Tall tales of the Golden East: the fabulous fabrications of two 20th-century con artists

Have literary deceit and spiritual self-invention ever been this entertaining? The question arises on almost every page of this galloping exposé of two men who were exceedingly relaxed about not telling the truth throughout their professional lives. They would have called it ‘storytelling’. Those who questioned the reliability of their often outlandish claims were dismissed as academic nonentities.

One minute Ikbal’s journey across the Middle East was 15,000 miles, the next it was 25,000 miles

Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah was the great-grandson of Jan Fishan Khan, a 19th-century Arab nobleman who had supported the British in Afghanistan and been rewarded with an Indian title, palace and pension. Ikbal failed to finish his medical studies at Edinburgh, married a Scottish woman and decided to make his name by the pen. Despite being a son of colonial India who had never set foot in Afghanistan, he claimed to be an Afghan insider who could help the British navigate the final chapters of the Great Game in Central Asia.

In the winter of 1920-21, Ikbal wrote a series of alarmist accounts of the Russian penetration of Afghanistan for the British press. He reported on (non-existent) Bolshevik roads and railways, blithely unconcerned by the towering mountain passes they supposedly traversed. The British representative in Kabul confirmed that Ikbal had never been to Afghanistan – but he had been spotted several times in London. A photograph in the Field purporting to reveal a Bolshevik outpost turned out to be nothing of the sort. The relevant men were loyal Indian soldiers. The India Office, on the receiving end of what Nile Green calls an ‘epistolary assault’ from Ikbal requesting all manner of jobs, sinecures and zany schemes, reckoned he was ‘a bit of a liar’.