style="font-size:15px;"> Harlan’s future was clear, at least in his own mind: he would join the maharajah’s entourage and rise to fame and fortune, while compiling a full inventory of the plants and flowers of the exotic Punjab. Like Lewis and Clark, with American bravado and learning he would open up a new world. The only hitch was that Ranjit Singh would not let him in. Although he had signed a treaty with the British back in 1809, as the greatest independent ruler left in India the maharajah was pathologically (and understandably) suspicious of feringhees, as white foreigners were called. The British were happy to let the Sikh potentate get on with building his own empire beyond the Sutlej. ‘Very little communication had heretofore existed betwixt the two governments,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The interior of the Punjab was only seen through a mysterious veil, and a dark gloom hung over and shrouded the court of Lahore.’ Which was exactly the way Ranjit Singh wanted it.
As he kicked his heels waiting for a passport that never arrived, Harlan began to form an altogether more extravagant plan that would take him far beyond the Punjab in the service of a different king, who also happened to be his neighbour in Ludhiana.
Fifteen years earlier Shah Shujah al-Moolk had welcomed Mountstuart Elphinstone to Peshawar, seated on his gilded throne. Now the Afghan king was an exile, and Ludhiana’s resident celebrity. ‘His Majesty might be seen almost daily in the vicinity of Loodianah in regal state,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The throng of a long procession proclaimed the approach of the King, shouting to the listless winds and unpeopled highways, as though he was in the midst of obedient subjects, with the deep and sonorous intonation of self-important command, where there was none to obey!’
The spectacle of this displaced potentate, parading the streets and demanding subservience from invisible subjects, struck the American as both touching and admirable, the display of a monarch who ‘never compromised his royal dignity’, and never disguised his belief that his protectors and hosts were infidels and inferiors. As Harlan observed with sly pleasure, even Captain Wade, the senior British official in Ludhiana, was treated as a minion. ‘The forms and etiquette of his court were no less strictly preserved by the banished king than they were in the brightest days of his greatness! Under no circumstances, however urgent, would His Majesty deviate from the etiquette of the Kabul court [and] his high and mighty hauteur could not be reconciled to an interview on equal terms with another human being.’
Ousted by his own brother, Shujah had fled to the Punjab in 1809, taking with him his harem and most of the Afghan royal jewellery, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the priceless gem originally taken from the Moguls by the conquering Nadir Shah of Persia and today a centrepiece of Britain’s Crown Jewels. Throwing himself on the mercy and hospitality of Ranjit Singh, Shujah found himself a prisoner of the maharajah, who had fixed his acquisitive eye on the diamond. ‘Sentinels were placed over our dwelling’, the exiled king wrote, as Ranjit gradually increased the pressure by depriving the king of the ‘necessaries of life’ which, in the case of Shujah and his luxury-loving entourage, were very considerable. Finally, the reluctant Shah Shujah had agreed to hand over the Koh-i-Noor in exchange for five thousand rupees and a promise that Ranjit would help him regain his crown. Instead of fulfilling his side of the bargain, however, Ranjit set about trying to extract Shujah’s remaining treasure.
Recalling his pleasant encounter with Elphinstone, Shujah resolved to make a dash for British India. Smuggling out some four hundred wives, children, concubines, eunuchs, retainers and others from under Ranjit’s nose was no easy task, but by bribing his guards, most of the harem was successfully moved to Ludhiana. Ranjit reinforced the ‘bodyguard’ surrounding his royal guest. ‘Seven ranges of guards were put upon our person, and armed men with torches lighted our bed,’ Shujah recorded. Finally the deposed king escaped by secretly tunnelling through several walls and then wriggling to freedom through the main sewer of Lahore, arriving smelly but safe on the other side of the city wall. After a series of adventures that took him through the passes of Lesser Tibet, he eventually reached Ludhiana. ‘Our cares and fatigues were now forgotten and, giving thanks to Almighty God who, having freed us from the hands of our enemies and led us through the snows and over the trackless mountains, had now safely conducted us to the lands of our friends, we passed a night for the first time with comfort and without dread.’ Reunited with his wives and provided with a substantial home and pension by the British, Shah Shujah al-Moolk had settled into comfortable exile, and immediately began plotting his return to Kabul.
The ousted king was a strange, violent, but curiously romantic figure. Astute, charming, vain and greedy, Shujah could be unexpectedly merciful on occasion, but by inclination he was brutal, capable of the most capricious and revolting cruelty. He had ruled for just six years, but was convinced he would one day return in triumph to Kabul. Visitors were always impressed by his poise, despite the indignities he had suffered, yet there was something mournful about him. It was said that he had been born under an unlucky star. Shujah talked a good military game but tended to balk on the battlefield at the critical moment, and despite removing the crown jewels en masse, he complained that he was almost broke. ‘He wanted vigour,’ wrote one observer. ‘He wanted activity; he wanted judgement; and, above all, he wanted money.’
Shujah repeatedly lobbied the British for help to win back his throne, but without success. ‘His Majesty strenuously kept alive the impression amongst his followers and contemporaries that he was about to attempt the invasion of Kabul, sustaining their hopes and anticipations,’ wrote Harlan, but the British insisted on maintaining strict neutrality, at least for the time being. The exiled king argued that he did not need a British army, but British cash. ‘Money would readily achieve all that was necessary,’ he had told Captain Wade. ‘By the loaning of a few hundred thousand rupees, he would disseminate confusion amongst his enemies. From the diffusion of gold, he proposed to create and nourish a powerful party that should sustain his own policy and by these means, which have ever been the successful mode of controlling the Avghaun tribes, to mount again that unsteady throne.’
Harlan discussed Shah Shujah’s predicament with Wade, and found the British agent doubtful that the Afghan king would ever regain his crown. ‘We conversed together upon the future probabilities of Shah Shujah’s restoration,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The subject of Russian influence was even then frequently discussed in the social circles of British India [and] the opinion of Captain W. sunk deep into my mind when he calmly observed, “There is no possible chance for Shujah’s restoration unless an ostensible demonstration of Russian diplomacy should transpire at Kabul”!’ This was Harlan’s initiation into the Great Game, the shadowy struggle between Britain and Tsarist Russia for influence and control in Central Asia. Harlan would later recall the ‘singular prescience’ of Wade’s observation. Fear of Russian encroachment would eventually persuade the British to restore Shah Shujah to his throne, with horrendous consequences.
The exiled king’s poignant daily cavalcade, the tales of his fabled wealth and the wild, primitive land beckoning from beyond the Indus captured Harlan’s imagination entirely. He wrote: ‘I had determined to indulge the spirit of adventure that then absorbed my views of life.’ If the British would not return this great man to his throne, then Harlan himself might take a hand in the restoration, perhaps winning power and fame in the process. Europeans had forged their own kingdoms here before, starting with Alexander the Great. The most recent self-made king had been George Thomas, an Irish mercenary who at the end of the previous century, with a combination of guile, good fortune and extreme violence, had carved out a realm east of Delhi and assumed the title of Rajah of Haryana. Here were kingdoms for the making, requiring only enterprise, energy and luck. ‘Every man in his own estimation is a king,’ wrote Harlan, ‘enfeafed in the royal prerogative of
