Return of a king, p.48
Return of a King, page 48
Over the following two months, as more regiments and supply wagons arrived, he slowly assembled his forces and his provisions, riding out every day with his field glass to study the elaborate defences and stone sangars the Afridis were building across the Khyber to block his advance. He had calculated that he needed around 275,000 rounds of ammunition in order to bring his force up to 200 rounds per man, and these had all arrived by mid-March. Following desertions by his camel drivers he delayed another fortnight until he had the transport capacity he needed. He also wrote to Ferozepur requesting one more regiment of cavalry and several more traps of horse artillery. Meanwhile, to the increasingly desperate Sale in Jalalabad he wrote: ‘Your situation is never out of my mind . . . Necessity alone has kept me here. Pray therefore tell me, without the least reserve, the latest day you can hold out.’ Sale replied in a message written in rice water, visible only with the application of iodine, that his last supplies of salt meat would run out on 4 April.65
The camels, cavalry and artillery finally arrived on 29 March. That evening Pollock gave orders to break camp and move to the fort of Jamrud at the mouth of the Khyber. A week later, at 3.30 a.m. on 5 April, he ordered his troops to advance silently through the darkness, in three columns, up the defiles of the Khyber. By sunrise, the Afridis found that Pollock’s sepoys were crowning the heights on either side of their stone sangar. By mid-morning, the tribesmen had abandoned all their carefully erected defences and were in headlong retreat. By 2 p.m., Pollock’s central column had taken the fortress of Ali Masjid and were already regrouping, ready to head on to relieve Jalalabad.66
The same morning that Pollock’s sepoys were storming their way up the Khyber, Shah Shuja finally gave up on his British allies. Having heard nothing from MacGregor in reply to his last and most desperate note, the Shah decided he now had no option but to leave the shelter of his fortress and head off to Jalalabad.
He had spent a sleepless night ‘restlessly walking up and down, calling on God, and constantly asking the eunuch servants what time of the night it was’. He then performed his ablutions, said goodbye to his wives and packed a small travelling pouch with the pick of his remaining reserves of diamonds, rubies and emeralds. ‘At the first glimmer of true dawn, His Majesty prayed the two prostrations of the customary prayer in his private apartments in the fort, intending to pray the remaining obligatory two prostrations at the Siyah Sang camp. He mounted his palanquin and urged the porters to move quickly so as not to be late for the main prayer in camp. His Majesty was accompanied by only a minimal escort of personal servants.’67
The previous day, 4 April, Shuja had left the Bala Hisar for the first time since the outbreak of the rebellion on 2 November. He rode out to his tent at the Siyah Sang, and there he held a review of the troops and a public audience for the Kabul nobles. It was at this audience that he formally announced his departure for Jalalabad and appointed his favourite son, Prince Shahpur, as governor of Kabul during his absence. Nasrullah, the eldest son of Aminullah Khan Logari, was appointed Shahpur’s acting chief minister. According to Mirza ‘Ata, the Shah brought with him ‘200,000 Rupees in cash and several bolts of double shawl cloth with which to honour the Kabul chiefs, each according to his rank and merit. He especially favoured Naib Aminullah Khan Logari who had become his closest confidant. Shuja then mounted his palanquin with his son and returned to spend a last night with his harem in the Bala Hisar Fort.’68
Unbeknown to Shuja, however, this action of publicly honouring Aminullah Khan had been interpreted as a deliberate insult to his other principal ally, Nawab Zaman Khan Barakzai. He and Naib Aminullah Khan were now barely on speaking terms, and the public demonstration of the Shah’s closeness to Aminullah at the Siyah Sang durbar had caused huge offence in the camp of the Nawab, who was from by far the grander lineage. ‘Zaman Khan was a great lord with many fighters in his retinue,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata,
while Aminullah Khan Logari had recently merely been one of his attendants. At the durbar Nawab Zaman Khan and others close to Amir Dost Mohammad Khan had received no cloaks of honour from the King and indeed were quite passed over in the gaze of royal favour. This change in fortune did not sit well with the Nawab. Had the King seen fit to bestow his favours more equitably, the hidden discord might have been healed rather than enflamed. But the Nawab and his followers were seething with rage and pique at the King’s taking no notice of them.
