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The book's premise as a historically accurate romance between an Indian noblewoman, Khair un-Nissa, and a British East India Company ambassador, James Kirkpatrick, is difficult to sustain when the availability of records preclude the reader knowing the woman's personality and even true degree of affiliation. Also, it is true that Kirkpatrick, a vocal proponent of British assimilation to Hyderabadi culture, differed in his approach to Indian societies to his segregating superiors in Calcutta, Cor...
The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India by William Dalrymple is a tour-de-force of historical writing. Packed with the results of an unbelievably enormous amount of research and detective work, it is highly detailed, yet it flows like a good novel. It gave me great pleasure reading it.Until the first decade of the 19th century, Europeans living in India had no difficulties with cohabiting and having sexual relations with the local Indians, whom they encountered. Many of
Blockbuster Dalrymple. If anyone ever doubted that he was a history writer par excellence, this is his answer.One of my favourite writers at the top of his game. This is how narrative non-fiction is done. Period.
Only for somebody with an eye for detail. And I mean ALOT of detail. I have to give credit to the author for clearly spending so much time and effort researching, and for transforming random bits of letters and pieces of history into an almost novel-like story.
I read this book as part of a book club and it made me feel like I was back at school being forced to read a book for my grades. I've given it one star but I normally wouldn't have chosen it to read but really didn't enjoy any part of it. Sorry.
I've learned babies, late nights and cycling into work make reading much harder than it used to be. This was probably quite a good book - and it's one I've been waiting to read for aaaages, but a combination of the above kept interrupting my flow.Possibly a shame because it is a sad story. The background research is obviously impeccable and for once William Dalrymple is a background figure, yet yet yet... A good third of the book is taken up with scene-setting which made going even slower, and o...
An interesting story of love and politics, but far too much unnecessary information for my liking. It reads more like an essay than a novel and being in the third person I found it difficult to relate to the characters.
I have a lot of admiration for this author’s Nine Lives, and The Anarchy is highly informative. But this book is supposedly a love story, which isn't actually all that well-documented and for which the author puts on heavily rose-tinted glasses to ignore the fact that the participants were aged 35 and 13 and that we know almost nothing about her life, thoughts, or feelings. In reality, the book is in part a biography of East India Company official James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and in part a very d...
Its only because of the name of Willam Dalrymple that i picked this one. But, by God, what a book. hats off to the writer. It builds on interestingly and like one of those Sydney Sheldon novels you just don't want to put it back. Always intriguing and woven in the mysteries of the oriental East.The book sheds a light on late eighteenth and nineteenth century life and politics of princely state of Hyderabad. From the Nizam to the power brokering imperialist British to a commoner in the street, on...
If you like to go through a historical novel at snail-pace then this is the kind of book for you. It made me rush through it because of the nitty-gritty of irrelevant details that the writer has gone into. Overall, it a good read
Oh, I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. I confess I know very little about the years before the Raj, before the British Crown took over India from the East India Company, so this book came as a delightful, entrancing revelation. During the years of the British Raj, the lines - social, political, religious, caste and class - dividing British from Indian were very clearly defined and adhered to, but this was not the case in the early years of the East India Company. Many officials had b...
So disappointed with this book. It's a rambling long-winded history lecture. The footnotes and references are hugely distracting. I'm more than a quarter into the book and am still waiting to find the characters. It does have pockets of beautiful historical excerpts but I'm not sure I have the patience to skim (yes I'm skimming) through pages of detailed historical data to get to the core of the story, if there is one. Maybe I shouldn't give up on it yet...(less)
Finally, I have finished reading this 500 page long, historical romance. I had tried to read it once, but I admit that I abandoned it midway because I was apprehensive that I will ever finish reading the book. But the book haunted me enough to make me pick it up again, and I gave it another shot. So here is my review of the book:1) As always, my recommendation is that ONLY if you are a history buff, pick it up. It is a detailed documentation of Mughal, Hyderabadi, and English era, and you don't
A grand, slow-moving procession through 18th-century IndiaStately processions are a leit motif in William Dalrymple's epic account of a doomed love affair between James Kirkpatrick, a British East India Company resident, and Khair un-Nissa, great-niece of Hyderabad’s chief minister. Midway through the book, for example, he quotes a source describing the massive pilgrimage for the annual festival of Mawlah Ali:“Some 3,000 elephants, as well as some 50,000 horses and load-bearing camels, with stal...
