Josiah the Great: The True Story of The Man Who Would Be King. Ben Macintyre

pitched to form a large, covered reception area, the floor spread with the finest hessian carpet. At one end of the enclosure, on an elevated platform, Harlan placed his armchair, where he would receive the prince in seated grandeur. Amirullah, toting the mace, formed a reception committee alongside Gul Khan in the full regalia of a native officer, while the guard of sepoys were drawn up before the tent door to greet the prince.

      At the appointed hour, Qutb’s son swept into the encampment mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and surrounded by a small army of retainers armed with swords, shields and matchlocks. Gul Khan held the prince’s bridle as the young man dismounted, and then ushered him into the tent. Harlan was immediately struck by the ‘grace and dignity’ of the handsome, olive-skinned youth who now bowed before him, clad in a shimmering white robe embroidered with gold, a huge shield in one hand and a long sword tucked into his waistband. Long dark curls tumbled down to his shoulders from beneath a striped silk turban decorated with golden thread, while his slippers were similarly spangled in gold and silver. Even more remarkable than his exquisite outfit, however, was his age: the prince of Mamdot, calculated the astonished Harlan, could not have been more than seven years old.

      ‘His manner and address were no different from a man of mature condition and polite education,’ Harlan observed. This dignified, heavily-armed child approached with a peace offering: ‘a beautiful green bow of Lahore and a green velvet gold embroidered quiver’. After a lavish exchange of compliments the boy-prince presented a letter, complaining of the iniquities of Sikh rule, which he asked Harlan to forward to the British lords of India. Harlan, of course, had no formal connection with the British, and was anyway heading in the other direction. Tactfully, he advised the young man ‘that his father should represent his case in person to the Company’s resident at Delhi’.

      The following morning, accompanied by a small contingent from Qutb’s tribe to guarantee safe passage through the bandit-infested region, Harlan crossed the frontier into Bahawalpur, the land of the formidable Nawab Bahawal Khan. Founded and named after Bahawal Khan Abbasi I in 1748, the princely state of Bahawalpur had won a large measure of independence during the civil war that dissolved the Afghan empire, but it now faced simultaneous threats from the expansionist Sikhs to the north and the looming British in the east. As Harlan wrote, ‘the present incumbent stood in an unenviable posture, with the prospect “of being ground between two stones” as the Persian proverb goes’. Like many native princes, Bahawal Khan was tempted to throw in his lot with the British. But as Captain Wade had warned Harlan, the nawab remained exceedingly nervous, and might not take kindly to having a force under an unknown flag marching unannounced through his territory.

      Harlan, however, was breezily confident. ‘The friendly relations existing between that prince and the British government precluded the possibility of hostilities against a Christian,’ he wrote, noting that Elphinstone had been graciously received by Bahawal Khan’s father. If the nawab could be persuaded to believe Harlan was a British official, he was probably safe. Moreover, he wanted to make contact with Bahawal Khan, for it was likely that Shah Shujah would have to cross Bahawalpur with a far larger army in the event of an invasion.

      Harlan’s troop had penetrated some ten miles into the nawab’s territories, when a body of armed men, mounted on camels and horses, suddenly bore down on them. The little army immediately prepared for battle: the sepoys took up positions among the baggage animals, with muskets levelled, while Harlan and the other mounted men rode a few yards ahead, ‘threatening them by the evolutions of our firearms with a reception at once repulsive and determined’. The demonstration had the desired effect. ‘They rode down upon us in a swarm, but our display made them draw up [and] they spread out upon the plain, apparently intending to surround our party.’ Harlan ordered Gul Khan to shout out that unless they halted where they were, the men would open fire.

      Retreating just beyond rifle range, the riders now stared at the intruders with what seemed to Harlan more like curiosity than hostility. They were a fearsome-looking group. ‘Their filthy appearance and barbarous visages peering out from beneath long black and greasy locks of matted hair seemed to forbid the conclusion that they could be men entertained in the military service of a chief.’ This, however, is precisely what they proved to be. A series of shouted exchanges between Gul Khan and the leader of the other troop established that these were scouts of Bahawal Khan’s army who had heard of the approach of ‘an army of feringees accompanied by Shah Shujah’ and had come to reconnoitre.

