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From Sepoy to Film Star: Indian interpreters of an Afghan mythic space*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

WALTER N. HAKALA*
Affiliation:
Department of English and Asian Studies Program, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, United States of America Email: walterha@buffalo.edu

Abstract

The paucity of sources documenting the role of Indians in the nineteenth-century British imperial engagement with Afghanistan has resulted in significant lacunae within later cultural artefacts documenting the period. The South Asians who formed the bulk of British expeditionary forces in the first Anglo-Afghan war (1837–1842) were, however, indispensable as cultural intermediaries, translating little-studied Afghan languages into patterns of South Asian speech that had become familiar to colonial officials through a gradual and ongoing process of exposure in India proper and, in the presence of comprador agents, beyond. For English-language authors writing in the aftermath of the traumatic retreat of the British army from Afghanistan in 1842, British India and its subject populations provided a convenient and long-established set of topoi through which to produce convincingly authentic representations of Afghanistan as an exotic and alien ‘mythic space’. Following George Steiner and Richard Slotkin, this article argues that the narrative memorials to the first Anglo-Afghan War become possible only through the activation of a particular set of stable, yet portable, South Asian literary figures which stand in for Afghanistan itself.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I owe many thanks to the mentors, friends, and colleagues whose encouragement helped bring this project to fruition. I am especially grateful to David Kazanjian, Christian Lee Novetzke, Benedicte Santry, Robert St. George, and Harold Schiffman for providing guidance during the early stages of this project; James Caron, Zubeda Jalalzai, and James Holstun for their corrections, comments, and valuable insights on later drafts; and Stacie Brisker for assisting me with the Special Collections at the Cleveland Public Library. I am responsible for all errors that remain.

References

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36 See, for example, Alam, M. and Subrahmanyam, S. (2004). The Making of a Munshi, Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East, 24:2, pp. 62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 66.

37 As recently as a decade ago, the final exam for an introductory course in Persian designed for the Urdu MA students at a prominent Indian university consisted only of a translation of a passage from the original Persian Gulistān into Urdu. This author observed that many students made use of Urdu-language printed translations that they concealed on their persons for surreptitious consultation throughout the exam.

38 Yohannan, J. D. (1950). Did Sir Richard Burton Translate Sadi's Gulistan?, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 3/4, pp. 185188 Google Scholar; Davis, D. (2000). ‘Saʿdī c. 1215–1292: Persian Poet and Moralist’ in Classe, O. Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, pp. 12121214 Google Scholar; Newman, R. J. (2004). ‘Introduction’ in Newman, R. J. Selections from Saadi's Gulistan, Global Scholarly Publications & International Society for Iranian Culture, New York, pp. 119 Google Scholar.

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40 Yohannan, J. D. (1987). The Poet Sa‘di: A Persian Humanist, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland, p. 57 Google Scholar.

41 Browne, Literary History, p. 526.

42 This phrase comes from the valuable discussion of Ezra Pound's Cathay in Steiner, After Babel, p. 359.

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46 Emphasis added. Brydon, W. (1875). ‘Appendix: Copy of William Brydon's Account from Memory, and Memoranda Made on Arrival at Jellalabad, of the Retreat from Cabool in 1842’ in Lawrence, Reminiscences, p. 307.

47 Trousdale, W. (1983). Dr. Brydon's Report of the Kabul Disaster and the Documentation of History, Military Affairs: The Journal of Military History, Including Theory and Technology, 47:1, pp. 2627 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

48 For instance, instead of the horsemen accompanying ‘us’, they are said to accompany ‘me’ in the 1969 reprint. Brydon, W. (1969). ‘William Brydon's Account from Memory and Memoranda Made on Arrival of the Retreat from Cabool in 1842’ in Macrory, P. A. The First Afghan War, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut, p. 162 Google Scholar.

