Embodying diplomacy

Afghanistan declared its independence in 1919, bringing to an end a forty-year period during which its foreign affairs were conducted by the Government of India since the signing of the Treaty of Gandamak in May 1879. In 1921, Afghanistan and Great Britain agreed to conduct ‘neighbourly’ relations in the Treaty of Kabul and sent diplomatic missions to each other's capitals.Footnote ¹ The British Legation arrived in Kabul in early 1922. Afghanistan's international recognition as an independent territorial power was an important stage in the making of the modern Afghan state. Internationally recognized independence became a global hallmark of modern statehood during the twentieth century. While the year 1919 provided a noteworthy watershed in the history of Afghanistan's international affairs, British–Afghan relations existed in a colonial twilight until the disappearance of the British colonial state in India in 1947. The colonial state had contributed to the shaping of Afghanistan in many ways, including the production of knowledge, cartographic exercises and boundary delineations since the earliest British–Afghan encounter in 1808–09.Footnote ² This article focuses on the British Legation in Kabul as a diplomatic representation of Afghanistan's former suzerain and of the colonial state in India between 1922 and 1947. The article complicates the notion of Afghanistan as a mere buffer state on the Indian imperial periphery and focuses attention on the continuing existence of colonial ambitions even after the declaration of Afghanistan's independence. It does so through an exploration of the quotidian practices of British diplomats in Kabul, which lay bare the tensions in the diplomatic–colonial relations existing between the British mission in Kabul and the Afghan state. In order to reveal these tensions, the article first develops the concept of the diplomatic body as an analytical category. A discussion of the colonial origins of the diplomats attached to the British Legation in Kabul (1922–48) will then reveal the ubiquitous importance attached to concepts of physicality in the colonial services and consequently in the context of British diplomacy in Afghanistan. The ubiquity of the body will finally be explored through the three themes of space, language, and medicine.

The concept of the diplomatic body: space, language, and medicine

The article's main analytical tool is the diplomatic body. The ‘corps diplomatique’ usually describes the community of diplomatic agents accredited to an independent government.Footnote ³ Exploiting the ambiguity of the term, this article understands it, quite literally, as the diplomatic body. The literal, corporeal understanding of the term offers an alternative perspective on diplomatic history, which has been regarded as an out-dated form of writing history but is showing signs of renewal.Footnote ⁴ Diplomatic historians are increasingly arguing that diplomatic historiography is about more than simply ‘decisive moments and pivotal people’.Footnote ⁵ Pointing in new directions:

The historiography on diplomacy and international relations has fruitfully harvested the results of a number of turns in the social sciences and generated fresh approaches for the conceptualization of the transactions between state and non-state actors.Footnote ⁷ The product is an innovative array of useful frameworks. The article attempts to add to the debate surrounding diplomatic and international historiography by reading archival materials in ‘new and interesting ways’.Footnote ⁸ As the body forms an important element in this respect, the article follows the lead of body historians who have already read the body as the ‘body politic’ in the context of the history of medicine as well as in terms of the foreign relations of both the United States of America and Norway in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹ The body has also been interpreted ‘as a site of colonizing power and of contestation between the colonized and the colonizers’ and as an ‘imperial body’.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition to these existing interpretations of the body, this article introduces the concept of the diplomatic body. The history of the British Legation in Kabul offers a rich array of evidence for an exploration of diplomatic history's corporeal dimensions.Footnote ¹¹ In particular, the article studies the body through its perceptions as well as through its everyday routines.Footnote ¹² Diplomats, being observers, commentators, collectors and disseminators of information, reporters, and interpreters, documented pieces of everyday life in abundance even if they were only vaguely related to the conduct of international relations. Diplomatic texts, ranging from the private to the official, reveal a significant amount of corporeal detail in Britain's diplomatic relations with Afghanistan, because the diplomats in question, consciously or otherwise, attached great importance to their own bodies. Colonial officers focused on the bodily impact of administering colonial rule in order to justify colonial rule's means and ends.Footnote ¹³ The body formed—and forms—a universal part of the human condition. Thus, the physical strains caused by indigenous people, foreign places, and unbearable climates made the heavy duty of the ‘white man's burden’ in colonial circumstances relatable.Footnote ¹⁴ This attention to corporeal detail was transported into the diplomatic record of British–Afghan relations, where it allows us to read the body in and between the lines of diplomatic reporting and recording.

An overview of the article's main argument illustrates this. The following discussion embraces several meanings of the diplomatic body. It employs the diplomatic body in its perhaps most common form as a descriptor for the collective of diplomatic agents. Moving beyond this conventional understanding, it also uses the diplomatic body in reference to the body of an individual engaged in diplomacy and international relations on the one hand and to a body charged with diplomatic significance and purpose on the other. The body is conceptualized as a contact zone, which allows for the exploration of the three distinct yet interrelated bodily themes of space, language, and medicine.Footnote ¹⁵ The diplomats of the British Legation in Kabul assessed Afghan space, in which they practiced diplomacy, in relation to the physical reactions that it excited. Their own bodies were fundamentally important requirements to conduct diplomacy in the assigned spatial conditions. British diplomats also employed a wide spread of physical registers in their textual recordings of Afghan statesmen, with whom they interacted. British renderings of Afghan space and people combined into a rich body language of diplomatic communication, capturing the body both as a means of communication, contact, and interaction, as well as a gauge to assess Afghan bodily qualities and to describe the newly independent state of Afghanistan and its representatives.Footnote ¹⁶ The body highlighted perceived political and civilizational differences between British and Afghan representatives by feeding on well-established colonial categories created during the emergence of the Afghan state in the nineteenth century. In order to maintain their own bodies in Afghanistan's spatial conditions as well as in order to enhance their political influence among Afghans, the Legation employed medicine on a large scale by means of its medical unit. It sought to exploit the Afghan need for adequate medical care for political ends by drawing on the healthcare resources of colonial India. The diplomatic body represented a corporeal entity, whose frailty as well as whose fitness served diplomatic ends.

