William Dalrymple was one of the – nay, perhaps the biggest name at the Hay Dhaka. His latest book is Return of a King – the subject of which this talk with Salahdin Imam centered on.
SI: I must say that reading your last book Return of a King about the First Afghan War of 1839-1842 was like experiencing the event itself.
WD: Thank you.
SI: Obviously you have many reasons for writing a book, but did this seem like part of a trilogy for you? What really impelled you to write it?
WD: It’s a trilogy only in that it covers that period of history, the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, this transition between the Mughals and the British which is I suppose now my special subject. I’ve written three books. White Mughals which covers 1790s to 1805; this one in the middle which is 1830 to early 40s, and then there’s The Last Mughal about the events of 1897. So this book fitted in very well. I knew where the archives are, I have a wonderful Persian translator who’s good at taking on the Persian material so in a sense it was an easy thing to put into operation. It’s a car I know how to drive.
SI: Yes.
WD: But there is another reason. I knew the story of the First Afghan war from reading the works of people like Peter Hopkirk, who wrote a wonderful series of books, The Great Game and Foreign Devils on the Silk Route. So I knew and loved that story. There is something very visceral about an entire army being wiped out and only one man surviving. In a sense you can’t go wrong with a story like that. It has a sort of perfection to it; even before you lift a finger to begin researching it, it’s got a lovely narrative shape. And I realised that this was of course becoming a parallel with the present. Even in 2008 I suppose, when I first hit on the idea, this was clearly a bit of history that was repeating itself. The British were back in Afghanistan, beginning to mess up again, the same old tribal configurations were reconfiguring, the Gilzais against the Durranis, weirdly in this case the British and Americans put back on the throne, Hamid Karzai, who is the direct descendant of Shah Shuja! (Note: The British invasion’s main purpose during the First Afghan War was to install Shah Shuja as the puppet ruler of Afghanistan.)
SI: That comes out beautifully in your new book Return of a King, and it’s another of these really striking features of the book that make it impossible to put down really.
WD: What you do with a story like this in a sense, you play with it a bit, you read around it, you write to people and find out if anyone is writing about the same thing. Also whether there are any new sources.
SI: But you had the original sources.
WD: I didn’t have that to begin with. I mean, obviously I started with just the secondary sources like Hopkirk’s The Great Game. I then wrote to all sorts of scholars on Afghanistan and the region who assured me that there were no archives in Kabul, that there was nothing surviving. I mean none of this turned out to be true.
SI: But you found them by accident almost didn’t you?
WD: No, no. I went out to look for them and the man who helped me find them was the man who was then the Chancellor of Kabul University and is now the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. My very first morning in Kabul I went to see him at the university and he said “Go to this shop in old Kabul and there’s this old book seller who’s bought up a lot of the families’ libraries in the 1980s when everyone was emigrating.” I went off there, spent about two or three hundred dollars buying up these wonderful, old Persian writings about the British invasion of 1839. I knew at that point I had my book! There is a moment with every book when you go from flirting with an idea to beginning to think seriously about an idea and then, as with every relationship, there’s a moment of having to actually commit, and I knew when I came back that morning with those five personal texts that, yes, this is go, green light.
SI: But also, the other thing that you mention is that the history of that period is still very much alive in Kabul, because, say, Alexander Barnes, he is unknown today in the UK, but in Afghanistan everybody knows his name, though as a hated figure.
WD: It’s their big freedom struggle; just as everyone In Bangladesh will remember 1971 a hundred years hence, so in Afghanistan they remember 1839, because what Garibaldi is to the Italians, what Robert the Bruce and Bannockburn is to the Scots, this is to the Afghans. This is their great triumph.
SI: And apparently Captain Mackenzie’s a relative of yours and he comes across, I don’t really know why, he just comes across as a wonderful person. (Note: Captain Mackenzie was a young British officer who played a key role in the invasion)
WD: He’s a nice man. I mean what you do when you research a book like this is that you end up reading, wading through a lot of very boring imperial histories, full of racist comments about the natives, and Mackenzie, I’m glad to say – he isn’t a direct relation, his wife is my relation – Mackenzie just stood out as being smarter.
SI: Did you know about that before you started to research?
WD: I didn’t know it at all. About a month in I remember talking to my brother, maybe when I came back from Kabul, and I said I think I’m going to write this book, it’s all coming together, and he said, “you do know Mackenzie was married to our great, great grandmother?” So yes, it was nice to have a family angle in the history. But what you need when you’re writing a book of this sort where you need detail to bring it to life, it’s not a novel, every sentence has to be based on primary sources, and what’s lucky about this is that not only the British but also the Afghans have written about this extensively because it’s hugely important to both of them in different ways.
And there’s this weird, weird thing where after the great massacre of their troops, the British sent back the Army of Retribution and it’s a very sinister thing as its name implies. It destroyed the country, burned down villages, cut up innocent families, and what is important as far as the writing of history is concerned, was that they came back through the massacred valleys as the snow was thawing. In other words, the bodies of the British soldiers which had been under the snow for winter, and had been preserved by the cold, were just newly uncovered…
SI: It must have been a surreal scene.