49 Emphasis added.

50 Among the memoirs penned by British witnesses to the battle at Khoord Kabul, the best known include: Sale, Journal; Eyre, Military Operations; Lawrence, Reminiscences; Mackenzie, H. D. (1884). Storms and Sunshine of a Soldier's Life: Lt.-General Colin Mackenzie, C.B., 1825–1881, David Douglas, Edinburgh Google Scholar.

51 Eyre, Military Operations, p. 313. A French translation prepared the following year deviates very little from Eyre's original, removing the idiomatic ‘in the same breath’ and providing further specificity to the verb ‘call’: ‘il étaità l’arrière-garde avec quelques chefs, et y ordonnait aux Ghildjis en persan de s’arrêter, et en pushtoo de faire feu [he was at the rear with several chiefs, and ordered the Ghildjis in Persian to stop, and in Pushtoo to fire]’. Emphasis in original. Eyre, V. (1844). Retraite et Destruction de l’Armée Anglaise dans l’Afghanistan, En Janvier 1842. Journal du Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, de l’Artill. de Bengale. Traduit de l’Anglais par Paul Jessé, Journal des sciences militaires (3e Série), 5, p. 247 Google Scholar.

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54 Sale, F. (1969). ‘A Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan, 1841–2’ in Macrory, P. A. The First Afghan War, p. 104n Google Scholar. This intelligence had been attributed to Pottinger earlier, however, and appears in fictionalized accounts as well. See Diver, K. H. M. (1913). The Judgment of the Sword: The Tale of the Kabul Tragedy, and of the Part Played therein by Major Eldred Pottinger, the Hero of Herat, Constable & Company, London, p. 352 Google Scholar.

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60 Examples may be be found in Dihlavī, S. A. (1974). ‘Muqaddamah-i Ṯabʿ-i Awwal-i Farhang-i Āṣafiyah’ in Dihlavī, S. A. Farhang-i Āṣafīyahi Vol. 1, National Akademi [Taraqqī-yi Urdū Board edition], New Delhi, pp. 6064 Google Scholar.

61 Cited in Brailowksy, Y. (2012). Subscription and Proscription in Marlowe's Edward II, Études Épistémè, 21: http://revue.etudes-episteme.org/?subscription-and-proscription-in, [accessed 23 November 2014]. I am grateful to James Holstun for bringing this to my attention.

62 Bronner, Y. (2010). Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 6.

63 Sale, Journal, p. 84.

64 Pottinger, Afghan Connection, p. 157.

65 Sale, Journal, p. 102–103.

66 Macaulay, T. B. (1970). Prose and Poetry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 729 Google Scholar. On the debates surrounding the extension of English-language education in South Asia, see also Zastoupil, L. and Moir, M. (eds.) (1999). The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843, Vol. 18, London Studies on South Asia, Curzon, Richmond Google Scholar; Hall, C. (2012). Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, pp. 225234 Google Scholar.

67 Raverty, H. G. (1855). A Grammar of the Pakhto, Pushto, or Language of the Afgháns: In which the Rules are Illustrated by Examples from the Best Writers, both Poetical and Prose, Together with Translations from the Articles of War, and Remarks on the Language, Literature, and Descent of the Afghán Tribes, J. Thomas at the Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, p. v Google Scholar.

68 Lawrence, Reminiscences, p. 121.

69 Ibid, p. 29.

70 Steiner, After Babel, p. 360.

71 Lawrence, Reminiscences, pp. 132–133.

72 The classic history of how the British enacted their ‘disguise fantasy’ in their dealings with Central Asia is contained in Hopkirk, P. (1990). The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, Murray, London. The writings of Rudyard Kipling, of which his novel, Kim, is the most famous example, contain classic fictional accounts of this conceit.

73 Burnes, A. (1843). Cabool: A Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in That City, in the Years 1836, 7, and 8, J. Murray, London Google Scholar.

74 Lawrence, Reminiscences, pp. 201–202.

75 Ibid, pp. 204–205.

76 Eyre, Journal, p. 188.

77 Lawrence, Reminiscences, pp. 129–130. Compare with the slightly longer version of the same account reproduced in Mackenzie, Storms and Sunshine, pp. 250–251.

