For all the post-colonial angst Brown folks have about the period of English Occupation, you do have to admit that the times created some fascinating history. Between the Thugees, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Gurkhas, and the Battle of Sargarhi, Victorian India created tales that rivalled practically any classical saga in adventure & intrigue.

Via the blogosphere, I came across the absolutely riveting story of the American who may have been the real life inspiration for Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King — the History News Network reports on the saga of Josiah Harlan–

Josiah Harlan served as the basis of Rudyard KiplingÂ’s short story, “The Man Who Would Be King,” written in 1888 while Kipling was a journalist for the Allahabad Pioneer newspaper. The real-life Josiah Harlan was born in 1799 into a Quaker family from Pennsylvania. As an adolescent, Harland read works in botany and medicine, but above all Greek and Roman history, having taught himself Latin and Greek. He became inordinately interested in the life and adventures of Alexander the Great, after whom he would no doubt later fashion his own adventures. …In 1822 Harlan sailed for Calcutta on a merchant ship. …[In 1826] Josiah succeeded in gaining a meeting with al-Moolk [the deposed king of Afghanistan residing in Punjab], during which he offered to travel to Kabul and link up with Shah ShujahÂ’s allies in an effort to organize a rebellion against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had stolen his crown. …Harlan left Ludhiana with a rag-tag army comprised of mercenaries and headed for Kabul. Along the way, he passed himself off as a religious mystic, a wealthy adventurer, and as a doctor, even treating the locals he encountered with a variety of ills. In 1828 Harlan reached Kabul and sent a message to Dost Mohammed Khan requesting a meeting, as news of a “feringhee” or foreigner having entered Kabul circulated throughout the city. Harlan wrote in his memoir that he found Dost Mohammed to be as intelligent and sophisticated as any Western ruler.

But how did he ascend the NW Indian political ladder? A drunk Punjabi raj & an interim step as the Governor of Gujrat had something to do with it. The IHT continues the story –

Bored, and hearing that Ranjit Singh, maharajah of the Punjab, was recruiting European generals, he rode off to Lahore, where he found a debauched one-eyed alcoholic who gave parties at which he “indulged without remorse or shame in sensualities of the most revolting description.” Yet Harlan set aside his Quaker sensibilities after being offered the governorship of Gujrat. Later, when Joseph Wolff, an itinerant English missionary, sought a meeting with the Gujrat ruler, “to his great surprise he heard someone singing ‘Yankee Doodle.’ Â… It was His Excellency the Governor himself. He was a fine, tall gentleman Â… with an Indian hookah in his mouth.” Harlan’s 15 years in the region were a febrile period of plots, treachery and edgy negotiations with murderous despots; he was involved in them all.

Governor of Gujrat, that’s understandable, I suppose. But Royalty? The Times of London carries some of the details of Harlan’s princely claim –

In 1842, Harlan boasted to a newspaper reporter that he had once been the prince of Ghor, a realm high in the Hindu Kush, under a secret treaty with its ruler. “He transferred his principality to me in feudal service, binding himself and his tribe to pay tribute for ever,” Harlan was quoted as saying. “The absolute and complete possession of his government was legally conveyed according to official form, by a treaty which I have still preserved.” This contract was assumed to be lost. Some claimed it had never existed. But there, yellow with age at the bottom of the box, was a document, written in Persian and stamped with an intricately beautiful oval seal: a treaty, 170 years old, forged between an Afghan prince and the man who would be king. Like Alexander of Macedon, who had led his army on the same mountain path 22 centuries earlier, His Highness Hallan Sahib, Prince of Ghor, was called great by his followers and was even said to have magical powers. He never travelled without his books, and when the guard had been posted for the night and the mastiffs howled to ward off the wolf packs in the ravines, he retired to his tent and wrote, tumbling torrents of words in a language none but he could read. For His Highness had started his life in another country by another name. The man who was to inspire Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King was, in fact, Josiah Harlan of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan.

Read more about it – an entire book about Josiah Harland has recently been published to rave reviews.

And lo, the plot always thickens. Based on this book, the BBC did some investigation and turned up the a modern day candidate for the title of Prince of Ghor – a Hollywood actor –

Scott Reiniger, …is the great, great, great grandson of Josiah Harlan, the first American to set foot in Afghanistan. As a result of a treaty Harlan signed, his heirs are granted the title Prince of Ghor in perpetuity. …”The treaty remains in effect,” Macintyre explained. “Although it would be a brave man who attempted to reassert his claim to be the Prince of Ghor at this stage.”