A H O U S E O N A H I L L

the Dogra dynasty, which would hold power for a century and a year. The origin
of Jammu and Kashmir, as this new kingdom was known, was thus organically
linked with the arrival and growth of British imperial rule in India.
Imperial Britain had good reason to give birth to this new state. Among
Britain s concerns in South Asia was the prospect of southward Russian expansion,
which it was feared would one day lead to the forces of the Czar pushing
their way through to the waters of the Indian Ocean. Any such thrust would have
had to come through Central Asia, and then Afghanistan or Tibet, regions little
known to the East India Company well into the second half of the nineteenth
century. Perched at the junction of these strategic regions, Jammu and Kashmir
was of critical military importance. By the time of his death at Bukhara in 1825
,
the veterinary surgeon William Moorcroft had surveyed large swathes of the
western Himalayas and central Asia. Although his expeditions had no official
sanction, they generated great amounts of material of military-intelligence valu
e
for the East India Company, not the least within which was an exhaustive descrip
tion
of Kashmir s famed shawl industry. Moorcroft relied not only on associates
from the Indian plains for information and aid, but also, notably, on the great
commercial networks of traders in Jammu and Kashmir, which stretched as far
west as China and what is now Myanmar.15
Moorcroft s discovery of two European-bred and European-trained dogs near
the Kailash summit in Tibet led him to believe that Russian agents had passed
that way in search of routes into India.16 While there is little reason to belie
ve
that this speculation was correct, the fact is that Russian operatives were inde
ed
headed in that direction. In 1819, the Russian military officer Nicolai Muraviev
was dispatched on a mission to the kingdom of Khiva, deep in central Asia,
to propose a commercial and strategic relationship with Moscow. Such efforts
accelerated as the century progressed. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Britis
h
had set up an intelligence service known as the Pundits to carry out covert
military cartography in Tibet, Afghanistan and central Asia. Trained to march
in precise steps, and thus taking measurements that could then be turned into
functional maps, the Pundits often travelled disguised as mendicants, using ritu
al
beads to record distances and a log-book concealed inside the copper tube of a
prayer wheel.17 Indian munshis, or secretaries, also played a key role in Britis
h
expeditions into the inner Himalayas. One of the most famous of these, Mohan
Lal, came from a Kashmiri family with a long tradition of service to the British
crown.18
To some in both Russia and Britain, these covert activities were precursors
to an inevitable full-scale war of imperial domination between the two great
rivals. The Soviet revolution ensured that this war never took place, but anothe
r
military enterprise was among the proximate causes of the creation of Kashmir.
Between 1839 and 1842, the East India Company dispatched an expeditionary
force into Afghanistan, in an ill-advised effort to strengthen their control ove
r this
strategically crucial area. The first Anglo-Afghan war ended in the decimation o
f
almost 40,000 East India Company troops, because of both logistical problems
10