78 Lawrence, Reminiscences, pp. 197–198.

79 Ibid, p. 392.

80 Waller, J. H. (1990). Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War, Random House, New York, p. 244 Google Scholar.

81 Steiner, After Babel, p. 380. On the extensive critical literature theorizing the roles played by linguistic and other intermediaries in colonial and post-colonial settings, see Cohen, P. (2011). ‘The Power of Apprehending “Otherness”: Cultural Intermediaries as Imperial Agents in New France’ in Abbattista, G. Encountering Otherness: Diversities and Modern European Culture, Edizioni Università di Trieste, Trieste, pp. 225226 Google Scholar n. 6. On the reliance of the British East India Company upon Indians, particularly Hindus, as comprador agents in Afghanistan, see Fisher, M. H. (2006). ‘Mohan Lal Kashmiri (1812–77): An Initial Student of Delhi English College’ in Pernau, M. The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, p. 243 Google Scholar.

82 Fisher, ‘Mohan Lal Kashmiri’, pp. 239–240.

83 Lal, M. (1846a). Life of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan of Kabul: With His Political Proceedings towards the English, Russian, and Persian Governments, Including the Victory and Disasters of the British Army in Afghanistan, Vol. 2, Long, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, pp. 429430 Google Scholar.

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85 Dupree mentions, however, the unpublished diary of the Afghan leader Aminullah Logari stored in the then-newly constructed Afghan National Archives. Dupree, ‘Introduction’, pp. viii–ix. Whether it has survived to the present day is uncertain. William Dalrymple's recently published history of the First Anglo-Afghan war is a rarity among English-language works insofar as it draws extensively upon Persian- and Urdu-language material from archives in Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, as well as published historical chronicles of the period in Urdu and Persian. See Dalrymple, W. (2013). ‘Author's Note’ in The Return of a King: Shah Shuja and the First Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42, Knopf, New York, pp. 441448 Google Scholar. While I have not been able to examine most of these primary source materials, his history makes very little mention of British knowledge of Pashto or the role of Indians as linguistic intermediaries. Dalrymple, Return of a King, pp. 17, 334.

86 Mohan Lal was trained in the latest methods of surveying land during a trip to Calcutta in 1834. Fisher, ‘Mohan Lal Kashmiri’, pp. 244–245.

87 Faruqi, S. R. (2001). ‘Constructing a Literary History, a Canon, and a Theory of Poetry’ in Āzād, M. Ḥ. Āb-e ḥayāt: Shaping the Canon of Urdu Poetry, Pritchett, F. W. (ed. and trans.), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, p. 20 Google Scholar. See also the discussion of the ‘ideal “new-model Indian”’ in Fisher, ‘Mohan Lal Kashmiri’, pp. 234, 242, 246.

88 Lal, M. (1846b). Life of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan of Kabul: With His Political Proceedings towards the English, Russian, and Persian Governments, Including the Victory and Disasters of the British Army in Afghanistan, Vol. 1, Long, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, p. ix Google Scholar.

89 Lal, Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, Vol. 1, p. x.

90 Lal, M. (1846c). Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, Turkistan, to Balk, Bokhara, and Herat; and a Visit to Great Britain and Germany, W. H. Allen & Co., London, pp. 102103 Google Scholar. Also cited in Dupree, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.

91 Lal, Travels, p. 32.

92 See, for example, Gopal, S. (1992). Indians in Central Asia 16th and 17th Centuries, Address of the Sectional President, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 52nd Session, pp. 219–231; Gommans, J. J. L. (1995). The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c.1710–1780, Brill, Leiden, pp. 1621 Google Scholar, 68–103; Levi, S. C. (2002). The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900, Brill, Leiden, pp. 5460 Google Scholar; Banerji, A. (2011). Old Routes: North Indian Nomads and Bankers in Afghan, Uzbek and Russian Lands, Three Essays Collective, Gurgaon Google Scholar.

