Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (39 page)

For the Shah, his inability to control his own corps of the army brought home as nothing else did his own powerlessness. It was at this period that he began to sink into a deep melancholy. ‘He often sat at the windows of the palace,’ wrote Durand, ‘whiling away time, his eye wandering over the different objects which the city and its plain offered. On one of these occasions, after a long silent pause, Shah Shuja made the remark “that everything appeared to him shrunk, small and miserable, and that the Kabul of his old age in no respect corresponded with the recollections of the Kabul of his youth”.’
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Even the perennially insensitive Macnaghten noticed that ‘His Majesty has of late been subject to a depression of spirits.’
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As much as Shuja wanted to control the new regiments and demonstrate his sovereignty, he was also painfully aware that he simply could not afford to maintain a sizeable army without British financial support. As ever in Afghanistan, it was a struggle to find the money to pay for the enormous army needed to secure so poor, fractured and uncontrollable a country. The army of the old Durrani Empire had been raised on taxes from the rich tributary regions such as Sindh and Kashmir. Since those areas had been lost all Afghan rulers had struggled to pay their troops without imposing unacceptable tax burdens on the relatively barren and unproductive regions that remained to them: ‘In the time of the Sadozais there was in every family and tribe one man of dignity, and the expenditure of the cavalry under them was provided from the revenues of the dependant countries of Punjab, Sindh, Cashmere and Moultan and part of Khoorasan,’ Shuja explained to Auckland. ‘Now from every family and house ten or twenty individuals have sprung up, and each begs the honours of chiefship to be bestowed upon them. I cannot think of any remedy but to apply to Your Lordship for friendly assistance.’ He added:

Dost Mohammad Khan notwithstanding his oppressive habits and extortions could not meet the expenses from his income. All his people were displeased with him and deserted him for they did not receive pay for six months in the whole year, and what remuneration they did get was in woollens. If I keep up a force equal in number to that of Dost Mohammad there will be no difference between me and himself. If I maintain a greater number than the revenue of this country, which cannot be equal to their expenses, there will not be sufficient to feed the troops. If I employ an army smaller than that of Dost Mohammad, it will disappoint the natives of this country who are daily swelling in number and petitioning to enter my service. Consequently I am involved in troubles and pass days and nights in vexation. When I look upon the payment of the soldiers I find no other source than to rely on Your Lordship’s favour.
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If it was the army reforms that first brought Macnaghten and Shuja into conflict, then there was also the problem of Shuja’s loyal Chief of Staff, Mullah Shakur, whom Burnes and Macnaghten found increasingly resistant to their ideas. ‘Whatever money he gained by public or private means he added to the coffers of the Shah,’ wrote Mohan Lal,

and he was therefore in great confidence with the king. Mullah Shakur was however very old, and totally unfit to occupy any high post. He had lost his memory to such an extent that he could not recognise a person whom he had well known before, if he had not seen him even for a day; but he perfectly understood the real meaning of our treaty with the king, and by it he knew that we had no right to take over the administration of the country.
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Long before Shah Shuja lost his patience with the interference of Macnaghten and Burnes in his internal affairs, Mullah Shakur was trying to resist British encroachment into the daily running of the country, while maintaining the appearance that Shuja was really running everything. ‘As long as Mullah Shakur was in office, the polite fiction was maintained that His Majesty did have some say in the affairs of the kingdom and the army,’ wrote Mohammad Husain Herati.

