Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (78 page)

The sources consist of two remarkable heroic epic poems – the
Akbarnama
, or The History of Wazir Akbar Khan, of Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, and the
Jangnama
, or History of the War, by Mohammad Ghulam Kohistani Ghulami, both of which read like Afghan versions of
The Song of Roland
, and were written in the 1840s in sonorous Persian modelled on that of the ancient Shahnameh of Ferdowsi to praise the leaders of the Afghan resistance. These epics seem to be the last survivors of what was probably once a very rich seam of poetry dedicated to the Afghan victory, much of it passed orally from singer to singer, bard to bard: after all, to the Afghans their victory over the British was an almost miraculous deliverance, their Trafalgar, Waterloo and Battle of Britain rolled into one.
7

The single known copy of the
Jangnama
turned up in Parwan in 1951 lacking its front and end pages, and written on East India Company paper apparently looted from the British headquarters in Charikar. It focuses on the deeds of the Kohistani resistance leader Mir Masjidi, the Naqsbandi Sufi pir who is long known to have been an important figure in the uprising, but who this manuscript maintains was central to the resistance. The
Akbarnama
, which also resurfaced in 1951, this time in Peshawar, by contrast praises Wazir Akbar Khan. ‘In this book,’ writes Maulana Kashmiri, ‘like Rustam the Great, Akbar’s name will be remembered for ever. Now this epic has reached completion, it will roam the countries of the world, and adorn the assemblies of the great. From Kabul, it will travel to every gathering, like the spring breeze from garden to garden.’
8

The
Ayn al-Waqayi
gives a slightly later view of the uprising seen from the perspective of Herat in western Afghanistan, on the border of Persia, while two late-nineteenth-century histories, the
Tarikh-i-Sultani
,
or The History of the Sultans, and the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
,
The Lamp of Histories,
are official court histories of the kings of Afghanistan and give the perspective from the point of view of Dost Mohammad’s successors.
9
The surviving Persian letters of one of the leading resistance leaders, Aminullah Khan Logari, which until the looting of the Taliban survived in the National Museum in Kabul, were recently printed by his descendants as
Paadash-e-Khidmatguzaari-ye-Saadiqaane Ghazi Nayab Aminullah Khan Logari
.
10

The angry and embittered but perceptive
Naway Ma’arek
, or Song of Battles, of Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad tells the story of the war from the point of view of a junior official from Shikarpur (now in Pakistan but then nominally under the sway of Kabul) who starts off in the service of Shah Shuja but later becomes disillusioned with his employer’s reliance on infidel support and who writes with increasing sympathy towards the resistance. The style of his Persian is florid provincial Mughal, but he has a more witty and sprightly turn of phrase than any other writer of the period. The book, which holds forth with some venom on the failures of the British, was perhaps surprisingly commissioned by the first English collector of Shikarpur, E. B. Eastwick, and Mirza ‘Ata writes rather nervously to his patron in the introduction, begging that ‘in accordance with the saying “telling the truth is bitter”, even though I have striven to select the most tactful expressions when describing the good and bad in these events, I pray I will avoid giving offence to those enthroned on the peaks of governance. In any case,’ he adds, ‘the joys and the griefs of this fleeting faithless world do not last: “the world is a dream – however you imagine it, it passes away; until you pass away yourself.”’
11

Perhaps the most revealing source of all is the
Waqi’at-i-Shah Shuja
, Shah Shuja’s own colourful and sympathetic memoirs, written in exile in Ludhiana before the war and brought up to date by one of his followers after his assassination in 1842. Shuja explains in his introduction that ‘to insightful scholars it is well known that great kings have always recorded the events of their reigns and the victorious military campaigns in which they took part: some writing themselves, with their natural gifts, but most entrusting the writing to skilled historians, so that these pearl-like compositions would remain as a memorial on the pages of passing time. Thus it occurred to this humble petitioner at the court of the Merciful God to record the battles of his reign from the time of his accession at the young age of seventeen, so that the historians of Khurasan should know the true account of these events, and thoughtful readers take heed from these examples.’
12
In these memoirs we have the hopes and fears of the principal player on the Afghan side – a vital addition to the literature.

Yet astonishingly, while most of these sources are well known to Dari-speaking Afghan historians, and were used by them in the nationalist Dari-language histories they wrote between the 1950s and 1970s, not one of these accounts ever seems to have been used in any English-language history of the war, and none is available in English translation, although an abridged translation of a few chapters of the
Waqi’at-i-Shah Shuja
appeared in a Calcutta magazine in the 1840s and a full translation of the
Siraj ul-Tawarikh
is currently under preparation by Robert McChesney at Columbia University, to which I was generously given access.

These rich and detailed Afghan sources tell us much that the European sources neglect to mention or are ignorant of. The British sources, for example, are well informed when talking of the different factions in their own army, but seem largely unaware of the tensions dividing the different groups of insurgents who made up the Afghan side. For the Afghan resistance – it is clear in the Afghan accounts – was in fact deeply fractured: different groups under different commanders camped in different places and often acted with only the bare minimum of co-ordination. Moreover, the rival groups had different aims and formed ever-changing coalitions of self-interest. One particular surprise is how many of the insurgents at the beginning wished to retain Shah Shuja as their king and only wished to drive out his British backers; the loyalties of these same pro-Royalist forces reverted to Shah Shuja as soon as the British army headed off towards its own annihilation in the Khord Kabul Pass. Just as the Soviet puppet Najibullah survived much longer than anyone expected after the departure of the Soviet army in the 1980s, so Shah Shuja might have survived indefinitely as King of Afghanistan had he not been treacherously assassinated by his own godson for reasons of personal pique and jealousy.

