Falsehood mixed with good advice

Surveying a ‘blank’ space

Rudyard Kipling published his short story, ‘The Man Who Would be King’, in December 1888, capping a year of immense creative productivity.Footnote ² A few pages into the story, when the characters Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot enter the narrator's newspaper office, these two ‘loafers’ come demanding not money, but access to books. The narratorFootnote ³ retrieves a small collection of atlases, encyclopaedia articles, grammars, and travelogues describing, through often unreliable and second-hand sources,Footnote ⁴ a little-studied and isolated region of Afghanistan then known as Kāfiristān (literally, ‘land of the infidel’):

John Huston adapted Kipling's account for his 1975 film of the same title, having bought the film rights some 20 years earlier. In his memoirs, he professed a deep and long-standing fascination with Kipling's use of language, claiming as a child to have ‘studied a Kipling glossary instead of algebra’.Footnote ⁶ Huston had initially intended to cast Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable—or even, according to other accounts, Richard Burton and Peter O’TooleFootnote ⁷ —as Dravot and Carnehan, but was prevented from doing so by their untimely deaths. Later, in 1973, he considered Paul Newman and Robert Redford for the roles that Sean Connery and Michael Caine would ultimately take.Footnote ⁸ Although Huston would heed Newman's advice and use British actors instead of Americans, to have cast Americans for the parts would not have been as infelicitous as it might otherwise appear: Kipling's ‘original’ story, though set in the 1880s, was itself a reimagined telling of an account published in 1842 by an American, Josiah Harlan, who adventured in Afghanistan well before the first forays of the British Army into the country.Footnote ⁹ Harlan, ‘a Pennsylvania-born Quaker and Freemason [who] slipped into Kabul disguised “as a dervish” in 1824’, went on to lead a remarkable life, having ‘trained an army for the amir of Kabul, crossed the Hindu Kush, and proclaimed himself king of the mountains’.Footnote ¹⁰

These connections demonstrate the persistence of Afghanistan as what Richard Slotkin once described as a ‘mythic space’ instantly identifiable to the English-language reader and viewer of these creative productions. Afghanistan served, and, it may be argued, continues to serve, as one of the most compelling cinematic and literary ‘mythic spaces’ available to English speakers, functioning as a topographical stage ‘as recognizable and as dense with memory and meaning as the streets we grew up on’. And yet, for all its familiarity as a mythic space, Afghanistan—then and now—is among what Slotkin calls the ‘never-never lands . . . whose special rules and meanings and teleology have more to do with genre conventions, myths, and ideologies than with historical representation’. Slotkin argues that the cultural persistence and pervasiveness of mythic spaces is due in greater part to the success of particular genres than that of individual works. He writes, ‘When we are presented with images of that space, we recognize it as the site of a certain set of possible adventures, engaging a characteristic set of issues and a relatively predictable cast of characters.’Footnote ¹¹ In George Steiner's formulation, a successful interpretation of the ‘radically alien’—such as that which confronted the British in Afghanistan—must not innovate so much as reinforce more proximate traditions of translation to which it is adjoined.Footnote ¹² How then are we to evaluate Steiner's thesis that ‘the more remote the linguistic-cultural source, the easier it is to achieve a summary penetration and a transfer of stylized, codified markers’? And what happens, as was the case in Afghanistan between 1837 and 1843, when one culture—the British—finds itself unable to engage with a ‘radically alien’ culture except through the intermediation of other, perhaps less radically alien, cultures?

The British pursuit of Persian

The origins of this Afghan ‘mythic space’ in the English-speaking world may be located in early British engagements with certain non-English texts, including accounts of the campaigns of Alexander of Macedonia in Central Asia and works of the classical Persian literary canon. These texts provided strong anticipatory frameworks for the first British encounter en masse with Afghanistan from 1837 to 1842. Having routed the forces of and exiled the Afghan amir, Shāh Dost Muḥammad Ḳhān (1793–1863), during their initial invasion of the kingdom in 1837, the leaders of the British occupational forces would go on to make a number of poor decisions leading to their disastrous withdrawal from Kabul to Jalalabad in the winter of 1842. Most notorious of all was the slaughter and capture of thousands from the retreating column at the Khoord Kabul Pass on 8 January 1842. For nearly half a decade, however, these British troops (amounting to several thousand), and many more Indian soldiers and camp followers, lived in close quarters with Afghans in the capital, Kabul, and its environs.

The socio-linguistic scene in which the English were to take part upon their arrival in Afghanistan must have appeared even more challenging than that they had already experienced in the Indo-Gangetic plains and Punjab. Persian had served for centuries throughout much of the eastern Islamic world as a link language, and, especially in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions, as the pre-eminent classical language of literature and statecraft.Footnote ¹³ The other widely understood language of modern-day Afghanistan and western Pakistan, Pashto, is spoken on both sides of the Sulaiman Range, which forms the border of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, albeit with significant variations in dialect typical of mountainous regions elsewhere in the world. Lacking a single strong political and cultural centre, and otherwise characterized by its topographical inaccessibility, there have historically been few socio-political forces strong enough to induce the Afghan people to adopt a single spoken lingua franca with the exception of a small literate elite, most of whom, in the nineteenth century, would have gained literacy through Persian rather than Pashto.Footnote ¹⁴

In contrast to this, the linguistic backgrounds of the British Civilians and military officials entering Afghanistan would have appeared quite uniform—this despite the preponderance of Scots serving in the military and medical establishments of the East India Company, some of whom may not have considered English their first language.Footnote ¹⁵ Many would have first arrived in the country via the colonial capital, Calcutta, and been exposed in that city to the variety of languages employed there.Footnote ¹⁶ A certain number might also have had the opportunity to study one or more of these languages, either in a formal pedagogical setting or through private lessons.Footnote ¹⁷ The most celebrated experiment in language pedagogy for the East India Company's officials was instituted in Calcutta for a short time at the College of Fort William.Footnote ¹⁸ The printed materials prepared by Indians working at the college would have an important effect on modern Indian languages, in particular on the development of prose writing.Footnote ¹⁹ And although tuition in Persian was established in 1806 at the Haileybury College in Hertford and in 1809 at Addiscombe College in Croydon, a great number of civil servants and military officers who obtained some degree of competence in Persian would do so in Calcutta.Footnote ²⁰

Knowledge of Persian was viewed by the British in the first half of the nineteenth century as essential for any political career in the Indian Civil Service. It also continued to be important as a military language (although its role in military matters, as in politics, would decline through the nineteenth century as Urdu came to occupy a more prominent role in the governance of British North India), as a means by which to command a diverse collection of ‘native’ (Indian) and Afghan soldiers. The celebrated military officer Sir George Lawrence (1804–1884) begins his 1874 memoir with an anecdote describing an encounter shortly after his arrival in India with the governor general, Lord Hastings, in which the latter advised, ‘Mind you study the native languages, sir!’Footnote ²¹ Lawrence later alludes to the versatility of Persian when he writes of his efforts to learn that language after being appointed military secretary to the British envoy in Afghanistan, Sir William Hay Macnaghten (1793–1841):

Nowhere in his memoirs does he note any commensurate efforts to learn Pashto. Macnaghten, himself a former student of the College of Fort William, was famously, if flippantly, described by Emily Eden (1797–1863)—sister of the British governor general, Lord Auckland—as ‘speak[ing] Persian rather more fluently than English; Arabic better than Persian; but, for familiar, conversation, rather prefers Sanscrit’.Footnote ²³ Prior to the British invasion of Afghanistan, Macnaghten had been engaged with editing the Arabic text of A Thousand and One Nights, the so-called second Calcutta edition being printed in four volumes between 1839 and 1842.Footnote ²⁴ Lady Florentia Sale (1790–1853), whose diary is among the most important sources detailing the first Anglo-Afghan War, places great emphasis on Macnaghten's successor, Eldred Pottinger's (1811–1843) ‘perfect knowledge of the Persian language, and his acquaintance with the manners and customs of the people’, his instruction in this language having begun in 1826 at Addiscombe College. She marvels at how literacy-aware Afghan landed gentry would attach talismanic qualities to the written deeds (‘empowering them to receive the government rents, &c.’) that Pottinger produced in this language, ‘executed . . . with an air of great condescension and with the gravity of a judge’. These written deeds ‘he well knew were mere pieces of waste paper: yet they had a magic charm for the time; which was all we required’.Footnote ²⁵ Nowhere in her account, however, does she find Pottinger's supposed ability to speak and understand Pashto (to be discussed in detail below) to be worth noting.

