Quickening

Inside a wonderful profile of William Dalrymple in Bookforum, I read something that made my inner Mr. “Everything Comes From India” spring to life:

It was during the writing of White Mughals that Dalrymple discovered something about his own family: His maternal great-great-grandmother Sophia Pattle was the daughter of “a Hindu Bengali woman … who converted to Catholicism and married a French officer in Pondicherry in the 1780s.” Like Virginia Woolf, who is descended from Pattle’s sister, Dalrymple is part Indian by blood. “If you look at photographs, Woolf looks almost Punjabi,” he laughs. “Indians haven’t yet caught on to it.”