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.
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