The resistance of the Afghan sources has a slightly different dramatis personae to those given in the British accounts: Mir Masjidi and his Kohistanis and Aminullah Khan and his Logaris are both much more prominent than in the British sources, or indeed in those later Afghan accounts written later under Barakzai patronage which emphasise the central role of the victorious dynasty in the uprising – something that was actually only true for the final stages of the revolution.

More importantly, thanks to the Afghan sources the leaders of the Afghan resistance suddenly come into view as rounded figures, human beings with full emotional lives and with individual views and motivations. While the British sources see only an undifferentiated wall of treacherous bearded ‘bigots’ and ‘fanatics’, thanks to the new sources it is now possible to understand why it was that individual Afghan leaders, many of them loyal supporters of Shah Shuja, chose to risk their lives and take up arms against the apparently invincible forces of the Company. The venerable Aminullah Khan Logari was insulted by a junior British officer and lost his lands for refusing to pay increased taxes to the Crown. The hot-headed young Abdullah Khan Achakzai had his mistress seduced by Alexander Burnes and was mocked when he tried to retrieve her. Mir Masjidi was about to turn himself in when contrary to all understandings the British attacked his fort and massacred his family; the fort was then seized and turned into the centre of the British provincial government and his lands shared among his enemies. Most fully sketched of all is the sophisticated and complex figure of Akbar Khan, who loved Hellenistic Gandharan sculpture, wanted to import western education and was regarded in Kabul as the most dashing of the resistance leaders. The
Akbarnama
even includes a detailed description of the pleasures of his wedding bed. The caricature ‘treacherous Muslim’ of the British sources transforms before our eyes into an Afghan matinee idol.

The Afghan sources also present us with a mirror which allows us, in the words of Alexander Burnes’s cousin Robbie Burns, ‘To see ourselves as others see us’.
13
For according to the Afghan epic poets, Burnes, far from being the romantic adventurer of western accounts, was instead the devilishly charming deceiver, the master of flattery and treachery, who corrupted the nobles of Kabul. ‘On the outside he seems a man, but inside he is the very devil,’ one nobleman tells Dost Mohammad.
14
Likewise to Afghan eyes the western armies were remarkable for their heartlessness, for their lack of any of the basic values of chivalry and especially for their indifference to civilian casualties. ‘From their rancour and spite there will be burning houses and blazing walls,’ Dost Mohammad warns Akbar Khan in the
Akbarnama
.

For such is how they show their strength

Terrorising those who dare to resist them

As is their custom, they will subjugate the people

So that no one makes a claim to equality
15

It is, moreover, a consistent complaint in the Afghan sources that the British had no respect for women, raping and dishonouring wherever they went, and riding ‘the steed of their lust unbridled day and night’. The British, in other words, are depicted in the Afghan sources as treacherous and oppressive women-abusing terrorists. This is not the way we expect Afghans to look at us.

At the centre of all the Afghan sources is the enigmatic figure of Shah Shuja himself. Shuja emerges through his own writings and those of his supporters as a sophisticated and highly intelligent man who models himself on the Timurid monarchs of the past. The self-portrait in the
Waqi’at
is backed by that of other writers to reveal a resolute, brave and unbreakable figure, weathering all that fate can throw at him. It is a portrait startlingly different to the corrupt and incompetent figure dismissed by the conceited British administrators who first reinstalled then tried to marginalise the heir to the Durrani Empire. He is also a very different figure to the weak quisling demonised in modern Afghanistan after 170 years of Barakzai propaganda. Shuja created around him a highly cultured Persianate world – there is no indication that the Shah ever knew Pashtu, and he certainly did not write in it. He lived, as the Mughals did before him, a life of mobile kingship and in many ways he emerges as the last Timurid, exercising his rule in a country that was still at the crossroads of Iran, Central Asia, China and Hindustan, not the mountainous periphery it would later become.

In retrospect, Shah Shuja’s reign marked the end of one world and the beginning of another. For, despite its many costly failures, the First Anglo-Afghan War had important and long-lasting effects. For the British it created a stable frontier. Within a few years, the British had absorbed the Punjab of the Sikh Khalsa and the lands of the lower Indus previously ruled by the Amirs of Sindh; but they had learned their lesson that Peshawar should be the North West Frontier of their Raj.

For the Afghans the war changed their state for ever: on his return, Dost Mohammad inherited the reforms made by the British and these helped him consolidate an Afghanistan that was much more clearly defined than it was before the war. Indeed Shuja and most of his contemporaries never used the word ‘Afghanistan’ – for him, there was a Kingdom of Kabul which was the last surviving fragment of the Durrani Empire and which lay on the edge of a geographical space he described as Khurasan. Yet within a generation the phrase Afghanistan existed widely on maps both in and outside the country and the people within that space were beginning to describe themselves as Afghans. The return of Shah Shuja and the failed colonial expedition which was mounted to reinstate him finally destroyed the power of the Sadozai dynasty and ended the last memories of the Durrani Empire that they had founded. In this way the war did much to define the modern boundaries of the Afghan state, and consolidated once and for all the idea of a country called Afghanistan.

If the First Afghan War helped consolidate the Afghan State, the question now is whether the current western intervention will contribute to its demise. At the time of writing, western troops are again poised to leave Afghanistan in the hands of a weak Popalzai-run government. It is impossible to predict the fate of either that regime or the fractured and divided state of Afghanistan. But what Mirza ‘Ata wrote after 1842 remains equally true today: ‘It is certainly no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.’

Notes

List of Abbreviations

BL (British Library)

OIOC (Oriental and India Office Collections)

NAI (National Archives of India)