WD: It was hideous. And so when the Army of Retribution was marching into Afghanistan to take revenge, they were having to march over the bodies of their killed comrades and it was like they had been killed yesterday, because, you know, the snow preserves. The skin goes white, the eyes maybe disappear and decay but the main body is there and so a lot of these guys would recognise their friends, and they would harvest from their pockets letters or diaries or last notes to loved ones.
SI: This is all in the sources?
WD: So a lot of this stuff, you’d be sitting in the British Library and you would go on to the computer and there would be some very grey entry saying, Diary of Ensign Stapleton 1841 to 1843 and you would type it up and you would call it into the computer. And so you’d order up some very grey sounding military thing and you’d type in the access code, XA331, whatever, return and half an hour later from the bowels of the British Library a little plastic packet would emerge on the desk and you’d take it over to your laptop, unwrap it and there would be this thing covered in blood, with a knife mark through it and with some incredibly emotional last thing saying, “darling I don’t think I’m going to get through, my feet are black with frost bite, my left arm was hacked off yesterday, I think my time has come, I don’t know if this will ever reach you, but if it does…” But the letter doesn’t make it. A year later some brother officer finds this thing, puts it in his pocket, and sends it back to England and it duly finds its way to the British Library. So you have incredibly immediate sources which bring this story to life – it’s not just some distant political act that took place some time ago in a foreign country – you know, if you can bring out the human story…
SI: One other parallel I see is the graveyard of empires concept which is the way the British, the Russians, everybody failed to survive Afghanistan. The East India Company also seems to have, you hint at it, faced its own doom in Afghanistan. After the invasion and the massacre of their troops the Company was bankrupt and that ultimately led to the Great Uprising of 1857 and the end of Company rule in India.
WD: Well, that’s true. Afghanistan is not impossible to conquer. Everyone has conquered Afghanistan, the Greeks, the Persians, White Huns, Mongols, Persians…
SI: A lot of invasions …
WD: It’s a whole succession of invasions. It’s a crossroads, it’s like the centre of the Risk board where every army that passes and has to cross! What people find is that while they can conquer Afghanistan – the British did and the Russians did, you know, the Americans have done – while you can do that and you can defeat the armies in the field, every successive army finds that you cannot hold Afghanistan! Although it looks wonderful and strategically important on a map, it’s a very, very poor country. And while if you conquer Bengal, as the East India Company did, you can rip off all the rich merchants who are making wonderful textiles and you can rip off and plunder the rich farmers who’ve got the lovely rice fields. But in Afghanistan there are few merchants, there are few farmers. And they’re very war-like and its very mountainous territory. So what every successive army finds, is that they are spending a huge amount of money trying to keep the Afghan tribes in order and they have to build roads, they have to build forts, train up troops, they have to pay troops, but there’s nothing coming in, there’s no income to pay for it. It’s the exact same problem faced by the current government. Ashraf Ghani can only contribute from tax ten percent of the cost of administering Afghanistan. So what always happens is that sooner or later the accountants of the invaders blow the whistle. And all these
people who do succeed in conquering Afghanistan, find that they have to withdraw. The Russians, it broke their economy, East India Company, it broke the company economy, and it hasn’t helped the Americans balance of payments one little bit over the last ten years. America hasn’t been broken by it, but it’s certainly lost its edge against China.
SI: I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean the way the US finances are in deficit now is a direct result of their excessive military expenditure.
WD: It’s at a trillion dollars I think at the moment. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. You know if they’d just gone into the country and offered every Afghan a line cruiser, a course at Harvard, and offered to build five-lane highways in every corner of the country, it would have been cheaper!
SI: And that is the thing that comes out in your book, too, that you mention the Afghans would have welcomed the British if they had come as friends in 1839 but the fact that they came and they tried to stay is what undid them. As you note, the Americans made the same mistake.
WD: Yup. So it was lovely and it was that strange sense of knowing what would happen next in the story because, you’ve seen it before! The big question now is obviously whether the Americans will continue supporting the government … and they’ve already cut the aid by half.
SI: White Mughals, what a beautiful book that was …
WD: That’s going to be a movie… the producer is the guy who produced the Game of Thrones, and the Director’s Ralph Fiennes. And they’re filming in January 2016.
SI: What about Return of a King? Could this be a movie too?
WD: The rights are available, so if anybody here wants to buy them, they’re for sale!
SI: So is there anything that you’d like to mention, anything I’ve missed out?
WD: My festival, Jaipur, which I do with Namita Gokhale. And it’s free and open to all, just turn up – but it makes it easier if you register in advance. And that is now the biggest literary festival in the world. Quarter of a million people. The book fair in Calcutta has two million or something but in terms of festivals, with writers performing publically, that’s now one of the biggest.
SI: What else makes Jaipur special?
WD: Jaipur was the first and it’s still the biggest. We’re the only ones who bring in large numbers of international authors. I mean here at Hay Dhaka we had ten international authors, whereas at Jaipur we have sixty and it’s two hundred and sixty authors in all, speaking to a quarter of a million people. The feeling is very like this, it’s all in tents in the open air. And it’s in late January. Well it’s very nice to be back here. I have a little Bengali blood in my veins… from the White Mughals period. I have a great, great grandmother from Chandraghona.
SI: You are always very welcome to return to this land of your forebears! Thank you very much for talking with us William.