Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

by William Dalrymple

Soon the Embassy’s two-mile-long procession of horses, camels and elephants found itself in “sand-hills, rising one after another, like waves of the sea, and marked on the surface by the wind, like drifted snow … Off the road our horses sunk into the sand above the knees.”31 Two weeks’ hard trudge brought them through “a tract of more than ordinary desolation, until we discovered the walls and towers of Bikaner, a great and magnificent city in the midst of a wilderness.”

Here the valleys were as benign and inviting as the hills were wild. The Embassy passed along straight avenues of poplar and mulberry, criss-crossed by streams and bridged with arches of thin Mughal brickwork shaded with tamarisks. Occasionally they saw a hunting party, where the men had hawks on their fists and pointers at their heels, or groups of fowlers out to catch quails or partridges.

Peshawar was at that time “large, very populous and opulent.” It was the winter capital of Durrani Afghanistan as well as being a major centre of Pashtun culture.35 Within the last century it had been the base of the two greatest Pashtun poets, both of whom Elphinstone had read.

Rehman Baba was the great Sufi poet of the Pashtun language, the Rumi of the Frontier. “Sow flowers, so your surroundings become a garden,” he wrote. “Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet. We are all one body, Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

it was the more worldly Khushal Khan Khattak who appealed to Elphinstone’s Enlightenment heart. Khushal was a tribal leader who had revolted against the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb and eluded his armies as they chased him through the passes of the Hindu Kush. In his diary, Elphinsto...

Just as Elphinstone’s Scottish Enlightenment education determined the way he responded to Afghan poetry, so when the time finally came for his first audience with Shah Shuja, the Ambassador’s reading guided the way he perceived the Durrani monarch.

he imagined the Afghans to be like the wild Germanic tribes, while the “decadent Persians” were the soft and dissolute Romans. Yet when he was finally led in to see the Shah, Elphinstone was astonished by how different the cultured Shuja was from his expectations of a rough barbarian chief from the mountains:

Shuja was keen for an alliance with the Company, and was especially anxious for British assistance in protecting his lands which had been promised by Napoleon to the Persians. But he was distracted by the bad news arriving in Peshawar from all sides.

Shuja’s problems stemmed partly from his own declared intention to bring a new dignity to Afghan politics. In 1803, when he had first come to power and released Shah Zaman from imprisonment, he had disdained to exercise the customary punishment of blinding his defeated half-brother, Shah Mahmoud.

This policy backfired badly when in 1808 Shah Mahmoud managed to escape and join forces with Shuja’s greatest enemies, the rival Barakzai clan. The feud between the two clans, the Barakzais and the Sadozais, was already bitter and bloody, and was soon to cause a conflict that would ravage the whole country, dividing the tribes and providing a range of opportunities for the neighbouring powers to intervene.

Shah Zaman then made the mistake of murdering not just the Wazir to whom he owed his throne but all the ringleaders, most of whom were senior tribal elders. Shah Zaman compounded this by failing to secure any of the Wazir’s twenty-one sons.

it gradually became clear that the most determined and threatening of the Barakzai boys was a much younger brother by a Qizilbash wife, named Dost Mohammad Khan.

Dost Mohammad was only seven years old and working as the Wazir’s cupbearer when he saw his father executed in court, and the horror of the event seems to have marked him for life.

Good God

When Shah Shuja first came to power in 1803, he had gone out of his way to try and end the blood feud with the Barakzais and bring them back into the fold. The Barakzai brothers were forgiven and welcomed to court, while to seal the new alliance Shuja married their sister, Wa’fa Begum. At first all seemed well; but the Barakzais were merely waiting for their opportunity to avenge their father,

Shortly after Elphinstone’s Embassy arrived in Peshawar, Shah Mahmoud and the Barakzai rebels seized the southern Afghan capital of Kandahar. A month later, on 17 April 1809, just as Elphinstone and Shuja were finalising the wording of their treaty, the rebels captured Kabul itself. They then made preparations to attack Shah Shuja in Peshawar. The situation was made more critical by the fact that the bulk of Shuja’s army was away fighting another rebellion in Kashmir, and around the same time as the news came of the loss of Kabul, reports began to arrive that all was not well with the Kashmir campaign either:

He was astute enough to note that success in battle in Afghanistan was rarely decided by straightforward military victory so much as by successfully negotiating a path through the shifting patterns of tribal allegiances.

