Along the Hindu Kush: Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier

As a new presidential election approaches, many Americans, when they are not thinking about gasoline prices and unemployment statistics, wonder how the national interests are served by U.S. soldiers and pilots battling in a remote corner of the world, Afghanistan.

Americans are aware of the less than ideal alliance with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and the repeated disputes, negotiations, and scandals that have rocked this alliance. Many are aware of how the fighting in Afghanistan has spread over the Hindu Kush— the daunting mountain barrier that divides Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent—into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden sought refuge in Pakistan. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban operatives have found safe havens in Pakistan's rugged borderlands. Political events in Pakistan since 2008 have thus excited reporters and baffled the American electorate. Pervez Musharraf, leading general and ex-president, was compelled to resign and flee from prosecution on grounds of complicity in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and his suspension of constitutional rule. An exile in London, he plans a political comeback. Meanwhile, the current prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, has had his hands full with his own crises and clashes with his military that have arisen ultimately from the fighting in Afghanistan.

Most Americans are aware that the imbroglio in Afghanistan and Pakistan has wider repercussions for Iran, the Republic of India, and the far more remote Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Yet most Americans are also products of today's ahistorical educational system and have no historical reference for comprehending these events, peoples, and lands. Those few remaining of the generation that won the Second World War have such a sense of history. Those few also witnessed the partition of British India, along with its religious and ethnic violence and then fierce fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Jammu. Indeed, the British imperial legacy in India has dictated much of what goes on today in these newly created nation-states along both sides of the Hindu Kush. The imperial legacy of British India is fundamental for understanding what we face today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Central Asia.

Two men are customarily hailed as the founders of the British Empire in India: Sir Robert Clive (1725-1774) and Warren Hastings (1732-1818). They turned the East India Company from a trade monopoly into the paramount military power in the subcontinent with a fiscal and military base in Bengal.

From Alfred Comyn Lyall, Warren Hastings (London, 1889).

To Lord Macaulay, Whig politician, secretary at war (1839-1841), and historian, Robert Clive was a brave and daring conqueror comparable to Julius Caesar, the obvious standard for all proper Englishmen who learned their Caesar and Latin together in public school. Yet, given his dissolute recreation at Madras between campaigns and his appetite for prize money, Clive did not fit the proper Victorian model. Indian nationalists despise Clive because he so adeptly outmaneuvered Indian princes in the duplicitous diplomacy of the era. Clive was also extraordinarily lucky. No commander in the 18th century was missed by more musket balls and shrapnel. His victory at Plassey on June 23, 1757, was both audacious and decisive. It won for the East India Company, commonly dubbed the Honorable Company, control over Bengal and the right to collect taxes from the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal Empire under the Treaty of Allahabad.¹

If Robert Clive proved the victor, Warren Hastings, the first governor-general at Calcutta (1773-1785), was the organizer of the empire in India, which came to be called the Raj after the reforms instituted in the wake of the Great Sepoy Mutiny in 1857-1858. Warren Hastings, however, is a far more complex a figure than Clive, and ultimately far more important; for he created India as we understand it today. Hastings started working for the Honorable Company as a clerk when he was 18 and rose quickly, sitting on the councils of both Calcutta and Madras. He was selected to govern British India, then divided into...