Rather than simply re-reading an established written record of British–Afghan transactions, this article applies the concept of the diplomatic body to its exploration of the colonial impact on British diplomacy. Located between the dates of Afghan independence in 1919 and the disappearance of the Raj in 1947, the article's material spans the period of the graded colonial and imperial withdrawal from South Asia. As a consequence, the article aims to blur the artificial boundaries that divide the disciplines of colonial and imperial history on the one side and diplomatic and international history on the other. A study of the British Legation in Kabul, which traces the introduction of colonial concepts of the body into diplomatic settings, benefits from the advances made on both sides of the disciplinary divide in the study of the body. Far from being an instance of ‘indirect’ colonial rule, the Legation's diplomats came into close and direct contact with Afghan bodies, unleashing colonial concepts of the body onto the political relations with independent Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁷ As a consequence, the history of British diplomacy in Afghanistan reveals several colonizing tendencies between 1922 and 1947. The body played a central element in this story.

The coloniality of British diplomacy in Kabul

Afghanistan's independence in 1919 prompted a reordering of its international relations. Prior to 1919, the Government of India had conducted Afghanistan's foreign affairs in return for the payment of an annual subsidy.Footnote ¹⁸ After that date, Afghanistan insisted on establishing direct relations with the British government in London through the Foreign Office, rather than through its fellow colonial ministry, the India Office. Several rounds of negotiations with British representatives between 1919 and 1921 seemed to conclude this demand in Afghanistan's favour, but really only preserved the ‘outward appearance’ of direct communication between the Legation in Kabul and the Foreign Office.Footnote ¹⁹ Behind the scenes of the Legation's diplomatic network, the colonial state in the shape of the Government of India remained the primary point of reference for British–Afghan relations. India's comparatively larger stake was underlined by the fact that its colonial services provided the personnel for the Kabul post. The Government of India conducted its external relations and those with the princely states by means of political officers. Political officers were organized in the Foreign and Political Department (from 1914) and in the Indian Political Service (from 1937). Together, they formed the Government of India's own ‘diplomatic corps’.Footnote ²⁰ As representatives of the Government of India, so-called Indian politicals resided in an area spanning from the Himalayas to the Gulf.Footnote ²¹ The majority of the political officers of the Government of India were drawn from a variety of colonial services, but mostly from the cadres of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Army.

As a result of this staffing policy, the diplomatic mission in Kabul was firmly in the hands of colonial service men, who were only seconded to His Majesty's Government's diplomatic service for the time of their posting. Between 1922 and 1947, the corps diplomatique Britannique in Kabul was predominantly colonial in origin. This had important implications on British perceptions of the Afghan state, its representatives, and subjects. British diplomats in Afghanistan entertained and applied qualified understandings of Afghanistan's sovereignty as a fully independent state, which were grounded in the colonial state's perception of its imperial periphery. During the nineteenth century, British representatives contributed to the shaping of Afghanistan into a state of European complexion. In particular, Afghanistan came to be mapped by the mission of Mountstuart Elphinstone in 1808–09 and territorially delineated by the Goldsmid and Durand Missions, which defined its eastern and western borders in 1870–72 and 1893. The development of Afghanistan into a territorially defined sovereign state culminated in the declaration of its independence in 1919. As a consequence of gaining independence, Afghanistan reached a new stage in its development within the international state system, which homogenized territorial sovereignty and political order along the normative Western ideal of the Westphalian state. The arrival of the British Legation in Kabul in 1922 symbolized the beginnings of Afghanistan's engagement in international diplomacy as defined by Western practices.Footnote ²² Afghanistan was expected to act according to the rules of international diplomacy partially set by its colonial neighbour.

As Afghanistan applied the language and practices of Western forms of diplomacy, the colonial officers, who became diplomats in Kabul, too, had to evolve. While British observers perceived of Afghanistan's transition to an independent sovereign state very acutely, they were less perceptive of their own development from colonial servants with authoritarian ideas of statehood to internationally accredited diplomats appreciative of statal independence and territorial sovereignty. Contemporary definitions of the person of the diplomat did not distinguish between colonial officers and diplomats. Ernest Satow defined diplomacy as ‘the conduct of independent states, extending sometimes also to their relations with vassal states’.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, Afghanistan's development into an independent state also shaped the colonial servant through the practices which this change required on his part. Just as Afghanistan developed into an internationally recognized, independent, and fully sovereign political entity within a clearly defined and delineated territory, colonial servants, too, underwent a similar process of becoming agents in the international practices of diplomacy, which represented Western notions of how modern states should interact with one another. Colonial servants had to adapt, qualify, and develop their own views, ideals, and practices in order to fit their new job profiles at the British Legation in Kabul and in the practice of diplomacy. These two parallel developments—of Afghanistan as an independent state and of colonial servants becoming diplomats—inform the discussion in this article.

The resultant tension between the colonial and the diplomatic identities of British representatives in Kabul is particularly visible in the bodily dimensions of British diplomacy in Afghanistan. British diplomats came to Kabul having experienced the ‘corporality of colonialism in India’ during years of service.Footnote ²⁴ The body was a core selection criterion for ‘political employ’ in colonial India and, therefore, also for the diplomatic post in Kabul.Footnote ²⁵ Even before joining the colonial services, Indian politicals were educated in public schools and universities, which provided a wide array of physical and competitive cultures.Footnote ²⁶ In the colonial services, officers were routinely checked for their physical (and emotional) fitness.Footnote ²⁷ Exercise and contest comprised the top layers of colonial administrations, not only in India, but also across the British empire, encapsulating a ‘badge of office’ in its own right.Footnote ²⁸ An excessive focus on athletics and games even contributed to the ‘intellectual mediocrity’ of the Indian Political Service.Footnote ²⁹ As a result of these multiple layers of physical education, former colonial officers introduced colonial notions of physicality into their relations with Afghan representatives and statesmen. They became agents in the transfer of colonialism's physical cultures from India to Afghanistan as they applied to a largely unfamiliar Afghan scene the bodily practices and lessons learned in the process of colonial encounters in India. The body performed a key role in the way Afghanistan was experienced, perceived, and recorded. Kabul's environmental, political, and social conditions prompted definitions of an ideal diplomatic body, which was always male and of robust physical strength. The diplomatic relations between Britain and Afghanistan were influenced by colonial concepts of the body as the physicality of the Raj was extended into an area that was geographically located outside of the purview of direct colonial impact.

