This recent summary in the Guardian of his new book by William Dalrymple augments some of the ideas I present in the “Symbolic Algebra Timelines” essay and further detail in such articles as “Making Arrows”.

Among the many books Dalrymple has written about India one especially I found gripping is White Mughals (2002).  From Wikipedia:

The book is a work of social history about the warm relations that existed between the British and some Indians in the 18th and early 19th century, when one in three British men in India was married to an Indian woman. It documents the inter-ethnic liaisons between British officers, such as Charles “Hindoo” Stuart, and Indian women, and the geopolitical context of late 18th century India. Like From the Holy Mountain, it also examines the interactions of Christianity and Islam, emphasizing the surprisingly porous relationship between the two in pre-modern times. …

The very title of White Mughals indicates its subject: the late 18th- and early 19th-century period in India, where there had been ‘a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas’. On one level, the book tells the tragic love story of James Kirkpatrick, ‘the thoroughly orientalised’ British [East India Company] Resident in Hyderabad and beautiful [Khair-un-Nissa, a Hyderabadi noblewoman of royal Mughal descent]. On another level, the story is about trade, military and political dealings, based on Dalrymple’s researches among letters, diaries, reports, and dispatches (much of it in cipher). 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. He paces the gradual revelations with a novelist’s skills, leading us on, after the death of Kirkpatrick, to “the saddest and most tragic part of the whole story”. The doomed lovers actually engender an optimistic coda, when their two children move to Britain. The daughter Kitty becomes a friend and muse of Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, and re-establishes contact with her grandmother in India through Henry Russell.

Several things struck me about this book. One was how this early period of British colonialism in India mirrored the lives of French frontiersmen in colonial America and Portuguese settlers in colonial Brazil, where they all established intimate relations with the indigenous people.  The racism came later.  Ironically, in the case of India the racism was promulgated by Cornwallis of recent American Revolution failure when he “was appointed in February 1786 to serve as both Commander-in-Chief of British India and Governor of the Presidency of Fort William, also known as the Bengal Presidency” (Wikipedia).  He vigorously denigrated the “native” relationships of such men as James Kirkpatrick and Charles Stuart.

The other thing that was unusual and made a strong impression was Dalrymple’s inclusion of letters, diaries, and documents in the tale.  Hearing the events through the participants’ actual words carried a powerful impact.  The precarious existence of all in that time and place added further drama to the tale. The intimate details shed light on what would be a major part of British history as its identity became further entwined in the South Asian subcontinent.