William Dalrymple

Ripping yarns

Once dismissed as an exotic fraud, Alexander Gardner was indeed the dare-devil Himalayan explorer he claimed to be

In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just the beauties of the valley and the cool, pellucid waters of the Dal Lake which took their breath away. Living there was a legendary relic of an earlier age, who quickly became an object of pilgrimage for the curious sahibs puffing away at their cheroots on the sundecks of the houseboats.

Alexander Gardner was, in the words of his latest biographer, John Keay, ‘a beturbaned colonel of uncertain nationality with a chequered past and a hole in the throat’. This throat wound was a dramatic souvenir of his days as the last of the western freelancers and renegades who had fought for the Indian princes in the days before the Raj seized south Asia, and regulated colonialism replaced the anarchy of the disintegrating Mughal empire.


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Gardner certainly looked the part. One observer described him as sporting a ‘fine white beard’ and wearing a ‘turban, a wonderful Byronic shirt and brown dressing gown with brass buttons and a great red sash’. More usually, however, his sartorial choices paid homage to his Scottish ancestry, though he claimed also to have Spanish and even Aztec blood. One visitor commented on his ‘most peculiar and striking appearance…’ clothed from head to foot in the 79th tartan, but fashioned by a native tailor in a garment of his own invention.

Even his pagri [turban] was of tartan, and it was adorned with the egret’s plume, only allowed to persons of high rank. He lived entirely in the native fashion, was said to be wealthy, and the owner of many villages.

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