The British were beginning to understand that Afghanistan was no easy place to rule. In the last two millennia there had been only very brief moments of strong central control when the different tribes had acknowledged the authority of a single ruler, and still briefer moments of anything approaching a unified political system.

The tribes’ traditions were egalitarian and independent, and they had only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about co-operation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the Durrani shahs in faraway Kabul or Peshawar.

Elphinstone grasped this as he watched Shah Shuja’s rule disintegrate around him. “The internal government of the tribes answers its ends so well,” he wrote, “that the utmost disorders of the royal government never derange its operations, nor disturb the lives of its people.”50 No wonder that Afghans proudly thought of their mountains as Yaghistan—the Land of Rebellion.

the only way to keep open communication with the Mughals’ Central Asian homelands was for them to pay the tribes massive annual subsidies: during Aurangzeb’s rule 600,000 rupees a year was paid by the Mughal exchequer to Afghan tribal leaders to secure their loyalty, Rs 125,000 going to the Afridi tribe alone.

without a ruler with a full treasure chest, or the lure of plunder to cement the country’s different interest groups, Afghanistan almost always tended to fragment: its few moments of coherence were built on the successes of its armies, never of its administration.

Less than a week later, the British were camped on the left bank of the Indus, under the sheltering walls of Akbar’s great fort at Attock, when they saw a bedraggled royal caravan arrive on the north bank and hastily prepare to make the crossing. It was the blind Shah Zaman and Wa’fa Begum, leading the Sadozai harem to safety.

The news Shah Zaman brought with him could not have been worse. Shuja’s defeat had been absolute. His army had been advancing from Jalalabad towards Kabul and its vanguard had just reached the cypresses of the Mughal garden at Nimla when his forces had been ambushed while still strung out along the road. The rebels had ridden them down with their lances and their sharp Khyber knives, screaming and spearing and clubbing with the buttstocks of their muskets.

Then the riders dismounted to gut and desecrate the torsos of the fallen, and slice off their genitals to place in the corpses’ mouths. Within minutes, Shuja’s general was dead, and the new recruits had bolted.

What is left of Nadir Shah’s Mughal loot is still kept locked up in the vaults of Bank Meli in Teheran.

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.

After the defeat at Nimla, Shah Shuja experienced a prolonged period of humiliation and exile. His wanderings were made all the more perilous by the fact that he was carrying on his person the single most valuable jewel in the world.

Wa’fa Begum, meanwhile, was loyally working to get him out. After her husband’s defeat she had made her way to Lahore, where according to Sikh sources she independently took it upon herself to negotiate a deal with the Sikh Maharajah, Ranjit Singh, offering him the Koh-i-Nur if he helped release her husband from prison.

At the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Shuja was put in a cage, and, according to his own account, his eldest son, Prince Timur, was tortured in front of him until he agreed to part with his most valuable possession.

The Shah had honoured the agreement made by Wa’fa Begum, but at this point, having got what he wanted, Ranjit Singh reneged on his promise to release Shuja.

Shah Shuja was not, however, the sort of man who would tolerate being detained at someone else’s pleasure, and before long he had come up with an escape plan. His first action, as after his defeat, was to ensure the safety of his womenfolk, and before escaping himself he decided to smuggle his harem out of Lahore.

When Ranjit Singh heard that Wa’fa Begum and the other women had made their escape, “he bit the finger of astonishment with the teeth of regret” and increased the number of guards to 4,000, “infesting every alley in the city, guarding all gates, all the mansions, even kitchens and lavatories, and especially our sleeping quarters … The soldiers would heat up oil and threaten torture, saying: ‘Give us your jewels, or else you’ll feel the heat of this boiling oil!’

Aligning himself with Ranjit Singh’s enemies among the disaffected rajahs of the Punjab Hills, Shuja planned to gather a small army, make a surprise raid on Kashmir and seize the valley. It was a smart move, and could have provided a rich base from which to begin the reconquest of his lost throne—for, as William Fraser observed, Shuja was still “beloved as a sovereign for his mellowness, leniency and liberality.”

in the aftermath of Ranjit Singh’s raid to free Shuja, the Kashmir Valley was without a clear ruler and was disputed by several powers. But one thing Shah Shuja consistently lacked in his campaigning life was that quality which Napoleon famously remarked was most important for a general: luck.

