Balti Britain: A Provocative Journey Through Asian Britain by Ziauddin Sardar

Author:Ziauddin Sardar [Sardar, Ziauddin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781847086846
Publisher: Granta
Published: 2012-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

(17) Jagirs from Government of India, 1921.

Here had been feast after famine, and it had proved indigestible. Of course soldiers win medals. Yes, Dada had a number of medals; that much had always been evident from the photograph. But Sword of Honour? Had he really seen action in China and Kabul? My instinctive response was doubt. How could he, my father, a mere child when his father died, remember so exactly all those dates and specifics of events that long predated his birth? Indeed, how much of all this had simply been a product of Bawaji’s ever fertile imagination?

I examined Bawaji’s list with care. It was a litany of the North West Frontier wars. Bawaji had presented me with a family history in which the pages of Kipling came to life. I could hear the ‘Boots – Boots – Boots, marching up and down’ as the lusty soldiers cheered for ‘Bobs, Bobs, Bobs’, that ‘plucky Khandaharder’ ‘Bobs Bahadur’. There it was in black and white. According to my father’s list my Dada was one of those who marched behind Field Marshal Lord (Bobs) Roberts in the campaign that made him an icon of the Empire. I was devastated.

Dada’s first military action, according to the list, was in the Second Afghan War (1878–80), one of those quintessentially colonial wars. The war was opposed by officials on the ground, who argued it was as unnecessary as it would be counterproductive. It had no purpose other than to impose the doctrine of imperial power on native peoples in reprisal, retaliation and revenge for their audacity in seeking to defend their independence. In this case, Afghan independence was fought over for geopolitical strategic reasons. In my time, such conflicts, the scourge of the Third World, were consequences of what was known, erroneously, as the Cold War. A century earlier it was more dismissively known by Kipling’s epithet, the ‘Great Game’ – the subtext and subject of his novel Kim. Afghanistan lay between two imperiums: imperial Russian expansion across Central Asia and the British Empire in India. For most of the nineteenth century the delusional idée fixe of British foreign policy was Russian expansion, an ever-present threat to British interests in and tenure of India. So Afghanistan was trapped in a classic pincer between two imperial powers, like so many emergent nations in my time. Indeed, Afghanistan would relive this history as a recurring nightmare up to and including the present day.

Unfortunately for Britain the Afghans have never knowingly been compliant to any outside ruler. It did not help, in the First Afghan War (1839–42), that the commanders of Britain’s Indian Army were appointed on seniority and not ability, according to the established practice of the East India Company. When it marched into Afghanistan, the army was led by incompetents who made every mistake possible. There was death in abundant, superfluous horror. The Afghans defeated the British forces in a major engagement at the southern city of Khandahar. They fell back on Kabul, where again military misfortune overtook them.

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