Enthralling though this story is, and well though Dalrymple tells it, it is only a peg on which he hangs the more substantial theme of the cultural and social encounter between Britain and India. The British in India in the 18th century, Dalrymple argues, were not a small alien minority confined within their compounds and staring, suspiciously but incuriously, at the world outside. On the contrary: “The tone of this early period of British life in India seemed instead to be about intermixing and impurity, a succession of unexpected and unplanned minglings of peoples and cultures and ideas.”

Kirkpatrick spoke fluent Persian and Hindustani; he adored the palaces and gardens of mughal India and sought to out-do them in his Residency; he habitually wore Indian clothes, smoked a hookah, hennaed his hands and belched after meals; he was interested in the Muslim faith and, the last straw as far as the Governor General was concerned, was converted to it so as to be allowed to marry Khair.

When the representative of a foreign power “goes native”, his government may legitimately worry lest he put the interests of his new love before those of his employers. Kirkpatrick, however, served the East India Company loyally and all his activities were to their long-term advantage. His trouble was that he lived at the wrong time. A generation before and he would have been exceptional, certainly, but unexceptionable; a generation later, he would have been inconceivable. As it was, he coincided with a period in which a liberal-minded and intellectually curious approach to Indian society went out of fashion and was replaced by an arrogant assumption of European superiority.

The full review from the Daily Telegraph: A Romance Famous in the East

The review from the Guardian: Mr Kirkpatrick’s rebellion