I first visited the city of Kandahar on June 18, 1960, when I witnessed and recorded the destruction of part of the north wall of the city. It was then in the process of being mined for the making of new sun-dried bricks, not in the normal casual way country folk often mine ancient tepes and ruins for an earth which already contains the proper temper for new bricks, but as part of an official program to dismantle the walls which had stood, in states of greater or lesser repair, for over two hundred years (Fig. 1). When I returned a few years later, where the north wall had stood there were patches of carelessly tended civic vegetation, and behind this, new low-built government structures, one a museum. Close to where the Id Gah Gate had stood there was now a flimsy, gaudily tiled arch spanning a road which led through the space formerly occupied by the citadel and into the Shah Bazaar.
The north city wall of Kandahar in disrepair, June 1960
Photographer William Trousdale
It could hardly have been a decision of a local council to demolish the city walls. If it had been up to the Kandaharis, the walls would still be in place and the gates shut against any outside interference. For in spite of the fact that all of the kings of Afghanistan—both Sadozai and Mohammadzai, from the coeval founding of the kingdom and the city of Kandahar—were tribally based in Kandahar, only the founder of the Sadozai Durrani dynasty found it possible to rule from this fractious city rather than from Kabul. Even Ahmad Shah spent most of his time elsewhere on campaigns, enlarging the boundaries of the land under his control, and, when he was near death, he moved to Murghab, a more salubrious locale a short distance north of Kandahar, to spend his last days.
Most of the detailed information we possess concerning Kandahar in the nineteenth century is directly attributable to its two extended occupations by foreign armies, first by the British and Indian Army of the Indus, from the spring of 1839 till the early months of 1842, and again by the British and Indian Southern Afghanistan Field Force and Kandahar Field Force, from early 1879 until the spring of 1881. The information on the city and its inhabitants collected during these two occupations is far greater than supplementary observations made by individual travelers or official foreign missions at other times during the century. Descriptions contained in this book, as well as the maps, plans, drawings, and photographs, many published here for the first time, owe their existence primarily to various members of these occupying armies.
The immediate catalyst for the present work is a plan of Kandahar (Plan A) I first saw in the late summer of 1985 and was subsequently able to acquire. Though hardly a fine example of the cartographers’ art, it piqued my curiosity for several reasons. First, it is oriented toward the east rather than north as all British plans I have seen are, at least in their final presentation. Second, there were numerous notations on the plan, not merely the principal gates and bazaars, but other public areas and structures as well as many individual family compounds. Third, the various sectors of the city occupied by the several Pashtun subtribes, as well as non-Pashtun groups, were delineated. Plans identifying the neighborhoods of the subtribes and clans were, so far as I know, not published until the period of the Second Afghan War, 1878–80, and yet this anonymous plan is dated 1840, a date corresponding to the occupation of the city during the First Afghan War, 1839–42. Most tantalizing of all was the prospect that this plan was not the work of the Bengal or Bombay Engineers, but of a Muslim who undoubtedly was attached to the army of occupation. While a British surveyor, or a native surveyor working under British direction, might have labeled the most important defensive features of the city, and perhaps even the principal gates and bazaars, it seemed to me that the evident interest exhibited by the author of this plan in locating mosques, baths, the mint, residences of mullahs, and even the burial spots of holy personages within the city walls, reflected particular Muslim concerns.
The genesis of the present work was, then, in a desire on my part to place this plan of the “City of Kundahar 1840” in the context of what was known about the city in the nineteenth century.
Acknowledgments
My work has benefited from the interest and kindness of many people. I should like especially to express my gratitude to Major J. T. Hancock of the Royal Engineers Library, Institution of Royal Engineers, Chatham, for permission to publish drawings in the collection, and for decoding shelf marks of earlier librarians, leading to the discovery of the elusive D’Aguilar plan of the Kandahar Citadel which, in all other plans, exists only as a schematic maze of lines. I should equally like to thank Mr. Hugh Bett who, over the years, has brought to my attention many important documents relating to Afghanistan.
I am indebted to Dr. Jonathan Lee, Fellow of the South Asian Society, and Dr. Ibrahim Pourhadi, of the Library of Congress, for insightful observations on some of the notations on the 1840 plan; to Charles O. Hyman, formerly of the National Geographic Society, for a photograph of what is probably the last dome to cover the Charsu at the center of Kandahar before the area was enlarged into a great open circle; to the trustees of the British Library; the staff of the Public Records Office; the Royal Geographical Society (particularly Rachel Duncan, former director of the Photograph Library, who conducted much research on my behalf); and the National Army Museum (especially Clare Wright of the Department of Archives, Photographs, Film & Sound) for permission to publish manuscript plans and photographs in their collections. My gratitude also goes to the late Professor Bridget Allchin and to the curator of the American Geographical Society map collection housed, since the demise of that venerable institution, at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Library, for permission to publish materials under their care.
The Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland have kindly granted permission for me to publish extracts from the surviving volumes of Henry Creswicke Rawlinson’s manuscript diary and his financial accounts in their archives. I should like also to express my gratitude to the late Mr. Charles P. Motsch, long acquainted with Afghanistan and as deeply fond of the land and people as I, for the generous hospitality at his home in El Paso, Texas, where I read manuscripts in his collection, and for his permission to quote passages from these.
The librarian of Special Collections at the University of California, San Diego, the staffs of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Henry Huntington Library, San Marino, were helpful in placing a number of rare sources at my disposal.
Because so much material remains from the period of the British occupation of Kandahar (1879–81) during the Second Afghan War, I sought and received in most generous measure the aid of many scholars and specialists in sorting through it, and in identifying unattributed, or uncertainly attributed, documents and photographs. Clark Worswick, John Falconer of the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), and the late Theon C. Wilkinson, M.B.E., founder and long Hon. Secretary of the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, were especially helpful in my efforts to learn more about the photographer at Kandahar in 1881 who signed his plates “B. Simpson.” Omar Khan, himself engaged in producing a book and documentary film on the curious life of John Burke, another photographer of the war, provided me with references to additional photographers at Kandahar, and even lists of some of their photographs, which neither I, nor anyone known to me, has ever encountered in any collection. This tantalizingly confirmed for me that many important materials may remain still in the attics and libraries of families with long India connections. I am again grateful to Professor Jonathan Lee for putting me into contact with Professor Daniel Balland of the Univérsité de Paris–Sorbonne, who was able to confirm for me the dates of L. G. Griesbach’s (Survey of India) residence at Kandahar, including his participation at the Battle of Maiwand on July 27, 1880.
John Burns was among a group of correspondents who were the first to visit Kandahar under the auspices of the Kabul government following the Russian withdrawal in 1989, and I should like to thank him for sharing with me his view and impression of the destroyed city at that time.
I am grateful to Leslie Z. Tobin of Columbia Pictures Television, Burbank, California, for materials relative to the use of the Soviet war in Afghanistan as a subject for adventure films, and to J. H. Carruthers, recently inducted into the United States Ski Hall of Fame, for documents relevant to the founding and history of the Kandahar Ski Club and Kandahar Cup. The drawings illustrating the pattern of the Kandahar streets as taken from the various plans and aerial photographs published here were all executed by Ms. Julie Perlmuter, and I thank her for the care she took in deciphering the original materials from which these were extracted.
I should like to express my gratitude to the late Professor Dr. Klaus Fischer, formerly at the University of Bonn, for introducing me, more than fifty years ago when I was first in Afghanistan as a Ford Foundation Fellow, to the archaeological potential of the country and for his unfailing generosity during the decades that followed; to Theon and Rosemarie Wilkinson for their friendship, hospitality, assistance in locating documents, and advice on so many matters over many years.
I also appreciate the assistance of Mitchell Allen and Cyndi Maurer for their work on preparing the final manuscript for publication. Several other scholars have suggested additional publications that I can only reference here as I am no longer actively working in the field. My thanks go to Warwick Ball, Jonathan Lee, John Falconer, Alka Patel, and two anonymous reviewers for the publisher for their suggestions.
I would be remiss if I failed to take special note of my good fortune throughout a long marriage to my late wife, Marion—for the sacrifices she endured on my account, when she would have preferred to be pursuing her own academic studies, in tolerating the antisocial behavior which inevitably possessed me during periods of intensive writing, and during which times I habitually failed to perform my share of family responsibilities.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. and Mrs. Fahim Qubain of Buena Vista, Virginia, for providing me with the understanding and precious solitude I needed in writing; to Marty, Joan, Sissy, Steve, and Phyllis at the Lexington, Virginia, HoJo’s for furnishing meals at eccentric hours; to the VMI cadets who, on fine autumn afternoons, manifested a disciplined pageantry on their parade ground that inspired and complemented the mental effort I needed to expend; and to Abdul Sami, who died so young, for the first ten thousand miles.
Note: Except in the final chapter, and where specifically otherwise noted, references to present-day Kandahar are to the city as it was in 1979, before the Soviet occupation. The same applies to Kabul and other localities cited in the text.
Editors’ Note: Trousdale wrote most of this manuscript in the late 1980s. When we began to assemble it for publication at his request almost three decades later, age and health prevented him from completing the final chapter or from updating his existing text based upon more recent research. We have added to the notes and bibliography a few essential references that were pointed out to us by others, but otherwise have left his content untouched as neither of us are specialists in this area. Even unfinished, Trousdale’s work is a major feat of scholarship that is unlikely to be repeated. We hope some other younger scholar will pick up the mantle and fill in the pieces that Trousdale would have added himself when he was an active scholar. It has been our pleasure to help him bring this book to publication. MA & CM