Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (94 page)
Read Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan Online
Authors: William Dalrymple
| 140 | Noelle, State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan , p. 57. |
| 141 | Fayz Mohammad, Siraj ul-Tawarikh , vol. I, p. 198. See also NAI, Foreign, Secret Consultations, 23 March 1843, no. 531, From Colonel Richmond, Agent of the Governor General in the North West Frontier, Ludhiana, 27 November 1843. |
| 142 | Mackenzie, Storms and Sunshine , vol. II, p. 33. |
| 143 | BL, OIOC, ESL no. 20 of 3 March 1847 (IOR L/PS/5/190), Lawrence to Curvie, 29 February 1847. |
| 144 | Mackenzie, Storms and Sunshine , vol. II, p. 23. |
| 145 | Ibid., p. 32. |
| 146 | Fayz Mohammad, Siraj ul-Tawarikh , vol. I, p. 297. |
| 147 | NAI, Foreign, Secret Consultations, 23 March 1844, no. 531, From Colonel Richmond, Agent of the Governor General in the North West Frontier, Ludhiana, 27 November 1843. |
| 148 | Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History , p. 127. |
| 149 | The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861 , ed. Arthur C. Benson and Viscount Esher, vol. II: 1844–1853 , London, 1908. |
| 150 | James Howard Harris Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister: An Autobiography , London, 2006, vol. I, entry for 6 June 1844, pp. 289–90. |
| 151 | Quoted by Figes, Crimea , p. 68. |
| 152 | Ibid., pp. 61–70. |
| 153 | I’d like to thank Michael Semple for pointing this out ot me. |
Author’s Note
| 1 | Gleig, Sale’s Brigade in Afghanistan , p. 182. |
| 2 | J. A. Norris, The First Afghan War 1838–1842 , Cambridge, 1967, p. 161. |
| 3 | Sherard Cowper-Coles, Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign , London, 2011, p. 289–90. |
| 4 | BL, Broughton Papers, Add Mss 36474, Wade to the Governor General,31 January 1839. |
| 5 | The one striking exception to this is Christine Noelle’s remarkable State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan (1826–1863) , London, 1997, but its treatment of the First Afghan War is very brief and she has accessed only a small number of the available Dari sources for the period. |
| 6 | Munshi Abdul Karim, Muharaba Kabul wa Kandahar , Kanpur, 1851, Introduction. |
| 7 | In his Chants Populaires des Afghans , Paris, 1888–90, p. 201, James Darmesteter mentions a whole body of song and poetry about the war, and adds that Muhammad Hayat sent him a collection from the war, but that it hadn’t arrived by the time of publication. |
| 8 | Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, Akbarnama. Asar-i manzum-i Hamid-i Kashmiri , written c.1844, published Kabul, 1330 AH/1951, preface by Ahmad-Ali Kohzad, ch. 34. |
| 9 | Muhammad Asef Fekrat Riyazi Herawi, ‘Ayn al-Waqayi: Tarikh-i Afghanistan , written c.1845, pub. Tehran 1369/1990; Sultan Mohammad Khan ibn Musa Khan Durrani, Tarikh-i-Sultani , began writing on 1 Ramzan 1281 AH (Sunday 29 January 1865) and published first on 14 Shawwal 1298 AH (Friday 8 September 1881), Bombay; Fayz Mohammad, Siraj ul-Tawarikh , pub. Kabul, 1913, trans. R. D. McChesney (forthcoming). |
| 10 | Muhammad Hasan Amini, Paadash-e-Khidmatguzaari-ye-Saadiqaane Ghazi Nayab Aminullah Khan Logari (The Letters of Ghazi Aminullah Khan Logari), Kabul, 2010. |
| 11 | Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad, Naway Ma’arek (The Song of Battles), pub. as Nawa-yi ma’arik. Nuskha-i khatt-i Muza-i Kabul mushtamal bar waqi‘at-i ‘asr-i Sadoza’i u Barakza’i, ta’lif-i Mirza Mirza ‘Ata’-Muhammad , Kabul, 1331 AH/1952. |
| 12 | Shah Shuja ul-Mulk, Waqi’at-i-Shah Shuja (Memoirs of Shah Shuja) written in 1836, supplement by Mohammad Husain Herati 1861, published as Waqi’at-i Shah-Shuja. Daftar-i avval, duvvum: az Shah-Shuja. Daftar-i sivvum: az Muhammad-Husain Harati , Kabul, 1333 AH/1954 ( Nashrat-i Anjuman-i tarikh-i Afghanistan , No. 29) [pub. after the text of the Kabul manuscript, without notes or index, with a preface by Ahmad-‘Ali Kohzad]. |
| 13 | Robert Burns, ‘To a Louse’, The Collected Poems , London, 1994. |
| 14 | Kashmiri, Akbarnama , ch. 10. |
| 15 | Ibid., ch. 32. |
a
In Napoleon’s luggage, captured on the retreat from Moscow, was found a portfolio full of ‘the reports, maps, and routes, drawn up by General Gardane at the request of the Emperor’, for the invasion of India which he was still planning to pull off after the subjection of Russia. NAI, Foreign, Secret Consultations, 19 August 1825, nos 3–4.
