2013 Reviews

How to do Empire Right?

Ahmed Asif, Manan

Now, in the near-aftermath of the fourth Anglo-Afghan War, William Dalrymple
takes the frame of Last Remnants of an Army and the intrigue of the Great Game
and fills in all that Butler had elided and Kipling implied. Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (1839-42) is the 3-D, IMAX,48-frames-per-second Hollywood version—featuring Kabul, Jalalabad, Qandahar, Peshawar,
Lahore, Ludhiana, London and Moscow. Brydon is joined by a wide cast of characters, native and colonial, elite and subaltern, male and female.