Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (11 page)

He has not fifty armed attendants and is greatly changed since I saw him last, having greatly increased in bulk and acquired a heavy, almost inanimate look. He has already been abandoned by most of those who arrived with him, and of the few attendants left, I did not recognise one who was of any note during the Kabul mission, nor one indeed whom I had seen before. The scene to me was a painful one. The reverse of fortune is nothing, but the ingratitude and abandonment which seem its consequence are indeed a sorry sight. The former is what all may expect and all should have, but the desolating nature of the latter might shake to its foundation the finest philosophy.
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Shuja arrived in Ludhiana at the end of September 1816, nearly two years after his wives. From the beginning he made it clear that the accommodation arranged for him was inadequate for his needs. He demanded as a king and an ally bound by treaty that the British provide him with more than just asylum and a pension: he should have a decent house with walls sufficiently high that his women could be secluded without being ogled by men sitting on the backs of elephants in the street. He also made it clear he didn’t intend spending very long in the town: as he put it in one letter to Ochterlony, ‘What advantage have I in remaining here?’
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The Shah had many faults, but lack of energy or an excess of self-doubt were never among them. Undeterred by his defeats, from the first months of his enforced exile he began to make plans to raise another army to retake his throne, ‘dreaming sweet dreams of re-conquering the Kingdom of Khurasan’. In his memoirs, he recounted how he took comfort in the example of previous monarchs who had lost their kingdoms only to regain larger dominions later in life: ‘Amir Timur [Timurlane], among modern rulers, was twelve times driven from Samarkand,’ he wrote, ‘while among the ancients, Afrasyab fought Kai Khusro in seventy battles, was defeated over and again, but never gave up. In the same way [the Mughal Emperor] Humayun inherited the provinces of India, but was defeated by Sher Shah and was forced to flee and beg help from Shah ‘Abbas Safavi in Iran. In truth, unless God wills it, nothing will succeed. But when God wills it, we shall surely be successful.’
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At this time, Shah Shuja tended to swing wildly between excitement, self-delusion and depression. One day he would dream up what Ochterlony described as ‘altogether visionary’ plans to surprise his adversaries by returning to Afghanistan via ‘the snowy mountains and Thibet’.
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The next, he would sink into gloom as the impracticality of his schemes became obvious. ‘The mind of the Shah remains in an unsettled and restless state,’ wrote one Ludhiana officer, ‘and he often observes that inactivity and want of employment ill-accord with the tenor of his disposition.’ The officer added:

It has been and will be a part of my duty to soothe, as much as possible, the troubled breast of the Shah . . . I use every persuasive argument that suggests itself to me to dissuade him from entertaining notions that cannot be gratified, such as that of getting British assistance for the recovery of his Throne, the wish of proceeding to Calcutta, or a strong desire to reside at some other post within the British territories. I have even delicately told the Shah’s advisers, that these proceed from an unsettled mind and that no place but Kabul would ever be found fully to answer the Shah’s expectations.
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Nonetheless, only a year after his arrival, concrete plans were in place, and anxious reports began to reach Calcutta about the number of cavalrymen descending on Ludhiana to seek service with the Shah. The government sent back pleas to Ochterlony that ‘His Majesty should be induced to continue to reside calmly at Ludhiana with his family on the provision assigned to him.’
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But it was clear to everyone that this was never going to happen.

After the fiasco of the winter raid on Kashmir, Shuja chose his moment with great care. In 1817, the feud between Afghanistan’s two great families, the Barakzais and the Sadozais, had suddenly erupted again, this time following an insult by the Barakzais to a Sadozai princess. The two leading Barakzai brothers, Wazir Fatteh Khan and his younger brother Dost Mohammad, had been sent by Shah Mahmoud and his son Prince Kamran Sadozai on a mission to Herat, the most magnificent city of western Afghanistan. The brothers were to mount a surprise attack and take the great Timurid citadel from a rebellious governor who was plotting to hand it over to the Persians. This they did; but during the plundering which followed, Dost Mohammad and his followers looted the harem and there ‘seized the jewelled band which fastened the trousers of the wife’ of the Governor.
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What they didn’t take into account was that the Princess in question was Shah Mahmoud’s niece.