The first disaster occurred when Shuja tried to get his finances in order and despatched a man to Lahore to bring the 150,000 rupees that he had deposited with the money-changers of the city. Ranjit Singh found out about the plan through his spies, intercepted the money and deposited it in his own treasury.

By the time the Shah had succeeded in raising sufficient money to finance an army against the jewels Wa’fa Begum had smuggled out to Ludhiana, then to recruit and train the mercenary force, the secret was out and the campaigning season was over.

In an attempt to reach the Kashmir Valley by an unexpected and unfortified route, he decided to take his troops across the heights of the Pir Panjal. Here, on a bleak ridge high above the dark spires of the deodar forests, only a few days’ march from Srinagar, the force was caught in a blizzard.

In 1816, Ludhiana was the British garrison town on the Company’s North West Frontier. From the flagpole of its Residency flew the last Union Jack between the Company’s Indian possessions and the British Embassy in St. Petersburg.

Before Shah Shuja’s arrival, Ludhiana was known mainly as a centre of the flesh trade, through which girls from the Punjab Hill States and Kashmir—considered the fairest and most beautiful in the region—passed into slavery in the Sikh-controlled Punjab and Hindustan.16 Shah Shuja’s arrival with his court-in-exile began its transformation from a centre of slave dealing into a major hub of political intrigue and espionage.

The Boston-born, hookah-smoking, pyjama-wearing Sir David Ochterlony was the first British Agent in Ludhiana. From there he had established the Company’s exact frontiers with Ranjit Singh. These were guarded by a regiment of Irregular Horse belonging to Ochterlony’s friend James Skinner, the dashing Rajput-Scottish warlord.

With their scarlet turbans, silver-edged girdles, black shields and bright yellow tunics, Skinner’s men were, according to one contemporary observer, “the most showy and picturesque cavaliers I have ever seen.”

Ochterlony was having none of it. He knew from personal experience what it was like to be a defeated refugee: his father was a Highland Scot who had settled in Massachusetts and fought as a Loyalist during the American Revolution.

Ochterlony also knew better than most of his contemporaries the etiquette concerning the protection of Muslim women: according to Delhi gossip, he had no fewer than thirteen Indian wives and every evening during his years in Delhi was said to have taken all thirteen on a promenade between the walls of the Red Fort and the river bank, each wife on her own elephant.

A foreigner, a stranger, and a woman of high birth is in misery, and has thrown herself on the protection of a government famed for its humanity and generosity.

You know you represent Britain right

Within a few months, however, once news of her reception had spread, the number of the Begum’s dependants had increased to ninety-six, and she moved to a semi-ruinous haveli that Ochterlony found for her. As she had no means of support, Ochterlony initially paid the Begum’s bills from his own pocket. Later, he managed to secure her a small annuity from the government.

Seven years of defeat, betrayal, humiliation, torture and imprisonment had taken their toll, and it was clear that Shuja had become damaged, difficult and depressive. He was also almost pathologically determined to ensure that the façade of his royal status should be maintained despite the reality that he was now no more than what Ochterlony called “an illustrious fugitive”—a refugee dependent on the charity of his former allies.

Like the last Mughals, having lost an empire, his court became the focus of his ambitions, and the more powerless he became the more he insisted on public acknowledgement of his royal status.

The Shah had many faults, but lack of energy or an excess of self-doubt were never among them. Undeterred by his defeats, from the first months of his enforced exile he began to make plans to raise another army to retake his throne, “dreaming sweet dreams of re-conquering the Kingdom of Khurasan.”

Nonetheless, only a year after his arrival, concrete plans were in place, and anxious reports began to reach Calcutta about the number of cavalrymen descending on Ludhiana to seek service with the Shah. The government sent back pleas to Ochterlony that “His Majesty should be induced to continue to reside calmly at Ludhiana with his family on the provision assigned to him.”29 But it was clear to everyone that this was never going to happen.

He quickly raised a body of troops, then marched northwards and within weeks had managed to recapture his old base of Peshawar. His triumph was, however, short-lived. Shuja’s haughty manner and insistence on the old forms of court etiquette alienated the tribal leaders of the area, so that before long “the premature exhibition of his exalted notions of regal dignity led to a battle between him and his inviters.”