The Widow’s Husband

In 1839, the British marched into Afghanistan, overthrew its king, and occupied Kabul. Three years later, the British community tried to flee Afghanistan over the Hindu Kush mountains, but one man made it. The Widow’s Husband is a novel set against the backdrop of this First Anglo-Afghan War.     

Other novels have been set against this historical background, but they told the story from the British side. The Widow’s Husband is the first to tell it from the Afghan side. The protagonists are from the tiny village of Char Bagh. There is Ibrahim, the spiritually tormented headman, the Malang, a mysterious mystic, and the headman’s charismatic sister-in-law, the widow Khadija.       

The novel moves from the secluded world of Afghan peasant women—a world never before portrayed in commercial fiction—to the lush fortresses of Afghan rebel lords, the labyrinth of Kabul’s Grand Bazaar, and those British compounds where, almost to the end, the chandeliers continued to burn and the memsahibs continued to host amateur theatricals as the insurgency kept mounting outside the walls unnoticed.

What is a Malang?   

The malang of Char Bagh is a pivotal figure in The Widow’s Husband. What is a malang? Muslims in and around Afghanistan believe that once in a great while, God plucks some simple soul out of the grooves of everyday life and transforms him into a living embodiment of devotion. When this happens, woe to the man’s wife and children, his friends and familiars, for a malang loses all interest in the comforts and entanglements of clan and tribe. If he was a farmer, his crops go untended. If he was a merchant, he leaves his store, never caring what thieves might plunder the merchandise. If in a crowded bazaar you see a ragged, even naked, man with disheveled thickets of unkempt hair muttering incoherently to himself, you can be pretty sure you are looking at a malang. If you feel insecure about your standing with God Almighty, this is your chance to make up ground. You can touch the malang; you can seek his blessing; you can get an amulet from him. A malang will never go hungry so long as there are slackards in the world who need to make up for their spiritual shortcomings with redemptive charity. A malang is both like and unlike those revered Islamic mystics known as Sufi sheikhs. As the modern-day Sufi Abdul Hayy puts it: both are intoxicated by God, but the Sufi sheikh is someone who can hold his liquor.       

The History   

In the 1830s, the British were consolidating their empire in India. Russia, meanwhile, was expanding south. Afghanistan lay between these two forces like a nut in a nutcracker. The British intervention began after Russian envoy appeared at the Afghan court, seeking trade agreements. The British ordered the king of Afghanistan to expel him and receive no further emissaries from the Czar. When king Dost Mohammed Khan balked at taking such orders, the British decided on regime change. They found Afghanistan easy to conquer—it took mere weeks. “The Dost,” as the British called him, fled north. A compliant new king, Shah Shuja, took the throne. The “forward policy” as the British called it, seemed successful. But when the British puppet lost control of his country, the British found themselves facing a mish-mash of tribal armies and no clear enemy to fight, much less any single leader with whom to negotiate.       

Historical Figures   

The central characters in The Widow’s Husband are fictional but some real historical figures appear in these pages.       

Alexander Burnes was the British spy chief in Kabul. As a young man, Burnes traveled through central Asia and wrote a book about it. He charged with rooting out conspiracies and foiling Russian agents in the country. He spoke local languages, affected Afghan dress, and considered himself quite an Afghan expert. On November 1, 1841, he assured the governor of India that Afghanistan was entirely pacified. “All is quiet from Dar to Bathsheba,” he wrote. Three days later, a mob dragged him out of his house and killed him.     

William Hay Macnaghten headed up the mission in Kabul as Her Majesty’s envoy. He was to install the British puppet and consolidate his rule. Once the job was done he would be recalled. Burnes expected to succeed him and may have minimized the insurgency in order to hasten Macnaghten’s departure. After Burnes was assassinated, Macnaghten asked the Afghan chiefs to meet him and negotiate a gradual, orderly British withdrawal. A battle broke out at the meeting, and the chiefs killed and indeed beheaded Macnaghten.       

Shah Shuja was one of many, many grandsons of the Afghan empire-builder Ahmad Shah Durrani, usually regarded as the founder of Afghanistan. In 1801, Shah Shuja attacked and blinded his own brother in order to seize the throne. He ruled until 1809 when he himself was toppled (by another brother) and fled to India. There where he lived on a British pension until 1839, when the British brought him back to Kabul and put him on the throne again. He was assassinated in 1842, almost immediately after the British fled.       

Wazir Akbar Khan

Wazir Akbar Khan , son of the ousted king, Dost Mohammed Khan. As the insurgency against Shah Shuja and his British sponsors mounted, young Wazir Akbar Khan emerged as a dashing hero among the Afghans. He led the attacks against the British in Kabul, but he was never the leader of a united Afghan force. After the British escaped the city, Akbar died in mysterious circumstances. His father may have had him poisoned, fearing his ambitions and his popularity.