Knowledge of Persian was not, however, limited to those who undertook formal study of the language. One encounters descriptions of soldiers who, due in part to intimate relations (marital or otherwise) with Afghan women, appear to have acquired some familiarity with the language. For example, Lady Sale, in her memoirs, mentions a particular ‘Sergt. Deane of the engineers’ department’ to whom ‘the army are very greatly indebted for his great personal exertions in getting grain’. She represents him as married to a ‘Persian woman’ and depicts him as ‘a particularly intelligent man, and very superior to his present station in life; and the fluency with which he speaks Persian enables him to pick up information, and also to go about at times in disguise for the same purpose’.Footnote ²⁶

It should come as no surprise that the children of British soldiers in Afghanistan would also rapidly attain facility in languages other than English. Vincent Eyre (1811–1881) records in his Journal the surprising linguistic transformation that took place in Tootsey, the daughter of Captain William Anderson (1803–1858) of Shāh Shujāʿ's 2nd Irregular Cavalry:

We are not told whether Eyre himself or some other person is responsible for translating the meaning of this little girl's credo, but her ability to speak in Persian acquired during her four-month captivity is also noted in Lady Sale's Journal as well as in Lawrence's Reminiscences.Footnote ²⁸ The latter notes that although ‘[s]he looks fat and well, [she] has acquired quite Affghan manners, and speaks nothing but Persian, although still understanding English’. The children of other officers appear to have learned enough Persian to read official correspondence and serve as translators in times of need. This became, in fact, somewhat of a problem, leading in one instance to the inopportune desertion of ‘native’ cavalry under Lawrence's command. These Persian notes, Lawrence writes,

The event to which he alludes is the fatal encounter of the British Envoy on 23 December 1841 during negotiations with leaders of the Afghan resistance including Muḥammad Akbar Ḳhān (1816–1847), son of the ousted king Dost Muḥammad Ḳhān and leader of the movement to oust the British from Afghanistan. The desertions of these troops left the envoy without an armed retinue adequate to defend him when Akbar Ḳhān's group attacked the smaller British contingent.

Trapped in the Rose Garden

George Lawrence describes a meeting in late May 1842, more than four months after having become a hostage of the Afghan resistance, with the Persian-speaking Qizilbash owner of a fort in the hills overlooking Kabul. He learns that ‘the poor Envoy’, Sir William Macnaghten, who had been assassinated during the 23 December 1841 negotiations, had in more peaceful times visited that very fort during the previous summer. His host, a ‘polite, gentlemanly man’, quoted to Lawrence ‘some appropriate verses of Saadi, illustrating the ups and downs of human life in its great uncertainty’. Much of the poignancy of this bittersweet anecdote derives from its idyllic, even apposite, setting, depicted by Lawrence as a ‘fine large garden, with a stream of water running through it’.Footnote ³⁰

It was to Saʿdī's Gulistān, or ‘Rose Garden’, and to a lesser extent his Būstān, or ‘Place of Fragrance’ (‘flower garden’), that many South Asian students of Persian—among whom many British colonial officials must certainly be included—would often gain their first direct exposure to literature in the Persian language.Footnote ³¹ These two works by the thirteenth-century Saʿdī, an author ‘longer and better known in the Western nations than any of his countrymen’,Footnote ³² were among the few complete works of Persian or Indic literature translated into European languages prior the final decades of the eighteenth century.Footnote ³³ An early ‘truncated and defective’ French translation by André du Ryer in 1634—the first in a European language—was followed in 1654 by a complete German translation by Olearius prepared with the assistance of an Iranian named Haqq Virdi in 1654.Footnote ³⁴ In the introduction written by Sir William Jones (1746–1794) to his influential 1771 Grammar of the Persian Language, first published more than a decade prior to his arrival in Calcutta, he advises students, after mastering the script and grammar, to proceed by studying ‘the Gulistán or Bed of Roses, a work that is highly esteemed in the East, and of which there are several translations in the languages of Europe’. By comparing manuscripts with a printed edition, the student will ‘soon learn the beautiful flowing hand used in Persia’. And through translating ‘some short and early chapter’ of that work into his native language, translating this back into Persian, and comparing ‘his second translation with the original . . . a student will gradually acquire the style and manner of almost any author, whom he wishes to imitate’. With all the confidence of one who has not yet set foot in South Asia, he concludes, ‘whosoever will study the Persian language according to my plan, will in less than a year be able to translate and to answer any letter from an Indian prince, and to converse with the natives of India, not only with fluency, but with elegance’.Footnote ³⁵

It was largely on the reputation of Saʿdī's work, both in traditional Persianate curriculaFootnote ³⁶ and among European orientalists like Jones, that the government in Calcutta would make comprehension of the Gulistān the basis for determining proficiency in Persian among its employees.Footnote ³⁷ Since the 1806 publication of the first complete English translation by Frances Gladwin, dozens of additional translations and ancillary pedagogical materials, including glossaries and commentaries, have been published in English,Footnote ³⁸ Urdu,Footnote ³⁹ and other Indian languages. This was due in no small part to the perceived pedagogical value of both the wisdom contained in its maxims—considered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to be ‘one of the secular bibles of the world’Footnote ⁴⁰ —and the language in which it was expressed. British educators preferred Saʿdī to more mystical Persian authors, for, in the judgment of the prominent British scholar of Persian, E. G. Browne, ‘in the main it may be said without hesitation that worldly wisdom rather than mysticism is his chief characteristic, and that the Gulistán in particular is one of the most Macchiavellian [sic] works in the Persian language’. While acknowledging that the work abounds in ‘[p]ious sentiments and aspirations . . . they are, as a rule, eminently practical, and almost devoid of that visionary quality which is so characteristic of the essentially mystical writers’.Footnote ⁴¹ Beyond having to demonstrate familiarity with a limited set of literary materials in order to pass language proficiency exams, British officers, in their intimate engagements with, or what Steiner calls the development of a ‘hermeneutic trust’ of, Persian ‘classical’ texts would, through ‘powerful pictorial and tonal anticipations’,Footnote ⁴² attempt to fit the material reality of what they witnessed to the (text-based, Persian) conceptual structures they transported with them across the Sulaiman Range and Hindu Kush Mountains. The Gulistān was central to the cultivation of this ‘hermeneutic trust’, lulling British figures into believing that they had already taken the measure of their Persian-speaking interlocutors.

If we allow that an individual utterance conveys a message in part through the deployment of various more or less stable conventions—ones that the speaker may reasonably expect to share with his or her audience, and that, additionally, channel an underlying set of lived experiences into a more or less stable set of social interactions—then we may call the experiences to which these discursive conventions refer the ‘reality effect’ (l’éffet du réel) of that class of utterances that deploy these conventions. Roland Barthes, of course, used this phrase to describe the process by which a novelist like Flaubert could use the conventions of genre to transform a messy, unmediated, illegible, and potentially indigestible ‘reality’ into highly cultivated and perduring notions of what constitutes a realistic reality.Footnote ⁴³ Stephen Greenblatt introduces a similar concept of ‘mimetic capital’, describing it as a ‘stockpile of representations, a set of images and image-making devices that are accumulated, “banked”, as it were, in books, archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such time as these representations are called upon to generate new representations’.Footnote ⁴⁴ John Frow likewise suggests, more broadly, that ‘one definition of aesthetic practices is that they are keyings of the real: representations of real acts or thoughts or feelings which are not themselves, in the same sense, real’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Certainly, an author's intention is not always to ‘key’ the real. The author, in some situations, may wish to play generic conventions off one another to undermine the genre's reality effects, or to lay bare the workings of generic conventions for the consumer of that work, to bring the consumer's attention away from the content of the work and towards the frame through which it is connected—and separated—from the outside word. For the British officers who would determine the fate of the thousands that would depart Kabul 8 January 1842, knowledge of classical Persian acquired in India became a means by which to comprehend and control the radical alienness that life in Afghanistan presented to them. It also tended to blind them to those aspects of the material reality that did not conform to the linguistic and literary models of classical Persian literature.

