The Great Mughals, as one historian memorably observed, arrived in India from central Asia in the sixteenth century as ‘ruddy men in boots’; they left it four centuries later ‘pale persons in petticoats’.7 Until the 1830s, there was every sign that India would have as dramatic a transforming effect on the Europeans who followed the Mughals. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. Uh-oh, we've got a suicide attempt on our hands here. It was certainly not enough to give rise to a major inquiry. One such slip occurs in 1630 when President William Methwold admits that the factors have almost completely given up using the Western drugs that the Company was in the habit of sending out to Surat, preferring to take the advice of local Mughal doctors: ‘The utility of the drugs is not to be doubted,’ writes Methwold, ‘but being farr fecht and longe kept, applied by an unskilful hand, without the consideration of the temprature of a mans body by the alteration of climats, they peradventure have small or contrary effects.’ Rather sheepishly he then admits: ‘wee for our parts doe hold that in things indifferent it is safest for an Englishman to Indianize, and, so conforming himselfe in some measure to the diett of the country, the ordinarie phisick of the country will bee the best cure when any sicknesse shall overtake him’.35, Only when an articulate traveller turns up is it suddenly possible to colour in the hard commercial outlines revealed in these carefully phrased public letters. These early descriptions of Indo-Portuguese culture set the tone for what was to come over the next three hundred years, in a wide range of encounters between different Indian peoples and various colonial intruders. Looking back to the 1790s, he reminds his readers that, the chief officers of the Government [at that time] belonged to a peculiar class. For nearly three hundred years Europeans coming out to the subcontinent had been assimilating themselves to India in a kaleidoscope of different ways. In the early years of the nineteenth century there was growing ‘ridicule’ of men ‘who allow whiskers to grow and who wear turbans &c in imitation of the Mussulmans’.106 Curries were no longer acceptable dishes at parties: ‘the delicacies of an entertainment consist of hermetically sealed salmon, red-herrings, cheese, smoked sprats, raspberry jam, and dried fruits; these articles coming from Europe, and being sometimes very difficult to procure, are prized accordingly’.107 Pyjamas, for the first time, became something that an Englishman slept in rather than something he wore during the day. Out of these sources he draws a fascinating picture of sexual attitudes and social etiquette, finding an "increasingly racist and dismissive attitude" among both Europeans and Indians towards mixed race offspring after the rise of Evangelical Christianity. That night the gentleman was seized with a terrible pain in his bowels, which threatened to endanger his life, and believing that it was owing to his forcibly entering into the pagoda & looking into every place, he sent for the Poojaries and questioned them. Virtually all Englishmen in India at this period Indianised themselves to some extent. Some of the stories circulating about Kirkpatrick, though perhaps enough to raise an eyebrow or two in Calcutta, were harmless enough. Increasingly Europeans were feeling they had nothing to learn from India, and they had less and less inclination to discover anything to the contrary. Over the course of the following few days Orr and Bowser answered, under oath, a series of questions of such intimate and explicit nature that the finished report must certainly be one of the most sexually revealing public documents to have survived from the East India Company’s India: to read it is to feel a slightly uneasy sensation akin to opening Kirkpatrick’s bedroom windows and peering in. This document is highly rated by Class 7 students and has been viewed 62046 times. He read Halhed’s book and, according to Charles James Fox, thereafter ‘spoke of the piety of the Hindoos with admiration, and of their holy religion and sacred functions with an awe bordering on devotion’; in Parliament Burke declared that ‘Wherever the Hindu religion has been established, that country has been flourishing.’81 This was still the Age of Reason, and loss of faith in the more intolerant and narrow aspects of Christianity combined with a growing interest in non-European civilisations to create an intellectual climate deeply receptive to the sort of ideas Halhed claimed lay at the heart of Hinduism. India was perceived as a suitable venue for ruthless and profitable European expansion, where glory and fortunes could be acquired to the benefit of all concerned. Well, at the beginning of the year anyway. This Deccani context is significant, for the great city states of the Deccan—like those of their contemporaries in Renaissance Italy—were always more eclectic and open to outsiders than even the cosmopolitan Imperial Mughal court in Agra. These eccentricities were, in themselves, hardly a matter for alarm. Not much is known about this strange Irishman who in the 1780s came out to India while still in his teens; but he seems to have been