In a random daily-film selection, I came across John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King, 1975: Sean Connery and Michael Caine as two drifters with army backgrounds who leave British India for the passes of the Hindu Kush and crown themselves on the throne of a wild country. I’d seen the film long ago, but this time I went digging into the plot details—and stumbled on a line I’d passed over before: the story has a very real prototype, an American named Josiah Harlan, who received in Afghanistan the hereditary title of “Prince of Ghor”—in perpetuity, for himself and his descendants.
Kipling’s novella came out in 1888; Harlan died in 1871 in San Francisco. Which means the literary kings of Kafiristan appeared seventeen years after the real “king” in the mountains had already done his stint. And the deeper I dug, the more interesting the question became: where does invention end in this construction, and the record of reality begin? The title is real, complete with the phrase “in perpetuity.” The country conquered by impostors in the novella existed on maps—and was erased from them during Kipling’s lifetime. And a living descendant of the “prince” still appears in the credits of Hollywood horror films.
What follows are three stories braided into one slim 1888 booklet: an adventurer with a lifetime contract for a throne, a doctor-spy who wrote the final eyewitness account of the land of the “infidels,” and Hollywood, which stitched its own volume into the case.
It was 1888, and Rudyard Kipling was twenty-two. The novella appeared as Volume V of the Indian Railway Library series—cheap books from Wheelers of Allahabad, the sort of thing Europeans in India could read in an evening. A pleasant backstage detail from biographer Charles Carrington: the names of the main characters—Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan—were chosen by Mrs. Hill, the publisher’s wife.
The plot in a nutshell. Two men appear at the Lahore office of an unnamed newspaperman: the adventurers Dravot and Carnehan, with a plan—to go where the maps end and the free market in thrones begins. Their capital is military know-how, familiarity with local customs and, as it turns out, Masonic signs: the editor, himself a Mason, recognizes the strangers as brothers. They make it through the mountains on sheer nerve and unstoppable cheek, set up a kingdom, and everything goes according to plan right up to the moment Dravot decides to take a wife. The priests remind the “god” of his own prohibition, the crowd recognizes him as an ordinary man, and the king gets a bridge. Some time later Carnehan returns to the newspaperman—with a golden crown and his partner’s head in a bag.
Biographers still argue over where the premise came from in the first place: whether Kipling had a real source, or whether he spun the anecdote of two con men setting off in search of a crown entirely out of conversations in the newsroom. There is no single answer in Kipling scholarship—a rare case of a canonical plot with no owner.
Josiah Harlan was born on June 12, 1799, in Newlin Township, Pennsylvania. In 1824, he signed on as an assistant surgeon in the East India Company’s army, and from there his biography begins to resemble the draft of a historical novel: service under Shah Shuja, then at the court of the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Kabul, Punjab again—from 1828 to 1841, he acted as soldier, spy, and governor in Punjab, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Genuine material from the Great Game, in which Britain and Russia collided over control of Central Asia and India—except that he was playing for the side with no flag.
The crown of his career was a charter from an Afghan chieftain: the title “Prince of Ghor,” a historic region in central Afghanistan, granted to Harlan in exchange for military aid—“in perpetuity, for himself and his descendants.” Ben Macintyre, who turned the biography into the book Josiah the Great, described the arrangement without romance: not vassalage, but a contractual monarchy—a man hired himself out to a local ruler as a condottiere and, as payment, demanded a crown with hereditary succession attached. Do you grasp the scale of it? A real, documented case in which an American provincial earned himself a title through an employment contract.
Harlan ended his career, absurdly enough, in the U.S. Army—during the Civil War he served on the Union side, and died in October 1871 in San Francisco. And, more importantly for our story, his escapades were known in India: biographer David Gilmour notes that Kipling almost certainly heard about Harlan, as he did about the earlier Irish mercenary George Thomas. In Gilmour’s version, there was one channel through which the tale traveled: an unnamed Mason encountered by the young journalist spoke of Harlan as a legend—by then, his expedition had already become Masonic folklore on the North-West Frontier.
And now for the genealogical cherry on top: a distant relative of Harlan’s is actor Scott Reiniger, who appeared in the original Halloween in 1978. A hereditary title granted in the mountains of Afghanistan nearly two centuries ago survives into the twenty-first century as a biographical fact about a man who, on screen, ran from Michael Myers.
Why are the two dodgy mugs recognized in the novella at all? This is the sharpest part of the construction, camouflaged as adventure exotica. In the story, Kafiristan is a lost corner where Masonic rites have survived since the days of Alexander’s soldiers. The mountaineers know the signs and the “word” of the second degree, that of a Fellow Craft, but not the grips of a Master Mason. Dravot and Carnehan are Master Masons—that is, formally senior in ritual rank. And then both sides begin playing the same game: the impostors “forge the ritual”—improvise a ceremony, hand out degrees—while the priests take it as the return of an ancient tradition. The password matches—the gates open.