‘Conditions in Kabul are peculiar’:Footnote ³⁰ British Indian bodies and Afghan space

The British diplomat's colonially trained body from India provided the primary point of reference for the experience of Kabul's spatial conditions in the early 1920s. In order to become British diplomats in Kabul, colonial servants had to first cross the perceived civilizational threshold demarcated by the Khyber Pass.Footnote ³¹ Afghanistan was regularly cast in anti-Indian terms spatially, meteorologically, and with regard to physical comforts, hygiene, and civilizational chronology. Afghanistan was not understood in absolute terms or as an independent entity. It existed in reference to colonial India.

When British diplomats reached Kabul in early 1922, they were faced with the problem of accommodation. For the first time since the nineteenth century, a fully fledged British diplomatic mission had to put up in Kabul for the long term. The last British resident, Louis Cavagnari, was killed in 1879 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. No permanent British representation of European origins had since then stayed in Afghanistan, but there had been several short-term missions.Footnote ³² Between 1882 and 1919, an Indian news writer represented British Indian interests as part of the government of India's Agency network.Footnote ³³ Against this background, the British Legation in Kabul is synonymous with an era of prolonged British–Afghan contact. A residence, let alone a representative one, did not yet exist. The Legation moved into its permanent premises only in late 1926. Afghanistan in general and Kabul in particular constituted largely unfamiliar territory.Footnote ³⁴ The experience of Henry Dobbs's mission, which had negotiated the terms of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty in Kabul in 1921, provided the single most important reference. Its physical experience of Kabul's sensory stimuli directly informed the housing arrangements for the British Legation in Kabul.

In late 1921, only days after the Dobbs Mission had concluded in the signing of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty, long-serving Indian politicals drew up a plan for the establishment of a permanent British Legation in Kabul. The outline for a Legation touched upon the ‘unfavourabl[e]’ accommodation that had confronted the Dobbs Mission in Kabul. Having been quartered ‘next door to some infantry barracks. . . life in it was rendered almost unbearable’.Footnote ³⁵ Henry Dobbs wrote of the ‘depressing and harassing conditions’ in Kabul, which had contributed to the death of Ghulam Muzaffar Khan, a member of his mission. The personnel was ‘crowded into a fairly restricted space[,] and sanitary arrangements were exceedingly difficult’.Footnote ³⁶ The plan for the establishment of a British Legation in Kabul concluded that ‘it would be preferable for the residence of a British Minister to be at some distance from the more densely populated part of Kabul City’, so as to render it ‘habitable according to European standards’.Footnote ³⁷ The physical separation of British and Afghan bodies in the process of the Legation's localization ran parallel to the ideas that underpinned the racial ordering of urban areas in colonial India.Footnote ³⁸

The Legation was at first accommodated in Baghrami on the outskirts of Kabul.Footnote ³⁹ In March 1922, only weeks after arriving in Kabul, the first British Minister in Afghanistan, Francis Henry Humphrys, ‘cr[ied] from the heart:. . . [w]e are very uncomfortable and likely to remain so until the new Legation is built’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The spatial conditions inside the mission quarters did not suit the average British colonial diplomat. Afghan and British bodies alike were too close for comfort. In the summer of 1922, the Legation moved to two historically significant serais, in which the Durand Agreement of 1893 had been signed.Footnote ⁴¹ Apart from representing a locality befitting the management of British–Afghan relations, the serais also offered more space to the Legation staff, but still did not entirely correspond with the Legation's physical needs: ‘The approaches to them are mean, and the surroundings insanitary. As a residence for Europeans in so notoriously unhealthy a city as Kabul during the hot weather, they can only be regarded as a doubtful but inevitable expedient’.Footnote ⁴²

Outside of the mission quarters, Kabul appeared as a health hazard, allegedly infectious and overcrowded with Afghans, who preferred ‘dirty water’ from streams and drains to the tap water coming from nearby hills.Footnote ⁴³ The Legation Surgeon, George MacGregor Millar, was called upon to assess the sanitary and hygienic conditions in Kabul in order to define suitable housing arrangements for a permanent British diplomatic mission. The Afghan summer of 1922, then at its peak, has left its mark on Millar's report. The Legation Surgeon urged that occupation of ‘the present insanitary residence by the British Legation should be as brief as possible’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In particular, Millar referred to Kabul's water supply, which consisted of local wells and a pipe originating in the Paghman Hills close to Kabul and running past the royal palace and the houses of Afghan officials.Footnote ⁴⁵ The water was of good quality but came in small quantities. According to Millar, this impacted directly on the conditions of hygiene prevailing in Kabul:

Kabul was liable to ‘attack by epidemic disease of the most serious and deadly order’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The report casts the Kabul of 1922 as a dirty, unhealthy place, almost uninhabitable for British bodies. The absence of water purification promoted ‘agriculture rather than hygiene’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The occurrence of cholera epidemics in India became a civilizational marker of difference between the familiar colonial notions of progress and backwardness.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kabul constituted a place that could throw the British body into crisis—a common phenomenon in colonial contexts.Footnote ⁵⁰ The commonly used rhetorical device of hyperbole in reports from Kabul—‘there is no sanitation in Kabul City’—and the claim regarding the indescribability of Afghan conditions are cases in point.Footnote ⁵¹