A week later, when Prince Kamran arrived in Herat, he received a delegation from the harem, demanding that their honour be avenged. Like Shah Zaman before him, Kamran had begun to be worried about the growing power of the Barakzais, and seized the opportunity that the violation of the Sadozai harem presented.

A few days after his arrival in Herat, the Prince announced that he was to throw a party in the royal garden outside the fortress, and he invited Fatteh Khan and his brothers to celebrate their capture of Herat. ‘Dancers and musicians gathered amidst the fruit trees, platters of kababs and decanters of red wine were prepared, and the nautch party was warming up,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata.

When the Wazir and his brothers entered the garden they drank cup after cup of wine, ate kababs and lost themselves in amazement at the dancing of the lovely women musicians of Herat. Soon they were hopelessly drunk, and the bird of sense had flown out of the Wazir’s brain, and he lay befuddled. Prince Kamran had already arranged everything in advance, so at a sign all the others present at the party got up and seized the Wazir, tied his hands and feet and proceeded to blind him, drawing the tip of their daggers across his eyes to spill the clear liquid on to the dark ground of blindness.
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Fatteh Khan was then scalped, and brutally tortured. Sometime later he was led, blind and bleeding, into a tent where had assembled a group of his enemies. He was told to write to his brother Dost Mohammad and order him to surrender. When he refused, saying he was a poor blind captive and without influence, his tormentors closed in. One – Atta Mohammad, the nobleman who had imprisoned Shuja and threatened to drown him in the Indus, and whose father Fatteh Khan had accused of plotting rebellion and had executed – hacked off his ear, naming his grievance as he did so. A second hacked off the other, voicing another complaint; a third the nose. One hand was cut off, then the other. As the blood haemorrhaged out, each of the nobles named the slight done to him for which he was now claiming vengeance, ‘thus depriving Fatteh Khan of the highest consolation the mind of a man can possess under torment – a conscience void of offence’. The Wazir bore the torture without complaint, until, when his beard was cut off, he burst into tears. When both feet had been hacked off, Atta Mohammad finally cut Fatteh Khan’s throat.
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As before, with Shah Zaman’s murder of Fatteh’s father Payindah Khan, it was one thing to kill the chief of the Barakzais, but quite another to round up the clan. Several of the brothers managed to escape from the garden party and fought their way out of Herat. Two others who were still luxuriating in a hamam ‘heard what had happened, quickly ran from the steam room, and fled. They laid hands on two horses belonging to merchants in the covered bazaar, and rode off towards Kandahar. At the fortress of Nad Ali, they joined the Wazir’s mother and resolved to avenge their brother’s execution.’
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Fatteh Khan may have been killed, but the rest of the clan now declared war on Shah Mahmoud and Prince Kamran and began to encourage rebellion across their dominions.

As the revolt spread, invitations from tribal elders began to arrive in Ludhiana for Shah Shuja, encouraging him to reclaim his throne and restore order. This was the moment Shuja had been waiting for. With Wa’fa Begum’s assistance, he managed to procure weapons and recruit a ragtag assortment of soldiers of fortune, including the American mercenary ‘General’ Josiah Harlan. Though shadowed all the way by a British intelligence officer, Captain Ross, and his two assistants, all of them disguised as Gurkhas, he made his way to the Sindhi banking centre of Shikarpur.
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There he secured a loan from the Hindu money-lenders.
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He quickly raised a body of troops, then marched northwards and within weeks had managed to recapture his old base of Peshawar.

