The return of a king The battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

Review by Choice Review

While the war in Afghanistan has created a cottage industry of history books on Afghanistan, few have said anything new about Afghanistan's history. Dalrymple's book is an exception. Using previously unused and often unavailable letters, diaries, and official records, Dalrymple's account of the First Anglo-Afghan War is every bit as exciting and detailed as the previous standard, Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game (1992), but broader and more nuanced. Furthermore, it is unquestionably less Anglocentric, as Dalrymple uses a number of Persian and Pashtu sources from Afghanistan. This is possibly the first time many have been used in translation. Although his quoting Persian poetry does get wearisome at times, Dalrymple's use of the primary sources is executed quite effectively. With these, readers get not only the Afghan perspective of the war, but also a much richer portrayal of the historical Shah Shuja than the popular image, which in modern Afghanistan is the poster boy for "foreign puppet." The historical Shuja, as with all figures, is much more complex and, indeed, the only one in Kabul associated with the British who attempted to do anything effectively. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. T. M. May University of North Georgia

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

BY THE END of the 19th century, almost all the major surviving classics of Greek and Roman literature had been translated into English. Since then a few new gems have turned up, mainly from papyri found in the rubbish dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. Here was found, for example, a tattered verse by Sappho and Pindar's paeans to Apollo. It is unlikely, however, that many more great works of classical European literature will surface; the canon of ancient European literature we have now is likely to remain largely unchanged a century hence. It is often assumed that the same is true for the other great classical literatures of the world, but this is very far from the case. In particular, the rich treasures of ancient Indian literature remain almost completely unexplored, even to those few who can read languages such as Sanskrit or classical Tamil. For there survives in manuscript form in libraries across South Asia a corpus of literature which is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek. Only a very small proportion of these manuscripts have even been cataloged, never mind translated - estimates range from 5 to 7 percent of the total, maybe 500,000 manuscripts of a surviving seven million; but there are really no accurate figures. The scholar David Pingree put the actual number closer to 30 million manuscripts. And such is the scale of the haul, and the poor state of their preservation, that several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts are destroyed or become illegible every week, their contents lost forever. Who knows what masterpieces of prose and poetry, what epics and chronicles, what vital works of sacred and secular literature could be disappearing every year? If the project of conserving and cataloging the ocean of ancient Indian literature has a long way to go, then the business of translation has barely begun. Faced with the vast seas to be explored, the small band of professional translators of Sanskrit tend to feel like infants paddling on the foreshore of the Atlantic, looking wistfully, but impotently, out to the depths of the turbulent sea. There are historical reasons for this neglect. Sanskrit eventually became an exclusively sacred language, the preserve of the Brahmins, and in the ancient Laws of Manu, any Dalit (untouchable) who attempted to learn it was sentenced to have molten lead poured into his ears. Partly as a result of this, before the arrival of the pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones in Calcutta in 1783, there was almost complete ignorance in Europe about India's classical literature. There began a stumbling progress that led to the translation of passages from the most prominent ancient Indian writers: Vyasa, to whom is attributed the Mahabharata; Valmiki, author of the Ramayana; and the greatest of ancient Indian playwrights, Kalidasa, who is to Sanskrit what Shakespeare is to English. Jones himself believed that Sanskrit was "more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either." Yet within 50 years, the same East India Company that had sent Jones out to India had lost interest in learning from Indian literature. By 1835, the high tide of Victorian self-confidence and narrow-mindedness, Lord Macaulay would write in his notorious Minute on Indian Education that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." Both Sanskrit and Persian were removed from the curriculum, and English was made the language of both education and government. Macaulay's successors, colonial and post-colonial, have done remarkably little to reverse this situation. HENCE THE GREAT importance of a 2,000-page brick of a book entitled "The Norton Anthology of World Religions." Volume I contains a generously wide-ranging collection of the key texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as