In India, rumours circulated regarding Kabul's other perceived disadvantages, which were largely based on a lack of experience with conditions in Kabul. One of these criticized the ‘notoriety’ of Kabul's climate, which actually compared positively to India, as later diplomats testified.Footnote ⁵² Robert Forrester Douglas MacGregor, the Legation Surgeon in 1944, wrote that ‘[t]here are four distinct seasons in Kabul; Spring is delightful, Summer not too hot, autumn beautiful, and winter the least pleasant (to me) season of the year. Taking it all round Kabul is a healthy place’.Footnote ⁵³

Kabul's climate attracted considerable attention because the colonial discourse on the environment conceived of tropical heat as a marker of health in its own right, whose detrimental impact ‘sapped the strength’ of even the most ‘virile’ civilizations and therefore also posed a potential risk for British rule in India.Footnote ⁵⁴

While Kabul's climate was increasingly regarded as being beneficial, healthy, and even desirable in comparison to India, Afghanistan did not compare quite so favourably in other instances.Footnote ⁵⁵ A posting in Kabul came with a range of amenities, such as free quarters, free transport between Afghanistan and India, exemption from Indian customs duty on imports from outside India, free electricity, a supply of fuel during winter months, and free water. These amenities were designed to compensate to some extent and in differing degrees for Kabul's perceived lack of physical comforts in comparison to India.Footnote ⁵⁶ Serving in Afghanistan was not a very popular thought ‘to the Indian mind’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was depicted by British diplomats in similar and, at times, even more extreme notions of overcrowding and unhealthiness than those pertaining, allegedly, in colonial India.Footnote ⁵⁸ When Humphrys reported his journey to Kabul in 1922 to George Curzon, the former Viceroy and then British Foreign Secretary, he stressed that he and his personnel had been ‘more fortunate than could have been expected in withstanding the rigours of our journey and of Oriental cookery’.Footnote ⁵⁹

In addition to unhealthiness, overcrowding, and discomfort, the diplomatic job in Kabul also involved a significant amount of risk of violent injury or death—quite understandably given the killing of previous British resident envoys in Kabul in 1841 and 1879. Acutely aware of historical precedents, Britain's past encounters with Afghanistan cast a shadow on the minds of the new arrivals, who expected their effort to take place at the risk of their corporeal integrity. The Secretary at the Legation, William Kerr Fraser-Tytler, wrote in a letter to his mother:

Judging from an entry in the Kabul Legation Diary, the Counsellor at the Legation in 1922, Richard Roy Maconachie, was aware of the fact that his date of birth overlapped with Cavagnari's date of death: 3 September.Footnote ⁶¹ The initial fears for life and limb never fully disappeared. As a matter of last resort, the Legation secretly stored a case of ‘bombs’ and rifles. Several events affected the Legation's sense of security, particularly during the winter of 1928–29 and again in 1933. During the rebellion against Amanullah Khan in the winter of 1928–29, the Legation found itself on the frontline between the rebel army of Habibullah Kalikani advancing on Kabul on the one side and the troops of Amanullah Khan on the other. Fighting took place across the Legation grounds. The Legation was hit by several shells and several thousand rifle rounds. Two Afghan ‘servants’ were shot dead, two others wounded.Footnote ⁶² The British staff escaped almost unscathed. The Superintendent suffered a flesh wound on the thigh and another member of the Legation a cut from bullet pieces.Footnote ⁶³ Humphrys himself had a narrow escape when a bullet broke his shaving glass and singed his moustache as Afghanistan's dangers imprinted themselves on his body in the process.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1933, Muhammad Azim, a teacher at the German school in Kabul, failed in his attempt to assassinate one of the Legation's diplomats, but instead shot the Garage Superintendent Geoffrey Herbert Stranger, the translator Syed Irshad Husain, and an Afghan employee named Yakub on the Legation grounds.Footnote ⁶⁵ The diplomatic body was at risk of being targeted for political reasons as the attack was interpreted as an expression of resentment of British influence in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁶⁶

Kabul was a trying place in terms of physical and mental health, safety, and comfort. As a consequence, reporting from Kabul as instanced by the diplomats attached to the British Legation cast Afghan space in terms of a male physique. Male diplomats in possession of fit bodies authored reports from Kabul that suggested that only those male bodies could conduct diplomacy in Afghanistan successfully. When the first batch of British diplomats travelled from Peshawar across the Khyber Pass, into Jalalabad, and on to Kabul, they did so without their female partners as, in the words of the Secretary of State for India, ‘it would not be wise for [the Minister] to take his wife to Kabul with him’.Footnote ⁶⁷ A sense of risk pervaded the policy, which preferred single men because they required fewer transport facilities and were more mobile in comparison to being with a partner.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the early days of the Legation, single men were preferred for service in Kabul since they also occupied less space than couples, particularly prior to the occupation of the permanent Legation premises in 1926. Over time, the restrictions imposed on wives and partners were lifted as the walls of the permanent Legation premises sheltered a family-friendly abode from Kabul's dangerous and adverse environment. However, as a ‘post of high and anxious responsibility’, Kabul's male domain was ‘no place for people with nerves and temperaments and such like things’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Kabul required a particular kind of diplomatic body. MacGregor, the Legation Surgeon in 1944, defined that the Legation's political and administrative personnel should be:

Again, Kabul appeared in contrast to India's ‘romantic’ places, first and foremost the ‘Indian India’ of the princely states on the one hand and of the Frontier on the other, both of which were administered by the same pool of people that also supplied Kabul's colonial diplomats. When MacGregor defined the ideal British diplomatic body for Kabul in 1944, the main risk for that body was psychological in nature and seemed to originate from living remotely among an alien people. MacGregor's use of ‘tropical neurasthenia’ is particularly revealing, as it included an unspecified set of symptoms, which predominantly befell white colonial elites.Footnote ⁷¹ The British Legation in Kabul was conceptualized in the same terms as other colonial enclaves as its diplomatic bodies were subjected to the medical knowledge of comparable colonial contexts.

