The Figure of the Expert in Britain’s Afghan Policy, 1830–50

Introduction

In the first years of the nineteenth century, as a result of expansionism, the East India Company’s territories in the north-west of the subcontinent came close to the Punjab and the Afghan passes that foreign invaders had in the past repeatedly used to descend on the Indian plains. In a region about which very little was known, the government of India feared French and/or Russian invasions or attempts at destabilising British India. Lord Wellesley, governor general from 1798 to 1805, considered it would eventually be necessary to absorb the Punjab so as to prevent a Russian invasion (Lal, 2004, vol. 1, p. 362).

During the next three decades, treaties were signed with the kingdoms lying close to the North-West frontier, which became buffer states between British India and Persia as well as Afghanistan, a recent monarchy (1747) now composed of three autonomous provinces, Kabul, Kandahar and Herat, instead of the eighteen provinces it had comprised in 1809.

From the 1830s, the area located between the Central Asian khanates, Persia and British India was in turmoil. Persia, supported by Russia, attempted to recover some of its former provinces that were now part of Afghanistan. There were also frequent skirmishes between Dost Mohammed, the ruler of Kabul, and Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, as the former tried to recover some of the provinces the latter had seized, especially Peshawar. The government of India feared an alliance between foreign states and Indian princes unhappy with the policy of treaties it had imposed on them and considered it necessary to get further involved in the region for political, but also commercial, reasons. Its dual objective was now to strengthen the North-West frontier while taking part in the trade between the subcontinent and the Central Asia khanates in a context of increasing Russophobia.

Since Britain’s Afghan policy between 1838 and 1842 failed, it is natural to examine the parts played by the agents who gathered intelligence and by those who devised the policy. Numerous books have been written on the First Afghan War. Interesting light on the issue of intelligence gathering and its use was shed by Christopher Alan Bayly in Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, published in 1996. And in the preface he wrote for the French translation of the mission Alexander Burnes was in charge of in Kabul from 1836 to 1838, Michael Barry focused in particular on the figure of the expert whose advice was not followed and who met a tragic death (Burnes, 2012, pp. 7–45).

In the 1830s, to devise the foreign policy regarding the states located beyond the North-West frontier, the British government and the government of India theoretically intended to rely on the intelligence gathered by a new generation of political agents who had received a scientific training and became prominent in the 1820s. Yet it will be seen that paradoxically little attention was actually paid to the recommendations made by such agents. This occurred for various reasons. One of them was that the competition between the experts present in the regions concerned weakened their recommendations. But a more significant reason was that the distribution of power between the British government and the government of India, as well as political and diplomatic lessons learnt from the relationships those two entities had with the countries located close to the North-West frontier from 1808, interfered with the experts’ recommendations. As a result, some experts on the Afghan question came to be seen as men who should be silenced – but this process could also apply to other regions or questions – and their fates will be considered. Alexander Burnes, whose murder marked the beginning of the Kabul rising on 2 November 1841, remains indissolubly associated with the First Afghan War. Another interesting figure is that of Mohan Lal, Alexander Burnes’s assistant and former munshi, i.e. Persian secretary, the alter ego of the tragically murdered expert, a secondary character, but one who could not be ignored and whose later career shed light on what was expected of experts at the time.

Although British knowledge of Afghanistan and of the countries located west and north of the North-West frontier increased considerably in the following decades, the lessons from the First Afghan War were not learnt by the British government. None of the following Afghan Wars waged by Britain (1878–80) or by other countries in the twentieth century were more successful.

First the steps taken to remedy the lack of intelligence on the countries that lay beyond the North-West frontier must be considered. Intelligence was essential to the existence and the consolidation of the British Raj. Bayly mentioned three crucial aspects: the reliability of the intelligence gathered – accuracy, quantity and variety of the sources –, bearing in mind that disinformation was widely used both by native rulers and by the British; how it was interpreted; and the response it triggered.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the amount of knowledge available on the area situated between the Sutlej, Persia and the Central Asian khanates increased significantly as a result of several diplomatic and exploratory missions, such as those carried out by William Moorcroft, Alexander Burnes, Arthur Conolly or Eldred Pottinger, to mention but the most recent ones. Thanks to the treaties signed with the neighbouring kingdoms – Sind, the Punjab, as well as smaller states, Kalat and Bahawalpur –, the government of India now had access to the official correspondence written in Persian – the ‘Persian correspondence’, or ‘Persian newsletter’ – that circulated between native princely courts and amounted to a letter of information. The intelligence thus obtained was then confirmed by consulting other sources. But beyond Peshawar, the government of India hardly had any networks to collect intelligence. It depended on a few local agents or informers recruited on the occasion of previous missions or on agents on a temporary mission in the area, as well as on some of the Pashtun soldiers of the East India Company’s armies. This led the government of India to increasingly rely on age-old Hindu and Muslim banking or trading networks, established by such communities as the Lohanis, the Shikarpuris or the Kashmiris, that spread to the heart of Central Asia. However, despite their growing hold on the Indian subcontinent, the British were painfully aware that native intelligence, travellers and commodities kept circulating quite freely without their knowing much about it.

