1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

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A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
INTRODUCTION
FRIENDS (one’s friends are ever indulgent) so constantly tell me how
interesting the y think my Afghan experiences, and ask me why I have
never turned any of m y piles of manuscript into a book, that I have
tried to do so again and again, but always without success; I have
found the task be yond me.
To explain ever ything would be to tell too much, to get down to the
dregs and stir up a sediment that is perhaps better left to settle. To half
explain would lead to misconstruction, and for this reason: so many of
my greatest difficulties in Kabul, and therefore the most interesting
incidents in my life there, arose from sources not Afghan in origin. An
autobiography of my sojourn in the capital of Afghanistan would
therefore necessarily entail many explanations that for ver y obvious
reasons it is better not to enter into. They are best forgotten.
To get over this difficult y I have written A Vizier’s Daughter, ever y
character in which is drawn from a model, and should, therefore, as far
as it goes, give an accurate description of one phase, at any rate, of
Afghan life. I lay no claim to originalit y, either as to plot or setting
except as regards the last two or three chapters, and even in them there
is more truth than meets the e ye. I write of what I saw and heard, and
of person that I knew as intimately as one can ever know a people so
far removed from us in thought and education. Gul begum told me
much, the Hakim a good deal, but far more is what actually passed
before my own eyes. I have, in fact, transposed some incidents, and
have drawn pictures of events which took place years before I went to
Kabul, from scenes that occurred while I was there.
As far as I have touched on Abdur Rahman himself, I have tried to
sketch him truly; but during a man’s lifetime it is almost impossible to
do so fully enough to make an exact picture.
I have been less cautious in dealing with his Chief Secretar y. Those
who have known him since he left Kabul will doubtless think I have
been unduly severe. I have certainly not flattered him. I have tried to
draw him as he was then, not as he is now after a period of repose,
surrounded with the luxury of the most refined and cultured intellects
in the world. I have tried to picture him first as the self-satisfied Court
favourite, flattered and sought after by every one; then as the
overworked official, intrigued against, bunted and accused of ever y
conceivable and inconceivable crime, b y enemies too unscrupulous and
too numerous not to be formidable. Let those who have never been in
such a country and in such circumstances be lenient. He is not always
lenient to himself.
On showing him the manuscript of this volume, which I would not have
published without his permissio n, his only comment was: “I think it is
very like what I was.” I do not exaggerate when I say he did, after a