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Summary
Summary
From William Dalrymple--award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer--a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West's greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time.
With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India--including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies--the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through.
But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West's first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah's principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban's foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan's age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first.
Informed by the author's decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.
Author Notes
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE is the author of seven previous works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; the best-selling From the Holy Mountain; White Mughals, which won Britain's most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson; and The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The British humiliation in the so-called First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42) has long been viewed by historians as a classic example of imperial overreach. Still, it is a saga that makes for marvelous storytelling, filled with heroes, knaves, incompetent fools, and savage, bloodthirsty warriors. It has been told often before but perhaps never so well as by Dalrymple, a historian and travel writer. He places British intervention within the context of the Great Game rivalry with the Russian Empire over influence in central Asia. When the British favorite in Afghanistan, Shah Shuja, was driven into exile, British officials in India feared enhanced Russian influence there and decided to reinstall him at the point of a gun. What followed was a mixture of farce, tragedy, and horror. The British army occupying Kabul was surrounded by a hostile and harrying population. When forced to retreat back to India through unforgiving terrain, thousands of soldiers and camp followers died from cold, hunger, or constant attacks by merciless mounted Afghans. Dalrymple doesn't shrink from drawing the obvious parallel with the current American intervention. That may, or may not, be facile, but this is an absorbing and beautifully written account of a doomed effort to control an apparently uncontrollable population.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BY THE END of the 19th century, almost all the major surviving classics of Greek and Roman literature had been translated into English. Since then a few new gems have turned up, mainly from papyri found in the rubbish dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. Here was found, for example, a tattered verse by Sappho and Pindar's paeans to Apollo. It is unlikely, however, that many more great works of classical European literature will surface; the canon of ancient European literature we have now is likely to remain largely unchanged a century hence. It is often assumed that the same is true for the other great classical literatures of the world, but this is very far from the case. In particular, the rich treasures of ancient Indian literature remain almost completely unexplored, even to those few who can read languages such as Sanskrit or classical Tamil. For there survives in manuscript form in libraries across South Asia a corpus of literature which is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek. Only a very small proportion of these manuscripts have even been cataloged, never mind translated - estimates range from 5 to 7 percent of the total, maybe 500,000 manuscripts of a surviving seven million; but there are really no accurate figures. The scholar David Pingree put the actual number closer to 30 million manuscripts. And such is the scale of the haul, and the poor state of their preservation, that several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts are destroyed or become illegible every week, their contents lost forever. Who knows what masterpieces of prose and poetry, what epics and chronicles, what vital works of sacred and secular literature could be disappearing every year? If the project of conserving and cataloging the ocean of ancient Indian literature has a long way to go, then the business of translation has barely begun. Faced with the vast seas to be explored, the small band of professional translators of Sanskrit tend to feel like infants paddling on the foreshore of the Atlantic, looking wistfully, but impotently, out to the depths of the turbulent sea. There are historical reasons for this neglect. Sanskrit eventually became an exclusively sacred language, the preserve of the Brahmins, and in the ancient Laws of Manu, any Dalit (untouchable) who attempted to learn it was sentenced to have molten lead poured into his ears. Partly as a result of this, before the arrival of the pioneering Orientalist Sir William Jones in Calcutta in 1783, there was almost complete ignorance in Europe about India's classical literature. There began a stumbling progress that led to the translation of passages from the most prominent ancient Indian writers: Vyasa, to whom is attributed the Mahabharata; Valmiki, author of the Ramayana; and the greatest of ancient Indian playwrights, Kalidasa, who is to Sanskrit what Shakespeare is to English. Jones himself believed that Sanskrit was "more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either." Yet within 50 years, the same East India Company that had sent Jones out to India had lost interest in learning from Indian literature. By 1835, the high tide of Victorian self-confidence and narrow-mindedness, Lord Macaulay would write in his notorious Minute on Indian Education that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." Both Sanskrit and Persian were removed from the curriculum, and English was made the language of both education and government. Macaulay's successors, colonial and post-colonial, have done remarkably little to reverse this situation. HENCE THE GREAT importance of a 2,000-page brick of a book entitled "The Norton Anthology of World Religions." Volume I contains a generously wide-ranging collection of the key texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as largely forgotten Daoist Chinese writings from the further side of the Himalayas. It is a major project. Under the direction of Jack Miles, the Pulitzer-winning author of "God: A Biography," the anthology is intended as a "landmark work in which the six major, living, international world religions speak to readers in their own words" and which will make available in English more than 1,000 primary texts from the world's major religions. The two volumes of the anthology bring together both the basic foundational works - the Bhagavad Gita, the Dao De Jing, the Bible, the Quran - as well as a notably eccentric collection of other texts from sages, mystics, commentators, scholars and skeptics that put them in some sort of context. As