The British institutionalization of Persian pedagogy was vital in determining how British political agents would conceptualize their material encounters with Afghanistan, Afghans, and Afghan languages throughout the debacle that would come to be called the First Anglo-Afghan War. The contents of the Gulistān—a text that was at the foundation of the British experience with Persian-language culture—produced many of the preconceptions through which the British were able to interpret the Afghan realpolitik. For those unable to read the Persian, translations of the Gulistān had long been disseminated in a process of building an Anglo-Persian hermeneutic tradition. It follows, then, that Saʿdī almost seems to be anticipating British policy in Afghanistan when he writes, ‘that falsehood mixed with good advice, is preferable to truth tending to excite strife’. Truth became, for the British, that which confirmed and conformed to their textual anticipations of an imaginary classical Persian world of which Afghanistan was understood be a particularly unrefined corner. Perhaps, however, Macnaghten would have done better to read Saʿdī’ more critically, ignoring the advice contained in the opening pages of the Gulistān by instead learning something of the language of that ‘poor wretch’ held captive by the king.

The ‘slay’/‘spare’ episode

If the British entered Afghanistan in the late 1830s with their own literary expectations of what they would discover there, they were even more prolific in the production of texts documenting what they had themselves witnessed in Afghanistan as they left in 1842. These literary productions, which took generic form as histories, memoirs, journals, and biographies, were to shape for later generations of foreigners the expectations of what lay on the other side of the Khyber and Bolan Passes in the mythic space that Afghanistan provided.

Included as an appendix to Lawrence's 1874 memoir is an account penned by the only Englishman known to have escaped capture and survived the ill-fated retreat of the British Army. In this version of the account, Dr William Brydon (1811–1873) narrates the series of events that led to what would be an especially bloody attempt of the column to pass through the Khoord Kabul Pass (located a mere 15 miles from Kabul) on 8 January 1842, the third day of the march. Describing the events of 7 January, he is recorded as stating:

William Trousdale has conclusively shown that this final version of Dr Brydon's narrative of the tragedy was expanded from earlier versions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The earliest extant version of Dr Brydon's account, a copy recorded by Captain Julius Brydon Backhouse in his diary entry of 20 January (a week after Brydon's arrival at the besieged fort of Jalalabad) and published in facsimile by Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree in 1967, makes no mention of the ‘slay’/‘spare’ episode, containing only in skeletal form what would become the first sentence of the above passage. Small, but significant differences even appear between the version published in Lawrence's book and that appended to a recent edition of Lady Sale's diary.Footnote ⁴⁸ What this suggests is the heavy hand of later editors—likely working with Brydon's draft and without his explicit permission—in refashioning the narrative so that its phrasing corresponded better to the theatrics inherent to its content. With its alliterative initial sibilants and King James diction reminiscent of 1 Samuel 15:3 (‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’),Footnote ⁴⁹ the particular combination of English verbs (slay and spare) attributed to Brydon in the final sentence of the passage quoted above would have served as mnemonic aids, reinforcing the already elevated drama of the events.

Brydon's account was by no means the only narrative that would come to be published by those who bore witness to the events at Khoord Kabul and after.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, Eyre's recollection of the events, to cite just one example, lacks the markedly aphoristic quality of Brydon's account:

While the battle at Khoord Kabul received a great deal of notice throughout the English-speaking world and must have been the first exposure to a specifically Afghan culture and history that many outside India would experience, it was Brydon's account in particular that would capture the imagination of the broader public and become the paradigm for later fictional accounts like Kipling's ‘The Man Who Would Become King’. In distant Philadelphia, for example, Josiah Harlan, the man who would go on the be an inspiration for Kipling's Daniel Dravot, worked quickly to write his Memoir of India and Afghanistan, which was published in 1842, so that he might take advantage of ‘this moment of great excitement’. As he wrote then, ‘The massacre en masse of a British army has awakened an intense desire for information concerning the people and the country which have been the cause and the scene of that appalling tragedy.’Footnote ⁵²

What is of particular interest here, however, is how Dr Brydon is able to report the speech of the Akbar Khan's Afghan ‘horsemen’—and this especially in light of his apparent inability to speak either Pashto or Persian. From among the mounted party that set out with Brydon, only Captain Bellew could communicate with the Afghans, and none of the editions report any Persian or Pashto speech beyond that mentioned in the ‘slay’/‘spare’ episode. His description of the manner in which he was able to acquire a new horse (and thus escape over the hills) on 12 January suggests that Dr Brydon could understand some ‘Hindustani’ (Hindi-Urdu): ‘In this way, I overtook a Hindostanee mochee (saddler) of the Shah's cavalry, who told me he was dying, and begged me to take his pony, or some one else would. I tried to encourage him, but he fell off, carrying away one of the stirrups, and I found the poor fellow was shot through the chest and head.’Footnote ⁵³ The best explanation we have, as suggested by Patrick Macrory, is that Dr Brydon (or his editors) constructed his account of the ‘slay’/‘spare’ episode upon what he had either heard or read of Major Eldred Pottinger's own recollections of that day's events.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pottinger, known popularly as ‘the Hero of Herat’, was said by 1837 (a full five years prior to the retreat) to have ‘already learned more than was needed to qualified as an Interpreter’ in Persian and Pashto.Footnote ⁵⁵ Unfortunately, most of Pottinger's writings, except for a small set of letters, were destroyed in a fire in the room of Sir John William Kaye, the official historian of the war.Footnote ⁵⁶

Prior to the First Anglo-Afghan War few if any among the British would have been able to gain any practical command of Pashto without having already developed at least some knowledge of another linguistically related Indo-Iranian language, in particular, Persian and the Hindi-Urdu of northern India.Footnote ⁵⁷ In many accounts, Pashto serves more as a catchall diacritical category of ‘most other’ in the British conceptualization of Afghan speech. It mattered little whether this language was actually what is today called Pashto (or what speakers of various Pashto dialects might call pəṣto, pəšto, pəçto, paxto), but merely that the speech belonged neither to Persian nor ‘Hindustani’. Beyond those few who could converse in it with any degree of proficiency, there were likely others who, like their Indian camp-followers, were able to understand only those parts of speech which were cognate or identical to the either Persian or ‘Hindustani’, familiar from prior exposure on the Indo-Gangetic plain and in the Punjab. While there is no doubt that the Pashto language developed in tandem with other South and Central Asian languages, including Persian and a spectrum of Indic languages, the degree and direction of linguistic cross-pollination is debated. The dominant view, voiced by Kushev, is that Pashto speakers made extensive borrowings at the lexical and literary (though less at the phonological and morphological) levels from New Persian and New Indo-Aryan languages (for example, Punjabi, Hindi-Urdu, and Kashmiri), but that the ‘influence of Pashto upon Persian [and other Indo-Aryan languages] was not essential’.Footnote ⁵⁸ I. A. Arshi, however, citing the proverbs and speech of communities residing in Rampur and other Indian cities that trace their ancestry to Pashtun regions of present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, argues that the linguistic influence of Pashto on Indian languages, particularly Urdu, has been greater than scholars of the latter language have generally been willing to acknowledge.Footnote ⁵⁹

One is left to contemplate whether the ‘slay’/‘spare’ episode—at the moment of its ostensible enunciation or later, at its moment of English transcription—derives some of its salience through its invocation of multilingual punning present in both European and Asian literary traditions. These range from the Hindvi-Persian macaronic verse, riddles, and misjoinders attributed to the Indo-Persian poet Amīr Ḳhusrao (1253–1325) of DelhiFootnote ⁶⁰ to bitextual English-French and English-Latin verses that appear in works like Marlowe's Edward II:

Sanskrit poets composed entire epic poems simultaneously conarrating both the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata using the technique of śleṣa, or oronymy, whereby ‘strings of sounds’ divided in various ways yield multiple meanings. Yigal Bronner argues that śleṣa was ‘a dominant literary mode’ across South Asia for more than a millennium.Footnote ⁶²