largely forgotten Daoist Chinese writings from the further side of the Himalayas. It is a major project. Under the direction of Jack Miles, the Pulitzer-winning author of "God: A Biography," the anthology is intended as a "landmark work in which the six major, living, international world religions speak to readers in their own words" and which will make available in English more than 1,000 primary texts from the world's major religions. The two volumes of the anthology bring together both the basic foundational works - the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing, the Bible, the Quran - as well as a notably eccentric collection of other texts from sages, mystics, commentators, scholars and skeptics that put them in some sort of context. As with any anthology, there are all sorts of aspects of the selection with which one could quibble, quite apart from the unwieldy weight of this concrete slab, which means it can only really be read resting on a lectern or a desk. Given that some 1,400 pages of this monster are devoted to Indic religious literature, it might have made far more sense to finish off the volume with the texts of other related Indian religious traditions such as Sikhism and Jainism, both of which are mysteriously absent, rather than trying to squeeze in an isolated slice of Chinese religious and philosophical literature. Moreover, the choice of texts is spiritedly unconventional: Among the canonical texts of Hinduism, and well-translated extracts from the Vedas, Puranas and Tantras, the editors have found a place for a short extract from Salman Rushdie's pathbreaking novel "Midnight's Children"; among those of Daoism, passages from Tennyson, Oscar Wilde and Carl Jung. Perhaps most surprising of all, ancient canonical Buddhist texts such as the Jataka stories and the Lotus Sutra are supplemented with an extract from Gary Snyder's 1960s "Smokey the Bear Sutra": "Those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada." Yet for all its oddities and omissions, this book brings into readily accessible form a larger and more dazzling selection of translations of sacred literature from ancient India than is currently available from any other single source - while being also probably the best repository of translations in English of the Daoist religious literature of ancient China. Difficult to hold, and almost impossible to read cover to cover, this remains nonetheless a major landmark of religious publishing and one to be warmly welcomed. Everyone will find her own favorite extract, but I for one was most charmed by some superb translations of little known medieval literature in Telugu. As with much Indian religious poetry, the author, Annamayya, a devotional poet writing in 15th-century southern India, slides deliciously from the sacred to the sensuous and back again: What appears at first to be a secular love poem is revealed to be also a cry of longing addressed to an incarnation of Vishnu, Lord Venkateswara of Tirupathi: What use is ecstasy without the agony of separation? Shade is nothing without the burning sun. What is patience without the fury of passion? Why make anything - love or poetry - if two can't be one? WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'S most recent book is "Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* The British humiliation in the so-called First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42) has long been viewed by historians as a classic example of imperial overreach. Still, it is a saga that makes for marvelous storytelling, filled with heroes, knaves, incompetent fools, and savage, bloodthirsty warriors. It has been told often before but perhaps never so well as by Dalrymple, a historian and travel writer. He places British intervention within the context of the Great Game rivalry with the Russian Empire over influence in central Asia. When the British favorite in Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, was driven into exile, British officials in India feared enhanced Russian influence there and decided to reinstall him at the point of a gun. What followed was a mixture of farce, tragedy, and horror. The British army occupying Kabul was surrounded by a hostile and harrying population. When forced to retreat back to India through unforgiving terrain, thousands of soldiers and camp followers died from cold, hunger, or constant attacks by merciless mounted Afghans. Dalrymple doesn't shrink from drawing the obvious parallel with the current American intervention. That may, or may not, be facile, but this is an absorbing and beautifully written account of a doomed effort to control an apparently uncontrollable population.