A bazaar on the way to Bibi Pak Daman, the shrine and mausoleum of Ruqayyah bint Ali in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. It was in a small newspaper office in Lahore that Peachey Carnehan and Danny Dravot broached their breathtaking scheme to conquer a corner of Afghanistan and rule it as Sir James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’, had recently ruled Sarawak in Indonesia. Their plan was to use their peerless training in the British Army to help some local tribal elder build a vast realm, and then take it over themselves. If Kipling did not intend this as a cautionary parable for the British Empire, he might easily have done so; and it would fit today’s ‘American Empire’ just as well.
Part 1 of 2
THEY certainly were too big for the office. Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan’s shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued:— “The country isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that without all the Government saying — ‘Leave it alone and let us govern.’ Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own. We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack* on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.”
“Kings in our own right,” muttered Dravot.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “You’ve been tramping in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and hadn’t you better sleep over the notion? Come to-morrow.”
* Peachey mispronounces ‘contract’.
Précis
In Rudyard Kipling’s short story, two former British soldiers burst into the cramped offices of a Lahore newspaper, and tell the bewildered editor (a fellow freemason) that petty Raj bureaucracy has forced them to a decision: they are going away to be kings in their own land. The editor’s response is to be as soothing as he can. (58 / 60 words)
Part Two
The snow-covered mountains of the Hindu Kush, which lies between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, but at the time when Kipling wrote his story was northeast India. It was across such beautiful but hostile terrain that Danny and Peachey had to cross before reaching their promised land. After nearly perishing in the icy mountain wastes they came into their realm, and all went well until Danny broke his ‘contrack’ with Peachey. Carnehan told his brother mason about it later, back in the stuffy newspaper office where he and Danny had first revealed their plans. “‘For Gord’s sake leave the women alone!’ I says. ‘Who’s talking o’ women?’ says Dravot. ‘I said wife — a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King.’”
“NEITHER drunk nor sunstruck,” said Dravot. “We have slept over the notion half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a-whack.* They call it Kafiristan.* By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawur.* They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty-third. It’s a mountaineous* country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful.”
“But that is provided against in the Contrack,” said Carnehan. “Neither Women nor Liquor, Daniel.”
“And that’s all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to drill men can always be a King. We shall go to those parts and say to any King we find — ‘D’you want to vanquish your foes?’ and we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dy-nasty.”
* Dan has made a verb out of Sarawak, a region of Borneo Island, which he uses to mean ‘do what Sir James Brooke did’. In 1842, Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien II ceded complete sovereignty of Sarawak to James Brooke (1803–1868), a former soldier in the East India Company’s militia and now a merchant adventurer in the Far East. Brooke was granted the title of Rajah of Sarawak in 1841 (formally proclaimed the following year) and remained in power until his death in 1868. Peachey and Dan dreamt of emulating Sir James’s extraordinary career as a ‘white rajah’.
* A real place in northwest Afghanistan, more or less where Nuristan Province now lies. Historically pagan, it was converted to Islam at the point of a sword in 1896, eight years after this story was written. Peachey and Dan’s proposed kingdom is remote and ‘mountaineous’, dry and rocky but relieved by green valleys and thickly forested slopes. Today’s ‘men who would be king’ in Afghanistan have found the land as difficult to subdue as did Peachey and Dan — “poor, poor Dan, that would never take advice” — and it remains largely under strict Islamic control by the Taliban.
* Peshawar lies in what is now Pakistan, and at that time was British India. It is Pakistan’s oldest and sixth-largest city. The northeast corner of Afghanistan’s Nuristan Province lies about 120 miles to the north of Peshawar — Dan admitted that his estimate of three hundred miles was generous. Dan and Peachey planned to go to Peshawar disguised as a priest and his servant, and then join a caravan bound for Kabul. They turned off at the difficult and dangerous Lataband Pass and set out northeast for Jalalabad, and beyond it Kafiristan.
* Dan mispronounces ‘mountainous’.
Précis
Danny and Peachey assure their host that they are quite sane and sober: indeed, they have a binding contract to touch neither liquor nor women, but to go to Kafiristan in northeast Afghanistan, and there use their drill-sergeant’s skills to win the confidence of local tribal leaders before they overthrow them, and create their own dynasty instead. (57 / 60 words)
