Murder in the Hindu Kush: George Hayward and the Great Game

by Tim Hannigan

On a bright July morning in 1870 the British explorer George Hayward was brutally murdered high in the Hindu Kush. Who was he, what had brought him to this wild spot, and why was he killed? Told in full for the first time, this is the gripping tale of Hayward's journey from a Yorkshire childhood to a place at the forefront of the "Great Game" between the British Raj and the Russian Empire, and of how, driven by "an insane desire," he crossed the Western Himalayas, tangled with despotic chieftains, and ended up on the wrong side of both the Raj and the mighty Maharaja of Kashmir. It is also the tale of the conspiracies and controversies that surrounded his death, while the author's own travels in Hayward's footsteps bring the story up to date, and reveal how the echoes of the Great Game still reverberate across Central Asia in the 21st century.

Genres: Biography, History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 11, 2011

About the author

Tim Hannigan was born in Penzance in Cornwall in the far west of the United Kingdom. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a chef and an English teacher. He started his writing career as a travel journalist based in Indonesia. His first book, Murder in the Hindu Kush (The History Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize. His second book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (Monsoon Books, 2012), won the 2013 John Brooks Award. He also wrote A Brief History of Indonesia (Tuttle, 2015), and edited and wrote new chapters for Willard Hanna's classic narrative history of Bali, now republished as A Brief History of Bali (Tuttle, 2016). His more recent books include The Travel Writing Tribe (2021) and The Granite Kingdom (2023). He has worked on guidebooks to many destinations including Nepal, India, Myanmar, Bali and Cornwall.

Reviews

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hannigan's efforts researching this book—the sheer breadth of texts and sources he brings to bear—are astonishing. Often, even in authoritative and highly-regarded texts, there's a certain thinness (and, occasionally, an unacknowledged counterpoint in your own background knowledge) that unmistakably comes from an author lacking a little reading in just this or that particular area of their subject. Tamim Ansary passes on a mistaken understanding of how Sikhism came about, for instance; Dan Carlin spends two hours telling an apocryphal story about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand; Steven Pinker... yikes. Murder in the Hindu Kush does not have that problem. Hannigan draws on sources so diverse—and so deeply-read—it feels as though he must have read virtually everything the British Library had to offer that was even tangentially related to British activities in Central Asia.

Unfortunately, that astonishing research comes to very little because Hannigan remains relentlessly focused on writing a biography of George Hayward rather than exploring the significance of the Hayward episode in the wider history of the Western Himalayas. The threads are all there, clearly, in Hannigan's magisterial understanding of the mountains' jealous, feuding fiefdoms and myriad wandering agents, but he chooses not to pull them tight. By the end, Murder in the Hindu Kush feels like a love letter to George Hayward more than it does an effort to write a really worthwhile book. The narrow focus on one person amid a fantastically important and interesting context, combined with Hannigan's tendency toward writing precisely the nauseatingly flowery, self-important prose he castigates his nineteenth-century subjects for producing, are serious limits on the value of this text.

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is well researched but suffers from the authors tendency to use flowery & sometimes unjustified adjectives.While he ridicules almost all other explorers of the same era on grounds of their ego or cravings for fame ,he ignores Haywards selfcenterdness & apathy towards his co-travellers. The authors use of the term "lickspittle" about Frederick Drew is also harsh considering the amount of evidence the author has provided.Infact while Hayward was moved by the madoori massacre & the dard's stories, Drew was also moved by his experiences with the dogra's. Moreover Mir Wali's deed somewhat justifies Drew's opinion about the dards .
The book is quite readable & informative .I picked this one after reading the great game by Hopkirk.That book has a much larger scope & is a far better history book,but does not provide this much detail about the regions people & geography . This book is a good supplemental read if you are interested about the great game.

[Pravin Subramanian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hannigan's account of a British geographer who sought to map the unmapped corners of the Earth is exciting and unputdownable in all honesty.

The story of George Hayward is explained in lucid prose without any embellishments and it projects him as a human with very real human flaws, including some that weren't counted as flaws in his time. His devil may care reckless attitude toward his own safety was one, his carelessness about his porters was another.

This came to a head when he was outraged by the sight of a massacre in Gilgit. Stirring up a hornet's nest eventually led to his untimely death.

Hannigan could however be a little bit more respectful toward people he has written uncharitably. Namely Christopher McCandless and Col Alexander Gardner. They were once human and it was perfectly sufficient to give a journalist's practical reporting for their backgrounds instead of taking a dig at them.

Read it all the same :)

[Arjanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice read and I enjoyed the sometimes flowery language.

[LRKK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quirky, marvellous, fascinating book about, well, a quirky, marvellous, fascinating man. Well told and well-written, and well-worth the time.

[Shrey Pareek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abandoned it a third of the way in. The language is too flowery and makes it difficult to follow. I really wanted to like this. Alas!!!

[Mazhar Uddin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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