almost immediately attracted to Hinduism, and within a year of his arrival in Calcutta had adopted the practice—which he continued to his death—of walking every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges according to Hindu custom. But this crude attempt at force-feeding unadulterated Portuguese culture to India proved as short-lived, and as unsuccessful, as previous attempts to impose unadulterated Turkish, Sassanian Persian or Greek culture had been during the preceding centuries. Review. The story is told in one of the first English travel books about India, Alexander Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies: Mr Channock choosing the Ground of the Colony, where it now is, reigned more absolute than a Rajah … The country about being over-spread with Paganism, the Custom of Wives burning with their deceased Husbands is also practiced here. By 1813, Thomas Williamson was writing in The European in India how ‘The hookah, or pipe … was very nearly universally retained among Europeans. Throughout, one has a feeling that people are being confronted by an entirely new type of problem as two very different worlds collide and come into intimate contact for the first time. Of the great Juggernaut procession in Orissa, Ainslie comments: ‘The cloths and mantles are furnished for the idol pageantry by British servants. Any signs that Hindu customs were being followed in a Christian house were enough to get the entire family and their servants arrested and put to torture. His account reveals that despite the attempts of the factors to portray their establishment as a sort of sober, pious outpost of Trinity College, Cambridge, washed up on the shores of Gujerat, the life of the factors was in fact much more lively than anyone was prepared to let on to London. The wills also show that in many cases the bibis achieved a surprising degree of empowerment. Summary. Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. White Mughals is a 2002 history book by William Dalrymple. Fanon places huge importance on language. Hickey makes no bones about the way he inherited Jemdanee after a neighbour returned home to England: ‘I had often admired a lovely Hindustani girl who sometimes visited Carter at my house,’ he writes in his Memoirs. I am therefore instructed by His Excellency the most Noble Governor General to impress this sentiment on your mind and to desire that you prepare yourself to give such information on the subject as you possess with that accuracy which is becoming [to] the solemnity of the occasion … 1. Outside, amid clouds of dust, squadrons of red-coated sepoys tramped along the hot, broad military road which led from the coast towards the cantonments at St Thomas’s Mount. A few indeed had large harems, even by contemporary Indian standards. White Mughals AuthorWilliam Dalrymple CountryUnited Kingdom LanguageEnglish SubjectNarrative history PublisherPenguin Books Publication date 29 March 2002 Media typePrint Pages512 pp ISBN0-14-200412-X OCLC55121980 Preceded byThe Age of Kali Followed byBegums Thugs And White Mughals White Mughals is a 2002 history book by William Dalrymple. Every Hindu he salutes with Jey Sittaramjee!’ On another occasion Gardner says he is going to have to take command as the General is planning to go off for a week to bathe at the Kumb Mela. The most amiable part of modern philosophy is hardly upon a level with the extensive charity, the comprehensive benevolence, of a few rude, untutored Hindoo Bramins … Mr Halhed has rendered more real service to his country, to the world in general, by this performance, than ever flowed from all the wealth of all the nabobs by whom the country of these poor people has been plundered … Wealth is not the only, nor the most valuable commodity, which Britain might import from India.80. Englishmen who had taken on Indian customs likewise began to be objects of surprise—even, on occasions, of derision—in Calcutta. ‘The Rajah from Tipperary’, as he was known back home, was referred to in India as ‘Jehaz Sahib’—a name which may have derived from an Indian mangling of George, or be a reference to his naval past, jehaz being Urdu for ship. Hindoo Stuart was not alone in facing criticism. Before long, Lord Clive himself appeared, attended by his Private Secretary, Mark Wilks. A novel of the period paints an intriguing portrait of a returned Calcutta nabobx tormented by depression following the premature death of his Hindu bride. He is a tall and pleasing looking old man, but was so wrapped up in shawls, Kincob fur and a Mogul furred cap, that his face was all that was visible … He has been absent from his home country about 54 years; he has there neither friends nor relations, and he has been for many years habituated to Eastern habits and parade. their love transcended all the political, social and cultural barriers as james married nissa and converted to islam. Submit Review. Hinduism, and Hindu culture in general, proved less accessible to the British than Islam, at least partly because many Hindus regarded the British as untouchable, refusing to eat with them, so restricting somewhat the possibilities for social intercourse. In British Idolatry in India, a sermon printed and disseminated to the Evangelical faithful back home, the excitable Ainslie wrote of his visit to a temple in Orissa: ‘I have visited the Valley of Death!’ he told a hushed congregation. She serves her prince wine in a European glass. ‘Calcutta,’ wrote Robert Clive, ‘is one of the most wicked places in the Universe … Rapacious and Luxurious beyond conception.’58 If it was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, it was also one where it could be lost in minutes in a wager, or at the whist table. Like From the Holy Mountain, it also examines the interactions of Christianity and Islam, emphasizing the surprisingly porous relationsh… Another of Legge’s contemporaries, George Thomas, had his roots in the opposite end of Ireland, but like Legge took service among the rajahs of the north of India. Worse still, the girl’s grandfather was said to have ‘expressed an indignation approaching to phrenzy at the indignity offered to the honour of his family by such proceedings, and had declared his intention of proceeding to the Mecca Masjid (the principal mosque of the city)’.4 There he promised to raise the Muslims of the Deccan against the British, thus imperilling the British hold on southern and central India at that most sensitive period when a Napoleonic army was still at large in Egypt and feared to be contemplating an audacious attack on the British possessions of the subcontinent. Thomas Legge, from Donaghadee in Ulster, developed an interest in Indian alchemy and divination and ended his days as a fakir living naked in an empty tomb in the deserts of Rajasthan outside Jaipur. Books … The name Mughal is derived from Mongol. With their new confidence and growing power, the British cities of the coast were becoming more and more un-Indian: every year new English theatres and libraries were being built alongside churches modelled on St Martin-in-the-Fields. Yet occasionally there are hints as to the degree to which the factors are adapting themselves to the world outside their walls. If a young Writer was bright, learned the languages and did well in his exams, he might still be posted to one of the Residencies attached to the various independent Indian courts. Thereupon the Poojaries brought a number of cows into the pagoda & performed thePooniacharum, or ceremony of purification; and they assembled the Brahmins & entertained them all for the sake of the God; whereupon the water which before fell from the Cows Mouth in a stream of the size of an elephants trunk, fell again. This new Imperial approach was one that Lord Wellesley was determined not only to make his own, but to embody. Technically it is impossible to convert to Hinduism: as much a social system as a religion, to be a Hindu you must be born a Hindu; traditionally there was no ceremony for conversion. For two years now rumours had been in circulation, rumours which two previous inquiries—more informal, and far less searching—had failed to quash. Over the course of the next fifty years, the women, the environment and the sheer distance of Goa from Europe all worked on the new arrivals, so that gradually, generation by generation, the conquistadors began abandoning the ways of Portugal and taking on instead the customs of India. James Kirkpatrick’s counterpart as British Resident in Delhi was the Boston-born Sir David Ochterlony, an old friend of Kirkpatrick’s elder brother William. He argues that black people exist in two modes: one when they are around other black people, and the other when they are in the company of whites. Utilizing a variety of primary and secondary sources as well as a wealth of historical knowledge about the social and artistic context of nineteenth-century Europe, it examines a love affair that took place between British Resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick and an Indian woman Khair-un … North of Surat, the British had rented a ‘lodge’ attached to a garden tomb, or as Mandelslo puts it, ‘a mausoleum of a person of quality of the country’. White Mughals is a 2002 work of narrative history by Scottish historian, art curator, and writer William Dalrymple. He's dressed in corduroy, hunched over the steering wheel of his car… inhaling exhaust fumes. For all these reasons, Wellesley decided to fall back on the strategy of holding a secret inquiry in Madras, and there to solicit the sworn testimony of the two most senior British soldiers in Hyderabad, Lieutenant Colonel Bowser and Major Orr, both of whom had come into close contact with Kirkpatrick, without either of them being close enough friends for their veracity to be compromised. In diet he was a rigid disciple of Brama’, eating rice, fruit, potatoes and other vegetables while ‘looking upon the slaughter of a cow as only next to the murder of a human being’.68That this tendency was not restricted to fiction is clear from the writings of several vegetarian nabobs from the period, including the Mayor of Calcutta and survivor of the Black Hole, John Zephania Holwell, as well as the enigmatic Irish General whose collection of sculptures forms the core of the British Museum Indian Collection, Major General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart. 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