Moreover, in the case of Afghanistan, a land characterised by division – between ethnic groups, tribes, clans, religions, languages –, there were numerous additional difficulties. There was no centralised state but three principalities whose rulers did not attempt to get on well together, although some of them belonged to the same family. And in Kabul, capital city of the principality that lay closest to the North-West frontier, the whole correspondence was in the hands of the Qizilbash, a Shia community of Persian origin which served Sunni Afghan chiefs or rulers. In such a context marked by quickly shifting alliances, the situation was bound to be difficult to assess.

Nevertheless, in the 1830s, some of these difficulties were supposed to be solved by the new methods of intelligence gathering considered as scientific used by the agents trained in the East India Company’s schools in England and/or in British India.

The New Experts

For the time being, the East India Company’s recruitment policy, based on patronage, remained unchanged.1 For its part, the government of India’s Political Department selected its agents depending on their field of expertise either in the Indian Covenanted Civil Service or in the armies – the East India Company’s or the Crown’s, the latter being more prestigious. Many experienced officers, engineers and doctors could be found in the latter.

The new generation of British and anglicised Indian agents was fluent in vernacular languages. They were taught to systematically and scientifically collect information on countless subjects, draw maps and write reports and personal journals. Scientific, linguistic and cultural expertise was expected and highly valued. This was the time when the London Royal Geographical Society was founded (1830) – in 1834, Alexander Burnes was awarded its gold medal for the narrative of his journey to Bokhara. The London Statistical Society was founded in the same year.

The agents belonging to this new generation were now used to publishing, with the approval of the British government, the narratives of their explorations, which had a wide readership in Britain, but also on the Continent where the most successful of them were soon translated into French and/or German. Surprisingly, the writers did not hesitate to disclose the aims of their missions as well as the sometimes dishonest means they had used to achieve them. Conversely, Russian explorers did not publish accounts of their travels, so it was easy for them to denounce British expansionism while the Russophobia which prevailed in Britain from 1829 to some extent prospered on the unobtrusiveness of Russia’s exploratory commercial and military missions.

The new knowledge derived from this scientific approach was expected to help consolidate the British hold on the Indian subcontinent and to meet the challenges resulting from British expansionism more easily, in particular improving security on the margins of what was now called British India.

The Limits of Expertise

Between 1830 and 1850, there were several experts on Afghanistan and the neighbouring regions. The very number of civilian or military political agents in charge of the relationships with the various states, or heads of exploratory or diplomatic missions, each having his own munshi and being seconded by a small team of British and Indian assistants, almost each of whom wrote one or several works on the region he was in charge of or on the missions he took part in, raises the problem of the fragmentation of expertise. Which agent could claim to have an exhaustive view of the situation?

This also implied competition between the experts, as professional promotion, recognition by the government of India and celebrity were at stake. Indeed, the army’s seniority system encouraged the best officers to develop some type of expertise and to distinguish themselves so as to be promoted more rapidly at a time when no military campaigns took place – the last one dated back to 1826. As a result, the various experts were rivals. Each usually defended the interests of the region he was in charge of, or, in the case of diplomatic agents, the policy most likely to bring him official recognition.

Alexander Burnes led successful diplomatic missions to Sind and to the Punjab in 1831 before travelling from Afghanistan to Bokhara and Persia from January 1832 to January 1833. Published in 1834, the three-volume narrative of those missions immediately became a bestseller and Burnes a celebrity in Britain and in France. This made him suddenly rank among the most valued experts called upon to advise the government of India on the policy to be implemented beyond the Sutlej. Nevertheless, when he came back to India in June 1835 after a furlough which had turned into a triumphant tour, Burnes was faced with the hostility of older political agents higher up than himself whose work had greatly contributed to improving British knowledge of the region, but who had not received the same amount of recognition as he had and who considered his meteoric professional promotion with a critical eye. This was especially the case of Claude Wade, who had been in charge of the relationships with the Punjab since 1823. Unsurprisingly, Wade exercised his right to inspect Alexander Burnes’s official correspondence, did not hesitate to criticise its contents and advocated solutions different from those he recommended.

Another way of viewing the different types of experts and the competition between them consists in opposing fieldmen – practical, experienced men – to bureaucrats. An instance of the latter is William Macnaghten, the government of India’s secretary to the Political and Secret Department from 1833 to 1839, who was appointed Envoy to Kabul by the governor general, Lord Auckland, in 1838. Despite considerable experience in law, languages and diplomacy, he was essentially a scholar who seems to have lacked the human touch. The policy he helped devise did not take into account practical aspects of the situation, in particular the human element.

Another type of expert on the region, a singular one, must be mentioned. Charles Masson (1800–53) was a former Company soldier – James Lewis – who deserted in 1826 and became an explorer and antiquarian. He knew the area between the Sutlej and Afghanistan and its people intimately. He was both an outsider and an unofficial fieldman. After Alexander Burnes obtained King William IV’s pardon for Masson in 1834, he had him officially recruited as a newswriter, i.e. an informer, in Kabul.

Another reason why expertise was not necessarily taken into account resulted from the administrative and political distribution of power. Because of the ‘double government’, the government of India had limited room for manoeuvre to achieve its own objectives in terms of security (André, 2007, pp. 67–68).

Since the 1784 India Act, the East India Company’s policy had been dictated by the British government’s India Board. This implied that the government of India’s foreign policy devised by the governor general and his council no longer had to be confirmed by the Company’s Court of Directors, but by the President of the India Board, a member of the Cabinet of which the Foreign Secretary was a key member.

Now when diplomatic issues had both an Indian and a European dimension, British alliances and objectives always came first, to the detriment of the government of India’s specific needs in terms of security within British India and on its frontiers. In London, neither the Whigs nor the Tories wanted to antagonise public opinion and they considered it essential to maintain good diplomatic relationships with continental countries and Russia. This constituted one of the stumbling blocks between the British government and the government of India. The former did not give credence to the existence of an ‘enemy within’ – potentially allied to a neighbouring state –, which, however, was the latter’s main source of concern. Indeed, for the government of India, the consolidation of frontiers aimed not so much at preventing invasions as at controlling the threat the opponents to the Raj represented within British India. In the subcontinent, no one really believed an invasion might occur and, even if one did, the government of India was increasingly in a position to repel it successfully.

Therefore, when the government of India wanted to take action, it could only do so with the British government’s approval and had to bear the cost of the military intervention itself. The British government and parliament had long made it a rule that British taxpayers should never have to pay for ruling or defending the Company’s territories. Worse, the British government had also grown into the habit of making the government of India execute and fund military interventions overseas, even if they had no direct links with Indian affairs. For instance, in 1839, the East India Company, which had been entrusted with a monopoly on the trade with the Indian subcontinent and a vast part of Southeast Asia by the charter granted on 30 December 1600, had to take charge of the expedition aimed at defending British commercial interests in Canton, although it had been deprived of its monopoly on the trade with China by Parliament in 1833. Moreover, by 1830, British India had become a place where liberal experiments were tested before being implemented in Britain itself. In the subcontinent just like in Britain, the ‘Age of Reform’ (1830–50), which Bayly called ‘age of hiatus’ (Bayly, 1996, p. 212), was marked by the tension resulting from the will to lead a reforming policy, on the one hand, and the need to check expenditure (retrenchment) on the other hand. From the term of William Bentinck, governor general from 1828 to 1835, the government of India was expected to implement a reforming policy in many fields, which was costly. Military spending was cut in consequence. The government of India’s budget was under constant scrutiny in London.

Even the best experts and the most modern methods of intelligence gathering also had to take into account lessons learnt since 1808, when diplomatic missions were sent to the kingdoms located west of the North-West frontier. Thus, officially, for geographic and political reasons, issues related to Russia and the Ottoman Empire were the preserve of the British government, as they were considered as aspects of its European policy, while the government of India was in charge of affairs related to Central Asia, Persia, Herat, Afghanistan, Sind, and the Punjab. But, in practice, the British government was responsible for Persian affairs, if only because a British consular representative had been appointed there. The government in London wanted Persia to be a low-cost buffer state provided this did not entail a worsening of relationships with Russia on the European diplomatic scene.

Another problem was that even though experts were indispensable, the authorities were wary about the ‘man on the spot’, usually the man in charge of a region, of a protected state, of the relationships with a foreign kingdom, or the head of a mission, seen as liable to send biased intelligence. Indeed, the government of India’s emissaries, just like those sent by the British government, sometimes in the same place and at the same time, often wrote alarmist reports. In the case of the missions sent from 1808, the British government had in most cases decided not to follow the recommendations made by the experts, considering it crucial that the British government and the government of India should not conclude treaties implying financial or military support and should not be dragged into new conflicts. There was no wish to re-enact Lord Wellesley’s term, which had been marked by a costly wave of territorial expansion. Consequently, the British government did not mind disowning political agents.

Who Devised the Afghan Policy in 1838 – and Disregarded the Experts’ Advice?

One of the means the British government relied on to give its own interests and objectives the top priority was to insist on a rule it had previously dictated providing that the governor general must be a politician belonging to the aristocracy. This often led to the appointment of a governor general who had no prior knowledge of the Indian subcontinent (Woodruff, 1953 & 1954, vol. 1, pp. 275–76). Thus, to succeed Bentinck, Melbourne’s second Whig government (April 1835–September 1841) passed over the most experienced candidate, Charles Metcalfe, a Company servant who had been acting governor general since 1835, and appointed Lord Auckland, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty and President of the Board of Trade, but had no experience of Indian affairs.2 Auckland was faced with the Afghan question as soon as he reached Calcutta in 1836, when Dost Mohammed asked for the government of India’s support in the contest that opposed him to Ranjit Singh. But Ranjit Singh was a faithful ally of the British and the only strong man in the region, and the Punjab was a good buffer state. Auckland refused to get involved in the dispute and reaffirmed the Company’s neutrality as regards the relationships between independent states. Yet Ranjit Singh was also an elderly man whose health was failing. At the end of 1836, so as to protect British India from Persia’s and Russia’s expansionist views in the years to come, check any risk of invasion or of disorder on the North-West frontier and achieve the new commercial objectives, Auckland considered making Afghanistan a buffer state. A mission led by Alexander Burnes was sent to Kabul (November 1836–April 1838) to convince Dost Mohammed to side with Britain rather than with Russia. At the end of 1837, the mission was disrupted by the siege of Herat, a former Persian province, by the Persians supported by Russia, then by the arrival in Kabul of a Russian agent, Yan Vitkevitch, who promised the rulers of the Afghan provinces funds and military support.

In his correspondence with his superiors, Burnes argued that the best solution to achieve stability in the region consisted in concluding an alliance with Dost Mohammed, who should be allowed to unify Afghanistan. This also implied refusing to get involved in the dispute over Peshawar. But Auckland suddenly demanded too many concessions from the Afghan ruler without offering any compensation. The mission failed.

From the end of 1837 to the beginning of 1840, Auckland visited the North-Western Provinces and met Ranjit Singh before settling in Simla. To devise his Afghan policy, he merely turned to the close advisors who had accompanied him there, in particular Macnaghten, instead of consulting the members of his council in Calcutta. Although the siege of Herat had been lifted by Persia following the intervention of the British Navy, which occupied the Persian island of Kharg, and against the advice of Burnes, Mohan Lal and most of the agents then working in the area, but with the approval of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, and of the President of the India Board, John Cam Hobhouse, Auckland decided to depose Dost Mohammed (1793–1863), a Barakzai who had imposed himself in Kabul in 1826, and to replace him by Shah Shuja (1780–1842), a Saddozai who claimed he was willing to cooperate with the British.3 Shah Shuja was undoubtedly a legitimate sovereign who had ruled Kabul from 1803 to 1809, but he had been deposed, had found shelter in British India and had failed to regain his throne on several occasions. The suggestion to install Shah Shuja as a puppet ruler seems to have originated with Wade (Moon, 1989, p. 502, note 12). ‘The British government, confident in the success of its measures in Persia, placed no value on an Afghan alliance [with Dost Mohammed]’, Alexander Burnes concluded (Burnes, 2001, p. 275). In the summer of 1838, a Tripartite Treaty was signed between the government of India, Ranjit Singh and Shah Shuja. In the following spring, the Army of the Indus invaded Afghanistan and occupied Kabul. Dost Mohammed fled and found shelter in the north of the province, before surrendering to the British in November 1840. He was sent to British India and placed under house arrest in Mussoorie.

According to Mohan Lal, Auckland behaved rashly when he changed his position regarding Afghanistan to comply with the Cabinet’s views (Lal, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 360–61). In 1839, convinced of the soundness of his policy despite the cost of the invasion, of the occupation and the warnings of the experts, in particular Burnes in Kabul and Henry Rawlinson in Kandahar, who signalled that the British position was increasingly difficult to maintain – Shah Shuja proved to be unable to retain the throne of Kabul without the financial and military support of the British –, Auckland defended the occupation of Kabul (1839–41). He was rewarded by the British government who made him an Earl in December. Macnaghten also defended this policy. He was ambitious and seems to have been completely out of touch with reality. He was made a baronet in 1840 and was informed that he had been appointed governor of Bombay on 29 September 1841.

Early in 1842, despite the emphasis laid on scientific intelligence gathering by the government of India, the Delhi bazar bankers were the first to be informed of the annihilation of the retreating army by the messengers of their counterparts in Kabul and Peshawar (Bayly, 1996, p. 139). The British had to negotiate the release of the few dozen hostages who had not been murdered through the traditional local networks.

Auckland did not understand why his policy had failed. He had not taken into account the fact that Afghans, whose country was an aggregate of principalities, ethnic groups, tribes and clans that kept fighting each other, could occasionally join forces to defeat foreign invaders, just long enough to get rid of them.

The mistakes, both political and military, made at the time have been discussed by historians. Philip Woodruff depicted an incompetent governor general who kept complaining that he was ‘bored’. Woodruff considered that the Afghan disaster would not have occurred if the British government had appointed governor general Charles Metcalfe, who advocated a ‘friends on the frontier’ policy in the case of Persia and Afghanistan.4 He also mentioned ‘[Auckland’s] dishonest manifestoes and the lying blue Book’ (Woodruff, 1953 & 1954, vol. 1, p. 386). Indeed, if the governor general followed Wade’s recommendations to devise a policy which was sanctioned by Hobhouse and Palmerston, when difficulties started arising – in fact from the very beginning of the occupation of Kabul –, the British government attempted to ascribe the responsibility of the failure of this policy to Alexander Burnes.

Despite the reliable intelligence collected and the sound recommendations made by experts during the mission to Kabul, then during the occupation, the British Afghan policy was a failure. The fortunes met by the experts involved in the Afghan affairs must now be assessed.

The Expert as Scapegoat

Alexander Burnes, like his Russian counterpart and rival Vitkevitch, is the archetypal expert used as a scapegoat. Because he was ambitious, he renounced his convictions to implement a policy he did not believe in and hoped he would succeed Macnaghten as Envoy to Kabul. In the spring of 1839, he was promoted honorary lieutenant-colonel and knighted, before being appointed resident in Kabul. In the autumn of 1841, Macnaghten dropped Burnes a hint that he would succeed him as Envoy.

But did Alexander Burnes really have a choice? Opposing the official policy would have been fatal to his career. For several decades already, the Company servants seen as disloyal had been punished.5 The sanctions were all the harsher as the stakes were important.

At the end of 1839, Burnes complained in his private correspondence that his official letters advocating an agreement with Dost Mohammed that were quoted in the official documents had been truncated so as to give the impression that he had recommended leading this policy with Shah Shuja (Kaye, 1867, vol. 2, p. 65). A former officer in the Company’s Bengal Army who had become a journalist and an historian, John William Kaye published in 1851 History of the War in Afghanistan, which soon became a standard work on the First Afghan War. He revealed that the British government had ignored Burnes’s recommendations, but also that Palmerston and Hobhouse had deliberately ‘garbled’ his official correspondence quoted in the Parliamentary Papers – the 1839 Blue Book, known as the ‘garbled Blue Book’ (Kaye, 2005, vol. 1, pp. 203–05). Hobhouse was to admit this in the following years. But by then the situation had become more comfortable for the government in London: the reprisals carried out by the Army of Retribution in 1842 were considered to have restored British prestige, the Afghans had been punished and the hostages released. The success of the First Opium War (1839–42) also contributed to consign to oblivion the issue of the responsibility for the Afghan disaster.

As often happened in the case of Indian affairs, the two major political parties agreed to cast a veil over embarrassing issues, to the radicals’ great displeasure. In 1851, Hobhouse acknowledged that the decision to invade Afghanistan had been made by the British government without consulting the Company’s directors. Following the publication of the original correspondence by Kaye in 1859, James Burnes attempted to publicly defend his deceased brother’s reputation with the support of John Bright. In 1861, the latter asked that a commission of inquiry be set up to establish the truth. The motion was not voted by Parliament. Palmerston never had to answer for his responsibility in the decision to invade Afghanistan and install a puppet ruler. Later appraisals of the conflict, all of which condemned it, were influenced by Kaye’s works.

The Case of Mohan Lal (1812–77)

On 2 November 1841, the military failed to intervene to save Burnes and the other British officials attacked in the city, and Macnaghten was assassinated by one of Dost Mohammed’s sons on 23 December 1841. Mohan Lal was not murdered during the Kabul rising. He was one of the best-informed experts involved in the Afghan campaign and occupation of Kabul. He knew all about the policy and its failure.

Mohan Lal descended from a line of impoverished Kashmiri Brahmans. His grandfather had held an administrative position at the court of the Mughal emperor and his father had, at one point, been Mountstuart Elphinstone’s Persian secretary. Accordingly, Mohan Lal could rely on a wide network of well-informed acquaintances. He was educated at the Delhi College where his intelligence and character attracted the attention of Charles Trevelyan, one of the assistants of Charles Metcalfe, then commissioner at Delhi. Mohan Lal became a perfect Indian representative of a British education imbued with scientific and Utilitarian principles. This is the way he was presented in articles published in the Anglo-Indian press in the early years of his career. He was both an expert and a subject of study. In 1831, he met Alexander Burnes, who had him hired by the Political Department. He was officially affected to the Bombay Presidency’s Medical Service. Mohan Lal took part in Burnes’s journey to Bokhara. Because of his close association with the British government and of his travels, he was soon disowned by his community. From 1834 to 1836, he was appointed newswriter in Kandahar by Wade, but spent part of that period in Calcutta where he completed his training at the Hindu College, met the highest members of the government of India and visited the Mughal emperor in Delhi before joining Henry Pottinger and his assistant, Alexander Burnes, who were trying to convince the Sind Amirs to sign new treaties more favourable to British interests. When Burnes was entrusted with the mission to Kabul, Mohan Lal was again one of his assistants.

After the British had left Kabul in January 1842, at the request of the highest military authorities, Mohan Lal accepted to remain in the city with his family. Until August, he was the only informer present there. At the end of June, he was imprisoned by one of Dost Mohammed’s sons. Although his position was extremely uncomfortable, he prepared the arrival of the expeditionary force and the release of the hostages by trying to rally the support of prominent Afghans. To this end, he spent money he had to borrow and made promises on behalf of the government of India. The services he rendered during and after the occupation of Kabul proved essential and were praised by several high-ranking British political and military officers present in Kabul and Jalalabad.

But once the war was over and Mohan Lal had returned to India, the government of India did not know what to do with him. He received a salary but was offered no new position. This led him to undertake a two-year journey to England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium and Germany. His contribution to the Afghan war was rewarded by exceptional official recognition, even greater than that received by Burnes in 1835. Yet it was only after tense negotiations that Mohan Lal was granted a yearly 1000-pound pension for life by the East India Company. By comparison, the salary of a Covenanted civil servant amounted to 300 pounds a year. It was impressed upon him that he was young, would have numerous opportunities of again distinguishing himself and that his pension would be reassessed when he retired.

The public recognition Mohan Lal obtained in London was not matched by professional promotion. Whether Whig or Tory, the British authorities wanted to forget about Afghanistan. Yet that was precisely the moment Mohan Lal chose to publish his version of the Afghan campaign. In 1846 he again edited the first work he had published in 1834, adding a biography of Dost Mohammed. Published with the approval of the British government, the two-volume work was the counterpart of the two narratives published by Alexander Burnes in 1834 and 1842. But despite oratorical precautions, Mohan Lal who, from the mid-1830s, had started expressing himself quite freely and had not made his opposition to the Afghan policy devised in 1838 a secret, did not hesitate to criticise some of the decisions made and to remind his readers of many an embarrassing detail, quoting the official correspondence to back up his claims. He also mentioned the disagreements between the political agents and the military in Kabul and deplored that the British should not have kept the promises they had made to some Afghans.

When Mohan Lal came back from Europe late in 1846, the situation on the North-West frontier was still unstable. Although his experience, skills and acquaintances were valuable, the government of India offered him no new appointment. What position could be given to that agent who was personally acquainted with all the sovereigns in the region, several of whom had awarded him prestigious titles, and which British officer might want to have him as an assistant, since an Indian could be no more than the assistant of a British officer?

It now appeared that Mohan Lal also had enemies among the British officers who had taken part in the Afghan campaign. Attacked by one of them in the Anglo-Indian press, he attempted, not without difficulty, to defend his reputation. One point is certain. The part he played in the release of the British hostages, which only Kaye and Vincent Eyre mentioned in their narratives of the First Afghan War, did not receive fair recognition.

The career of Mohan Lal, then aged thirty-four, was over. None of his repeated requests to be appointed Persian secretary to the government of India or to a princely court was successful. His fellow students at the Hindu College, who had been less critical of the official policy and had been less in the limelight, did not face the same professional difficulties. He did not obtain any financial compensation for the large sum of money he had borrowed in Kabul in 1842. He was reminded that he had been granted an exceptionally generous pension, which was supposed to allow him to live comfortably.

The British who had worked with Mohan Lal had described him as ‘free from the failings of the native character and fully deserving of confidence’ (Gupta, 1943, p. 59). But now, to justify the fact that he was kept in the background, it was said that some aspects of his character made the British authorities feel ill at ease or antagonised them. He was accused of mixing with the wrong kind of people, of having a lavish lifestyle – his family had long been used to living beyond their means and Mohan Lal was constantly indebted –, of supporting numerous relatives and friends – many of whom were Afghans – and of having a harem – seventeen wives in all, not including a British woman he was rumoured to have married. Mohan Lal also invited criticism when he presented himself as ‘Mohan Lal, Esquire’ and denied having been Burnes’s munshi, although that was his actual position, as Burnes’s narratives and one of Mohan Lal’s Indian biographers confirmed.

Mohan Lal was too Indian at heart, he vindicated his rights and was too self-assured to be only an anglicised expert. He embodied both the survival or the reappearance of the traditional munshi and the threat represented by an educated Indian who could not be contained by the colonial framework.6 In a colonial context, whatever his skills may have been, his professional advancement could only be limited, as Jawaharlal Nehru summarised in the foreword he wrote to one of the biographies of Mohan Lal.7 For his part, Bayly described him as ‘India’s first modern anti-imperialist’ because of his opposition to the British government’s forward policy (Bayly, 1996, p. 232).

The British government did not wait until the 1857 uprising to let the gap between the Indian and British communities widen. In this respect, it met the expectations of Anglo-Indians who increasingly considered Indians not only as a source of competition, but also as a threat (Bayly, 1996, p. 371).

Charles Masson’s later career was even more disappointing than Mohan Lal’s. From the moment he became officially associated with the government of India, Masson, who resented having been denied a position in the Political Department, openly criticised the government’s objectives in the region, the policy it adopted and even Burnes, although at some point Masson himself advocated restoring Shah Shuja to the throne of Kabul (Lal, 2004, vol. 1, p. 368). The government of India always remained extremely reserved towards him, suspecting him of being a Russian agent. Mohan Lal also mistrusted him for reasons that he mentioned in his work published in 1846. Masson finally returned to Britain in 1842. Today he is famous for his work as an antiquarian and for the books he devoted to his discoveries.

Conversely, the later careers of Palmerston, Hobhouse, Auckland and Wade did not suffer from the Afghan disaster in any way.

Conclusion

The First Anglo-Afghan War was one of the first great clashes that marked the Great Game – the term was coined by Arthur Conolly,8 one of the British experts on the region, in 1840 –, which was referred to as ‘a tournament of shadows’ by Count Nesselrode, Russia’s Foreign Minister (1816–56). Experts were expendable pawns within the context of the competition between Palmerston and Nesselrode, as was remarked by Vitkevitch, the tsar’s Envoy whom Mohan Lal and Alexander Burnes met in Kabul in December 1837 (Lal, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 378–79). Palmerston having lodged an official complaint with Count Nesselrode about the presence of the Russian agent in Kabul, Nesselrode disowned the mission as well as the Russian ambassador to Persia. Yet, although his mission had been a success – Dost Mohammed accepted the support of Russia –, Vitkevitch was found dead on 8 May 1839 in his hotel room in St Petersburg. He was reported to have committed suicide, but the exact circumstances of his death have remained unclear to this day.9

Interestingly, the military benefitted from the fact that the political agents’ recommendations were ignored. The expedition, the occupation of Kabul and the reprisals carried out in 1842 once again justified the existence and the cost of the Company’s and the Crown’s armies in the subcontinent.