      While the local warriors watched from a distance, Harlan ordered the advance, collecting the sepoys around his horse with bayonets fixed. Still looking distinctly unfriendly, the hairy horsemen and camel-riders fell in some distance behind. The strange procession had gone less than a mile when a smartly dressed individual, flanked by two horsemen, rode up to Harlan and presented himself as ‘the attaché of Nadir Shah, commander of the Nawab’s forces’. With a low bow the envoy welcomed Harlan in the name of Bahawal Khan, and invited him to pitch camp at a village a little way ahead, where he promised that supplies of every kind could be found. In spite of the man’s polite manner, Harlan was deeply suspicious. The line moved off once more, with Bahawal Khan’s man leading the way, and an hour later they pitched camp outside a small, apparently deserted village.

      As he had feared, Harlan was now effectively a prisoner. ‘Our camp was quickly surrounded by numerous irregular infantry of the Rohillah and Beloochee races, soldiers in the service of Nawab Bhawal Khan.’ These had been instructed to prevent the advance of the newcomers until orders arrived from Bahawal Khan himself. Harlan was furious. ‘I entertained a feeling of infinite contempt as a military force for the miserable guards surrounding us,’ he wrote. Summoning Gul Khan to his tent, he told his lieutenant that they would march the following day, and if the nawab’s troops tried to stop them, they would fight their way out. The Rohillah accepted this order with visible, and entirely justified apprehension. The nawab’s army might look a fright, but they were numerous, heavily armed and, if provoked, likely to prove murderous. But Harlan was not to be dissuaded. Not for the last time, he wondered quite how valiant his warlike commander would prove in a fight.

      At sunrise the next morning, the bugle sounded, the camels were loaded and the men were preparing to march when Gul Khan, who had spent the previous hour ‘in earnest conversation’ with the leader of the native troops, approached Harlan, ashen-faced, and warned that the nawab’s men were ‘determined to prevent our baggage from leaving without orders from their chief’. The surrounding troops began to close in. Harlan’s solution to the impasse was simple and dramatic. ‘I called the captain of Bhawal Khan’s men into my presence and immediately placed him under a guard of fixed bayonets, holding him as a hostage with the threat of instant death in case of any turbulent movement on the part of his troops.’

      Feeling exceedingly pleased with himself, Harlan now marched off with his new hostage in chains alongside him, the troops in fine regimental order, and a mob of Bahawal Khan’s soldiers trailing angrily behind. They had not marched two miles before, as Harlan put it, ‘the consequences of my headstrong efforts began to show themselves’. On the eastern horizon, he saw ‘a vast cloud of dust rising in the desert’. Minutes later, a troop of tribesmen mounted on camels appeared just out of range, and then vanished. They were followed by horsemen, galloping in circles, their cries carrying across the flat land, impossible to count due to the clouds of dust raised by their mounts. Through the gritty haze Harlan glimpsed footsoldiers stretched out across the desert, and finally, in the distance, ‘a train of heavy artillery drawn by oxen slowly lumbered upon carriages lazily creeping over the plain’. It was now that Gul Khan belatedly passed on a rather crucial piece of information: the man Harlan had taken hostage was none other than the brother of Nadir Shah, military commander of Bahawalpur, who had now mobilised the full force of Nawab Bahawal Khan’s army to get him back.

      As Harlan was wondering what to do next, a horseman appeared through the dust and respectfully invited the visitor to pitch camp at the next village where his master, Nadir Shah, ‘desired the honour of an interview’. Harlan reluctantly complied. ‘We found ourselves in the same situation as we were at sunrise,’ he remarked. The only difference being that they were now surrounded by an entire army, ‘encamped a short distance from us, out of view, secluded within the vast jungle of high reed grass which grew in tufts tall enough