White Mughals — William Dalrymple

Dalrymple reconstructs the love affair and marriage between James Kirkpatrick, the British Resident at Hyderabad, and Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal noblewoman, as a way of examining a particular moment in colonial history — before the hardening of racial attitudes that would characterise the nineteenth century — when accommodation between British officials and Indian culture was both possible and common. The book is a biography, a love story, and a work of cultural history simultaneously.