‘going native’, still as
Resident at Delhi that brought the wrath of Lady
Maria Nugent (wife of the British Commander-in-Chief
in India) who castigated him and his lifestyle
widely in East India Co. circles. He had built
a tomb for himself (and his ‘favorite’
wife) in the Mughal Garden near Shalimar Bagh,
but he died in Meerut, and his empty tomb (a hybrid
architectural fusion of religions) was destroyed
during the 1857 War of Independence.
William Linnaeus Gardner had married Cambay Begum,
converted to Islam, fought in service of various
princes including the Nizam, founded his irregular
army (Gardner’s Horse), and had a large
Anglo-Indian dynasty -- half Muslims, half Christian
(James Jehangir Shikoh Gardner was both Muslim
and Christian; the Rev. Bartholomev Gardner was
a Christian but also went by a Muslim name, Sabr,
under which nom-de-plume he became a notable Urdu
and Persian poet). He settled down in Khasgunge
(near Agra), where many members of his dynasty
still live. Toward the end of his career, he was
deputy to another White Mughal, Major General
Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart, an eccentric
Irish man who commanded the largest cavalry cantonment
in Saugor, central India. Gardner also referred
to him as ‘General Pundit’ and ‘Pundit
Stuart’.
The British weren’t interested in only Muslims
either. Edmund Burke (1729-97), the British statesman
and political thinker (and the man who launched
the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor
of Bengal, as a measure of colonial guilt) had
at that time also been speaking of Hinduism with
“an awe bordering on devotion.” Some
British in India also adopted Hindu culture and
customs. A few like Charles Stuart went further:
he had come to Calcutta as a teenager, converted
to Hinduism within a year, married a Hindu ‘bibi’,
and remained all his life a practicing Hindu (including
vegetarianism, morning baths and worship in the
Ganges). He even built a Hindu temple at Saugor.
His huge statue collection of Hindu deities is
now part of the British Museum.
The East-West culture mix didn’t involve
just the British. In those days, Hyderabad also
had a French Cantonment area -- across the Musi
in Malakpet. General Michel Joachim Raymond was
the mercenary commander of French Battalion in
Hyderabad (a French rival/counterpart of the British
James Kirkpatrick at Nizam’s court). He
had also adopted Mughal ways. He had given up
Christianity but no one knew whether he was a
Muslim or a Hindu. To his sepoys and admirers,
he was ‘Monsieur Raymond’ (with the
usual French title for ‘Mr.’), which
over the years took on some local touch -- ‘Musa
Ram’ to Hindus and ‘Musa Rahim’
to Muslims. He’s also buried there; his
tomb existed till March 2002 when it was destroyed
by vandals. Nizam marked the anniversary of his
death (25 March) in a secular way (sending a box
of cheerots and a bottle of beer to the monument).
Apparently this custom lasted till “the
last Nizam left for Australia.” Once, while
in Hyderabad on Raymond’s anniversary day,
Dalrymple climbed up to the monument, and saw
the offerings left behind his tomb; a photograph
of it is in his book.
Fyze’s sister, Nur Begum was married to
the French General Benoit de Boigne, one of the
great military figures of the 18th century India,
who trained Marathas (against the British and
the Nizam) in the French military techniques.
de Boigne already had two other Hyderabadi concubines
(Mihr-unnisa and Zeenut).
Cultural mix also involved some matters of personal
hygiene: it seems it was the Indian women who
introduced the British men to regular bathing
habits. Some British men even had themselves circumcised
to satisfy the religious requirements of their
wives and companion (C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian:
the British Empire and the World 1780-1830, p.
115; London, 1989).
Dalrymple’s description of the 18th century
Hyderabad, its people, culture, buildings and
neighborhoods is rich and detailed, supported
by a sketch of the city, circa 1805. Those familiar
with Hyderabad would nostalgically recognize these:
Apart from Residency and other well known landmarks
(Golconda Fort, Qutub Shahi tombs, CharMinar,
River Musi and Purana pul and Afzal Bridge, Hussain
Sagar etc), some others still in existence (Banjara
Hills, Chaumhala Palace, Purani Haveli, Mir Alam’s
Deorhi, Mecca Masjid, Daira Mir Momin, Maula Ali’s
shrine, Darush-Shifa, British and French cantonments,
Parade Ground cemetery, tomb of Mah Laqa Bai Chandan,
etc).
The British Residency complex in Hyderabad was
the main site of the James-Khair-unnisa affair,
and the book describes it in considerable detail.
Then, it was a vast Palladin villa with other
buildings set in beautiful scenic environs, an
architectural envy of the time that James helped
construct; it was remarkably similar to its contemporary,
the White House, Washington, DC. Now, it is the
site of Osmania University Women’s College,
which, as Dalrymple mentions in the ‘Acknowledgments’,
is in such a dilapidated condition that it was
recently placed on the list of ‘One Hundred
Most Endangered Buildings’ (of the World
Monuments Fund). For its restoration, there is
a fund-raising effort by a non-profit group, ‘Friends
of Women’s College, India, Inc.’ (800
Third Ave., Suite 3100, New York, NY 10022; osmaniafoundation@hotmail.com).