It is thus with no little irony that, based at least on anecdotal English-language evidence, a few Afghans had developed a high degree of proficiency in English and other European languages. Lady Sale complained, ‘The Affghans, having persons who can read English, French, and Latin, were aware of all our secrets’,Footnote ⁶³ and George Pottinger relates how ‘On 30th December Eldred got a letter off by cossid [messenger] to Mackeson at Peshawar. Since there were those in the enemy's camp who could read English, he wrote in French, and signed his name in Greek.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Elsewhere, Lady Sale worries that:

This last extract presents what one might imagine as a Macaulayan dystopia, wherein the colonial subject with academic training in English works to dismantle the very pedagogical system that produced him. A few years earlier, Thomas Macaulay had argued in his well-known ‘Minute on English Education (2 February 1835)’ for an end to official British support of education in the classical Indian languages (Arabic and ‘Sanscrit’), advocating instead for the formation of ‘a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Below, it will become apparent that the ‘sçavant’ to which Lady Sale refers was not the only one who had ‘imbibed literature at the college of Delhi’. It is sufficient to note here that this Afghan, for all his people's appearance of having, in the words of an early British grammarian of Pashto, ‘paid no attention’ to the ‘rules of language’, had, in this case at least, mastered the colonizer's language better than the colonizer had been able to learn his.Footnote ⁶⁷ One gathers from Lady Sale's words her feelings of betrayal and cultural violation: the Afghans had gained access to her languages, which is to say, English, French, Latin, and perhaps Greek, and, to add insult to injury, had gained this access through modern, European-style educational systems.

Of course, from the obverse perspective, the Afghans also appeared to have an advantage in their ability to ‘code-switch’, which is to say, their ability to shift in and out of the lingua franca, Persian (a language which certain British officers had mastered), and into their ‘own’ languages, languages to which the British had little access. This strategy was employed often, as when Lawrence, describing the negotiations that took place between himself and Muhammad Akbar Ḳhan one evening during his captivity, writes:

This ability of the Afghans to switch from language to language, or perhaps, from register to register within a language, quite clearly frustrated the British, and likely gave cause to the British feeling, in their negotiations, that the people upon whom their safety depended were incapable of speaking truthfully.

Mixed with their distrust for the Afghans, however, was a degree of admiration. The British saw in the (male) Afghan the same wilful independence and cunning that they wished to project into their own cultural past. This ambivalence of feeling finds expression through authors such as Lawrence, who describes the Pashtun as:

Lawrence's assessment of the Afghan people, supported through ‘intimate’ acquaintance of a non-textual variety, is consistent with subsequent opinions expressed on numerous occasions by other representatives of his government, and it served to solidify a view of the people that would persist for several generations. This is an example of how, as George Steiner expresses it, ‘the Western eye has fixed on certain constants’, whereby the source, or here, the multiplicity and inaccessibility of the sources, becomes ‘a feature, almost non-linguistic, of landscape, reported custom, and simplified history’. Following the British withdrawal from Afghanistan, Lawrence's assessment would only become more established in the popular British imagination, as increasingly, ‘no semantic specificity, no particularity of context interposes itself between the poet-translator and a general, cultural-conventional sense of “what the thing is or ought to be like”’.Footnote ⁷⁰

It should be of no surprise, then, that the Afghans, hailing from a multilingual society themselves, would accord greater respect to foreigners able to communicate in Persian, at that time employed throughout much of Central and South Asia as the pre-eminent cosmopolitan language of prestige and statecraft. The degree of respect the Afghans would grant Persian-speaking British subjects would often go beyond what the British felt was justified by their official military rank. When George Lawrence was charged during the withdrawal of the British army with the responsibility of negotiating with the Afghan chiefs the terms of a treaty by which certain British hostages of ‘suitable’ rank and importance would be handed over in return for Afghan assurances of safe passage, he records how his Afghan counterparts mentioned ‘a barrack-sergeant of the name Deane who from the extensive monetary transactions he had in the course of his duty to carry on with several of their number, must, they supposed, be an officer of high dignity and of great importance’. Deane, it will be recalled, was the same British soldier singled out by Lady Sale for his fluency in Persian attributed to his ‘Persian wife’. Amused at their suggestion, Lawrence responded by asserting, ‘Surely you don't want him as a hostage; he is only a Gorah, an English private soldier, and not a Sahib or officer, although a very worthy man and excellent soldier, but not in a position to associate with officers.’ This, he believes, created a favourable impression of his honesty in these negotiations among his Afghan interlocutors, who announced, ‘Lawrence Sahib is truthful and to be depended on . . . he might easily have passed off Deane on us as an officer quite fit for a hostage, but he would not deceive us. We shall trust him; he is a man of truth.’Footnote ⁷¹ Throughout the long period of captivity that followed the decimation of the British army, it was middle-ranking and especially political officers with a knowledge of Persian—such as Major Pottinger and Captains Lawrence and Colin Mackenzie (1806–1881)—who would carry out negotiations with the group's Afghan captors, largely bypassing the nominal commanders of the group, Major General Elphinstone and Brigadier Shelton.

The disguise fantasy

To assume, however, that the British were the only ones anxious about the control, by others, of ‘their own’ languages, would be misleading. The British conceit of disguise reappears repeatedly throughout the literature which deals with the first Anglo-Afghan war, and is as much a literary trope as it is a practical tactic of survival whose roots may be traced back far beyond the first British engagements with Central Asia to early European travel accounts in Asia. In examining the literature dealing with the European experience in Afghanistan and Central Asia more broadly, certain disguises and personages recur with greater frequency,Footnote ⁷² most notably horse-dealers (merchants), holy men, and burqa-clad women. Significantly, these represent segments of the population that remained largely ‘illegible’ to states and opaque to epistemological control.

The two historical figures who are remembered for having best mastered the art of dissemblance were the celebrated spy and explorer, Sir Alexander Burnes (1805–1841), and Eldred Pottinger. The most popular image of Burnes, reproduced in many of the books about the period and as the frontispiece of his Cabool, has the caption ‘Sir Alexander Burnes, C.B. in the Costume of Bokhara’.Footnote ⁷³ Eldred Pottinger, too, in the widely reproduced portrait held in the United Kingdom's National Army Museum, is depicted as bearded, wearing a dark robe and large turban. Their portraits are most striking when juxtaposed, as they are in the plates included in the 1843 second edition of Lieutenant Eyre's Military Operations at Cabul, with images captioned ‘Shah Shuja Ool-Mulk’, ‘The Late Sir Alexander Burnes C.B. &c.’, ‘Capt. Colin Mackenzie’, ‘Mahomed Akber Khan’, ‘The Late Sir William Macnaghten BA’, et cetera. The sketch of Macnaghten and another famous 1841 watercolour portrait of him by James Atkinson both depict the envoy wearing British clothing: dressed in a top hat, bow tie, and striped overcoat, his appearance seems entirely incongruous.

Disguises were not always part of a larger British programme of Central Asian conquest. In some instances, dissembling faith in Islam was a means by which to effect one's safety amid the violence of the retreat. This held a particular fascination for Lawrence, who noted two occasions on which British soldiers manipulated Islamic cultural symbols for their own self-preservation. In one instance, he describes how a gunner of the Horse Artillery, like Dravot in Kipling's story, convincingly played the part of an antinomian Muslim mendicant, or qalandar:

He recounts a similar story about a Corporal Lewis who ‘to save his life had consented to turn Mahomedan’. When the Lawrence's party of British hostages arrived at the fort owned by Lewis's captor and religious preceptor, Lewis ‘seized the opportunity to beg [Lawrence] to intercede with the Sirdar’ to allow him to accompany them as they continued to be shuffled from one fort to another. Lawrence addresses Muḥammad Ḳhuda Baḳhsh Ḳhān, the Afghan ‘Sirdar’ (sardar, or ‘commander’), asking, ‘Now, Sirdar, will you allow Lewis to come with us if he desires it?’ Ḳhuda Baḳhsh, incredulous of the possibility that Lewis might in truth be an apostate, agrees. When Lewis is asked what he wishes to do:

Later that same day, the group's Afghan guides express their wish to perform prayers, compelling the group to halt along their path through the mountains. These guides ‘looked at Lewis, expecting him of course to join them’. According to Lawrence, even then the Afghans still refused to believe that Lewis had renounced Islam:

Lieutenant Eyre alludes to one example of the third category of disguise when he makes a laconic reference to the Anglo-Indian Captain James Skinner (1805–1862), whom he mentions as having ‘since the outbreak of the rebellion, passed through some curious adventures, in the disguise of an Affghan female’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Lawrence helpfully elaborates by describing how Skinner escaped a mob that had gathered outside his house in the city of Kabul on the morning of 2 November 1841:

Eyre's apparent discomfiture in narrating the details of Skinner's situation points to a silence he felt was necessary to maintain in light of the potential subversiveness of a disguise so contrary to the social position from which he was writing. Whether the reader's shock may have been attenuated by knowledge of Skinner's questionable social status as an Anglo-Indian, Eyre clearly was reluctant to condone a disguise so culturally and sexually disruptive.

