Book review: Return of a King by William Dalrymple
“History never repeats itself exactly….” is how the author pens in one of the paragraphs in the final section of the book, “Author’s Notes”; and goes on to bring out how the latest military expedition to Afghanistan at that time of writing the book (2006) had strong parallels to the first military expedition 170 years ago.
The book is thoughtfully titled “Return of a King”. It never loses to bring forth the strengths and the weaknesses of the last Timurid Mughal-styled monarch of Afghanistan, then known as Khurasan. And how this shaped his fate and the fate of his ‘Kingdom of Kabul’.
As with his other books, William Dalrymple chooses a style of narration that covers the different shades of grey of each of the major characters in the plot and the subplot responsible for the culmination of the event. He succeeds in that through a careful balance of not overwhelming the reader with an overdose of information unlike other historians in one go; rather surgically stitching up the bibliographical references into a thriller storytelling. A sneak peek into the ‘Bibliography’ section tells you about the vast multitude of references the author has looked up for writing this book. The references include published and unpublished text, private collections, Government archives (something which the author falls back on in most of his books), contemporary works, and periodical articles expanding across Europe, Russia, British, and India. This indefatigable approach to storytelling is typical of William Dalrymple.
The context is built in the first three chapters which are a little slower to read for anyone not knowing this part of the world, the Indian subcontinent, and Central Asia.
Post the first three chapters the book takes an amazing pace. The major characters of the Great Game are hitherto made well known to the readers through insights into their personalities and insecurities, which in turn affect their decision-making. That the first Anglo-Afghan war was the result of a rivalry between two East India Company officers and a very incapable Governor General of the East India Company is a startling revelation. That the seeds of the Great Uprising of 1857 by the Bengal regiment had been well sowed in this first failed Anglo-Afghan military expedition makes the reader startle up and take notice, of this ‘Return of a King’.
Thanks to William Dalrymple, Shah Suja, the man so misunderstood in Afghanistan to date and quite wrongly portrayed by the British as incapable emerges a rather very strong character who took his promises sincerely.
The storytelling could have been further helped by the images in the book and the map sketches depicting the routes of invasion and retreat of the East India Company’s Army distributed chapter-wise.
As before, while reading the book The Anarchy, I again preferred to stay awake at night and siloed during the day to complete reading this book. And how on the penultimate day of finishing this book to read, as I lay on the bed preparing for my sleep, I imagined Lady Sale, the brave wife of ‘Fighting Bob’, imploring and threatening, both at the same time, Major General George Pollock to avenge the death of his soldiers and caravan by pursuing the head of the treacherous yet brave Amir Khan to Khulm.
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