ONE MORNING, Siraj offered to show us Chitral fort. He introduced the idea, saying that it was the site of ‘an interesting bit of family history’, a phrase that so often prefaces an episode of unremitting tedium.
But in this case it led to a tale of multiple fratricide, the intercession of an imperial power, a siege, two epic marches, several battles, a series of betrayals and the enthronement of his grandfather at the age of 12.
Chev was particularly delighted at the thought of visiting the fort. He was reading about Siraj’s family ‘incident’, an episode in the 19th-century Great Game, when British and Russian officers vied for influence in these intractable mountains, the no-man’s-land which then separated their two empires.
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Hoiking a leg through a hatchway in the fort’s solid, metal-plated gate, Siraj ushered us into a courtyard of grand crumbling buildings, chinar trees, dilapidated arched colonnades and old Indian lotus-leaf plasterwork embellishments.
At its corners stood rustic, square stone towers and beyond its walls, a backdrop of mountains.
He then detailed the beginnings of the story. The death of his great-grandfather, Aman ul Mulk, in 1892, had unleashed a war of succession. One of his sons, Afzul, happened to be in town and he murdered some of his numerous half-brothers before he set out to kill the real heir, his elder brother, Nizam, who was hunting in the north. But on hearing of his brother’s approach, Nizam fled to neighbouring British-controlled Gilgit.
But before the British could help him secure his rightful inheritance, a third contender for Chitral’s throne threw his pakol into the ring: the late ruler’s brother, Sher, who returned from exile in Kabul and, having lured him into a trap, shot Afzal dead at the fort’s gates. On hearing of his brother’s death, Nizam set out for Chitral with British support and gathered such a following on the way that Sher fled back to Afghanistan.
From the courtyard, Siraj led us past moth-eaten and badly taxidermised heads of a snow leopard, an ibex and a markhor, into a baroquely gilded council hall.
Chev was now in transports of delight. This sort of historical intrigue had long pricked his imagination, but its attraction was compounded by an interest, perhaps natural to an elder brother, in the subject of fratricide.
The hall’s whitewashed walls were neatly blazoned with floral murals and not very skilled portraits of turbaned and bearded Chitrali rulers who eyed one another suspiciously across a dining table, trying not to betray, Chev and I fancied, a local weakness for the brotherly kind of murder.
‘You see, there was a race to bump off people around you,’ Siraj said catching our gazes. ‘Because they were trying to bump you off,’ he added, as if explaining the rules of a childhood game.
He continued the story: Nizam claimed the throne and held on to power for less than a year when his teenaged half-brother, Amir, killed him while they were on a hunting trip. Nizam had not killed this brother only because the British had asked him not to – fools!
Rightly fearing British retribution, Amir forged an alliance with the ruler of neighbouring Swat, Umra Khan, who started off with 3000 men for Chitral. A British Political Officer based in Gilgit, Major George Robertson, fearing his counterpart in Chitral was in danger and that the Russians might have taken advantage of instability in the crucially strategic state, set out with 400 troops for Chitral, where he removed Amir from the throne, replacing him with the late Aman ul Mulk’s second youngest son, the 12-year-old Shuja ul Mulk, Siraj’s grandfather.
But, then, perhaps not totally unexpectedly, Sher returned from Kabul, allied himself with the Swat ruler, Umra Khan, and joined the march on Chitral. Robertson was forced to take up a defensive position inside the fortress, and so began the siege on March 3, 1895.
Siraj now led us back into the courtyard and showed us a row of cannon dating back to that year, the charred part of a tower which saboteurs had set on fire, and the place where attacking tribesmen had dug a tunnel in which they had hoped to detonate explosives under the fort’s walls, a plan thwarted by a charge of Sikhs under British command. Before long, food, ammunition and morale had been running dangerously low, but unknown to those in the fort, help was on its way in the form of two British forces.
From the south, General Robert Low had set off with fifteen thousand men from Nowshera, defeating Pathan tribesmen in Swat before crossing the 10,000-foot Lowari Pass and entering Chitral.
More memorable still was the role of Colonel James Kelly and a force of 900 irregular mountain warriors from Hunza and Nagar and 400 Sikh Pioneers who were more used to road-building than fighting.
From Gilgit, in the north, they marched 200 miles across some of the world’s most forbidding terrain, carrying heavy cannons over the snow-blocked 12,000-foot Shandur Pass and fighting their way down through Chitral. They arrived at the fort first, where they found ‘walking skeletons’.
We returned to the council hall, where Siraj began the story’s dénouement. Umra Khan of Swat fled, with eleven mule loads of treasure from his palace, into Afghanistan, and Sher was eventually captured and sent into exile in India.
The British had impressed their will on this remote corner of mountain fastness, locking the gates of India against the Russians.
Siraj picked up a framed black-and-white photograph of bearded turbaned tribal leaders, at the centre of whom was seated a slight 12-year-old boy on a throne, his grandfather, smartly booted feet dangling above the ground.