The element of ‘fantasy’ in these disguises emphasizes two points. First, it acknowledges the British admiration for the Afghan people, albeit an admiration that was tempered by more frequently voiced expressions of disgust, frustration, and hatred. Second, it was essential that these disguises remain within a realm of fantasy: the English-language print public required assurances that any transformations undertaken by British subjects be temporary and reversible. Moreover, narratives of British and Indians donning these disguises—the dishevelled qalandar, the foreign merchant, and the burqa-clad woman—perpetuated the fantasy that it was possible for outsiders with little to no knowledge of an Afghan language to blend in merely by selecting a role where articulateness was either unnecessary or even infelicitous.

This notion of disguise as ‘fantasy’ further serves to explain Lawrence's increasing preoccupation throughout his captivity with both affirming and publicly demonstrating his Christian faith, of which his reports about British apostates of Islam are a part. In his account of his group's return to the Khoord Cabul pass on 23 May, more than four months after the ‘slay’/‘spare’ incident, he recalls,

Lawrence felt his faith to be threatened by the intimate and sustained contact with his Muslim captors. The ostentatious consumption of alcohol, no matter how ‘excellent’ the sherry, is also a performed affirmation of irreconcilable alterity, a refusal to ‘disguise’ himself and dissolve into the (at that moment, from his perspective as a hostage) dominant culture.

Mohan Lal

It is also possible that the ‘slay’/‘spare’ story originated not entirely through the rare linguistic faculties of Major Eldred Pottinger, but rather through, or at least with the help of, the numerous Indians also at hand on that day who witnessed and suffered through the massacre. The experience of Indians who served as linguistic intermediaries for the British in Afghanistan was nothing if not equally violent and emotionally disruptive, and yet it was also the experience of an alien culture at what Steiner, in his discussion of translation theory, would call ‘close quarters’.Footnote ⁷⁹ It bears repeating that 12,000 of the approximately 16,500 people who departed from the British cantonments in Kabul on 6 January were Indian camp-followers, and that approximately 3,500 of the remainder were Indian and Gorkha Nepali ‘native’ and irregular troops.Footnote ⁸⁰ In spite of their numerical preponderance within the column, there is a distinct if not unexpected paucity of narratives recorded by Indian survivors of the retreat. Their role was often that of cultural mediator, albeit one whose ‘hermeneutic incursion, i.e. the thrust of understanding into the neighbouring or kindred language and cultural context, is complicated by a legacy of mutual contact’.Footnote ⁸¹ Some among the Indians were equally if not more familiar with classical Persian than were many of Afghans, especially those Afghans who did not reside in larger cities.

There exists a description of another episode, in the second volume of Mohan Lal's Life of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan of Kabul, that is surprisingly similar to the Pottinger ‘slay’/‘spare’ incident. Mohan Lal (1812–1877), the most celebrated Indian to accompany the British to Afghanistan, was among the first Indian students to study English at the newly established Delhi College, gaining the patronage of Charles Trevelyan, who, allied with Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, was among the most fervent advocates of English education in colonial India during the first half of the nineteenth century. His father had served as Persian munshi (secretary) to Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) for an earlier British diplomatic mission to the court of Shāh Shujāʿ in Peshawar.Footnote ⁸² In his biography of Dost Muḥammad, Mohan Lal depicts the scene as the British left the cantonment on 6 January 1842, two days prior to their attempt to enter the pass:

There are several ambiguities in Mohan Lal's description, not least of which is his use of the term ‘Turkish’ to refer to an Afghan language. First, having remained behind in Kabul after the departure of the British army, it is not clear whether he himself was witness to the Afghan chief's bilingual shrewdness. Indeed, it is not even clear when, according to Mohan Lal, Muḥammad Akbar Ḳhan actually issued these contradictory orders: was it indeed on 6 January or could it perhaps have been reported to him by others at a later time? This doubt stems from the fact that Life of the Amir Dost Mohammad Khan was not itself published until 1846, having been written from memory in faraway England several years after the actual events transpired and without the help of written notes. For all its potential unreliability, Mohan Lal's text is a vital source of information, for, as Nancy Hatch Dupree asserts, ‘Mohan Lal is the only such author who lived in Kabul throughout this period and maintained contact with rival Afghan leaders, as well as with the British garrison besieged at Jalalabad.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Beyond its general importance as a historical account produced in the immediate aftermath of the British occupation of Afghanistan, it has historic value as one of only a few near-contemporary works written by a South Asian author and available in English.Footnote ⁸⁵

Mohan Lal was an early example of what the literary critic Shamsur Rahman Furuqi has described as ‘the perfect prototype of the “loyal”, technologically current,Footnote ⁸⁶ politically correct, and “morally sound” individual whom the British wanted to develop in India’. This sort of individual would be ‘typical of the anglicized Indian generations—generations who could descry their past but dimly, and whose future seemed to have been mapped out by the British’.Footnote ⁸⁷ By and large, Mohan Lal's own work did correspond with a larger orientalist project insofar as it added to the collection of knowledge that European nations developed of the cultures they encountered in their imperial endeavours. It was thus assumed that the readership of works produced as part of this project would be Europeans, and particularly, as Mohan Lal's dedication to Queen Victoria makes abundantly clear, the British rulers of India. And yet, Mohan Lal originally intended that his work reach a readership beyond that which would present itself to him through the medium of English prose. He tells us in the preface to his book that:

The question of whether Mohan Lal's simultaneous production of a text in two languages was part of a more deliberate ploy by him to present his work to the very subject of his investigation—in terms that his subject (Dost Muḥammad Ḳhān) could comprehend and which he might even be able to critique—is, while certainly intriguing, probably indeterminate. It is telling, however, that Muḥammad Akbar Ḳhān chose to suppress the original Persian manuscript rather than make it available to his countrymen. Mohan Lal himself, elsewhere in his preface, gives us a clue into his own method of composition. He writes,

Quite clearly, Mohan Lal wishes his English readers to recognize that Persian is the language in which he feels most comfortable writing.

It is worth pondering whether a person such as Mohan Lal, raised, to use a phrase from the period, ‘on the Company's salt’, could ever, after experiencing the disruptive effects of an English-model education in India, feel a sense of belonging with any of the cultures then around him. He writes with horror of the conditions he was forced to endure during travels into Afghanistan with Alexander Burnes:

According to Dupree, ‘While learning English, Mohan Lal had become thoroughly anglicized and this was clearly not his idea of gentlemanly deportment.’ Moreover, he was sceptical when Burnes suggested that they don Afghan clothes and feign poverty to discourage robbers, commenting that ‘this imposition would not bear close inspection’.Footnote ⁹¹

It would seem, however, following the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1837 and the establishment of a large military presence in Kabul, that Mohan Lal could have counted himself in good company among a large cohort of Indians transplanted by service with the British to Kabul. These added to an already sizable and long-established minority population of ‘Islamicate’ Hindu inhabitants of Kabul.Footnote ⁹² These persons maintained their distance from more militant Afghans and their struggle to rid the country of the British. Indeed, they had much to gain from the continued presence of the British in the capital. It was thus with deep sympathy that Mohan Lal would report how, prior to the return of the British army of retribution in the fall of 1842,

It is unlikely, however, that Mohan Lal considered himself a part of this group. This was due in part to his earlier conversion to Islam. In spite of the great efforts he made, usually through bills of credit drawn against his own property, to guarantee the safe passage of the British back to India, and, subsequently, to effect their release from the custody of Afghan tribal leaders, his conversion was considered by many of the British to be treasonous.