b
What is left of Nadir Shah’s Mughal loot is still kept locked up in the vaults of Bank Meli in Teheran. This includes the ‘sister’ of the Koh-i-Nur, the Dariya Nur, or Ocean of Light.
c
The same was often true in India: Clive’s ‘victories’ at Plassey and Buxar were actually more like successful negotiations between British bankers and Indian power brokers than the triumphs of arms and valour that imperial propaganda later made them out to be.
d
The British later learned to follow the Mughal model. According to a piece of imperial doggerel it became British policy to ‘Thrash the Sindhis, make friends with the Baluch, but pay the Pathans.’
e
Mubarak Haveli still survives in Lahore’s old city, a five-minute walk from the Punjab Archives in Anarkali where much of the research for this book was done. The haveli [courtyard house] is still as it was in Shah Shuja’s day, with a succession of courtyards giving on to living quarters reached through wooden fretwork lattices and carved balconies. After the First Afghan War it was given by the British to exiled Qizilbash leaders from Kabul and it remains a centre of Shia activity today, with its own ashurkhana in the furthest courtyard. When I was last there a bomb went off outside the haveli as a Shia Muharram procession left the building, and the area now has a strong police presence.
f
Mubarak Haveli has a large underground cool room, or tykhana, which apparently dates from this period. Its existence must have made the breakout much more feasible than it at first appears.
g
The Afghan war artist James Rattray claims in the notes to his celebrated Afghan lithographs that it was Wa’fa Begum, not Shuja, who organised his escape (as well as her own), and he calls her conduct ‘an example of coolness and intrepidity’. It seems unlikely that even Wa’fa Begum could have organised the tunnelling and boatmen from across the Company border in Ludhiana, but it is a measure of the extent to which the legend of Wa’fa’s abilities had flourished that Rattray was told this thirty years later, long after her death. See James Rattray,
The costumes of the Various Tribes, Portraits of Ladies of Rank, Celebrated Princes and Chiefs, Views of the Principal Fortresses and Cities, and Interior of the Cities and Temples of Afghaunistaun,
London, 1848, p. 29.
h
The Shikarpuri Sindhi money-lending community had long specialised in financing wars and dealing in arms, and the tradition continues to this day: the most notable Shikarpuris in this business today are the Hinduja brothers, who, among many other such deals, were allegedly involved in the controversial sale of the Bofors guns to Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the 1980s.
i
In the 1820s the East India Company spent a massive Rs 5,000 in buying the journal of one of these officers, General Claude August Court, in which he described his overland journey through Afghanistan.
j
It is a book written by James Burnes,
A Sketch of the History of the Knight’s Templars
(1840), that first links the Freemasons to the Templars and Roslyn Chapel near Edinburgh. It is the ultimate progenitor of a wash of popular nonsense like
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
and
The Da Vinci Code
.
k
For more on Henry Russell, see my
White Mughals
(London, 2002).
l
The same title was later taken by Mullah Omar of the Taliban who in 1996 looked explicitly to the example of Dost Mohammad for inspiration for the founding of the Taliban Islamic Amirate of Afghanistan.
m
The hunky male eighteen-year-old Chippendales of Islamic heaven, counterparts to the supermodel houris.
n
The selective editing of Burnes’s despatches for the Blue Book in order to win Parliamentary approval for the war later became a major scandal, the ‘dodgy dossier’ of its day. See G. R. Alder, ‘The Garbled Blue Books of 1839’,
Historical Journal
, vol. XV, no. 2 (1972), pp. 229–59.
o
Home of the future Bhutto dynasty.
p
This at least is what Nesselrode told Palmerston. In reality it is clear that Simonitch was ready to rejoin the beautiful Princess Orbeliani and their ten children in Tiflis. Since the murder of Griboyedov, a previous Russian envoy to Iran, the Teheran Legation had been considered unsafe for spouses or children, much like the British and American embassies in modern Pakistan. After Simonitch’s return to Georgia, his successor Duhamel initially took a similar diplomatic line to Simonitch.
q
This has become a famous line and is widely remembered even today. In 2003 it was repeated to me by Javed Paracha, a wily Pashtun lawyer who has successfully defended al-Qaeda suspects in the Peshawar High Court. In his fortress-like stronghouse in Kohat, deep in the lawless tribal belt that acts as a buffer between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Paracha had sheltered wounded Taliban fighters – and their frost-bitten women and children – fleeing across the mountains from the American daisy-cutters at Tora Bora, and was twice imprisoned in the notorious prison at Dera Ismail Khan. There he was kept in solitary while being questioned – and he alleges tortured – by CIA interrogators. Despite seeing at close quarters what modern western weaponry was capable of, he knew his history, and never believed NATO would succeed in its occupation of Afghanistan. When I went to interview him in Kohat soon after the installation of President Karzai he quoted Mehrab Khan’s line to me as evidence of the futility of the attempt to install another Popalzai in power.