White Mughals, by William Dalrymple

Before the repressed Raj, Brits in India loved the country - in all senses, reports Toby Green

Nobody who has read Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts will think warmly of the British colonial project in India. Davis showed how the administration's racism was a significant element in the multiple famines that scarred the subcontinent in the late 19th century.

That inhumanity confirms our impression of the Raj as peopled by repellent Victorians who shunned the "natives". And, as William Dalrymple stresses in White Mughals (his third book on India), this portrait is essentially accurate. However, the Victorians' success in "colonising not just India but also our imaginations" has led to the centuries of intermingling which preceded them being overlooked. The notion that, until the 19th century, British settlers in India frequently converted to Islam or Hinduism is difficult to square with our prevailing ideas.

The history of this intermingling forms his subject. The product of five years' study of archives and Persian and Hindi texts, White Mughals is a thought-provoking work, distinguished by Dalrymple's erudition. Its centrepiece is the marriage of James Kirkpatrick, the British Resident in Hyderabad, to Khair un-Nissa, the granddaughter of a senior Mughal official – a marriage epitomising the possibilities of Anglo-Indian relationships before the Victorian era.

At first, Kirkpatrick did not seem liable to "turn Turk", as the saying went. His early career in India was characterised by a desire to extinguish French interests and advance the British East India Company. But, at that time, there were no safe predictions about the British. Dalrymple's research throws up many comparable stories, including that of "Hindoo Stuart": a wildly eccentric general who exhorted Englishwomen to adopt the sari, which he saw as "the sexiest garb imaginable".

The desire of settlers to explore their sexuality is an intriguing feature of White Mughals, a break with the stereotype of the repressed and repressive colonist. One British Resident in Delhi had 13 "consorts", and even Richard Wellesley, who, as Governor General became a prototype for the aloof, aggressive administrator, wrote of his insatiable sexual appetite. Dalrymple notes the lack of British women in India at this time, and it becomes clear that biological imperatives were among the principal causes of Anglo-Indian liaisons.

White Mughals also recounts stories of Portuguese settlers who also formed inter-racial marriages. As with the Anglo-Indian couples, where children were often brought up as Muslims by their mothers, these partnerships were relatively equal.

As Dalrymple implies, the Mughal civilisation challenged notions of European superiority on Europe's terms. As Mughal cities were often larger than any the settlers had seen, they accepted Indian ways, something reflected in these often happy marriages. In the Americas, by contrast, where Aztec and Inca civilisations were destroyed in a few years, indigenous peoples were dismissed as brutes by Europeans.

Like many ground-breaking works, White Mughals poses as many questions as it solves. The British transition from integration to disdain suggests a psychological shift, yet the roots of this change remain elusive. But one sympathises with a writer who has heroically laboured to rescue this material from obscurity, and then had to shape it according to the requirements of soundbites. There is much more to this book than the "love and betrayal" of its subtitle.

The implications of the white Mughals for our own time, when relations between the West and Islam are more strained than for centuries, are clear. It is, as Dalrymple says, "bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear" which drive east and west apart: only by engaging with cultural differences can we begin to repair the rift.

Toby Green's latest book is 'Meeting the Invisible Man' (Phoenix)