For example, if the price of wheat was fixed at a particular rate, any trader who flouted the rules would be punished by Mullah Shakur in his role as assistant governor of Kabul – but whenever Alexander Burnes sent his chaprasi messenger to protest that the trader in question was under his protection, the offender would be released. By such means, Mullah Shakur attempted to maintain the appearance of the legitimacy of the government. But Burnes and Macnaghten did not like to be contradicted in any way, nor to pay attention to the intricacies of government, and day by day they grew more hostile to the Mullah.
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These were not the only things that undermined the popularity and effectiveness of Shah Shuja’s government as spring turned to summer in 1840. Many were now complaining of Shuja’s distant style, which formed a sharp contrast with the consciously egalitarian approach of Dost Mohammad. It had long been a pattern with Shuja that the more he felt his status diminished, the more he wished to make public demonstrations of his rank. So it was in 1840, just as he began to feel his grip on power slipping, that we begin to read reports of grand perorations of the King and his court around Kabul and its vicinity. ‘The wild grandeur’ of Shuja’s company ‘baffles description’, wrote the artist James Rattray when he came across them around this time. In front came the royal dromedaries ‘with bells suspended from their harness, ringing in time to their dreamy gait, with outstretched necks tasselled and ornamented. There were hundreds of them,’ and many bore small cannon decorated with green and scarlet flags which the camel drivers fired at random: ‘plumes were carried away and whiskers singed, much to the delight of the unearthly marksmen’. As the deafening camel batteries passed on, next came the royal stud, ‘glistening in cloth of gold and jewelled housings’. There followed the officers of the household,

executioners, stave, sword, kettledrum and standard bearers in their many-horned and pointed scarlet caps, clearing the way by choking it up, restoring order by creating confusion. A clattering array of Afghaun horse followed them, beplumed and armed cap-a-pie, their kettledrums beating, and their bossed and ornamented furniture jingling as they swept past, followed by a host of bare-legged, long-haired groom-boy runners. After them pranced a squadron of the Envoy’s body-guard, in blue and silver, and then – Majesty itself.

The Shah was splendidly mounted, sat well and upright, and looked every inch of him the King. The imperial velvet crown, with drooping leaves of emerald pendants branching from the upper part of it, encircled his high brow, which glistened in a band of costly gems. His dress was a tight-fitting purple satin tunic, embroidered in gold and precious stones, and from shoulder to wrist were bound armlets of massive plates of jewellery. Shagreen leather, pointed-toed and iron-heeled boots, and a flat compact cashmere shawl girdle, from which was suspended a splendid Isfahan scimitar, completed his attire. The Shah was a man of great personal beauty, and so well got up that none could have guessed his age. The character of his countenance was one of excessive hauteur, blended with melancholy; an expression which was increased tenfold by his regularly marked eyebrows, long dark eyes, and beard of jettest black.

Rattray was dazzled, and noted that the people of Kabul were not uninterested: ‘As the royal train swept on through the narrow winding streets, every window, doorway and roof was crowded with spectators.’ But they were not cheering the man they called ‘the Firangi’s King’. Instead they showed no sign of ‘pleasure or loyalty’ but merely looked on ‘mute and dogged, counting their beads as they stood motionless, with arms crossed over their breasts. The silence was unbroken save for the voice of a petitioner driven back in an attempt to reach the royal ear, the tramp of cavalry, and the shout of the officer proclaiming the power, excellence and majesty of the Shah of Shahs, the pearl of the Durrani dynasty.’ Another officer-turned-artist, Lockyer Willis Hart, went further: ‘This form and ceremony, so hateful to the Affghans, was the King’s foible, and was sometimes carried to an absurd extent.’
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It was not just the people on the street. Many of the chiefs also felt humiliated and belittled by the grandeur and distance of Shuja’s ultra-royal style: ‘By the late ruler the nobles were treated very attentively, almost on equal terms and enjoyed much influence,’ recorded Colonel Wade’s munshi, Shahamat Ali, ‘while now . . . they found it very difficult to obtain admittance to the royal presence; and those who by flattering the ushers could do so, were made to stand at a respectful distance from his Majesty with their hands folded in a most humble manner, and often compelled to retire from the durbar without being allowed to say a word to the King.’
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It was also this that made the British officers of Shuja’s Contingent so loath to attend on their nominal employer. As Burnes tried to explain to the Shah, ‘he might remedy the non-appearance of the British Officers at his Durbar by fixing a day in the week to receive them as they often came and after waiting for a long time departed without an audience’.
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But the biggest problem of all, as Macnaghten was frank enough to recognise, was simply the growing taint to Shuja’s reputation brought by his continued association with the infidel British and the spreading conviction that he was merely their puppet. ‘His Majesty labours under peculiar and complicated difficulties,’ Macnaghten wrote to Auckland,