with any anthology, there are all sorts of aspects of the selection with which one could quibble, quite apart from the unwieldy weight of this concrete slab, which means it can only really be read resting on a lectern or a desk. Given that some 1,400 pages of this monster are devoted to Indic religious literature, it might have made far more sense to finish off the volume with the texts of other related Indian religious traditions such as Sikhism and Jainism, both of which are mysteriously absent, rather than trying to squeeze in an isolated slice of Chinese religious and philosophical literature. Moreover, the choice of texts is spiritedly unconventional: Among the canonical texts of Hinduism, and well-translated extracts from the Vedas, Puranas and Tantras, the editors have found a place for a short extract from Salman Rushdie's pathbreaking novel "Midnight's Children"; among those of Daoism, passages from Tennyson, Oscar Wilde and Carl Jung. Perhaps most surprising of all, ancient canonical Buddhist texts such as the Jataka stories and the Lotus Sutra are supplemented with an extract from Gary Snyder's 1960s "Smokey the Bear Sutra": "Those who recite this Sutra and then try to put it in practice will accumulate merit as countless as the sands of Arizona and Nevada." Yet for all its oddities and omissions, this book brings into readily accessible form a larger and more dazzling selection of translations of sacred literature from ancient India than is currently available from any other single source - while being also probably the best repository of translations in English of the Daoist religious literature of ancient China. Difficult to hold, and almost impossible to read cover to cover, this remains nonetheless a major landmark of religious publishing and one to be warmly welcomed. Everyone will find her own favorite extract, but I for one was most charmed by some superb translations of little known medieval literature in Telugu. As with much Indian religious poetry, the author, Annamayya, a devotional poet writing in 15th-century southern India, slides deliciously from the sacred to the sensuous and back again: What appears at first to be a secular love poem is revealed to be also a cry of longing addressed to an incarnation of Vishnu, Lord Venkateswara of Tirupathi: What use is ecstasy without the agony of separation? Shade is nothing without the burning sun. What is patience without the fury of passion? Why make anything - love or poetry - if two can't be one? WILLIAM DALRYMPLE'S most recent book is "Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42."
Choice Review
While the war in Afghanistan has created a cottage industry of history books on Afghanistan, few have said anything new about Afghanistan's history. Dalrymple's book is an exception. Using previously unused and often unavailable letters, diaries, and official records, Dalrymple's account of the First Anglo-Afghan War is every bit as exciting and detailed as the previous standard, Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game (1992), but broader and more nuanced. Furthermore, it is unquestionably less Anglocentric, as Dalrymple uses a number of Persian and Pashtu sources from Afghanistan. This is possibly the first time many have been used in translation. Although his quoting Persian poetry does get wearisome at times, Dalrymple's use of the primary sources is executed quite effectively. With these, readers get not only the Afghan perspective of the war, but also a much richer portrayal of the historical Shah Shuja than the popular image, which in modern Afghanistan is the poster boy for "foreign puppet." The historical Shuja, as with all figures, is much more complex and, indeed, the only one in Kabul associated with the British who attempted to do anything effectively. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. T. M. May University of North Georgia
Guardian Review
The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 is one of those passages of history the close examination of which requires a strong stomach - and which therefore also requires the most thorough investigation. What happened during the invasion was largely determined by the personalities of the British men involved, too many of whom were arrogant, ignorant and pig-headed, and no novelist is better at portraits than Dalrymple. He has uncovered sources never used before, and to the rich material in British, Russian, Urdu and Persian archives, he has been able to add nine previously untranslated full-length contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict. In addition, there runs through this story a disturbing undercurrent of relevance, and he ends with a conversation he had with two Afghan elders, one of whom remarked: "All the Americans here know their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this." And one can't put down this book without feeling that the old man is right, and that politicians who know not what they do have been at it yet again. - Diana Athill The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 is one of those passages of history the close examination of which requires a strong stomach - and which therefore also requires the most thorough investigation. - Diana Athill.
Kirkus Review
An intensively focused study of the ill-begotten launch of the Great Game in Afghanistan. Who would gain control of the portal to India: Britain, France, Russia, the Sikhs or the Afghan tribes themselves? And was there really cause for alarm at imperialist advances or a "dysfunctional" intelligence gathering by both the British and Russians? In his exciting, exhaustive study, British historian Dalrymple (The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857, 2007, etc.) sheds light on the enormously convoluted rationale for the First Anglo-Afghan War, ostensibly provoked by Britain in order to reinstall the compliant Shah Shuja ul Mulk (chief of the Sadozai clan) to power in Afghanistan over Dost Mohammad Khan (chief of the Barakzais), who supposedly favored the Russians. In truth, the war exposed the greediness and ignorance of all sides: protecting the interests of the East India Company and catering to the competing ambitions of major players like Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, Polish agent Ivan Vitkevitch, William Hay Macnaghten and Scottish agent Alexander Burnes. The British garrison was soon outnumbered 10-1 by the rebel forces of Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammad's able, ferocious son; forced to surrender and retreat in ignominy back to India, the British left Shuja to fall to Dost's assassins in April 1842 and gained virtually nothing save a more defined border. Dalrymple sagely points out that while the Afghans learned a valuable lesson from this early conflict, namely a firm rejection of foreign rule and a sense of nationalist integrity, the Western powers did not and, indeed, still perpetuate a policy of folly and waste. A rich excavation of both British and Afghan sources, with gorgeous colored reproductions of Muslim and romantic renderings of the action and characters.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.