93 On the moneylenders of Shikarpur, a city located in present-day Pakistan, see note 92 and Dalrymple, Return of a King, p. 42.

94 Lal, Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, Vol. 2, pp. 486–487.

95 Spooner, B. (2012). ‘Persian, Farsi, Dari, Tajiki: Language Names and Language Policies’ in Schiffman, B. Language Policy and Language Conflict, pp. 89117 Google Scholar.

96 Yapp, M. E. (1964). The Revolutions of 1841–2 in Afghanistan, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 27, p. 380 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Dupree, ‘Introduction’, p. xxii.

98 Norgate, J. T. (1970). ‘Preface by Translator’ in Pandey, S. R. From Sepoy to Subedar; Being the Life and Adventures of Subedar Sita Ram, a Native Officer of the Bengal Army, Written and Related by Himself, Vikas Publications, Delhi, p. xiii Google Scholar. For another possible eyewitness account, see the testimony given by the Gorkha infantryman, Motee Ram Havildar, and translated by T. MacSherry, reproduced in Havildar, M. R. (1879). ‘Appendix D: Extract from the Englishman Newspaper, of Calcutta, April 27th, 1842; Personal Narrative of Havildar Motee Ram, of the Shah's 4th or Ghoorka Regiment of Light Infantry, Destroyed at Char-ee-kar’ in Haughton, J. C. Char-ee-kar and Service There with the 4th Goorkha Regiment (Shah Shooja's Force), in 1841 an Episode of the First Afghan War, Provost and Co., London, p. 57 Google Scholar.

99 For interesting parallels, see Fraser, G. M. (1969). Flashman, From the Flashman Papers 1839–1842, World Pub. Co., New York Google Scholar; Fraser, G. M. (1975). Flashman in the Great Game: From the Flashman Papers 1856–1858, Barrie & Jenkins, London Google Scholar; Murphy, D. (2004). Review: The Last Man: The Life and Times of Surgeon Major Brydon, CB by John C. Cunningham, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 14, p. 149 Google Scholar.

100 Fraser's novels have inspired readers to produce a vast online apparatus of supplementary materials, albeit of an often ephemeral nature. D. Tibbetts, founder of the erstwhile Flashman Society of the United Kingdom, compiled a valuable Flashman Reader online, which sadly is no longer available (see http://members.aol.com/dtibbe2926/UKC/frl.html). The ‘Flashman-gmf’ Listserv, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flashman-gmf/, [accessed 23 November 2014], however, remains active with 143 posts in July 2012 alone.

101 Phillott, D. C. (1914). Annotated English Translation of Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl or “Visions of the Past”: The Textbook for the Higher Standard Examination in Hindustani, 2nd Edition, Baptist Mission Press, Calcutta, p. 112 Google Scholar.

102 Dalrymple, Return of a King, p. 460.

103 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. 77.

104 Ibid, p. 78.

105 Pandey, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 79, 116.

106 I agree with Phillott that the verse in question is actually ‘quite apposite’. Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. 80.

107 Ibid, p. 82.

108 Ibid. Lunt inexplicably alters this statement to read ‘my accent always gave me away’. Pandey, Sepoy to Subedar, p. 121.

109 Norgate, ‘Preface’, pp. xiii, xvi. This is also discussed in Thomas, F. W. (1912a). ‘Letter from F. W. Thomas to Sir G. A. Grierson, 13 November 1912’, Cleveland Public Library East India Company Manuscript Collection 091.92 L569 (hereafter CPL), ff. 12–15. See also Cadell, P. (1959). The Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 37, pp. 5354 Google Scholar; Lunt, J. D. (1970). ‘Editorial Note’ in Pandey, Sepoy to Subedar, p. xvi Google Scholar; Safadi, A. (2010). From Sepoy to Subedar/Khvab-o-Khayal and Douglas Craven Phillott, The Annual of Urdu Studies, 25, p. 44 Google Scholar. For an attempt to reconstruct a timeline for the various editions of the work, see Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 44–48. I am in complete agreement with Safadi's conclusions regarding the inauthenticity of this work.