Most upset of all was Shuja’ al-Daula, Zaman Khan’s eldest son, ‘who . . . had received his name from his godfather [Shah Shuja’s] own lips’ and at whose birth the Shah had been present.
Shuja’ al-Daula, whose name means bravery or valour, a name which influenced his character, complained thus to his father: ‘That Aminullah Khan Logari was a mere servant of ours. He and those other minor chiefs with no solid base in society, they have now received all the King’s favours, all the honourable appointments. Meanwhile we have been passed over, all our services to the crown and sacrifices for the cause forgotten: we look on dry-lipped, receiving no sign of gratitude, while the others get all the praise. I’m going to kill him if ever I am able to do so!’ In spite of his father remonstrating that now was not the moment and that it was the time to concentrate on fighting the English, the boy took no notice and planned to ambush the King as he came from the fort to the army camping ground in the morning. Before dawn, he hid with 15 gunmen until the royal cavalry escort approached.
As Shah Shuja’s party headed down the corkscrewing road from the Bala Hisar, the Nawab’s son appeared and hailed his godfather’s palanquin. The carriers paused and put down the palanquin. The Shah peered out of the curtains, and at that moment the waiting gunmen opened fire. The bloodied figure of Shuja stumbled out and tried to limp away across the fields. The assassins were already making off from the scene of the crime when one of them spotted the Shah and shouted to his employer to finish the job properly. ‘So Shuja’ al-Daula gave chase and pounced on the prostrate monarch, stabbing him pitilessly with his sword, shouting “Give me that cloak of honour now!” He stripped the dead King of his jewels and golden arm-band, belt and sword – all worth some one million Rupees. The King’s gentle body, bred to rest on soft cushions of fine wool and velvet, was now dragged by the feet on rough stony ground and dumped in a ditch.’69
‘That blameless monarch’, commented Herati,
was martyred between two prayers, all the while repeating the holy names of God in his dawn litany, while the foul murderers earned only eternal damnation! Shahnawaz, one of His Majesty’s attendants, tried to resist and wounded two of the assassins, but then seeing that the place was empty and abandoned, and that the travelling case of jewels was unattended, grabbed it and rushed towards the fort. He hid it in a crack in an old wall, intending to retrieve it at a later stage and sell the contents. But his actions were observed and so it was that the jewels fell into the hands of the murderer Shah Shuja and his father Nawab Zaman Khan.
Alas for that monarch, who once walked the avenues of the royal gardens but never picked the flowers of his hopes and ambitions! Instead he remained lying in blood and dust, unburied in the open plain. He died on the 23rd of the month of Safar, fixing his permanent abode in the kingdom of heaven. ‘For we belong to God and to Him we return!’70
Prince Shahpur hastened at once to the Bala Hisar fort to protect the royal women and children. The body of his father was left to lie where it fell for twenty-four hours, while the Sadozais barred the gates of the fort and gathered together, with the old blind Zaman Shah taking charge, as they tried to work out a strategy to save their position and seek revenge on the murderers. ‘Meanwhile the Barakzais shouted out their gleeful congratulations, and Mir Haji promptly returned from his pretended jihad with his battle standards announcing, “We’ve sent the greater Lord [Shah Shuja] to join the lesser Lord [Macnaghten].” All were congratulating each other, saying “Now we’ve uprooted these infidel foreigners from our country!”’71
Only one man saw it as his duty to attend to the corpse of the murdered Shah. Shuja’s faithful water carrier, Mehtar Jan Khan Ishaqzai, who had followed Shuja into exile in Ludhiana, returned to the corpse late that night and remained next to it, guarding it from mutilation. The following morning he and another old retainer of the Shah’s, ‘Azim Gol Khan, the ‘Arz-begi, helped prepare the corpse for burial. Working alone, the two men dug a shallow grave inside a ruined mosque near the place of the murder. This they covered with earth, and placed the King’s palanquin on top. They also raised a small cairn of stones to mark the place of the murder.