The body, diplomatic language, and British–Afghan relations

The colonial services’ physical routines trained and socialized the colonial diplomat and equipped him with the ability to perceive of and qualitatively label surrounding bodies. Physical appearance and bodily demeanour were central elements of colonial spectacle in South Asia.Footnote ⁷² Humphrys remarked in the report on his accreditation with Amir Amanullah that ‘My first impression of the Ameer suggested a good-looking and intelligent young man, a little too soft physically and mentally somewhat highly strung. Though his glance was too quick and shifting to give an idea of much dignity or composure, he smiled at times with a sudden attractiveness’.Footnote ⁷³

Amanullah had claimed the throne in 1919 after his father's assassination during a hunting trip. He had led Afghanistan to independence in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, was committed to making Afghanistan fully independent, to installing far-reaching domestic reforms, and to maintaining his influence with the Pashtun tribes on the Indian side of the Indo-Afghan borderland. All these policy goals constituted significant elements of British–Afghan relations after 1919. Amanullah also presented himself in a very different fashion from his father, Habibullah Khan, and his grandfather, Abdur Rahman Khan.Footnote ⁷⁴ With almost 20 years of Frontier experience, Humphrys seemed unable to appreciate Amanullah physically as well as politically.Footnote ⁷⁵ Humphrys's physical assessment of Amanullah foreshadowed the problematic political relationship between the two men, which ended with Amanullah's abdication and the departure of the British Legation from Kabul in a dramatic airlift in 1929.Footnote ⁷⁶ After Amanullah's abdication in 1929, Habibullah Kalikani, also known as Bacha-i-Saqao, seized the throne for a matter of months before Nadir Khan and his brothers managed to assert their authority on the country. Nadir Khan became King Nadir Shah.Footnote ⁷⁷

Nadir Shah's brief reign (1929–33) was marked by the introduction of a new dynasty as well as by a different approach to British–Afghan relations.Footnote ⁷⁸ Richard Roy Maconachie, British Minister in Afghanistan between 1930 and 1935, and Nadir Shah established ‘closer’ British–Afghan relations, partly because Nadir Shah was more concerned with establishing himself on the throne of Afghanistan than he was with continuing Amanullah's reforms.Footnote ⁷⁹ Nadir Shah had close personal ties with India, having been brought up in the Indian hill station of Dehra Dun. In 1929, Nadir Khan took Kabul from Habibullah Kalikani with the help of an army consisting of 12,000 Wazir tribesmen from India. British authorities in India were aware of this, although the British government, in Humphrys's words, ‘refused to take any part in King-making; their policy was one of strict neutrality, and non-interference’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Despite this declaration, Maconachie and Nadir Shah met in person prior to the latter's advance into Afghanistan: ‘The two men met and talked, and from that meeting there developed a mutual confidence and respect for each other's integrity, which was to be of infinite value to themselves and their Governments in the years that followed’.Footnote ⁸¹

After ascending the Afghan throne, Nadir Shah pronounced a course of neutrality, which promised that Afghanistan would not ‘interfere’ with the Pashtun tribes on the Indian side of the common border.Footnote ⁸² Unlike Amanullah, Nadir Shah appeared to restrict the influence of the Afghan state to the territory located inside its borders, following Western concepts of territorial sovereignty, rather than South Asian notions of territorially unrestricted relations of kinship. It is no surprise that Maconachie commented positively on Nadir Shah's realization that Afghan and British interests at the common border were now ‘essentially identical’.Footnote ⁸³ The suggestion of a growing intimacy between the two men paralleled the ‘identity’ of their interests and of their adherence to the same notions of normative statal behaviour within the delineated territories of colonial India and Afghanistan. Given the recognition of the Afghan king's ‘good’ behaviour, it is also no coincidence that Nadir Shah's body enunciated a widely positive description on the occasion of Maconachie's accreditation in 1930:

Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies differentiated royalty's body natural and its body politic, dividing the human being from the ruler.Footnote ⁸⁵ In their descriptions of Afghan bodies, British Ministers combined both kingly bodies, whose natural appearance was representative of the larger Afghan body politic. Describing the Afghan king's body was a well-established trope in diplomatic correspondence. Maconachie's description of Nadir Shah's body is almost intimate, offering opportunities for the application of a ‘personal touch’ to British–Afghan relations: ‘The value of personal contact in oriental diplomacy is of first importance, and among Orientals it is nowhere more important than in dealing with Afghans’.Footnote ⁸⁶ The pleasing political outlook of the king as respecting Western concepts of territorially limited statehood also went hand in hand with the positive representation of his body. Maconachie's readership in London found it ‘comforting that King Nadir Shah's health, upon which so much depends, is good’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Amanullah Khan's ‘soft’ features paralleled his political adversity. By contrast, Nadir Shah appeared strong—despite evidence to the contrary—paralleling British hopes with regard to his apparent policy goals.Footnote ⁸⁸ British Ministers projected the expectations of British–Afghan political relations onto the bodies of Afghan kings.