the foremost of which is his connection with us. We have placed him on his throne, but it will be some time before our motives in doing so are understood and there are many who wilfully misunderstand them. The difference of our religion is of course the chief cause of antipathy on the part of the people. The Afghans are a nation of bigots. Besides an intolerance of our creed, there is an intolerance of our customs and it behoves us therefore to be very wary in our attempts at innovation, nor ought it ever to be forgotten that a system, though excellent in itself, may not be good as applied to this country, nor may it be such as to meet appreciation. It requires the most cautious steering to refrain on the one side from alarming popular prejudices, and on the other from leaving the government in the same imbecile state in which we found it.
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To Colvin, Macnaghten developed a similar theme: ‘You rightly conjecture that the Barakzais have the most inflammable material to work upon. Of all moral qualities, avarice, credulity and bigotry are the most inflammable, and the Afghans have all these three in perfection.’ While Macnaghten was correct to point to religious difference as lying at the heart of Afghan objections to the new regime, and to realise that the Muslim ‘ulema were fast establishing themselves as the centre of opposition to Shuja, he was wrong to interpret their objection as mere ‘bigotry’. The mullahs had initially been co-opted by the Anglo-Sadozai regime, which from the beginning paid salaries to those among the ‘ulema who came out in support of the Shah. But the mullahs grew in time to have good reason to dislike a regime which only intermittently patronised their institutions or helped restore their mosques, and which seized for itself many of their
waqf
endowments to help augment the regime’s tax revenues: particular horror was caused when the British ‘went so far as to usurp control of the endowments of the great Sufi shrine of Ashiqan wa Arifan, which had been registered from the days of bygone rulers’. This was an especially tactless move as the shrine, formerly a Buddhist monastery, was Old Kabul’s most important and ancient cult centre, and for several generations had been the burial place of the Barakzais. Moreover, it was controlled by two powerful and respected hereditary Naqsbandi sheikhs from Kohistan, Mir Masjidi and his brother Mir Haji, who was also the hereditary Imam of the Pul-i-Khishti Friday Mosque and the leader of the Kabul ‘ulema.
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They were enormously influential figures and the Anglo-Sadozai regime should have done all it could to keep them within the Shah’s inner circle. Instead it seemed to be doing all it could to alienate them.

To aggravate matters further, the British also interfered in the mullahs’ administration of justice. The ‘ulema understandably didn’t like being lectured on the Sharia by the conceited Macnaghten who was now writing, ‘I have gained a complete victory over the Moollas who have since freely admitted that my knowledge of the Mahomedan Law is superior to their own.’
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Most of all they disliked the way the ‘licentious infidels’ were corrupting their city, and strongly objected to the daily spectacle of carousing British and Indian squaddies openly drinking and whoring in their streets.

These conservative objections to the British presence were shared by the nobility. In the summer of 1840, the British intercepted a letter from a senior Barakzai leader, Sultan Mohammad Khan, the former Governor of Peshawar, who wrote to his half-brother Dost Mohammad complaining, ‘I cannot tell you what oppression is committed by the Firangis. Some of the people have publicly turned Christians and others have turned prostitute. Grain has got very dear. May God turn this accursed set out of the country as their appearance has discarded both religion and modesty.’
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All this came to a head in July 1840 when, at the instigation of Mir Haji, the ‘ulema began to omit proclaiming the name of Shah Shuja at Friday prayers, on the grounds that the real rulers were the Kafirs. According to Burnes, the Shah immediately summoned him to the Bala Hisar and told him: