Return of a King: The Battle For Afghanistan (9 page)

This was certainly how it was beginning to look for Shah Shuja and what was left of his grandfather’s empire. By May 1809, two months after the arrival of Elphinstone’s Embassy, the full scale of the disaster facing him was becoming clear: ‘The roads are unsettled, and all the clans and chiefs relieved from the slight control which did exist, plunder, quarrel and fight with one another,’ wrote Fraser.

The King’s army in Kashmir has been wholly destroyed . . . Out of 15,000 men, only 3,000 have returned. The rest have either perished, or gone over to the enemy . . . Meanwhile Shah Shooja exerts all his energies and endeavours to raise money in every possible manner, cheers some, coaxes others, and secures the rest by promises. He intrigues too with the sardars [commanders] of the other party, and makes every sacrifice and does everything that a brave man, and an anxious king can do, with an empty treasury, a defeated, dispersed army, and proud independent nobles.
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In desperation, the Shah recruited a new army from the tribes of the Khyber, and spent May drilling whatever recruits he could afford to raise; a few more troops continued to straggle in from Kashmir ‘dismounted, disarmed and almost naked’.
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Such was the tension in Peshawar that an angry mob gathered outside the Embassy’s quarters after a rumour spread that the British had been in communication with the rebels and that Shuja had ordered the house to be plundered.
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On 12 June, with the safety of the Embassy now in jeopardy, and the roads becoming daily more dangerous, Elphinstone and his assistants said farewell to the Shah, and headed off south-east towards Delhi and Calcutta.

Shuja meanwhile prepared to make his stand. ‘Though the Shah was engulfed with catastrophic news from everywhere and helplessly watched malevolence and ill-fate taking over his administration, he stood steadfast and didn’t let fear overcome him,’ recorded Sultan Mahmoud Durrani in the
Tarikh-i-Sultani
. ‘Instead he marched off to resist Shah Mahmoud’s attack.’
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Less than a week later, the British were camped on the left bank of the Indus, under the sheltering walls of Akbar’s great fort at Attock, when they saw a bedraggled royal caravan arrive on the north bank and hastily prepare to make the crossing. It was the blind Shah Zaman and Wa’fa Begum, leading the Sadozai harem to safety. ‘To describe to you the effect of such a meeting upon the minds of all our party would be as difficult as melancholy,’ wrote Fraser. ‘Many with difficulty restrained their tears. The blinded monarch was seated on a low cot . . . His eyes at a moderate distance would not be perceived to be defective, merely as if there was a speck on each, with a little irregularity of the surface. After we were seated, he welcomed us in the usual manner and said only that he regretted Shuja’s present misfortunes, and trusted it would please God to favour him again.’
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The news Shah Zaman brought with him could not have been worse. Shuja’s defeat had been absolute. His army had been advancing from Jalalabad towards Kabul and its vanguard had just reached the cypresses of the Mughal garden at Nimla when his forces had been ambushed while still strung out along the road. The rebels had ridden them down with their lances and their sharp Khyber knives, screaming and spearing and clubbing with the buttstocks of their muskets. The lanced and punctured bodies fell as if suddenly deflated. Then the riders dismounted to gut and desecrate the torsos of the fallen, and slice off their genitals to place in the corpses’ mouths. Within minutes, Shuja’s general was dead, and the new recruits had bolted. Many of his noblemen, won over by the bribes offered by Fatteh Khan Barakzai, now changed sides.
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Shah Shuja had been towards the rear of the procession. By the time he came to hear of the ambush, it was already over. His new army had disintegrated, and in the chaos of the headlong flight he became detached even from his own bodyguard.

Later, in the thunderous twilight, a storm crashed over the broken army, the noise drowning out the dull clop of the exhausted horses. ‘The scourge of heaven was such that it rained enough that day to flood the river, and it became almost impossible to cross it,’ recorded the
Tarikh-i-Sultani
. ‘But Shah Shuja trusting to the Almighty entered the stream with his horse.’ At first, the keel of the horse’s breastbone cut through the waters, and the stallion kept its footing on the shingled strands of the Kabul River. But Shuja ‘had forded only till midway when a torrent came, and he slipped from his mount. Eventually he and the horse, with much difficulty, swam across to the other side; but the rest of the soldiers refused to make the crossing. So it was that the Shah ended up spending the night alone, deserted by every one of his courtiers and servants.’
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Shuja himself put it more succinctly. ‘We were left alone and unprotected,’ he wrote, ‘like a precious stone in its setting.’
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The king whose year had begun so auspiciously, and who had put on such a dazzling and theatrical display of absolute power only a few weeks earlier, was once again, as in his youth, a lone fugitive, cantering blindly through the darker provinces of the Afghan night.

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An Unsettled Mind

After the defeat at Nimla, Shah Shuja experienced a prolonged period of humiliation and exile. His wanderings were made all the more perilous by the fact that he was carrying on his person the single most valuable jewel in the world.

For several months Shuja visited the durbars of his allies, asking for their help in mounting a campaign to regain his kingdom and depose Shah Mahmoud and the Barakzais. One night, a former courtier named Atta Mohammad invited him to stay at the great fortress of Attock which guards the principal crossing over the Indus. There, according to Mirza ‘Ata,

they invited Shah Shuja to a private party where they served sweet water melons and started playfully throwing the melon skins at each other. But the jest bit by bit turned to scorn and effrontery, and Shah Shuja soon found himself arrested, held first in Attock then sent under close surveillance to Kashmir where he was kept prisoner in a fort . . . The lancet was frequently held over his eyes; and his keeper once took him into the Indus, with his arms bound, threatening him with instant death if he didn’t hand over the celebrated diamond.
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Wa’fa Begum, meanwhile, was loyally working to get him out. After her husband’s defeat she had made her way to Lahore, where according to Sikh sources she independently took it upon herself to negotiate a deal with the Sikh Maharajah, Ranjit Singh, offering him the Koh-i-Nur if he helped release her husband from prison.
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Ranjit Singh agreed to her terms. In the spring of 1813, the Sikh leader sent an expedition to Kashmir, which defeated the Governor who was holding Shuja and released him from his dungeon. Ranjit Singh then took the deposed Shah to Lahore. There he was separated from his harem, put under house arrest and told to fulfil his part in his wife’s bargain by handing over the diamond. ‘The ladies of our harem were accommodated in another mansion, to which we had, most vexatiously, no access,’ wrote Shuja in his memoirs. ‘Food and water rations were reduced or arbitrarily cut off, our servants sometimes allowed to go and sometimes forbidden from going about their business in the city.’ He regarded this as a breach of the laws of hospitality. ‘It was a display of oafish bad manners,’ he wrote, dismissing Ranjit Singh, his one-eyed captor, as ‘both vulgar and tyrannical, as well as ugly and low-natured’.
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Slowly, Ranjit increased the pressure. At the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Shuja was put in a cage, and, according to his own account, his eldest son, Prince Timur, was tortured in front of him until he agreed to part with his most valuable possession.
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On 1 June 1813, Ranjit Singh arrived in person at Mubarak Haveli in the heart of the walled city and waited upon the Shah with a few attendants
e
. He was received by Shuja:

with much dignity, and both being seated, a pause and solemn silence ensued, which continued for nearly an hour. Ranjit then, getting impatient, whispered to one of his attendants to remind the Shah of the object of his coming. No answer was returned, but the Shah with his eyes made a signal to a eunuch, who retired, and brought in a small roll, which he set down on the carpet at an equal distance between the chiefs. Ranjit Singh desired his eunuch to unfold the roll, and when the diamond was exhibited and recognized, the Sikh immediately retired with his prize in his hand.
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The Shah had honoured the agreement made by Wa’fa Begum, but at this point, having got what he wanted, Ranjit Singh reneged on his promise to release Shuja. Shah Shuja’s jewels were not all that was of value; the deposed Shah too was potentially a lucrative asset. So the Maharajah kept him under house arrest, allowing him only the occasional carefully guarded outing for a picnic in the Shalimar Gardens. ‘In flat contradiction to the treaty we had made,’ wrote Shuja, ‘it now transpired that, whenever we desired to take the air and visit gardens or shrines, spies would secretly follow us all around. We did not deign to take notice of them.’
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Shuja was at least allowed to summon the poets of Lahore to amuse him. One celebrated poet of the period, Rukn-ul Din Lahori ‘Mukammal’ (‘Accomplished’), describes in his memoirs being summoned by Shuja to Mubarak Haveli, only to have the Shah choke with tears at the memories his verses stirred. ‘O breeze what have you done to the long hair of my beloved?’ replied Shuja with lines in the same metre.

You have disturbed the peace of my heart.

The bird of my heart is lamenting the memory of my homeland

This bulbul is lamenting its separation from the garden.
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A few months later, Ranjit Singh decided to seize what was left of Shah Shuja’s treasures. Shuja was invited to take part in a Sikh attack on Peshawar where his estranged brother-in-law Fatteh Khan Barakzai was trying to consolidate his rule. ‘Even though we were then suffering from an extremely sore throat,’ wrote Shuja, ‘we left our ladies encamped in the Shalimar Gardens and set out to join the Sikh by forced marches.’ After Shuja had been lured out of Lahore into the countryside, the campaign was mysteriously called off, ostensibly because Fatteh Khan had withdrawn to Kabul. It was on the return journey that Shuja had his camp plundered by a group of armed robbers who descended on the royal tents in the middle of the night. When one of the dacoits was captured by Shuja’s Afghan bodyguard, he revealed that he was working for Ranjit Singh himself. ‘We were astonished and horrified at this evidence of the heartless treachery of these crass, ignorant Sikh dogs,’ commented Shuja. He then wrote to Ranjit: ‘What sort of behaviour is this? Whatever it is that you are plotting to do, do so openly – but stop this sly and underhand harassment! It is shameful!’

The following evening, the stolen trunks were brought back into the camp. ‘Making a complete uproar, our Sikh escort brought the trunks, carpet bags and treasure chests into Our Royal Presence – all of them empty!’ Shuja lamented:

Everything was gone, apart from a few old clothes of no particular use. The boxes full of lustrous pearls, the Ottoman and Sindhi guns with gold bands, the fine Persian swords, jewel-encrusted gilt pistols, chests of coins in red and white gold, fine cashmere and silk shawls, all of it gone! And the black-hearted hypocrites had the gall to say to us: ‘Here we bring your possessions, which we’ve fearlessly saved from the robbers! Let His Majesty inspect now to see if anything might by any chance be missing!’ Such shameless robbery, and then the effrontery to protest loyalty: it is quite repulsive! God save us from all such!

Knowing that Ranjit Singh himself was behind the robbery, Shuja added,

we mentally dismissed all the stolen property as an illusion or a bad dream . . . After these repeated betrayals, we entertained no further hopes of any help coming from these monsters. But given that our womenfolk and our honour were held hostage in Lahore, we had to submit, though sick at heart. We spent the next five months under the strictest surveillance, which was vexatious in the extreme: like clothes too tight in the heat. The feet of resilience stubbed toes on the rocks of oppression, but we could only beat our breasts to relieve the painful heart.
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