In fact, Mohan Lal had come to feel most closely tied with Shia Qizilbashi community, which is to say, that section of Kabul inhabitants who claimed Persian ancestry and maintained a distinctive non-Pashtun, Persianate domestic culture. They were participants in the comparatively cosmopolitan culture of Kabul, speaking the dominant language of that city, what is now called Dari—a dialect of Persian, not Pashto.Footnote ⁹⁵ The greater body of this community did not support the efforts of their Afghan neighbours to expel the British.Footnote ⁹⁶ Instead,

Mohan Lal's reliance upon the Persians of Kabul, which Dupree asserts ‘accounts for much of the bias’ in his writings, was a shortcoming he shared with his collaborator and travelling companion, Sir Alexander Burnes. It seems fair to say that his over-reliance on Persian sources was symptomatic of the entire British intelligence apparatus at work in Afghanistan, explaining in part the surprise and dismay that lie behind the ‘slay’/‘spare’ episodes described above.

Sita Ram Pandey

The single example we do have of a work claiming to have been written by an Indian survivor of the massacre comes to us in the form of a translation, entitled From Sepoy to Subedar, purporting to be the ‘Life and Adventures’ of an Indian army infantryman named Sita Ram. While subsequent scholarship belies the assertion of Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Norgate, the ‘translator’ of this account, that Sita Ram's memoirs are ‘one of the first attempts of any native soldier to give his thoughts and ideas to the world’, his is the only account that is both widely known in the West and clearly purports to have been written by an Indian eyewitness to the massacre at Khoord Kabul.Footnote ⁹⁸ Much like the character Flashman in George MacDonald Fraser's (1925–2008) more recent series of historical novels and, for that matter, William Brydon, who also had the misfortune—and good luck—to survive the siege of Lucknow during the so-called ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ of 1857, Sita Ram Pandey participated in nearly every significant armed conflict in South Asia during the early to mid nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁹ And, in a fashion reminiscent of Fraser's Flashman novels,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ the lengths to which the author goes to assert the veracity of the account has tantalized generations of readers seeking an authentic—literally ‘subaltern’—voice of a soldier who had upheld ‘the English rule under which I had served and eaten salt for so many years’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ More recently, William Dalrymple has described Sita Ram Pandey's work as ‘an irresistible text’ and one that, despite its problematic provenance, he is ‘inclined to accept’ as authentic on the basis of his having examined a number of spurious letters allegedly written by Indian soldiers to the Indian press.Footnote ¹⁰² For the purposes of this study, however, it is Pandey's experiences during the so-called First Anglo-Afghan War that provide the most intriguing and troubling insights into the ways that Afghanistan continues to function as ‘a mythic space’ in the minds of English-language readers and audiences alike.

Compared with the memoirs of his contemporaries, Pandey's narrative is short on details for the two dates of interest in the ‘spare’/‘slay’ episode (6 January in Mohan Lal's version, and 7 January in Brydon’s), recording only that ‘The first march out of Cabool no annoyance was given by the Affghans: the second passed over quietly.’Footnote ¹⁰³ On the third day, he loses consciousness in heavy fighting after being struck by an Afghan bullet. And yet Sita Ram Pandey does claim to be able to communicate with the Afghans, as, for example, when he learns, upon being revived, that he is to be sold as a slave. He begs ‘to be shot, or to have my throat cut, and I poured abuse in Pushtoo and my own language on the Affghans’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He is sold to an Afghan scholar of Islam, or maulvi, who was ‘able only to make me understand very little in his language, [and] gave orders I should be taught Farsee (Persian)’. Sita Ram is able to gain a degree of goodwill by taking ‘pains to learn his [master’s] accursed [yet unspecified] language’, even citing a couplet in Persian, which according to his modern editor, was ‘not relevant to his theme, and [was] probably intended to display his knowledge of the language’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ How James Lunt was qualified to make this determination is not adequately demonstrated in his edition of Sita Ram's memoirs. It seems based entirely upon Norgate's own assertion that ‘I do not see how they [the words in the verse] apply much, probably to show his knowledge of Persian.’ As is clear from the Persian (with my literal translation following), Norgate was having a laugh at his English-language readers’ (and future editor’s) expense:

Elsewhere, Sita Ram represents himself as able to write in the Perso-Arabic script, having prepared ‘a small note in the Hindee language in Persian characters’ in an attempt to contact the British prisoners held captive in Kabul, but apparently to no effect.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Earlier, in trying to realize his escape, he reports with some surprise that ‘Although my dress was like an Affghan’s, still my voice always betrayed me.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like an actor in a historical drama, Pandey is surprised that his costume, though sufficiently authentic in its details, fails to convince his audience to overlook other infelicities, notably of language and ‘voice’.

Apparently, it was due to the efforts of Norgate, his last commanding officer, that Sita Ram was convinced to pen his account in the first place. Sita Ram is supposed to have prepared the manuscript in 1861, shortly after his retirement, and to have sent one copy, via his son, to Norgate. Sita Ram's original manuscript was written in Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi spoken in the centre of present-day Uttar Pradesh in northern India. Norgate purports to have been assisted in his work by an Indian translator. To this end, Norgate tells us in his preface to the 1873 edition that his translation appeared some ten years earlier in an ‘Indian periodical’, which he describes as being ‘defunct’ as of 1873. This original 1863 edition was, according to Norgate, ‘at the time, met with great favour, and excited no little interest’. Norgate goes on to cite a review in The Times as proof of this ‘great favour’. Here, among other places, however, one must take Norgate's assertions on faith, for no evidence of the previous edition has since come to light. Despite numerous inquiries by a variety of scholars, there is no evidence of the 1863 ‘original’ edition ever having been reviewed, let alone mentioned, in The Times during the several decades that preceded and followed it.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In fact, there are several other archival problems that lead one to doubt the authenticity of this text. For, in addition to Norgate's missing ‘original’ 1863 edition and the contemporary ‘favour’ that was said to attend it, what is even more problematic is the absence of Sita Ram's Avadhi original. To an extent, J. T. Norgate convincingly attempts to pre-empt such criticism of his translation, primarily through what we might call his manipulation of readers’ ‘climates of expectation’. These ‘climates of expectation’ are the result what Richard Slotkin calls, in the context of film studies, ‘genre effects’, or the ‘encoding of a . . . complex framework of understandings in a set of simple visual signs’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ So, for example, as if in response to the complaints of military historians that it would have been impossible for Sita Ram to have participated in all the events he claims to have witnessed, Norgate writes in his preface, ‘In some parts of the narrative, it becomes rather confused, and some of the dates are evidently incorrect, but when it is remembered that “This Life” embraces scenes and events which occurred during a period of half a century, and are related by a Native, these errors are not surprising.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, it is ‘on account of Sita Ram's haziness about names and dates’ that the account ‘rings true’ for James Lunt, the editor who, in 1970, published his own ‘more easily readable’ version in which he ‘cut out most of the Hindi expressions with which Norgate sprinkled his translation’.Footnote ¹¹²

With regard to criticisms of the language of the translation itself being an inaccurate rendering of the Hindi original, Norgate writes that he has ‘obliged to give the general meaning, rather than adhere to a literal translation of many sentences and ideas, the true idiom of which it is almost impossible to transpose into English’. He goes on to assert, ‘For the benefit of those who may wish to criticize the translation, where any idiomatic words are used, the original are often given and critics are welcome to put that construction on these, as seemeth them best.’Footnote ¹¹³ Many of these ‘idiomatic words’, such as Badshah (king), Moulvie (a Muslim learned man), Nawab (a title of rank), Mem Saheb (respectful designation of a European married lady, combining the English ma'am and Perso-Arabic ṣāḥib), and Pundit a man learned in Sanskrit lore, were, at the time of Norgate's writing, already so well established in the Indo-English lexicon as to not require typographic notice in italics.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Indeed, it seems as though Norgate only invites us to criticize the words that he need not have translated at all. Safadi cites analogous linguistic infelicities in Norgate's retention of certain ‘babu English’Footnote ¹¹⁵ verbal phrases (for example, Sitar Ram, in his preface, describes having ‘eaten seven severe wounds’Footnote ¹¹⁶ , his representation of Sita Ram Pandey's lexical choice of Arabo-Persian terms unlikely to be spoken by a Hindu Brahman (but perfectly natural to the ears of an Englishman educated in the Persianate style of official ‘military Hindustani’), and his bizarre orthographic transcription of Indic terms with aspirated consonants. For Cadell and Lunt, however, the transposition of syllables in Pandey/Norgate's ‘vernacular rendering’ of the Major General Sir David Ochterloney's surname as ‘Loneyackty’ is a ‘usual Indian perversion’ of English names.Footnote ¹¹⁷ That this sort of metathesis together with examples of verbal reduplication are among the most distinctive forms of early British parodies of Indian English would not seem to diminish their linguistic credulity.