Later that summer, the stones and the bloodstained palanquin were still lying where the two loyal retainers had left them.72
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the historian Fayz Mohammad was told that Shah Shuja Sadozai had eventually been laid to rest in the magnificent Mughal-style mausoleum of his father, Timur Shah. That may well be the case, and it seems probable that his sepulchre is one of three male graves in the basement of that building; but if so the grave remains unmarked, a measure of the Shah’s standing in Afghanistan today.
Even in his own time, the victorious Barakzai view of the struggle between the two clans dominated the way the Afghans wrote about the war, not least because they were patronising the poets who did the writing. Maulana Hamid Kashmiri, for example, puts into the mouth of the Shah’s assassin a speech which he shouts at the dying Shuja and which represents the Barakzai position on Shuja’s legacy: ‘O cruel tyrant!’ he taunts. ‘When were you ever Shah that you call yourself so?’ And he adds:
‘The country that bestowed upon you this title of Shah
You have destroyed by casting a shadow of doom
Drunk like a maddened elephant
You aided and abetted the Firangi forces
Devastation came to Ghazni and Kabul
Into every home reached the hand of oppression
You turned the land of Islam into the land of infidels
You made the marketplace of infidelity brisk and vigorous
Your outer garb is like that of holy pilgrims in Mecca
But within, you thirsted for the blood of Muslims
You killed many brothers of mine
And now you say that I am murdering you?
I am extracting blood vengeance by law
With the blood of your throat I will wash you clean of blood.’73
It is certainly true that the Shah was a deeply flawed man and made many errors of judgement. He was rarely an impressive leader in war and his arrogance and hauteur alienated potential followers throughout his career; as William Fraser noted soon after he crossed the frontier into British India for the first time in 1816, he was indeed ‘very Ultra-Royal in his wishes and expectations’.74 This belief derived from Shuja’s essentially Timurid view of his own kingship: as he wrote to Lord Bentinck in 1834, he believed himself to be ‘under the special protection of God’.75
Yet, for all this, Shuja was a remarkable man: highly educated, intelligent, resolute and above all unbreakable. Throughout his life he was fated to suffer desperate and repeated reverses, often for reasons quite outside his own control, but he never gave up nor ever gave way to despair. ‘Lose no hope when faced with hardships,’ he wrote in his youth while on the run after the blinding and deposition of his brother. ‘Black clouds soon give way to clear rain.’76 This optimism remained a strength throughout his life. Observers constantly remarked on his ‘grace and dignity’, even in the most adverse circumstances.77 The British called him ineffectual, and Burnes in particular mocked him as the man who lost the kingdom of his ancestors; but when the moment of crisis came at the outbreak of rebellion in November 1841, Shuja was the only figure in Kabul to offer an effective military response, and the only person who made any attempt to save Burnes, even though Burnes had always done his best to humiliate him.
Shuja was always unusual for his honourable loyalty to his allies and his faithfulness to his agreements, in a region not known for either. This was one reason he never forgave the Barakzais for breaking the arrangement made between his grandfather, Ahmad Shah Abdali, and Dost Mohammad’s grandfather, Haji Jamal Khan, that the Sadozais would rule as King, with the Barakzais as their faithful servants. He saw himself as the true heir to a highly cultured Persian-speaking Safavid and Timurid civilisation, and as well as writing fine verse and prose himself was a generous patron to poets and scholars, as Mountstuart Elphinstone discovered to his surprise when he spent time in Shuja’s court in 1809. His vision of his kingdom was one which saw it not as an isolated and mountainous backwater but instead as tied by alliances to a wider world, and which through the common Persianate civilisation was diplomatically, culturally and economically integrated with the other countries of the region. It was sadly not a vision that shows much sign, even today, of being realised, though the idea has never completely died.
