Yesterday I asked what it would be like to be the son of an absolute monarch. Today comes one answer:
Mohamed Sedik Khan, the eldest son of the Sirdar Kohendil Khan, is about thirty-two years of age; his person is small, and his regular features are not wanting in expression. His deep-set black eyes are three parts covered by the eyelids, and indicative of a treacherous character. Ferocious and intractable, he has a heart of bronze; his ambition is insatiable, and I have known but one Afghan more covetous or more vain. Knowing no law but his own will, governing by fear only, his rule is heavy indeed to bear, for he tyrannizes and tortures, with or without reason. His heart is incapable of friendship; he has no affections, and would without remorse sacrifice his nearest relations to gratify his ambition or his pride. With respect to religion, he is the worst Mussulman in Afghanistan. For years he has never said a prayer, fasted in Rhamazan, or observed any other precept ordained by the Koran; his scepticism is extreme, and in that respect it is certain that his equal is not to be found in the whole country.
… All his relations, including even his father, cordially detest him, and he possesses not a friend in all Afghanistan.
It sounds as if he would be right at home in Silicon Valley or in Riyadh today, and I assume there are Chinese princelings even now who resemble him.
But there is a twist to this character sketch. When first Ferrier is brought before Mohamed Sedik Khan, the prince has a proposition for him.
“You see in me now a friend who will preserve you from every danger; but, in return, I have one service to ask of you. You are English, I am certain, and your denials will not affect my opinion on that point; listen, then, and do me the service I am going to ask of you. At the death of my father Kohendil Khan there will be twenty pretenders to the sovereignty of Kandahar, and he whom the English favour will be sure to succeed: therefore, to obtain their support, there is no sacrifice that I am not ready to make; I would take up arms against my father, my brothers, my uncles; I would do it without hesitation; I would be the devoted slave of the English, and ask nothing in return but their influence to assist me in maintaining my hold upon the sovereign power.”
What a cold-blooded, treacherous bastard, you may say. Like others of his sort I have known (and one rose to be deputy editor of the Daily Express) he did not for a moment consider that other people might not be the same; those who appeared kinder or more decent than him were merely better at hypocrisy or self-deception. He alone looked at the world quite undeceived.
He judged his neighbour of Herat as he knew he should be judged himself— that is, by supposing him capable of every species of disloyalty and dark intrigue which forms the foundation of Afghan policy, and I could not impute it to him as a crime that he put my sentiments on a level with his own.
And then comes the kicker.
Had he not had for thirty years before his eyes the English system of invasion in India? And could he not cite me a hundred examples of the audacious policy which subdued by turns Moguls, Nawabs, Emirs, and Rajahs?
This is one of the lessons of Ferdinand Mount’s wonderful book The Tears of the Rajas: that decent, honourable men and women gave their lives to a system that was neither. More troublingly, to return to my theme on war crimes, they could not have brought to India the justice and good administration which they did (and which Ferrier admires), had they not worked within a system that was at its heart exploitative and predatory.
In fact, as I read on, I find I have turned the whole circle back to Stalky and Co. The boys who would be rulers of the empire fit nicely into Ferrier’s description:
The Afghans, to do them justice, never pretend to the possession of great virtues—they never praise themselves for any thing but their courage; and if they hear of a bad action or a great crime, they exclaim at once, with the consciousness of their own sentiments, “In kar Afghan est,” that is Afghan work.
To think that I started on this journey because I had been reading the autobiography of John Stuart Mill. Wearying of his highmindedness I bailed when Harriet Taylor made her appearance, and switched to Flashman at the Charge. When I had finished that (and it is a wonderfully skilful work) I wanted to know more about the Khanates that the Russians were at war with, and also about the geography of those mysterious regions through which Alexander fought his way for years. And so I found Ferrier.
What I am actually reading at the moment is Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. Now that is a book to rave about to all your friends; but it is also one to digest before writing about.