White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

Between 1780 and 1784, following the disastrous British defeat by Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur, seven thousand British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.* Of these over three hundred were circumcised and given Muslim names and clothes.48 Even more h

Nizam ul-Mulk was an ingenious general but an even more talented statesman, using bribery and intrigue to achieve what his old-fashioned and outmoded Mughal armies could not. While breaking from the direct control of Delhi, he made a point of maintaining his nominal loyalty to the Mughal Emperor, and throughout the eighteenth century the people of

Afterwards [they] have permission to approach but seldom sit down. There is more state and pomp here than I ever saw at [the Mughal Emperor] Shah Alam’s durbar. Agreeably to the custom of the Nizam’s family he [Nizam Ali Khan] never smokes but swallows large balls of paun which as he has no teeth he cannot chew; he drinks a great deal of coffee, &a

Dundas had instructed Wellesley to ‘cleanse’ those pockets of Indian power that had been ‘contaminated’ by French influence: namely the courts of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Nizam Ali Khan of Hyderabad, and those of that network of rival Hindu chiefs who ruled the great Maratha Confederacy – all of whom had raised sepoy armies trained by Francophone mer

What in fact had happened, as Kirkpatrick later learned, was that an intermittent cannonade by the Marathas had panicked the Nizam’s women, and especially Bakshi Begum, the Nizam’s most senior wife,

The Nizam’s father, Nizam ul-Mulk, had founded the semi-independent state of Hyderabad out of the disintegrating southern provinces of the Mughal Empire in the years following 1724.

At a time when the British showed no particular enthusiasm for cleanliness, Indian women for example introduced British men to the delights of regular bathing. The fact that the word shampoo is derived from the Hindi word for massage, and that it entered the English language at this time, shows the novelty to the eighteenth-century British of the I

when Nizam Ali Khan acceded to the throne thirty-two years earlier in 1762, few would have guessed that, almost alone of the contending forces of the Deccan, it would be Hyderabad that would survive the vicissitudes of the next seventy-five years.

But the bulk of the Nizam’s army had succeeded in reaching their designated campsite on the banks of a rivulet three miles on from the slopes of Moori Ghat. There they dug in for the night, well positioned for the expected battle the following morning. No one was quite sure at the time what went wrong, but just after eleven o’clock that night, a su