For the reader who doubts the ‘native’-ness of the narrator himself, Norgate deploys the tactic of self-deprecation, writing that ‘The narrative without doubt might have been expressed in more elegant language, and there are incidents enough, had one the pen of a “Grant,” to have produced a romantic tale, but as Truth is said to be stranger than Fiction, I have preferred to let it remain in its own unvarnished style and simplicity.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ This self-deprecation serves to convince one historian that:

Philip Mason comes to much the same conclusion, arguing that ‘if Norgate was really the author, he was something of a literary genius and something of an amateur anthropologist, and it is odd that he never wrote anything else’, implying, of course, that Norgate was neither.Footnote ¹²⁰ The narrative derives much of its authentic purchase from the combination of its elegantly inelegant English and what readers perceive as a superfluity of cultural prejudice.

Norgate, thus, in his preface, fulfils his readership's ‘climates of expectation’. He confirms the reader's received knowledge that the Indian possesses an underdeveloped or complete lack of historical consciousness through a portrayal of Sita Ram's poor technique of memory and emplotment, or, in short, of the archival.Footnote ¹²¹ Despite suspicions that ‘the whole thing is too good to be true’, Philip Mason, in discussing the authenticity of the memoirs, believes (as per the principle of lectio difficilior potior) that, ‘To me the lapses in memory are arguments in favour of authenticity’, discounting the possibility ‘that Norgate inserted inaccuracies and mysteries to add an air of verisimilitude’.Footnote ¹²² It is, however, the linguistic claim to authenticity, and specifically his strategic use of a limited Anglo-Indian lexicon, that most convinces the reader of Norgate's identity not as the fabricator of this narrative but merely as its translator. This strategy is what Slotkin calls a ‘double-action authenticating device’. It is analogous to the effort to which a stage director will go ‘to get the costumes right’ in order to convince the viewer to accept historical inaccuracies in the plot of a play.Footnote ¹²³ Here, however, instead of meticulously researched costumes, Norgate's deployment of a semi-internalized vocabulary of Indian exoticism serves to authenticate the reader's expectation of an Indian narrator's anachronisms. In fact, Norgate's defence of this deployment of ‘idiomatic words’ is doubly pre-emptive: for while on the one hand, a criticism of the presence of such words only confirms the authenticity of the voice of the Indian narrator, on the other hand, the putative absence of the translator's mediation in the deployment of these ‘idiomatic words’ conforms to the imagined transparency of Norgate's role in the process of translation itself. We should not underestimate the importance of language as an authenticating device, as important as if not more than appearance, for, as Sita Ram himself reminds us, ‘Although my dress was like an Affghan’s, still my voice always betrayed me.’Footnote ¹²⁴

In the final analysis, the most easily falsified fiction of Norgate's preface proved to have the most transformative effect of all. Norgate quotes a fictitious reviewer from The Times as having written of the 1863 edition of Sita Ram's memoirs that ‘It would be well if all officers whose lot compels them to serve with native troops, were to study this Life of the old Soobadar.’ Indeed, shortly after the 1873 publication of Norgate's ‘translation’, an Urdu translation from the English appeared through an Indian publisher.Footnote ¹²⁵ Urdu, a language that shares with Modern Standard Hindi a grammatical basis in the spoken dialect of the region surrounding Delhi, had by the mid 1830s replaced Persian as the official vernacular language of governance in the North-Western Provinces under the control of the British East India Company. Urdu continued to serve as an official language throughout much of northern India—including in regions like the Punjab where it was not commonly understood by the populace—during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the authors of Urdu texts deemed to have educational value had the potential to receive substantial state patronage. Sometimes known as ‘military Hindustani’, and called ‘the Hindee language in Persian characters’ by Pandey, it continues even to this day to serve as the lingua franca of the Indian Army and the national language of Pakistan.Footnote ¹²⁶

In 1910, Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Craven Phillott (1860–1930), secretary and member of the board of examiners in the vernacular languages, selected Sita Ram's memoirs as material for use in a textbook that would help to prepare British Army officers for their Urdu language examinations.Footnote ¹²⁷ With Phillott's decision to publish a new Urdu retranslation of Norgate's original English ‘translation’ of Sita Ram's original Avadhi text, Norgate's Subedar would win more fame than anyone could have imagined. Phillott's translation, according to his modern editor James Lunt,

Allison Safadi has recently discovered a new translation, prepared in 1999 by Madhukar Upadhyay, of the text in Sita Ram's ‘own’ language, Avadhi, with the title Kissā Sītārām Sūbedār (‘The story of Sita Ram the subedar’). With this retranslation (based, one presumes, on an English reprint edition of either Phillott or Lunt), she notes, ‘the “memoirs” finally came full circle’.Footnote ¹²⁹

Several hitherto unnoticed letters preserved in a copy of Phillott's 1911 edition of Ḳhwāb o Ḳhyāl in the collection of the prominent orientalist and editor of The Linguistic Survey of India, Sir George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941), provide new insights about the provenance of the work.Footnote ¹³⁰ Grierson received his copy in October 1911 from David Beveridge Mair, a Cambridge mathematician who would become director of examinations for the Civil Service Commission from 1913 to 1933.Footnote ¹³¹ In the letter that accompanied the book, Mair remarks that he noticed ‘what appear to be dialectical forms, probably not enough to trouble candidates’; in a postscript, he wonders whether the ‘bad English’ in Norgate's English-language text, for example ‘laid (for lay) & these sort’, was deliberate.Footnote ¹³²

The text evidently piqued Grierson's interest, for other letters he received attest to his efforts to seek an original text. G. E. Ward, known for his meticulous Roman-script transliterated editions and translations of Urdu literary works, writes in a letter dated 9 November 1912:

He goes on to cite several instances of this latter phenomenon.Footnote ¹³⁵ He criticizes Phillott's retranslation for misrepresenting certain English-language idioms, concluding, ‘Honestly I do not think that the cause of Hindustani is benefited by this new textbook.’Footnote ¹³⁶

Contained in the correspondence with Grierson are two letters from Frederick William Thomas (1867–1956), librarian at the India Office at Whitehall, in which the latter voices doubts about the existence of a Hindi original. In a letter dated 13 November 1912, he verifies that two copies had been published by Norgate in 1873 and 1880, and provides the full title of the Urdu ‘vernacular version’ published in 1873.Footnote ¹³⁷ About the latter, he offers that the title alone suggests ‘that the story is a work of imagination’ and that his ‘superficial & prima facie impression would be that no such original ever existed’ for Phillott to have consulted in compiling his 1910 retranslation and 1911 edition of Norgate's English edition. He indicates that library staff had ‘tried in vain to discover what periodical is meant’ by Norgate when he claimed in 1873 that ‘This Life and Adventures appeared some years ago in an Indian Periodical since defunct.’Footnote ¹³⁸ In a second letter, Thomas adds new information: Norgate had passed away on 28 August 1894 and was survived by a daughter, a ‘Miss H. M. C. [sic] Norgate’, resident of Fowey, Cornwall.Footnote ¹³⁹ Grierson, whom Thomas perceived as believing in the existence of ‘an original Hindi’ version, wrote to her immediately, and in her reply, dated 21 November 1914, F. M. C. Norgate reports, ‘I cannot trace which Indian Periodical my Father Genl Norgate published the story in originally. As regards the original manuscript, I am inclined to fancy that it must have been in Hindi; and was very probably returned to the old Soobadar when done with; as he would naturally treasure it.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ F. E. Lowe, general registrar in the Central Secretariat of the United Provinces (India), in one of the last letters preserved in this collection, endeavours to clarify Sita Ram's statements about his regiment, its commanding officers, and the actions in which he claims to have been involved. He concludes, ‘It is not easy to trace [Sita Ram’s] statements as he has mixed up the brigades and divisions, in which his regiment served, inextricably; for no regiment served in the manner he states. . .’Footnote ¹⁴¹