Observing Nadir Shah's health went far beyond a personal expression of private relief. The resilience of the king's body was synonymous with Afghanistan's stability—an important piece in the puzzle of the defence of India and in Frontier governance. British diplomats perceived a close connection between the health of the Afghan ruling elite and the health of Afghanistan's larger body politic. The ruling family's physical health and its outdoor activities in pursuit of it were listed in great detail in regular diplomatic reports emanating from Afghanistan between 1931 and 1939.Footnote ⁸⁹ Health was as important as political events because it was central to conducting diplomacy as much as it was key to stabilizing Afghanistan and British–Afghan relations. Afghan kings, too, customarily inquired after the health of British monarchs in conversation with British diplomats, signalling the close connection between the sovereigns’ bodies, the healthiness of the state and of diplomatic relations existing between the two.Footnote ⁹⁰ Even when there was little to talk about, health was always a topic. In 1936, Fraser-Tytler wrote in a private letter about his meeting with the Afghan king, Zahir Shah: ‘He didn't say very much to me, but asked after my phlebitis & was quite pleasant’.Footnote ⁹¹ Pleasing policy goals reflected positively on British representations of Afghan bodies, which in turn carried the weight of the entire Afghan state. Especially after Nadir Shah's assassination in 1933, Afghanistan's stability seemed to hinge entirely on Hashim Khan, Nadir Shah's brother and uncle of the succeeding King Zahir Shah.Footnote ⁹² Hashim Khan effectively ruled Afghanistan between 1933 and 1946 as its ‘autocratic’ prime minister, earning him the attributes ‘the great man’ and ‘dictator of this country’.Footnote ⁹³ The physical strength and good health of Afghanistan's leadership not only indicated its ability to rule, but defined the country's fate as illness could cause ‘acute anxiety’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Hashim Khan's health was closely monitored by British diplomats in Kabul until he suffered a heart attack in 1944 and retired two years afterwards in 1946.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Afghan body provided a foil for British–Afghan relations, which projected various political meanings and judgements. It prompted diverse responses, such as attraction, concern, and disapproval, which indicated political cohesion and closeness or opposition and disagreement. The Afghan body was intimately assessed, but also expressed extreme estrangement. If Afghan statesmen did not correspond to British expectations of reasonable political behaviour, the Afghan body could be dehumanized in order to give expression to the colonial notion of the civilizational distance between Afghan and Indian political orders. Reporting on the impact of Amanullah Khan's ambitious reform project in 1928, Humphrys bestialized Amanullah Khan by likening him to a horse: ‘I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that King Amanulla[h] has temporarily taken the bit between his teeth and bolted. When he returns to the stable I shall use my best endeavors to curb his petulance and prevent another outbreak’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Humphrys suggested to his superiors in London that Amanullah Khan's political actions were animalistic, exceeding even common notions of ‘oriental’ irrationality. The Afghan king appeared in need of being reined in politically by the British head of mission in Afghanistan. The political officer's core competence of horsemanship is also visible in Humphrys's description of Afghans as an ‘unbridled people’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Even if applied only metaphorically, the analogy suggests Humphrys's urge to order Amanullah Khan's political instincts. For British administrators in India and British diplomats in Kabul, Amanullah Khan remained a problematic figure long after his abdication in 1929. In 1939, William Kerr Fraser-Tytler, British Minister in Afghanistan between 1935 and 1941, referred to Amanullah Khan as ‘that unworthy object Amanullah’, removing him ‘beyond humanity’ altogether.Footnote ⁹⁸ Even if British diplomats maintained good personal relations with Afghan statesmen in Kabul throughout the 1930s, this did not guard against excesses of diplomatic reporting. In 1940, Fraser-Tytler suggested that Afghan rulers suffered from ‘oriental fatalism. . . short-sightedness and narrowness of outlook’:

The body was employed to highlight differences between Afghans and British diplomats. British diplomats gendered and infantilized, bestialized, and Orientalized Afghan bodies in diplomatic reports by means of body metaphors, which cast Afghan statesmen as children, animals, and savages. These well-known stereotypes, dating back to the earliest instances of British–Afghan encounters, meant to express Afghan lack of civilizational advancement.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The civilizational gap was expressed by using the body as the point of reference for the reporting of political relations.

Health, medicine, and diplomacy: the Afghan body as a political asset

The above considered the reactions of British diplomatic bodies to Kabul's spatial conditions. It also underlined how the bodies of Afghanistan's ruling elite were intimately assessed. Both points illustrate that a healthy British body provided the initial requirement to conduct diplomacy and that the functioning of the Afghan state depended on the health of its leadership. Afghan and British bodies seemed to have identical needs, which could be met by the provision of healthcare from colonial India's medical services.

The British diplomat's body was cared for by the Legation Surgeon and the Legation's medical unit. The Legation Surgeon was one of the five ‘superior’ political staff members of the Legation.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Originating from the Indian Medical Service, the Legation Surgeons were attached to the Foreign and Political Department of the Government of India. Successive Legation Surgeons judged medical care in Afghanistan to be insufficient. ‘Adequate’ healthcare in colonial India was more than a day's journey away under perfect travel conditions. Looking from India, Kabul was a remote place. With Afghanistan's ‘national sanitary efficiency’ in doubt and ‘uncertain medical help in time of need’, a quick medical response on the spot proved vital.Footnote ¹⁰² Fraser-Tytler underwent a successful appendectomy in 1940, but the Military Attaché Alfred Noel Irvine Lilly did not recover in 1924.Footnote ¹⁰³ The reports on Kabul's environment reinforced the need to provide diplomatic bodies with the necessary immunity against Kabul's allegedly adverse hygienic and medical conditions. The provision of medical autarchy to the Legation was the guiding principle behind the establishment of its medical unit. Yet, this medical autarchy constituted only a minor share of the Legation's medical activities since the Legation staff accounted for only a fraction of cases treated at the Legation's medical unit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Rather, the Legation's medical establishment addressed Afghan bodies in need of healthcare on a large scale for diplomatic purposes.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In doing so, British diplomacy in Afghanistan revealed larger ambitions, which it disguised as ‘altruistic’ humanitarianism.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The idea to employ medical care for diplomatic ends was articulated very early during the planning stages of the Legation as a ‘good hospital under a British medical officer would undoubtedly do much towards establishing good relations with the Afghans’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Although ambitions of this magnitude, reminiscent of the public hospitals in colonial India, were not realized, Denys Bray, India's Foreign Secretary, underlined the ‘great political value’ of a dispensary, a combined daytime practice and pharmacy.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Consequently, the Legation established an outpatient dispensary, which was open to all, approval of the Afghan government permitting. Most of the dispensary's medical work was undertaken by an Indian Sub-Assistant Surgeon, a pharmacist, a dresser, and a full-time nurse. The Legation also featured a small-scale hospital, which provided medical care in urgent cases, ‘who cannot be moved from Kabul’, particularly surgeries and confinements.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Its use was primarily reserved for the Legation's staff, Kabul's Indian community, and other foreigners in emergencies, who required stationary care. The Legation's hospital did not treat Afghans, who were referred to Kabul's public hospitals. The provision of medical care was structurally integrated into the British Legation's diplomatic setup from the very beginning. Even before the Legation moved into its purpose-built houses with its separate hospital compound in 1926, it already maintained a dispensary at its temporary accommodation in the historic serais of the Durand Agreement. The medical unit also provided, by and large, a cheap option to meet political ends. Its costs were allocated at Rs. 100,000, while the construction of the Minister's house at the new residence alone consumed around Rs. 200,000.