Kipling did not write this secondhand: he belonged to lodges himself, including the Order of Mark Master Masons, and his Masonic terminology is exact down to the smallest details—from the square on a Master’s apron to the phrase “sons of the widow.” The novella’s epigraph is built along the same line: the motto “Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy” stands beside O’Shaughnessy’s stanza about a man with a dream, who alone can conquer a crown. In 1986, Marie Roberts formulated a reading of the entire construction: a Masonic fable that is, at the same time, a parody of colonization. Power rests not on guns, but on the recognition of ritual; empire as one vast lodge spectacle, where a fake password is enough.
The collapse in the novella comes with a change of protocol: Dravot breaks his own prohibition and decides to marry. The priests say: gods do not take wives. The king insists. One drop of ordinary red blood is enough—and the crowd is already shouting that before them stands “only a man.” In engineering terms, the bridge beneath the “god” proves the most honest element in the entire construction.
Literary critics split into camps here with an audible crack. Kingsley Amis, in 1975, tore the novella apart as “grossly overrated”: in his view, the story of a predictably deserved catastrophe takes the reader for a ride, while critics mistook its tricks for complexity and “habitually confused it with depth.” Edmund Wilson, in 1964, saw in it a parable of what would happen to the English when they lost their moral authority. The same text: con men for Amis, an indictment of empire for Wilson. The spread of reactions to a short novella is almost a service manual for reading Kipling in general.
As the Pakistani historian Omer Tarin observed, Kafiristan never had clear borders—it was a region in the Hindu Kush, not a state; “kafir” was the word used by neighboring Muslims, meaning “infidel.” One of the first Europeans to describe the country from within was the British military doctor George Scott Robertson: with the Indian Medical Service from 1878, he became surgeon-agent in Gilgit in 1888, from where he made expeditions into the mountains. The result of those journeys was The Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush (Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), an ethnographic primary source still cited by anthropologists today.
While Robertson was gathering material, his subject died. In 1895–96, the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan, conquered Kafiristan and forcibly converted its inhabitants to Islam; the country was renamed Nuristan—“the land of light.” By the time the book appeared, the region under that name no longer existed on the map: the publication was received as an obituary. Only the Pakistani side of the old territory survived—three valleys of Chitral, where the descendants of the Kafirs, the Kalash, still live today.
Robertson, however, was no armchair ethnographer. When a struggle for power broke out in Chitral in March 1895 after the ruler’s death, and a British detachment—around four hundred men—was trapped in the fort, it was Robertson, the surgeon and senior officer from Gilgit, who took command of the defense. The chronology of the siege reads like a military thriller: on March 3, a sortie at the cost of 23 dead; on April 7, the attackers set fire to the southeast tower—it burned for five hours and held; on April 11, the enemy began driving a tunnel with an explosive charge beneath the wall. On the night of April 18, cries came over the fort that the siege had lifted—by morning reconnaissance confirmed it: two columns were hurrying toward Chitral, a smaller one from Gilgit and a larger one from Peshawar.
It makes for an eloquent loop: in 1888 Kipling published a fable about two impostor “kings,” and later personally met the man who had actually traveled through their “kingdom,” wrote its defining book, and held an outpost at the moment when the drama of a booklet became military chronicle. Scholars later even read the novella as a prophecy of the fragility of the “Pax Britannica”—what could happen in Kafiristan could happen to the empire as well. Kipling and Robertson would probably have laughed about it differently, but more simply: the drama there had always been real.
Huston had been nursing the adaptation since the late 1950s and wanted to cast Bogart and Gable. Both died before filming could begin—and only in 1975 did Connery and Caine play Dravot and Carnehan; Huston wrote the screenplay with Gladys Hill, while Morocco stood in for Kafiristan (filming took place in the Atlas Mountains and in France). The film became the definitive version of the story: every new generation of viewers learns about the two bags with crowns through it.
Scott Reiniger, Harlan’s distant relative, appeared in Carpenter’s Halloween three years after Huston’s premiere. The coincidence is almost indecent: first, in 1975, a film about the fictional kings of Kafiristan; then, three years later, a horror movie featuring a relative of the real one. The dynasty of the “Princes of Ghor,” granted “in perpetuity,” now lives in exactly two documents—in the biography of an adventurer and the filmography of an actor.
One honest footnote remains. The pages of this story have accumulated apocrypha in old retellings: for instance, I have repeatedly encountered the legend that Harlan supposedly assembled scattered tribes into the “United States of Kafiristan,” but I found no supporting primary source in the available material—so that lovely detail has been deliberately excluded from the facts above. The anecdote of the newspaperman’s wager deserves its own apocryphal status as well: in the accessible biographical notes, it is not attached to any source.
The conclusion, without gloss. Of the three men who wore the Kafiristani crown in the 1880s—two fictional and one real—the real one lasted longest: because he alone treated the throne as a clause in an employment contract, not as clothing. Harlan tied his charter to life and profession: he died an old man in San Francisco, while the “forever” remained in the document’s text. Kipling, growing a fable from the same material, showed the exact opposite mechanism: the moment a crown is put on a head, it ceases to be paper and becomes a target. Formally, no one ever revoked the title—the next “Prince of Ghor” simply never ascended the throne, but appeared in a film. It seems to be the most durable version of royal power produced by the nineteenth century.