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ratings: ★★★★★ (4.8/5)
Genre: History, Non-fiction, Biography, Romance

Book Review:
William Dalrymple's ''White Mughals'' is a masterpiece of narrative history, a book that is at once deeply researched and compulsively readable. As Salman Rushdie declares on the cover, Dalrymple is ''that rarity, a scholar of history who can really write,'' and this book is a brilliant testament to that rare gift.

Winner of the 2003 Wolfson Prize for History, ''White Mughals'' tells the extraordinary true story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, a British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad in the late eighteenth century. Kirkpatrick arrived in India as an ambitious soldier of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the subjugation of a nation. Instead, he found himself conquered—not by an army, but by a Muslim Indian princess.

In 1798, Kirkpatrick glimpsed Khair un-Nissa (''Most Excellent among Women''), the great-niece of the Nizam's Prime Minister. She was beautiful, intelligent, and just fourteen years old. Despite the immense obstacles—she was locked away in purdah, engaged to a local nobleman, and a Muslim, while he was a Christian representative of a foreign power—Kirkpatrick fell deeply in love.

What follows is a tale of breathtaking romance, secret assignations, harem politics, and court intrigue. Dalrymple meticulously reconstructs their story, drawing on a wealth of sources, including a cache of love letters that miraculously survived. He reveals how Kirkpatrick, in order to marry Khair, eventually converted to Islam and, according to Indian sources, even became a double-agent, working for the Hyderabadans against his own Company.

The Times Literary Supplement called it ''moving, wide-ranging and richly textured,'' a book that ''through massive research blessed with serendipity, and through imagination and empathy... has evoked the world of the British in late 18th century India as no one has before.'' The Sunday Times described it as a ''gorgeous, spellbinding and important book'' whose story of a colonial love affair ''will change our views about British India.''

''White Mughals'' is more than just a love story. It is a window into a fascinating, often forgotten world where East and West mingled, where identities were fluid, and where love could transcend the boundaries of race, religion, and empire. A spellbinding, moving, and utterly essential read.