their own fidelity. Harlan preferred clemency, and merely ordered the man to be manacled and placed under guard. At the next village he was handed into the custody of the local headman. Harlan remarked: ‘He was probably released immediately after I left.’
The incident convinced Harlan that there was only one member of the party he could trust implicitly: ‘Amongst my followers there was one of low degree who held an elevated position in my regard and was certainly the most faithful, disinterested and by no means the least useful of the cortege.’ He was referring, of course, to his dog, Dash.
Harlan was anxious to push on quickly, but the baggage animals flatly declined to be hurried. ‘The old camels especially cannot be made to move above one coss and a half per hour,’ he complained. A coss was the old unit of Indian measurement, which Harlan calculated at one mile and three quarters. Distance seemed to expand as the column trudged on through a landscape of desert fringed with jungle, and such measurements became almost meaningless, Harlan reflected. ‘The peasant whom you interrogate as to the distance of the next village will sometimes reply, “As far as the twice boiling of a pot of milk” [or] “As far as you can carry a leaf without [it] wilting.”’ The population was sparse, but the local tribespeople seemed reasonably well-fed, with a diet that included mutton from the fat-tailed sheep, goats’ meat, beef, fowl, eggs and butter. Harlan gorged on ‘the finest perch and a species of catfish peculiar to the Indus’, but noticed that locals seemed to regard fish as an inferior food. Finding grain and forage for the cattle was far more problematic. As a visiting dignitary he expected to be sustained with free supplies from the local chiefs, in accordance with the ancient traditions of hospitality. If they seemed unwilling to provide such necessities, Harlan believed he would be within his rights, according to local custom, in taking what he needed. The local chiefs had once lived under Afghan rule, but they were now unwilling subjects of the aggressively expanding Sikh empire; each paid tribute, either directly or through a superior, to Ranjit Singh. Since Harlan was assumed to be a representative of the great British power to the east, and therefore a potential counterweight to Sikh domination, he expected a cautious welcome from the native barony. ‘All who were opposed to the Lahore paramount – and the tributaries generally were – showed by their alacrity of service and obsequious bearing the candidness with which they desired to recognize in every Christian traveller a representative of an antagonist power.’ Harlan was only too happy to be mistaken for a British officer, and if the local rulers thought that by providing him with food and forage they were currying favour with the powers in India, that was just fine with him.
Harlan’s attitude towards the local inhabitants, in common with most white men in India, was paternalistic, haughty and often dismissive, and a vein of cultural condescension runs through much of his early writing. Yet his outlook was similar to that of Thomas Jefferson himself, who maintained that the American Indians were noble savages who could be absorbed into the expanding American empire through education and religion. ‘I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman,’ wrote Jefferson in 1785. In the same way, Harlan regarded the various Indian, Sikh and Afghan tribesmen he would encounter over the next two decades as potential equals, held back not by any inherent racial inferiority but by physical circumstance and ignorance. He would immerse himself in the local ethnology, history and languages with all the enthusiasm that Jefferson devoted to his Indian studies. He might scorn the local customs as superstitious and barbaric, yet he observed them with fascination and described them with care. This openness of mind would develop over time, as his early distrust and disdain of native ways turned to understanding, and in many cases admiration. The colonist would eventually be colonised, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it.
About seventy coss from Ludhiana, after two solid weeks of marching, Harlan’s troop entered the district of Mamdot, the dominion of Qutb ud-Din Khan, one of those chiefs who was eager to rid himself of the obligation to pay tribute to the Sikh maharajah. The men were pitching camp when an envoy appeared from Qutb, accompanied by a troop of horsemen, to welcome the supposed British envoy with an avalanche of compliments. ‘This was the first instance in which I had been received with the ostentation that marks the Oriental display of festive diplomacy,’ Harlan observed. The envoy explained that although Qutb himself was on a hunting trip, he had sent a message for the noble feringhee, to be delivered in person by his son. This, Harlan calculated, would be an excellent moment to make an impact on the locals, in the knowledge that the bush telegraph would swiftly pass on news of the arrival of a powerful foreign prince, and so ensure a welcoming reception further ahead. The etiquette for the occasion was planned with care: first the tents were pitched to form a large, covered reception area, the floor spread with the finest hessian carpet. At one end of the enclosure, on an elevated platform, Harlan placed his armchair, where he would receive the prince in seated grandeur. Amirullah, toting the mace, formed a reception committee alongside Gul Khan in the full regalia of a native officer, while the guard of sepoys were drawn up before the tent door to greet the prince.
At the appointed hour, Qutb’s son swept into the encampment mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and surrounded by a small army of retainers armed with swords, shields and matchlocks. Gul Khan held the prince’s bridle as the young man dismounted, and then ushered him into the tent. Harlan was immediately struck by the ‘grace and dignity’ of the handsome, olive-skinned youth who now bowed before him, clad in a shimmering white robe embroidered with gold, a huge shield in one hand and a long sword tucked into his waistband. Long dark curls tumbled down to his shoulders from beneath a striped silk turban decorated with golden thread, while his slippers were similarly spangled in gold and silver. Even more remarkable than his exquisite outfit, however, was his age: the prince of Mamdot, calculated the astonished Harlan, could not have been more than seven years old.
‘His manner and address were no different from a man of mature condition and polite education,’ Harlan observed. This dignified, heavily-armed child approached with a peace offering: ‘a beautiful green bow of Lahore and a green velvet gold embroidered quiver’. After a lavish exchange of compliments the boy-prince presented a letter, complaining of the iniquities of Sikh rule, which he asked Harlan to forward to the British lords of India. Harlan, of course, had no formal connection with the British, and was anyway heading in the other direction. Tactfully, he advised the young man ‘that his father should represent his case in person to the Company’s resident at Delhi’.
The following morning, accompanied by a small contingent from Qutb’s tribe to guarantee safe passage through the bandit-infested region, Harlan crossed the frontier into Bahawalpur, the land of the formidable Nawab Bahawal Khan. Founded and named after Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in 1748, the princely state of Bahawalpur had won a large measure of independence during the civil war that dissolved the Afghan empire, but it now faced simultaneous threats from the expansionist Sikhs to the north and the looming British in the east. As Harlan wrote, ‘the present incumbent stood in an unenviable posture, with the prospect “of being ground between two stones” as the Persian proverb goes’. Like many native princes, Bahawal Khan was tempted to throw in his lot with the British. But as Captain Wade had warned Harlan, the nawab remained exceedingly nervous, and might not take kindly to having a force under an unknown flag marching unannounced through his territory.
Harlan, however, was breezily confident. ‘The friendly relations existing between that prince and the British government precluded the possibility of hostilities against a Christian,’ he wrote, noting that Elphinstone had been graciously received by Bahawal Khan’s father. If the nawab could be persuaded to believe Harlan was a British official, he was probably safe. Moreover, he wanted to make contact with Bahawal Khan, for it was likely that Shah Shujah would have to cross Bahawalpur with a far larger army in the event of an invasion.
Harlan’s troop had penetrated some ten miles into the nawab’s territories, when a body of armed men, mounted on camels and horses, suddenly bore down on them. The little army immediately prepared for battle: the sepoys took up positions among the baggage animals, with muskets levelled, while Harlan and the other mounted men rode a few yards ahead, ‘threatening them by the evolutions
