(HOST) The Super Bowl is this Sunday, but commentator and Humanities Council Executive Director, Peter Gilbert, has been thinking about not the "big game," but "The Great Game," a contest that went on for well over a century – and the clock is still running.
(GILBERT) The Great Game is what British participants and historians called the nineteenth century geopolitical contest between the British Empire and the empire of Tsarist Russia to establish and defend their empires in Central Asia. The phrase was coined by Captain Arthur Connolly of the East India Company before he was beheaded in Bokhara for spying in 1842. It was Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim that popularized the phrase. The Russians called the long-standing military and diplomatic intrigue "the tournament of shadows."
In the nineteenth century, the British were concerned in this regard about two things: protecting their colony in India and Russian expansion generally. One imperialist power was not about to let another steal a march on them, literally – and so the region was rife with intrigue. In the early years, the Great Game centered on Afghanistan: If Afghanistan’s leaders were favorably disposed towards Britain – or even under its thumb – there’d be a buffer protecting India from Russia. Back then British India included what is now Pakistan, making it Afghanistan’s immediate neighbor to the east.
The Great Game featured not only large expeditionary military forces, such as those involved in the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars, which ended disastrously for the British. It also featured explorers who, alone or in small parties, trekked across mountain ranges and deserts filling in the blank spaces on maps. Many were men of great talent and intellect, not to mention physical courage – botanists, ethnographers, and brilliant linguists who learned countless languages. Of those who survived, many published scholarly books and lectured about what they’d seen and learned.
The Great Game also employed locals whom the British trained to be solitary explorers – spies, really – to travel into remote Himalayan regions where westerners could not go. After all, you can’t influence or invade a region if you don’t know where the mountain passes, forts, towns, and rivers are. These men counted modified Buddhist prayer beads to keep track of the number of steps they took, which gave them precise distances for the maps they drew. Prayer wheels concealed compasses and coded notes. The British referred to these intrepid travelers as pundits, from the Sanskrit word meaning a learned man.
The Great Game proper may have ended in the early twentieth century, but in many ways it continues in overtime, even today. You see it in Chairman Mao’s marching into Tibet and in the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And, of course, what was the initial focus of the Great Game in 1842 is still very much a focus of concern – Afghanistan and the rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where both Taliban forces and Al-Qaeda stir the pot amidst tribal peoples who, even today, look askance on outside authority.