Dalrymple’s 459-page expose is a product
of five years of his research in Hyderabad, Delhi
and through various archives scattered in England,
based on loads of rarely seen documents, both
official and private letters, in languages, from
Urdu, Persian, English to some in French -- including
such old Hyderabadi historical records as Gulzar-i-Asafiya,
Tarikh-i-Asaf Jahi and ‘Tarikh-i-Nizam’.
The Bibliography is quite comprehensive, extending
over more than 7 pages. Material is drawn from
a vast variety of contemporary works and journals,
unpublished manuscripts and PhD dissertations
on that late 18th - early 19th century period
(at least two from Osmania University, and one
each from universities in Cambridge, California
and Wisconsin). The book includes genealogical
information of both Khair-unnisa and James Kirkpatrick,
rare photographs/paintings from private collections
and painting/sketches of people, buildings and
places in Hyderabad, together with chapter-by-chapter
explanatory notes and bibliography (over 60 pages
in all). Prominent among the illustrations is
“the only contemporary image of Khair-unnisa,”
painted in Calcutta (1806-1807). This picture
is also on the book-cover. James’ private
secretary, Henry Russell, wrote soon after the
painting and with some disappointment: “She
is so much more handsomer than her picture.”
The author also mentions problems and setbacks
in his research. A couple of them are quite interesting.
In the vaults of the Indian National Archives
in New Delhi, someone installing air-conditioning
system had left, out in the open, all six hundred
volumes of Hyderabad Residency Records. The following
year, when Dalrymple came back for more study,
they were too moldy and had to be fumigated, and
he never saw them again. Around the same time,
in Hyderabad, the Musi had flooded, and BBC showed
live footage of the old City, with a lot of archival
material hung outside to dry. Another has to do
with a lucky find in Hyderabad on the last day
of his final trip. A few hours before his return
flight on a Sunday, he goes to a half-closed Chowk
looking for gifts (Bidri boxes etc) for his family.
A small boy (thinking Dalrymple was looking for
‘books’, not ‘boxes’)
offers help, and takes him deep into the labyrinths
behind the Chowk Masjid to a small dingy book
store of rare Urdu and Persian books and manuscripts.
There, among other useful material, he found ‘Kitab
Tuhfat al-‘Alam’ by Abdul Lateef Shustari
(cousin of Khairunnisa’s grandfather) --
a 600-page autobiography written immediately after
Khair’s marriage to James -- and ‘Gulzar-i-Asafia’,
a very rare history of Hyderabad of that period.
That side trip cost Dalrymple 400 pound-sterling,
but gave him a wealth of material. He found much
on the Henry Russell-Khair connection in the Bodleian
Library archives (Oxford) and Duke Humfry’s
Library. And, just months before he started, family
papers belonging to the great-great-great-grandson
of James Kirkpatrick-Khairunnisa turned up “
a couple of miles” from Dalrymple’s
home in West London !
Dalrymple is a travel writer, but no dabbler in
India or its culture: he and his family spend
par t of their time in New Delhi, and his collection
of essays on India, “The Age of Kali,”
was published in 1998. And, there’s also
a personal connection (an unexpected discovery
in this research), mentioned in ‘Introduction’
(page xlv):
“I [Dalrymple] was myself the product of
a similar interracial liaison from this period
[18th Century], 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 an married a French officer in
Pondicherry in the 1780s.”
This period of East-West mix ended after 1857,
when the British drew the line, and the Anglo-Indian
descendants were forced to make a choice between
East and the West, and faced severe reprisals,
including persecution. Some returned to the Western
ways, others tried to stay with the East, but
not without disappointments.
“The book,” as The New York Sun commented,
“breathes,” and added: “You
can almost smell the special meats in the Hyderabadi
biryanis or the flowering fruit trees Kirkpatrick
planted in the Residency garden [an old Hyderabad
building].” It is the story, as the New
Yorker put it, “not … of conquest
but of appreciation, adaptation, and seduction”
of the British by India and its culture and people—“a
cast of men and women, ranging from the comic
to the heart-rending,” to quote The Guardian
(UK) Books of the Year.
The noted British author, Karen Armstrong (the
so-called “runaway nun” who wrote
several widely-acclaimed books on the commonality
of three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity
and Islam and more recently on problems of fundamentalism)
says that these ‘white Mughals’ “were
a source of difficulty and embarrassment to colonial
administrations from the sixteenth century until
the 1850s, when a new breed of Crown subjects
too the reins.” Extending these sentiments,
The Scotsman (Edinburgh) offered, “At a
time when Islamophobia is rising to danger levels
in the West we need this reminder more than ever
that once, however briefly, East and West met
in tolerance and peace – and love.”
A kind of symbiotic relationship, in more ways
than immediately apparent!
Despite the notoriety of the famous Kipling lines
(quoted at the beginning of this series: “East
is East and West is West, and never the twain
shall meet…”) , I think he perhaps
came lot closer to the truth in his less-known
accompanying lines of the same ‘Ballad’:
“But there is neither East nor West, nor
Breed, nor Birth, / when two strong men stand
face to face, tho’ they come from the ends
of the earth!” You can replace the fictional
‘Kamal’ and ‘Colonel’s
son’ of the Kipling ‘Ballad’
with real people (even of opposite sex) in historical
scenarios.
[* “The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal
in Eighteenth Century India” by William
Dalrymple (ISBN: 0-670-03184-4, hardcover; 0 14
20.0412 X, paperback)]
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