110 Slotkin, Continuity of Forms, p. 1.

111 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xi; Norgate, ‘Preface’, p. xiii.

112 Lunt, ‘Editorial Note’, p. xviii.

113 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xii; Norgate, ‘Preface’, p. xiii.

114 Yule, H. (1903). Hobson-Jobson: A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursive, Crooke, W. (ed.), Murray, J. London, pp. 567, 610612, 740–741Google Scholar.

115 Baboo is defined by Yule as ‘a native clerk who writes English’. See Hobson-Jobson, p. 44.

116 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xv. This is transformed by Lunt into ‘suffered seven severe wounds’. Pandey, Sepoy to Subedar, p. xxix.

117 Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 57–60; Cadell, Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, pp. 5, 53; Pandey, Sepoy to Subedar, p. 26. This ‘perversion’ is transcribed as ‘Loneyocker’ by Cadell. Compare Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, pp. 18, 20, 21; Cadell, Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, p. 5.

118 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xi; Norgate, ‘Preface’, p. xiii. On this reference to James Grant's First Love and Last Love (1868), a romance of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, see Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, p. 54.

119 Cadell, Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, p. 52, refers to James Justinian Morier (1782–1849), best known for his novels Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Isphahan (published anonymously in 1824) and its sequel, Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Isphahan, in England (1828).

120 Mason, P. (1974). A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, p. 210 Google Scholar.

121 On this perceived lack, and for a corrective to this perception, at least from a Bengali-language perspective, see Chatterjee, P. (1993). ‘Histories and Nations’ in Chatterjee, P. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Google Scholar. For a broader discussion, see Dirks, N. B. (1990). History as a Sign of the Modern, Public Culture, 2:2, pp. 2532 Google Scholar.

122 Mason, A Matter of Honour, pp. 208–209. On this passage and others, see Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 50–52.

123 Slotkin, Continuity of Forms, p. 9. Likewise, Huston's wardrobe department went to great efforts to research the costumes and props for The Man Who Would Be King. Huston, Open Book, pp. 356–357.

124 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. 82. See also note 108.

125 Thomas, ‘Letter to Sir G. A. Grierson, 13 November 1912’, ff. 13–15; Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 44–45.

126 King, One Language, Two Scripts, p. 57; Chaudhry, N. A. (1977). Development of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, 1849–1974, Punjab Govt. Record Office, Lahore Google Scholar; Naim, C. M. (1984). ‘Prize-Winning Adab: A Study of Five Urdu Books Written in Response to the Allahabad Government Gazette Notification’ in Metcalf, B. D. Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, University of California Press, Berkeley Google Scholar; Green, N. (2009). Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire, Cambridge University Press Cambridge, pp. 134135 Google Scholar.

127 On Phillott's career, see Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, p. 43.

128 Pandey, From Sepoy to Subedar, pp. xvi–xvii.

129 Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 47–48.

130 These letters are housed in the East India Company manuscript collection at the CPL. See Repp, A. (2011). ‘Detailed Description of The Collection’ in Guide to the East India Company Manuscript Collection, http://ead.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ead/view?docId=ead/OCl0035.xml;chunk.id=dsc_1;brand=default, [accessed 23 November 2014]. Some of the corresponding letters by Grierson, written between 1912 and 1915, are discussed in Cadell, Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, p. 55.

131 Chapman, R. A. (2004). The Civil Service Commission, 1855–1991: A Bureau Biography, Routledge, London, p. 21 Google Scholar.

132 Though a later and abridged version, he is referring to instances of these usages appearing in Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, pp. 7, 14.

133 On Mr Jabberjee, see Anstey, F. (1897). Baboo Jabberjee, J. M. Dent & Co., London Google Scholar; Rita, R. (1999). On Global English and the Transmutation of Postcolonial Studies into ‘Literature in English’, Diaspora, 8:1, p. 74 Google Scholar.