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An intensively focused study of the ill-begotten launch of the Great Game in Afghanistan. Who would gain control of the portal to India: Britain, France, Russia, the Sikhs or the Afghan tribes themselves? And was there really cause for alarm at imperialist advances or a "dysfunctional" intelligence gathering by both the British and Russians? In his exciting, exhaustive study, British historian Dalrymple (The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, 2007, etc.) sheds light on the enormously convoluted rationale for the First Anglo-Afghan War, ostensibly provoked by Britain in order to reinstall the compliant Shah Shuja ul Mulk (chief of the Sadozai clan) to power in Afghanistan over Dost Mohammad Khan (chief of the Barakzais), who supposedly favored the Russians. In truth, the war exposed the greediness and ignorance of all sides: protecting the interests of the East India Company and catering to the competing ambitions of major players like Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, Polish agent Ivan Vitkevitch, William Hay Macnaghten and Scottish agent Alexander Burnes. The British garrison was soon outnumbered 10-1 by the rebel forces of Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammad's able, ferocious son; forced to surrender and retreat in ignominy back to India, the British left Shuja to fall to Dost's assassins in April 1842 and gained virtually nothing save a more defined border. Dalrymple sagely points out that while the Afghans learned a valuable lesson from this early conflict, namely a firm rejection of foreign rule and a sense of nationalist integrity, the Western powers did not and, indeed, still perpetuate a policy of folly and waste. A rich excavation of both British and Afghan sources, with gorgeous colored reproductions of Muslim and romantic renderings of the action and characters.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpted from the hardcover edition. 1 No Easy Place to Rule The year 1809 opened auspiciously for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of the icy landscape long clotted with drifts of waist-high snow. Now the small, sweet-smelling Istalif irises were pushing their way through the frozen ground, the frosted rime on the trunks of the deodars was running to snowmelt, and the Ghilzai nomads were unlatching their fat-tailed sheep from the winter pens, breaking down their goat-hair tents and readying the flocks for the first of the spring migrations to the new grass of the high pastures. It was just then, at that moment of thaw and sap, that Shah Shuja received two pieces of good news--something of a rarity in his troubled reign.1 The first concerned the recovery of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had been made to find it. Shah Zaman, Shuja's elder brother and predecessor on the throne of Afghanistan, was said to have hidden the gem shortly before being captured and blinded by his enemies. A huge Indian ruby known as the Fakhraj, the family's other most precious gem, had also disappeared at the same time. So Shah Shuja summoned his blind brother and questioned him on the whereabouts of their father's most famous jewels: was it really true that he knew where they were hidden? Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being taken prisoner. Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court historian later recorded, "Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts. They found the Koh-i-Nur with a Shinwari sheikh who in his ignorance was using it as a paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj, they found it with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream to wash his clothes. They impounded both gems and brought them back in the king's service."2 The second piece of news, about the arrival of an embassy from a previously hostile neighbour, was potentially of more practical use to the Shah. At the age of only twenty-four, Shuja was now in the seventh year of his reign. By temperament a reader and a thinker, more interested in poetry and scholarship than in warfare or campaigning, it was his fate to have inherited, while still an adolescent, the far-flung Durrani Empire. That empire, founded by his grandfather Ahmad Shah Abdali, had been built out of the collapse of three other Asian empires: the Uzbeks to the north, the Mughals to the south and to the west the Safavids of Persia. It had originally extended from Nishapur in modern Iran through Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab and Sindh to Kashmir and the threshold of Mughal Delhi. But now, only thirty years after his grandfather's death, the Durrani Empire was itself already well on its way to disintegration. There was, in fact, nothing very surprising about this. Considering its very ancient history, Afghanistan--or Khurasan, as the Afghans have called the lands of this region for the two last millennia--had had but a few hours of political or administrative unity.3 Far more often it had been "the places in between"--the fractured and disputed stretch of mountains, floodplains and deserts separating its more orderly neighbours. At other times its provinces formed the warring extremities of rival, clashing empires. Only very rarely did its parts happen to come together to attain any sort of coherent state in its own right. Everything had always conspired against its rise: the geography and topography and especially the great stony skeleton of the Hindu Kush, the black rubble of its scalloped and riven slopes standing out against the ice-etched, snow-topped ranges which divided up the country like the bones of a massive rocky ribcage. Then there were the different tribal, ethnic and linguistic fissures fragmenting Afghan society: the rivalry between the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism within clans and tribes, and especially the blood feuds within closely related lineages. These blood feuds rolled malevolently down from generation to generation, symbols of the impotence of state-run systems of justice. In many places blood feuds became almost a national pastime--the Afghan equivalent of county cricket in the English shires--and the killings they engendered were often on a spectacular scale. Under the guise of reconciliation, one of Shah Shuja's chiefs invited some sixty of his feuding cousins "to dine with him," wrote one observer, "having previously laid bags of gunpowder under the apartment. During the meal, having gone out on some pretext, he blew them all up." A country like this could be governed only with skill, strategy and a full treasure chest. So when at the beginning of 1809 messengers arrived from the Punjab bearing news of an East India Company Embassy heading north from Delhi seeking an urgent alliance with him, Shah Shuja had good reason to be pleased. In the past the Company had been a major problem for the Durranis, for its well-disciplined sepoy armies had made impossible the lucrative raids down onto the plains of Hindustan which for centuries had been a principal source of Afghan income. Now it seemed that the Company wished to woo the Afghans; the Shah's newswriters wrote to him that the Embassy had already crossed the Indus, en route to his winter capital of Peshawar. This not only offered some respite from the usual round of sieges, arrests and punitive expeditions, it potentially provided Shuja with a powerful ally--something he badly needed. There had never been a British Embassy to Afghanistan before, and the two peoples were almost unknown to each other, so the Embassy had the additional benefit of novelty. "We appointed servants of the royal court known for their refinement and good manners to go to meet them," wrote Shah Shuja in his memoirs, "and ordered them to take charge of hospitality, and to treat them judiciously, with caution and politeness."4 Reports reaching Shah Shuja indicated that the British were coming laden with gifts: "elephants with golden howdahs, a palanquin with a high parasol, gold-inlaid guns and ingenious pistols with six chambers, never seen before; expensive clocks, binoculars, fine mirrors capable of reflecting the world as it is; diamond studded lamps, porcelain vases and utensils with gold embedded work from Rome and China; tree-shaped candelabra, and other such beautiful and expensive gifts whose brilliance the imagination falls short in describing."5 Years later Shuja remembered one present that particularly delighted him: "a large box producing noises like voices, strange sounds in a range of timbres, harmonies and melodies, most pleasing to the ear."6 The Embassy had brought Afghanistan its first organ. Shah Shuja's autobiography is silent as to whether he suspected these British bearing gifts. But by the time he came to write it in late middle age, he was well aware that the alliance he was about to negotiate would change the course of his own life, and that of Afghanistan, for ever. The real reason behind the despatch of this first British Embassy to Afghanistan lay far from both India and the passes of the Hindu Kush. Its origins had nothing to do with Shah Shuja, the Durrani Empire or even the intricate princely politics of Hindustan. Instead its causes could be traced to north-eastern Prussia, and a raft floating in the middle of the River Neman. Here, eighteen months earlier, Napoleon, at the very peak of his power, had met the Russian Emperor, Alexander II, to negotiate a peace treaty. The meeting followed the Russian defeat at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807, when Napoleon's artillery had left 25,000 Russians dead on the battlefield. It was a severe loss, but the Russians had been able to withdraw to their frontier in good order. Now the two armies faced each other across the meandering oxbows of the Neman, with the Russian forces reinforced by two new divisions, and a further 200,000 militiamen waiting nearby on the shores of the Baltic. The stalemate was broken when the Russians were informed that Napoleon wished not only for peace, but for an alliance. On 7 July, on a raft surmounted by a white classical pavilion emblazoned with a large monogrammed N, the two emperors met in person to negotiate a treaty later known as the Peace of Tilsit.7 Most of the clauses in the treaty concerned the question of war and peace--not for nothing was the first volume of Tolstoy's great novel named Before Tilsit. Much of the discussion concerned the fate of French-occupied Europe, especially the future of Prussia whose king, excluded from the meeting, paced anxiously up and down the river bank waiting to discover if he would still have a kingdom after the conclave concluded. But amid all the public articles of the treaty, Napoleon included several secret clauses that were not disclosed at the time. These laid the foundations for a joint Franco-Russian attack on what Napoleon saw as the source of Britain's wealth. This, of course, was his enemy's richest possession, India. The seizure of India as a means of impoverishing Britain and breaking its growing economic power had been a long-standing obsession of Napoleon's, as of several previous French strategists. Almost exactly nine years earlier, on 1 July 1798, Napoleon had landed his troops at Alexandria and struck inland for Cairo. "Through Egypt we shall invade India," he wrote. "We shall re-establish the old route through Suez." From Cairo he sent a letter to Tipu Sultan of Mysore, answering the latter's pleas for help against the English: "You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an invincible army, full of the desire of releasing you from the iron yoke of England. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!"8 At the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, however, Admiral Nelson sank almost the entire French fleet, wrecking Napoleon's initial plan to use Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. This forced him to change his strategy; but he never veered from his aim of weakening Britain by seizing what he believed to be the source of its economic power, much as Latin America with its Inca and Aztec gold had once been that of Spain. So Napoleon now hatched plans to attack India through Persia and Afghanistan. A treaty with the Persian Ambassador had already been concluded: "Should it be the intention of HM the Emperor of the French to send an army by land to attack the English possessions in India," it stated, "HM the Emperor of Persia, as his good and faithful ally, will grant him passage." At Tilsit, the secret clauses spelled out the plan in full: Napoleon would emulate Alexander the Great and march 50,000 French troops of the Grande Armée across Persia to invade India, while Russia would head south through Afghanistan. General Gardane was despatched to Persia to liaise with the Shah and find out which ports could provide anchorage, water and supplies for 20,000 men, and to draw up maps of possible invasion routes. Meanwhile, General Caulaincourt, Napoleon's Ambassador to St. Petersburg, was instructed to take the idea forward with the Russians. "The more fanciful it sounds," wrote the Emperor, "the more the attempt to do it (and what can France and Russia not do?) would frighten the English; striking terror into English India, spreading confusion in London; and, to be sure, forty thousand Frenchmen to whom Persia will have granted passage by way of Constantinople, joining forty thousand Russians who arrive by way of the Caucasus, would be enough to terrify Asia, and make its conquest."9 But the British were not caught unawares. The secret service had hidden one of their informers, a disillusioned Russian aristocrat, beneath the barge, his ankles dangling in the river. Braving the cold, he was able to hear every word and sent an immediate express, containing the outlines of the plan, to London. It took British intelligence only a further six weeks to obtain the exact wording of the secret clauses, and these were promptly forwarded to India. With them went instructions for the Governor General, Lord Minto, to warn all the countries lying between India and Persia of the dangers in which they stood, and to negotiate alliances with them to oppose any French or Franco-Russian expedition against India. The different embassies were also instructed to collect strategic information and intelligence, so filling in the blank spaces on British maps of these regions. Meanwhile, reinforcements would be held in readiness in England for despatch to India should there be signs of an expedition being ready to sail from the French ports.10 Lord Minto did not regard Napoleon's plan as fanciful. A French invasion of India through Persia was not "beyond the scope of that energy and perseverance which distinguish the present ruler of France," he wrote as he finalised plans to counter the "very active French diplomacy in Persia, which is seeking with great diligence the means of extending its intrigues to the Durbars of Hindustan."11 In the end Minto opted for four separate embassies, each of which would be sent with lavish presents in order to warn and win over the powers that stood in the way of Napoleon's armies. One was sent to Teheran in an effort to impress upon Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar of Persia the perfidiousness of his new French ally. Another was despatched to Lahore to make an alliance with Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs. A third was despatched to the Amirs of Sindh. The job of wooing Shah Shuja and his Afghans fell to a rising young star in the Company's service, Mountstuart Elphinstone. Elphinstone was a Lowland Scot, who in his youth had been a notable Francophile. He had grown up alongside French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle, of which his father was governor, and there he had learned their revolutionary songs and had grown his curly golden hair down his back in the Jacobin style to show his sympathy with their ideals.12 Sent off to India at the unusually young age of fourteen to keep him out of trouble, he had learned good Persian, Sanskrit and Hindustani, and soon turned into an ambitious diplomat and a voracious historian and scholar. Excerpted from The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 by William Dalrymple All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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