The Afghan disaster had far-reaching effects. It was the first time British prestige had been shattered in the subcontinent. This emboldened some of the opponents to the Raj and contributed to unrest in the region. Sind was annexed in 1843 and the Punjab in 1849 for security reasons, to strengthen the North-West frontier.

In Britain, the East India Company’s recruiting policy was modified in 1853 when the India Act put an end to its patronage to adopt the principle of the competitive exam. The servants of the Indian Covenanted Civil Service were from then on to be selected among the highly qualified graduates, Indian ones included, of British universities. In 1854 it was decided that Haileybury, founded in 1806 and which trained civilians, would be closed down. This was done on 31 January 1858. Addiscombe Military Seminary, founded in 1809, was closed down in 1861. But the British government retained the principle of patronage to appoint the governor general, who still had to be a politician issued from the British aristocracy.

The links between India and the East India Company, whose eventual dissolution had long been taken for granted, were severed in 1858 – the official dissolution by an Act of Parliament intervened in 1874 –, once the 1857 rising had been crushed. At long last, India became a Crown colony and the British government officially assumed responsibility for its policy.

One of the principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was that diplomacy should be resorted to to settle future disputes between European countries. On the occasion of a state visit to Britain in 1844, Tsar Nicholas I reaffirmed his intention that Central Asia should remain a neutral area, which satisfied the British government. It was only when Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire at the gates of Europe that Britain decided to wage war on Russia and landed in the Crimea (1854–56). Yet the threat Russia supposedly represented for British India was overestimated, as the failure of General Perovski’s expedition to Khiva (October 1839–June 1840) showed.10 During the first half of the nineteenth century, maintaining good relations with Russia mattered more in Britain than the threat Russia represented in the Middle East and in Central Asia, no matter what the local experts and the government of India thought about it. This explains why Britain’s Persian policy was not a success.11 Its Afghan policy was a downright failure.

By a tragic irony, at the end of 1842, Dost Mohammed was released and regained Kabul… with the British government’s blessing. In 1855 a treaty of perpetual peace and friendship was concluded between him and the government of India. An additional treaty was signed in 1857. Assured that he had nothing to fear from the British, rewarded with a pension, Dost Mohammed managed to unify Afghanistan’s three provinces shortly before he died in 1863.

The First Afghan War was a case in point showing how knowledge, the scientific collection of which had been encouraged by the government so as to protect and strengthen British India, was ignored by the same political power which devised a policy that was not debated in Parliament until after it was too late. In a two-party state, both parties had the same immediate interests and did not want to lose the support of public opinion nor to endanger their relationships with other powerful nations – the Russian empire in this particular case.

The progressive adoption of what Bayly called ‘abstracted institutionalised knowledge’ (Bayly, 1996, p. 179) did not prevent the British policy in Afghanistan from failing. Nor were the British in a position to impose on Afghanistan the type of informal control – the ‘indirect empire’ defined by Jürgen Hosterhammel (Porter, 1999, p. 148) – they forced on China over the same period.

No matter how valuable they were, the recommendations made by experts, whose aim was to meet the government of India’s need for security, eventually mattered little when the British government devised its own European and imperial policy. Barry concluded that ‘the regional expert is practically useless. Even his best-informed advice will only be heeded by a government if it confirms an already made government decision. For that matter, the expert is essentially recruited by a government so that he should answer for their policy. He will always be blamed for being right too early’ (Burnes, 2012, p. 32, emphasis in original). This rule became all the more inescapable as control over the subcontinent grew firmer. Treaties were imposed on all princely and neighbouring states, direct rule replaced indirect rule and the means of transport and communication developed. The men on the spot as well as the highest representatives of the government of India also gradually lost their already limited room for manoeuvre to the benefit of the government in London. In the case of Afghanistan, this rule still applies today, as Barry demonstrated recently in Le Cri afghan (2021).