134 Ward, G. E. (1912). ‘Letter from G. E. Ward to Sir G. A. Grierson, 9 November 1912’, CPL, ff. 5–6.

135 Including tabeez (for ta’ ʿwīż, amulet), tosahkana (for toshah-ḳhānah, ‘wardrobe’; ‘store-room’), nikahana (apparently for nikāh-paṛhāʾī(?), ‘marriage fees’), pāk (for ‘a man restored to caste’), and zāt (for the Sanskrit-derived jātī, caste). See Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, pp. 5, 24, 26, 34, 35, 37. Safadi has analysed several of these terms in Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 57–59.

136 Ward, ‘Letter to Sir G. A. Grierson, 9 November 1912’, f. 9.

137 Thomas, ‘Letter to Sir G. A. Grierson, 13 November 1912’, ff. 12–15. The 1873 Urdu version is discussed in Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 44–45.

138 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xii.

139 Thomas, F. W. (1912b). ‘Letter from F. W. Thomas to Sir G. A. Grierson, 18 November 1912’, CPL, ff. 25–26.

140 Norgate, F. M. C. (1912). ‘Letter from F. M. C. Norgate to Sir G. A. Grierson, 21 November 1912’, CPL, f. 33.

141 Lowe, F. E. (n.d.). ‘Letter from F. E. Lowe to Sir G. A. Grierson, 18 November’, CPL, ff. 69–71. Lowe does not identify the year. Assuming that it is the enclosure mentioned in the letter of 22 January 1914 by Sir Richard Burn in the same collection, Lowe's letter must have been written in 1913.

142 Cf. Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. 90. The nagrī script, written from left to right, has come to be associated with Hindi, and the Arabic script with Urdu.

143 Phillott, D. C. (1912a). ‘Letter from D. C. Phillott to Sir G. A. Grierson, 17 November 1912’, CPL, ff. 16–23.

144 Phillott, D. C. (1912b). ‘Letter from D. C. Phillott to G. A. Grierson, 20 November 1912’, CPL, ff. 29–31.

145 Phillott, Ḵẖẉāb o Ḵẖyāl, p. xiii; Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 44–45.

146 Cadell, Autobiography of an Indian Soldier, p. 55.

147 Safadi appears to have arrived at a similar conclusion in Safadi, Sepoy to Subedar, pp. 49–50.

148 Slotkin, Continuity of Forms, p. 4.

149 Huston, Open Book, p. 351. On the imagery of the untamed Kāfirī in British literature and film, see Fowler, Chasing Tales, pp. 51–69.

150 Kipling, ‘The Man Who Would be King’, p. 268. On changes Huston made to Kipling's character, see Kozloff, ‘Taking Us along’, p. 187.

151 Huston, Open Book, pp. 353–356; Kozloff, ‘Taking Us along’, p. 184. This tradition of anatopic cinematic representations of Afghanistan persists with the well-known Rambo III (1988) having been largely filmed in Israel, and the recent low-budget horror film, The Objective (2008), in Morocco.

152 Platts, J. T. (1884). A Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English, W. H. Allen & Co., London, p. 494 Google Scholar.

153 Rudolf, R. de M. (ed.) (1902). Short Histories of the Territorial Regiments of the British Army, Including the Names of the Officers and Soldiers who Have Won the Victoria Cross or the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Harrison & Sons, London, p. 55 Google Scholar.

154 Morgan, P. D. (1999). ‘Encounters between British and “Indigenous” Peoples, c. 1500–c. 1800’ in Daunton, M. J. and Halpern, R. Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, p. 49 Google Scholar.

155 Handler, R. and Saxton, W. (1988). Dyssimulation: Reflexivity, Narrative, and the Quest for Authenticity in ‘Living History’, Cultural Anthropology , 3:3, p. 253 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slotkin, Continuity of Forms, p. 18.

156 Kipling, ‘The Man Who Would be King’, p. 259.