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White Mughals
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White Mughals reconstructs the relationship between James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident at Hyderabad, and Khair-un-Nissa, a young noblewoman from an influential Muslim family. Their marriage reveals a late eighteenth-century world in which some East India Company officers adopted Indian languages, clothing, customs and family ties.
Dalrymple places their private lives inside the Company’s rapid political transformation. As Richard Wellesley expanded British power through war and subsidiary alliances, older forms of cultural accommodation gave way to sharper racial boundaries and imperial control. The result is both an intimate history and an account of a narrowing colonial society.