Deep, romantic and savage
Helena Drysdale
THE KHYBER PASS: A HISTORY OF EMPIRE AND INVASION by Paddy Docherty
Faber, £17.99, pp. 261, ISBN 9780571219773
✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In 1842 my cousin Charles Gascoyne was home from India on furlough, when he heard some devastating news. His regiment, the 5th Bengal Light Cavalry, had been retreating from Kabul through the winter-bound Khyber Pass where it was wiped out by Afghan tribesmen. A memorial tablet in St Peter’s Church in Calcutta still vividly records his fellow officers, ‘the lamented braves’, who
though greatly outnumbered by a most treacherous foe in snowy wastes and rugged defiles, for several days and nights together, without shelter or even a tent, and suffering from extremes of cold, hunger and thirst, in the depths of winter, sold their lives dearly, as became British soldiers.
Over 16,000 people died. Charles never recovered from the shock, and from the loss of so many friends.
Paddy Docherty’s excellent history brings home how the sheer physical geography of the Khyber Pass shaped events, just as much as the sword-wielding Ghazis who crouched behind every ‘rugged defile’. He describes its mouth yawning open, then closing up ‘like a muscle contracting’. The border town of Torkham resembles ‘the debris from a rock fall’ strewn beneath a ridge as jagged as ‘a madly serrated blade’.
For millennia this mountainous crevice, in some places only 16 metres wide, has been the conduit by which armies squeezed from arid Afghanistan out to the fertile plains of the Punjab. It has seen the ebb and flow of warriors from ancient Persians to Greeks, Scythians, Kushans, White Huns, Turks, Mongols, Mughals, Afghans, Mauryans, Parthians, Sikhs and Pathans, and ultimately to today’s Americans and British and their Al-Qaeda prey.
Until the British first invaded Afghanistan in 1839, the flow was mostly west-east, bringing empires, cultures and trade — although ivory, spices, textiles and Buddhism also flowed back the other way. Docherty uses the Khyber Pass as a hook on which to hang the history of these military and cultural exchanges, and to explore how they shaped the world we recognise in today’s central Asia — a region that is both familiar and yet little known.
Docherty tells his story with imagination and enthusiasm. His masterful grasp of events is embellished with vivid reconstructions of ancient warriors tramping through the Pass. He also draws out wider implications, such as the fact that when the Persians annexed north-west India in the sixth century BC, Indian soldiers were drafted by Xerxes to fight the Greeks thousands of miles west. In other words, thanks to Persian penetration of the Khyber Pass, Indians were participating in the great classical civilisations of the Mediterranean.
Perhaps the most extraordinary people to venture into the Pass were the White Huns, Iranian nomads lured east by Indian riches in the 5th century AD. They had deep gashes gouged into their faces, but their scariest feature was their elongated heads. Infant skulls were tightly wrapped to force growth in height, producing towering conical heads that along with the facial scars must have terrified their enemies.
Interestingly, we get half way through the book before we meet our first Moslems. Despite Islam being the religion that we associate so deeply with the region (peaceloving Buddhism seems wholly out of place here) it was not until the Turks arrived at the end of the 10th century that Muslim rule was finally established over northwest India.
Certain characters leap from the page. Alexander the Great, of course, and Genghis Khan, but also lesser known figures such as the elegantly moustachioed Louis Cavagnari who signed the 1879 treaty that acquired the Pass for Britain, before being murdered in Kabul. Another is Texan Congressman Charlie Wilson who armed the Mujahideen with Stinger missiles to destroy Russian helicopter gunships, thereby almost single-handedly defeating the Russians and helping to end the Cold War. When Wilson visited the Khyber in 1983 he brought along his bellydancer girlfriend who — not to offend his Pakistani hosts — posed as a member of his staff.
In describing his own experience of the Pass, Docherty acknowledges that because life there is hard and dangerous, people must treat each other with suspicion in order to survive. As he says, the Khyber Pass is more than a line on a map; it is an ancient zone of contested ground, unmastered even by the most powerful. For the British, that disastrous retreat from Kabul and subsequent years of guarding the northwest frontier elevated it into an icon of fear, something our present leaders forgot.
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