Begums, Thugs and White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes is a 2002 historical travel book based on the journals of Fanny Parkes and edited by William Dalrymple.

Dalrymple previously edited another book by Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque.

He wrote the introduction in which he challenged some of the preconceptions of academic studies of travel writing, which attempt to fit all English views on India into the 'Orientalist' template laid down by Edward Said.

If even the attempt to understand is seen as aggression or appropriation, then all human contact declines into paranoia.’ The attacks made on Fanny highlight the problem with so much that has been written about 18th- and early 19th-century India: the temptation felt by so many critics to project back onto it the stereotypes of Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes with which we are so familiar."

This article about a non-fiction book on history of India or its predecessor states is a stub.