His triumph was, however, short-lived. Shuja’s haughty manner and insistence on the old forms of court etiquette alienated the tribal leaders of the area, so that before long ‘the premature exhibition of his exalted notions of regal dignity led to a battle between him and his inviters’.
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At this critical moment, a shell landed in the Shah’s gunpowder store, setting off an enormous explosion which killed large numbers of his troops; ‘a huge plume of smoke rose into the sky’, remembered Shah Shuja, ‘and legs, hands, arms and bodies were scattered in all directions. The enemy pressed their attack, and we were forced to take shelter in the mountains of the Khyber.’
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Yet again, Shuja had to retreat. Driven back by the now increasingly powerful Barakzai brothers, he had no option but to return to the territories of the Company, losing more of his troops during a sandstorm on a reckless summer crossing of the desert shales between Shikarpur and Jaisalmer. He also failed to repay the bankers of Sindh, who vowed never to lend to him again. As Mirza ‘Ata put it, quoting a Persian proverb, ‘those once bitten by a snake fear even a twisted rope’.
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By October 1818, after a pilgrimage to the great Sufi shrine in Ajmer, and a visit to the Mughal Emperor Akbar Shah II in Delhi, Shuja returned to Ludhiana to plot his next move.

The Shah now had no option but to accept that a long period of exile lay ahead, and, with more resignation than pleasure, he embraced the inevitability of setting up his court-in-exile in Ludhiana.

There was, however, to be no compromise on the Shah’s ceremonial, and his durbar was to be maintained in its full theatrical entirety. Remarkably, thanks to the intervention of Ochterlony, the Company was prepared not just to tolerate this pantomime, but to finance it annually to the tune of 50,000 rupees. Shuja and his entourage moved to more substantial quarters, and visitors to the dusty bazaars of Ludhiana were treated to a lavish piece of political theatre: ‘His Majesty might be seen almost daily in the vicinity of Loodhiana in regal state,’ wrote the American soldier of fortune Josiah Harlan. ‘The throng of a long procession proclaimed the approach of the King, shouting to the listless winds and unpeopled highways, as though he was in the midst of obedient subjects, with the deep and sonorous intonation of self-important command, where there was none to obey.’
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A bizarre durbar assembled around the deposed Shah. The head of Shuja’s household was Mullah Shakur Ishaqzai – ‘a short, fat person’, wrote Harlan, ‘[whose] rotundity . . . was adequately finished by the huge turban characteristic of his class, encased in voluminous outline by a profusion of long thick hair which fell upon his shoulders in heavy sable silvered curls’. The curls were there for a purpose: to hide the absence of his ears, which had been removed at Shuja’s orders as a punishment for an earlier failure of courage on the field of battle. But the mullah was in good company, at least according to Harlan, who claimed that Shuja had developed the habit of removing pieces of his household’s anatomy whenever they failed to perform: many of the ears, tongues, noses and genitals of Shuja’s servants had been forfeited at different points, resulting in ‘an earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king’s service’.

The unfortunate Chief Eunuch, an African Muslim named Khwajah Mika, had allegedly lost his manhood when a harem screen protecting Wa’fa Begum and the King’s other wives had been blown down by a gust of wind, though ‘the executioner was of a tender conscience’, reported Harlan, and ‘merely deprived Khwajah Mika of the lower part of the organ’. After this, the subsequent loss of his ears had been but a minor blow, and, unlike Mullah Shakur, the Chief Eunuch had ‘shaved his head and now fearlessly displayed the mark of royal favour’.
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Visitors who spent time with Shuja continued to be impressed by his charm, manners and dignity. The pioneering Central Asian traveller Godfrey Vigne, for example, reported that Shuja was ‘good natured . . . looking more like a gentleman who has lost an estate than a monarch who had lost his kingdom’.
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Moreover, Shuja was also ahead of his time in establishing a school for his dependants: by 1836 there were approximately 3,000 school-age males enrolled.
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The records of the Ludhiana Agency, which survive in their entirety in the Lahore Archives, do however seem to confirm Harlan’s hints that he was in other ways not one of the more enlightened employers in the Punjab: his slave girls, for example, were frequently reported as running off, possibly to escape Shuja’s punishments, but in some cases ‘to seek the protection’ of the handsome young officers of the British garrison in the town. This inevitably led to several diplomatic stand-offs between the Ludhiana barracks and the Afghan court-in-exile.
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