Dalrymple as he progresses with the narrative manages to paint a stark picture of India that had very little connection to the one that we see today. Much of the book has been written based either on hearsay or on the letters of James to his brother William or on the written testimonies of the relatives of the protagonists. Women of such aristocratic origins had to stand behind a veil to converse even with those they were very much acquainted with and in a time when today’s liberal values were just beginning to sprout on the margins of an 18th century feudal Indian society, Dalrymple writes with so much awe and shock about this particular inter-racial affair that had the potential to damage the politics of south India immensely. Needless to say, Khair’s family is one of inveterate orthodoxy and no male other than the husband of a woman can directly look at her face to converse with her regardless of the gravity of the situation. James actually is a Resident appointed by the East India Company to oversee the affairs of the Court of Hyderabad’s Nizam and Khair is a direct descendant of that illustrious Mughal family that ruled over a considerable portion of South India. Here was a tale that apparently was a love story between a fourteen-year-old Hyderabadi noblewoman named Khair-un Nissa who is smitten by a much older British official named James Kirkpatrick. As people who have had a cultivated habit of reading would testify, the quality of the language alone would suffice for a reader to keep going with the book no matter how dreary the content actually is. So I started this one but as I moved across the pages, there was nothing but the vividness of the prose and the quality of Dalrymple’s vocabulary that kept me interested.

This was purportedly a real tale and right from my childhood I wasn’t a big fan of real-time love stories- I didn’t like even the much -acclaimed Prithviraj-Parvathy Malayalam blockbuster- Ennu Ninte Moideen.īut I didn’t have a choice since I didn’t have any other book that I hadn’t read in my shelf. Had it been a work of fiction I could have relied on the imagination of the author to keep me hooked to the narrative with his supposed ‘flights of fancy’ just like I was in love with Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera. The blurb of the book indicated something like a fairy-tale romance and since much of the story was supposed to be true, I did not get much interest to pick and read it. I had the chance to borrow a book last month titled White Mughals by Dalrympledespitenot being drawn towards its theme- a Hyderabadi noblewoman drawn romantically to a British Resident braving all cultural and political odds. I had read one of his long essays on The Guardian and was very much impressed with his compelling prose and vivid style of narration some years back. I had planned to read historian William Dalrymple for quite a long time.

William dalrymple books in hindi