The Legation dispensary became almost immediately popular with the Afghan population ‘in the absence of any clinic in this country in which Afghans put any faith’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In 1926, the dispensary registered about 26,000 annual cases. These figures rose to over 40,000 in 1938 and even 60,000 in 1941.Footnote ¹¹¹ The large numbers of patients underlined the need for and the quality of the medical healthcare provided by the Legation dispensary. Not surprisingly, it provided ‘one of our most valuable political assets’, according to Humphrys.Footnote ¹¹² In order to underline that status, Humphrys requested the shipment of an X-ray machine, because no such machine was in operating order in Kabul in 1926.Footnote ¹¹³ When Kabul's only other X-ray machine broke down in 1931, the British Legation de facto became part of the state-run public health organization of Afghanistan, simply by providing resources that were otherwise unavailable in the country.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The Legation's medical unit provided several points of diplomatic contact. In addition to the public outpatient dispensary, the Legation Surgeon attended personally to the private circles of the royal family and to members of the court.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Amanullah Khan's ‘evident terror of disease’ provided a point of entry for British medical officers to establish themselves as figures of authority in Afghan court circles.Footnote ¹¹⁶ There is a long history of Indian officers assuming both medical and political roles in Afghanistan. To name only two of them, Mahbub Ali Khan accompanied the Dobbs Mission as Sub-Assistant Surgeon before becoming the Legation's Oriental Secretary. Even earlier, Henry Walter Bellew's mission to Afghanistan blended British political and medical objectives in middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The influence of the Legation Surgeon amongst Afghans was usually compounded by a sense of urgency, which provided him with an opportunity to stake out his work more clearly against that of other international doctors operating in Kabul. The Legation Surgeon became a diplomatic agent in his own right as successive British Ministers highlighted the importance of his work for political reasons. Legation Surgeons ‘succeeded in winning the confidence and affection of Afghans of all classes’, including Amanullah Khan's gratitude for providing him with a pair of glasses.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The resultant popularity of Legation Surgeons with high-ranking Afghan statesmen was often noted in diplomatic reports.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In general, there was more medical work than the Legation could handle. Humphrys commented in 1925 that the number of patients at the dispensary was ‘inconveniently large’, indicating that the Legation did not have sufficient personnel to satisfy Afghan demand.Footnote ¹²⁰ As a consequence, the female partners of the British Legation staff took over nursing duties at the hospital.Footnote ¹²¹ A nurse from the Lord Minto Indian Nursing Association from Calcutta assisted Queen Soraya in the birth of her second son in 1923, expanding the points of contact between the Legation and the Afghan population otherwise closed to male diplomats. Briefly, Gertrude Humphrys, the British Minister's wife, had been considered to act as a midwife, providing a significant example of the overlap of the physical and the political.Footnote ¹²² Afghan women were visited at their homes. The Legation later established the post of a full-time nurse and even discussed the appointment of a ‘lady doctor’ as well as a dentist.Footnote ¹²³

The Afghan body in need of medical care provided a political opportunity, which was not to be missed. The Legation's medical establishment—a dispensary for the public, a small-scale hospital for emergencies among the Legation personnel and foreigners living in Afghanistan, doctors and nurses—set it apart from all other diplomatic missions in Kabul. The provision of Western medicine was applied to overcome the Legation's political status as the ‘most unpopular institution in Asia’ in the early 1920s.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Legation's reputation was balanced by the positive assumption that its medical unit constituted ‘[t]he only efficient, and by far the most popular medical institution in Afghanistan’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The reports written on the dispensary, hospital, and the activities of the Legation Surgeon praised their successes. Legation Surgeons likened their role to that of a ‘chairman’ and ‘authority of appeal’ among doctors in Kabul, without whose decision no important case could be concluded.Footnote ¹²⁶ From the perspective of the British Legation in Kabul, the Afghan public healthcare system seemed ‘crude and inadequate’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This assessment was fuelled and perpetuated by the popularity of the Legation's medical unit. As a result, the Legation sought to foster its influence in the Afghan medical sector. Both the inefficiency of Afghan institutions and the productivity of the Legation dispensary were continually advertised. H. A. Ledgard, Legation Surgeon in 1942, even suggested that the arrival of the British Legation in Kabul was coincidental with the ‘dawn of medicine in Afghanistan’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Given this situation, the spread of Western medicine appeared as a powerful tool for British diplomacy. British medical care in Kabul displayed similar ‘hegemonic attributes and ambitions’ which have been established for British medicine in India.Footnote ¹²⁹ Once again, colonial India appeared as a point of comparison to the British Legation in Kabul. In India, Western medicine was initially employed as a ‘tool of empire’ for the benefit of Europeans, but underwent several stages of development to also confront resistances, generated for instance by nationalist aspirations.Footnote ¹³⁰ In Kabul, too, British ambitions to occupy several areas in the Afghan medical and healthcare sector generated Afghan resistances. As early as 1925, the dispensary's popularity conflicted with the monopoly given to the medical department of the Afghan state. The close interaction of British and Afghan bodies at the dispensary seemed discomforting to the Afghan government for reasons of ‘undesirable activities’ as much as for the ‘personal danger to the Legation staff’.Footnote ¹³¹ Until early 1926, the Afghan government discouraged the treatment of Afghans at the dispensary, but Humphrys convinced Mahmud Tarzi, the Afghan Foreign Minister and Amanullah Khan's father-in-law, to lift these restrictions for the male Afghan public.Footnote ¹³² Afghan women were not allowed to seek medical help ‘in view of popular prejudice on the subject’, but diplomatic reports indicate that Afghan women still sought treatment at the dispensary.Footnote ¹³³

