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And that is what it was: A large, if impressive, tome running
into almost 700 pages of print, the book apart from a brief
prologue, The view from the Khyber, and an impressive
epilogue, The Owl of Minerva, has been divided into
three, near-equal, parts. The first starting with William
Moorcrofi, the "horse-doctor", ploughs through the
sorry, if sordid, tale of the First Afghan War (1838-42) and
ends with, the "Bulgarian atrocities" and the Treaty
of San Stefano ( 1878) when a victorious Russia imposed its
peace on a rickety , badly worsted, Ottoman Empire.
The second part
begins with "Bloornsbury's War" the Second Afghan War
(1878-81) and ends with the epoch-making British and Russian
"finds" in the heart of Central Asia:
Aurel Stein's
amazing discovery of Dunhuang juxtaposed with the redoubtable
Pyotir Kozlov's KharaKhoto, the fabled "Black City" of
the Tanguts.
Part three
occupies itself largely with Tibet. And Curzon's determined
pitch to force it open. The result, Francis Younghusband's armed
expedition to holy Lhasa (1903-4), rated as the "most
pointless" of British India's imperial adventures, and the
Dalai Lama's flight from his land and his people. He was soon
caught, even as Tibet was, in the vortex of the October (1911)
revolution in China and its most destabilising aftermath.
With the Manchus
overthrown and a moribund republican regime in the saddle in
Nanking, the Lama was almost free to run his country's affairs,
especially after the British and the Russians concluded a hands
off truce (1907) bringing the Great Game to an eventful end.
Not that it
sounded the finale. For the "Tournament" dwells on the
exploits of the American twosome, Suydam Cutting and Arthur
Varnay who repaired to Lhasa (1935) and came into close contact
with the post-13th Dalai Lama regime. There is also the
fascinating tale of the Bavarian German explorer Dr Ernst
Schafer who, trained a zoologist at Gottingen, ended up (1939)
as an SS agent carrying an apso dog as a present from the
Tibetan regent to Adolf Hitler, "the King of Germany".
And the oft-repeated escapade in the early 1940s of the
Americans Brooke Dolan and Ilia Tolstoy who, part of the US
Strategic Command, had, for the first time, brought Tibet into
official contact with Washington.
An epilogue
carries the "Tournament" fast forward beyond both
Halford Mackinder with his "heartland" view of Eurasia
as the geographical pivot of history and Beijing's 1962
incursion into Indian territory when the "gullible and
weak" Nehru allegedly "succumbed" to the imperial
theses about geography and distant frontiers. As the "Owl
of Minerva" goes on the prowl there is more to its embrace
including the late Harry Hodson' s well-reasoned view that the
Great Game "really was a Game with scores but no
substantive prizes". Not that the last word has yet been
said. For principled assurances to the contrary notwithstanding,
Central Asia again bids fair to become the setting for the next
Great Game- between Russia, the USA and China as they compete
for access to the, vast oil reserves of the region. A husband
and wife team, Karl Meyer is a foreign correspondent of the
New York Times editorial board and currently editor of the World
Policy Journal. Shareen Brysac is an author and editor of
the Archaeology magazine. Between the two they have made
the book a rich, rewarding, fare. To say that it has a nice turn
of phrase and is racy is not saying much; the
"Tournament" is well researched and a treasure-trove
for any meaningful understanding of all that the Great Game was
about.
Two minor
irritants. One, easily understandable, an overblown view of US
involvement.
Thus WW Rockhill
the "Open Door Diplomat"- Suydam Cutting and Brooke
Dolan loom larger than life. Two, with footnotes relegated to
the end, the flow of the narrative goes unimpeded and yet there
is, for the inquisitive reader, an unending turning of pages up
and down. This though is churlish, petty nit-picking. For one
hates to detract from the merits of an outstanding work.
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