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Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

In the light of history, I think the Game really was a game, with scores but no substantial prizes.

H. V. Hodson, editor (1950-61) of the London Sunday Times

This book is a recent addition to a short list of books that survey the history of the Great Game. The Game pitted Russia against Britain (especially the Indian Raj) for the control of Central Asia including areas now part of China such as Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang) and Tibet. The Game started in the late 1700s after the British secured a foothold in India and when Russia expanded eastwards and finally concluded when the British Empire disintegrated and when Russia's empire collapsed from internal causes for the second time in the same century.

Comparisions of this book with the many works of Peter Hopkirk on this topic are inevitable. This book is both greater and smaller in the number of topics covered than the several books published by Peter Hopkirk on this period of history (like "The Great Game", "Trespassers on the roof of the world", "Like Hidden Fire" and "Setting the East Ablaze"). Some additional topics to be found here are:

• The strange case of Duleep Singh, Victoria's favorite Maharaja: a ruler without any subjects. He spent his life in Britain after the British annexed the Sikh kingdom founded by his father, Ranjit Singh.
• The stories of people like Madam Blavatsky and Nicolas Roerich who exerted a strong mystical influence on people who determined the foreign policy of many Western nations including Britain, Germany and America.
• The story of the American `Panda hunters', Suydam Cutting, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt.
• The 1943 OSS mission to Tibet lead by Major Ilia Tolstoy (the grandson of the famous Russian author) and Captain Brooke Nolan. They formed Lhasa's first offical contact with Washinton.
• The secret Nazi mission to Tibet under the direction of Himmler's Ahnenerbe, the SS's `Ancestral Heritage' office.
• The American camp in 1961 located in the Colorado Rockies set up to train eastern Tibetan Khampa warriors to fight a guerrilla war against the Chinese Communists. The Khampas were routed by the Chinese and as is common in such cases were soon abandoned by the Americans.
• The Indian attempt under Prime Minister Nehru to annex the Aksai Chin glacier as an attempt at a `forward policy' which lead to a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962.
• The last chapter is full of subsequent modern repurcussions of the Great Game as it was played out before the Second World War with a parade of interesting characters who all fancied themselves still playing the Game in the post-colonial era.

This is, of course, far from being an exhaustive list of the many historical facts related to the control of Central Asia which are covered in this book. The most important point is that while other books perceive the events mostly as being a power struggle between the British and the Russian empires, this book includes other global players of the Game including Germany, America and Indians (distinct from the Indians who served under the Raj).

One major attraction for Great Game enthusiasts is also the citation of a fairly large number of recently published facts about the Great Game cited in this book. Some published sources are as recent as 1999 (published the same year this book was).

The other major strength of this book is the detail of the research into the historical fact and a more in-depth analysis of the events than what has been previously attempted.

Sometimes the details can change your entire opinion: after reading so much about the daring exploits of Colonel Younghusband in Peter Hopkirk's book "The Great Game", I was quite disappointed to read his `Kit List' reproduced in this book uncovered by his biographer Patrick French. His kit included sixty-seven shirts as well as nineteen coats (a full dress coat, a morning coat, an Assam silk coat, two jaeger coats, a Chesterfield coat, a poshteen long coat, a Chinese fur coat, etc.) plus a shikar hat, a khaki helmet, a white panama, a thick solar topi, and the imperial cocked hat. This sartorial spendor along with tents, a bath, beds, rifles, swords, were crammed into twenty-nine containers and hauled by locally employed porters (most probably Indian) through `mountain passes, through forests and icy rivers, over dry plains where your eyeballs could freeze in the sockets'.

Other differences with Hopkirk's book are also telling. While the story of Stoddart and Connolly and the infamous Pit of Bokhara forms the centerpiece of Hopkirk's book, their story gets a small mention and more surprisingly in this book the motivations and thoughts behind the actions of the Emir of Bokhara get a larger analysis where others like Hopkirk usually explain the Emir's actions as those consistent with the stereotypical corrupt, evil and parochial Oriental potentate. This far more reasoned telling of this story while not as romantic is far more interesting.

%T Tournament of Shadows
%T :the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia
%A Karl E. Meyer
%A Shareen Blair Brysac
%I Washington D.C.: Counterpoint
%D 1999
%G ISBN: 1582430284 (hc)
%P 646
%K history

Date written: 2000/08/18

Posted by anoop at February 1, 2005 02:15 PM