Shuja’s reign was brought down not by his own faults but by the catastrophic mishandling of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as managed by Auckland and Macnaghten, and as lost by General Elphinstone. This left him in the unenviable position of being distrusted and used by the British, while being seen across the country as the Kafir’s puppet. Yet the uprising of 1841 was a rebellion not against Shah Shuja but specifically against the British; indeed it is clear from the Afghan sources that many of the participants saw themselves as rescuing the Shah from the gilded cage into which it was believed the British had locked him for their own ends. The rebels even offered Shuja the leadership of their struggle, and only began opposing him when he refused to disown his British patrons. The rebellion only became a Sadozai–Barakzai power struggle much later on with the arrival of Akbar Khan. When Akbar Khan left Kabul for Jalalabad, the allegiance of many nobles reverted to the Shah. Throughout, Shuja remained surprisingly popular, and outlived almost all those who had been involved in the fiasco: not just Burnes and Macnaghten and the rest of the Kabul army, but even the man who took his most precious possession, Ranjit Singh.
Shuja’s greatest mistake was to allow himself to become too dependent on the troops of his incompetent British patrons. He should have insisted on the return of all British forces immediately after his installation in 1839, for as the most perceptive of the British observers of Afghanistan, Charles Masson, noted at the time, ‘the Afghans had no objection to the match, only the manner of the wooing’.78 As his renewed popularity after the exit of the British in 1842 showed, there were still great reserves of support for the Sadozai monarchy if he had only had the confidence to rely on it. Instead, he remained for ever hitched to his unpopular allies, and it was his unwillingness to sever his links with the British that was in the end his undoing.
As a result, Shuja’s turbulent life ended, as so much of it had been lived, in failure. His premature death left behind him no legacy for his successors: as Maulana Hamid Kashmiri put it, his sons and grandsons were now ‘like a flock out to pasture with no shepherd’. Although after the Kabul army was massacred it briefly seemed as if the revival of the Sadozais might be possible, on his death his sons and his blind brother Shah Zaman were left in a hopeless situation, with little chance of consolidating the power of his dynasty. As Herati noted, for the Sadozais ‘the day now turned to blackest night . . . His Majesty was 65 years of age when he was murdered: he had tasted the triumphs and misfortunes of a long life, and had learned to distrust his fickle subjects. Shah Shuja’ al-Mulk of noble lineage would never have disgraced himself by ingratitude for their years of hospitality, but the repeated wrong choices made by Macnaghten compromised him beyond hope of recovery.’79
Shuja’s death did not, however, bring the end of the killing, nor the end of the war. For even as Shuja’s corpse was lying in the Kabul dust, Pollock’s Army of Retribution was marching for Jalalabad and, as Lady Sale had already heard from her anxious jailers, it was taking no prisoners and giving no quarter.80
10
A War for No Wise Purpose
On the evening of 6 April 1842, Akbar Khan’s artillery around Jalalabad thundered into life and blazed out a series of rolling salutes. All night the guns continued, accompanied – so the garrison could hear from the walls – by the sounds of celebration, music and dancing from beyond the far side of the siege works.
The salutes had been ordered by Akbar Khan to celebrate the death of Shuja and the mortal blow which the Barakzais had just inflicted on their Sadozai rivals and blood-enemies. Within the walls of the besieged city, however, the gun-salutes were assumed to have a quite different meaning. The garrison knew that Pollock was about to attempt the difficult feat of taking the Khyber Pass by force, and supposed the victory salutes were to celebrate his defeat. A false report from a British informer confirmed the error, adding incorrectly that Akbar Khan had just sent reinforcements to the pass to help wipe out what was left of Pollock’s force.
Sale had made all his calculations for the defence of Jalalabad around the certainty that Pollock was imminently coming to his rescue. Now, with his ammunition nearly expended and only 500 sheep left to feed the defenders, Sale believed he had few options left. Plunged into deep gloom, he allowed himself to be persuaded by his younger officers to risk everything in a last desperate attempt to break out, even though the garrison was by then outnumbered at least three to one by Akbar’s huge army of Ghilzai and Shinwari tribal levies. A Council of War was summoned where ‘each gave his opinion that if they must perish, it would be better to die like men, with arms in their hands’, as the Rev. G. R. Gleig put it. ‘They were about to throw their last die and engage in their final battle; for, let it terminate how it might, there would not remain for them musket ammunition enough to try the fortune of another. It was necessary, therefore, that their victory should not only be sure, but complete; so complete as to open for them a free passage to the head of the Khyber – and perhaps beyond it.’1
