mughals

I just finished reading my 4th William Dalrymple book called "White Mughals". It was on a side of India I had never heard of before. It was like reading the background behind every Bollywood movie we had seen in the last few years. Now I understand where they all came from - the 18th century Indian lives of the wild and crazy British age. There were some pretty wild characters he found in doing his research for this book. I especially like one of the photos in his book of a Scottish man who had a salwar kameez made out of tartan material and even had a turban made of the same cloth. Such interesting British people who mixed with the native people of India. Most of them feel in love for the Mughal woman and some even had harems. Some dressed like the Mughal royalty they interacted with. This quote sums up the whole book on page 7:

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces and transforms them

On page 366 is the summary of the Mughal woman covered in the whole book:

Those are the final words we hear of Khair un-Nissa, the Most Excellent of Women, beloved wife of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, and Henry Russel's rejected lover. She had lived the saddest of lives. At a time, and in a society, when women had few options and choices, and little control over their lives. Khair had defied convention, threatened suicide and risked everything to be with the man she had eventually succeeded in marrying, even though he was from a different culture, a different race, and, initially, from a different religion. He love affair had torn her family apart and brought her, her mother, her grandmother and her husband to the brink of destruction. Then, just when it seemed that she had, against all odds, finally succeeded in realising her dream, both her husband and her children were taken from her, for ever, and in her widowhood she was first disgraced, then banished, and finally rejected. When she died - this fiery, passionate, beautiful woman - it was so much from a broken heart, from neglect, and sorrow, as from any apparent physical cause.