In the letters that Phillott addressed to Grierson, he responds point by point to the issues raised by Ward and others (apparently reported at second hand by Grierson to Phillott) to argue for the authenticity of the Sita Ram's narrative. For Phillott, it was Sita Ram's extended stay in Kabul that transformed him from ‘a bigoted Brahmin’ whose ‘mother tongue must . . . have been a sort of Hindi’ into an ‘outcaste’ whose use of ‘Muslim words’ was only natural in light of his having studied Persian in captivity and, after his release, having been compelled to consort with Christians and Muslims. Phillott points to the appearance of the nonsensical term raunnat (a possible transcription of the hypothetical term ) in place of the expected sannat ( ; mode of living, or traditions of Muhammad) as evidence that Norgate had been working off a nagri-script manuscript.Footnote ¹⁴² He concludes, ‘No—Sita Ram wrote a bastard “Hindi”—in the Nagri character—I feel sure of it.’Footnote ¹⁴³

Whether this convinced Grierson is unclear, but in light of the discoveries of F. W. Thomas in the India Office Library, Phillott had to admit in a subsequent letter to having been unaware of Munshī ʿAbdūl-Ġhaffārī's 1873 Urdu translation:

Phillott's (re)translation of Norgate's English edition, ‘accomplished with the efficient help of Mawlavī Raẓā ʿAlī Waḥshat’ in ‘simple colloquial Urdu’, was thus an entirely independent effort.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Patrick Cadell, who had access to letters Grierson wrote to Sir Richard Burn, describes how Grierson, in his capacity as examiner for the Indian Civil Service, learned in 1915 of a copy of Sita Ram's work that had once been in the possession of Girja Shankar Bajpai, an Indian Civil Service probationary candidate. Bajpai claimed ‘Sitaram gave my grandfather a copy of his book, and it is still in our family. My father has it still. I used to read it as a boy and knew it off by heart.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Until additional evidence is unearthed, however, one can only assume that Bajpai was making reference to ʿAbdūl-Ġhaffārī's 1873 Urdu translation.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Finding Billy Fish on the plains of Shinar

Sita Ram as an Indian prototype continues to serve as a persistent and efficacious cultural and narrative intermediary in English-language emplotments and re-enactments of encounters within the Afghan mythic space. Seen in this light, the success of Norgate's From Sepoy to Subedar is more what Slotkin would call ‘generic’ than individual, in that ‘it set the pattern for a successful formula’, and began the process by which the industries of culture (including Hollywood) ‘created the Victorian Empire as a “mythic space”’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In the adaptation of ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ from short story to film, John Huston admitted to carrying out ‘a lot of invention, and it turned out to be good invention, supportive of the tone, feeling and spirit underlying the original short story’. Referring back to his early fascination with Kipling's liberal use of South Asian terms in his fiction, he would add that ‘Kipling's glossary served me well.’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This ‘glossary’ arrived in the form of a reimagined character who would translate between the English-language dialogue of Carnehan and Dravot and the untamed, unwritten speech of the Kāfirīs. The character whose role John Huston augments is Billy Fish: in Kipling's story, he is a chief in the first Kāfirī village Carnehan and Dravot conquer; in Huston's film adaptation, he becomes a Gorkha Nepali rifleman and lone survivor of a British military campaign that took place in August 1880—during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In the film, Billy Fish (played by the Indian-born actor Saeed Jaffrey) serves as a translator, addressing the Kāfirīs in Urdu with the Moroccan extras responding to him in a mix of vernacular Arabic and Berber.

By deploying a by-then-familiar South Asian intermediary as a recognizable character type, Huston had found a cinematic solution to the problem of Carnehan's narrative unreliability: Kipling's Carnehan admits to being unable to understand Kāfirī and yet is the only survivor who lives to report the dialogues—presumably conducted in the Kāfirī language—that took place between Dravot and the people of Kāfiristān. Despite his desire to film it ‘on the actual ground where Kipling's story is set’, Huston had been compelled to seek alternate sites for the film since Nūristān (the name given to Kāfiristān after its integration into the Afghan state and the conversion of its population to Islam in 1890s) was at that time closed to foreigners. The Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Ephesus in Turkey were considered before settling on sites of production in Marrakesh and in the nearby foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He describes having ‘French-, Arabic-, Berber- and English-speaking interpreters’, and sometimes having ‘to go through all four languages to give an order’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Through the same sort of double-action authenticating device employed by Norgate, the ‘genre effect’ of Jaffrey's Urdu speech convinces viewers to accept the linguistic anatopisms of Jaffrey's dialogue.

This use of Hindi-Urdu in Victorian empire literature is an under-theorized narrative device, and is often neglected by those who focus instead on other manipulative ‘genre effects’ such as the surfeit of visual detail employed in historical fiction and dramas. Once we learn that our heroes will be travelling to Afghanistan, we, as viewers of Huston's film, begin to anticipate with not a little dread the macabre turn the story is certain to take. This may even be detected in the title of Phillott's ‘official’ Urdu retranslation of Sita Ram's memoirs, Khwāb o Khayāl—commonly given in English as Thoughts and Dreams (and appears in the book's frontispiece as ‘Visions of the Past’), it is glossed more idiomatically as a set phrase meaning a ‘vision’, ‘spectre’, ‘phantom’, or even ‘delusion’.Footnote ¹⁵² In the end, it is left to Michael Caine to play the by-then stereotypical role of the lone survivor in the Afghan debacle narrative cycle, modelled on, among other examples, Dr Brydon's solitary escape during the retreat from Kabul as memorialized in his Memoranda and a widely reproduced romantic painting, The Remnants of an Army by Lady Elizabeth Butler, which depicts his arrival at the fort in Jalalabad on 13 January 1842. Interestingly, Michael Caine had carried out his national service obligation in the post-war years with the Royal Fusiliers, no doubt serving under officers schooled in the ‘delusions’ of Phillott's textbook. Although they did not see action in the First Anglo-Afghan war, they were involved with later conflicts including the Second Anglo-Afghan war of 1879–1880 and the ongoing actions of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.Footnote ¹⁵³

While one must agree with Philip Morgan that English-language narratives depicting encounters with Afghans should not simply be read as ‘“Manichean showdowns” between an indigenous people and the imperialist force. . .[whose] binary oppositions fail to capture the complicated intercultural zones where cultural differences were mediated’, English-language cinema in particular seems unable to fully account for the multilingualism of Afghanistan and South Asia more generally.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ By way of contrast, Kabir Khan's Bollywood production, Kabul Express (2006), despite its many inaccuracies, its frequent deployment of hackneyed cinematic tropes and offensive ethnic stereotypes, and the absence of named characters who speak Pashto, is nevertheless able to provide a far more compelling depiction of South Asian multilingualism than any English-language film to date. Its Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian characters discover Hindi-Urdu to be at least as useful as English as a regional lingua franca. Huston's Billy Fish and Norgate's Sita Ram, while certainly indispensable to their (own?) particular narratives, ultimately become, in their generification within the ‘Victorian Empire Movie’ and affiliated genres, all too iterable as narrative plot devices. Here, as in every other epic narrative within this recognizable genre, the imperial narrator's ‘appropriation of the historical other takes the form of a public role admitting multiple instantiation’, subsuming that identity into an all too comprehensible, if ultimately invisible, intermediary.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ One wonders if Michael Caine's Carnehan is indeed giving a nod to his historical and literary forebears when he commands the Kipling narrator-figure of the film to keep looking at him lest maybe his ‘words will go all to pieces’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