Afghan attendance at the Legation dispensary was a recurring theme in British–Afghan relations. In the summer of 1942, the Afghan government again prohibited visits to the Legation dispensary. The ban was enforced by police officers at the gates to the Legation's hospital compound.Footnote ¹³⁴ The Afghan government acted in pursuance of its policy of neutrality during the Second World War, while resistance to the British activities and ambitions displayed in the field of medical care may have also played a role. Francis Verner Wylie, British Minister in Afghanistan from 1941 to 1943, interpreted the restrictions placed on Afghan attendance at the British Legation as an effort by the Afghan government to maintain its monopoly on healthcare and to guard its independence. The Legation, according to Wylie, had overstepped the initial need to establish a medical unit. Wylie criticized the thinking underlying the maintenance of the dispensary for the Afghan population as ‘rank bad psychology’. The British Legation's medical facilities illustrated to a wide Afghan public the inadequacy of Afghanistan's own institutionsFootnote ¹³⁵ :

Unlike his predecessors, Wylie questioned the political value of the Legation's medical work. He conceptualized the Legation's medical unit as a humanitarian institution, which had also exploited the inadequacy of Afghanistan's healthcare system for British diplomatic ends. But, because the links between imperial power and healthcare provision were becoming increasingly evident, Wylie advised his superiors that the ban should not be challenged. The Legation dispensary was never officially reopened to the Afghan public. Between 1944 and 1948, attendance at the walk-in dispensary did not exceed 10,000 cases per year, including Afghan patients, who circumvented the official ban placed on the Legation dispensary.Footnote ¹³⁷ With Afghan attendance reduced, the Legation provided healthcare on a smaller scale primarily to Kabul's international community. The Legation also facilitated the passage of Afghan notables to India and England for medical treatment as it increasingly focused its efforts on selected individuals.Footnote ¹³⁸ Nevertheless, the political potential for the provision of medical care continued to be underlined by later Legation Surgeons as well as by Wylie's successor, Giles Frederick Squire, the British Minister from 1943 to 1948 and British Ambassador thereafter.Footnote ¹³⁹ On a smaller scale, the Legation's—and from 1948 the Embassy's—medical services continued to be crucial ‘to all facets of our relations with Afghanistan, diplomatic, social, educational and economic’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ When the ‘inevitable separation of British and Indian interests’ loomed in March 1947, the British Legation tried to salvage the Raj's ‘prestige’ by means of providing medical assistance to Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But, the previous ban imposed by the Afghan government on Afghan attendance at the Legation dispensary now combined with the financial situation of the post-war period to prevent this. Similar lack of funding for public healthcare institutions existed in India towards the end of colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁴² This lack of—or unwillingness to facilitate—funding automatically affected the diplomatic enclave in Kabul, which was connected to the same colonial resources. At the same time, the Afghan government did not ask Britain to provide medical assistance. Given the elevated role that Legation Surgeons had played in Kabul's medical community, Ronald Duncan MacRae saw the potential for a British doctor to become the head of the Afghan medical services. MacRae's approach was rejected by the Afghan government on grounds that his salary demands exceeded those of other foreign doctors—Turkish, Indian, and Pakistani—already in Afghan employment.Footnote ¹⁴³ MacRae's decision to offer his services to the Afghan government was more than a humanitarian act. It was also an opportunity to circumvent retirement, which officers of the Raj faced as a result of the termination of India's colonial services at the moment of Pakistan's and India's independence.

The Afghan body in need of medical attention and care provided points of contact for British diplomacy. It was a political asset to British diplomacy in Afghanistan, which could be exploited by technological means provided from India or by personal examination in Kabul. The continued insistence on the backwardness of the Afghan healthcare system did not automatically translate into the adoption of British measures and personnel. Instead, British ambitions to exploit the Afghan body in need of medical attention led to resistance by the Afghan government, which tried to prevent British contact with the wider Afghan population. As a symbol of the independence of the Afghan state, the Afghan body was guarded against British treatment, at times even against its own wishes and needs as the Legation's medical unit continued to be popular with both Afghan men and women. Afghan responses to British medical care also were not uniform. While a larger public was disallowed from attending the Legation dispensary, a selected few individuals continued to be attended by the Legation Surgeon or afforded treatment in India or even further abroad.

Pakistani and Indian independence impacted on the British Legation in Kabul in several corporeal ways. With the demise of the Raj and its corollary India Office in 1947, the Foreign Office assumed full charge of the Kabul post while the majority of colonial personnel were retired from service on and after 15 August 1947. In 1948, the Legation was elevated to the status of an Embassy. Most importantly, a change in personnel took place. The majority of the colonial officers were either retired or opted for administrative service in Pakistan and India. The Legation's primary and widely used bodily tool, the dispensary, never achieved its pre-war attendances. After 1948, numbers are not forthcoming from the archival record. Specialized reports by the Embassy medical officers also seem to have stopped after 1948. The annual political reviews no longer dedicated entire sections to the public healthcare system of Afghanistan or to the health of the Embassy's diplomatic personnel. The Legation's hospital plan was scaled down to provide medical care only to a small community.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The waning of textual evidence of the Raj's physicality after 1947 is striking. The annual reports written by the British Ambassador, A. J. Gardener, in 1949 and 1950 make only fleeting references to King Zahir Shah's health.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The explicit connection between the provision of public healthcare and its political relevance for British–Afghan relations disappeared almost entirely, thus retrospectively underlining the inherent colonial characteristics of the Legation's colonial ambitions prior to 1947.Footnote ¹⁴⁶