{"book":"adl1197","page":17,"text":"- 6 -\nwould be a child's play for the Afghans to conquer India. View-\ning this fact as early as one hundred and fifty year prior to the\ntime (in 1797) Lord Wellesley devised a scheme by wich not only\nthe Afghan progress is to be stopped making its way further into\nnorth-India to Lahore and beyond; but the areas of the east and\nsouth-east beyond the western regions of the Indus river, includ-\ning the areas of Sindh and Baluchistan should be seized from them.\n\nEnglish writers, like Alphinstone, Rawalson, Maleson, Tail\netc; are all united in expressing the opnion that, the fundametal\npolicy as laid down at Calcutta in the third quarter of the 18th\ncentury of Christian Era contrived to place all sorts of impede-\nments in the path of Zaman Shah Sadu Zai, whether in the\nwestern borders of Afghanistan, or even in his country itself in\norder to \"keep him busy\", so that he may not be permitted to\nenter into the eastern part of his realm in the Punjab and his\nplans for a progress in India may be made nul and void.\nTo execute this policy, the workers for the East India com-\npany had devised ways and means: one such stratagem was to\nhave him engaged against the Qadjaras in the western frontiers\nof Afghanistan so that the attention of the Sadu Zais might be\ndiverted in that direction. On the other direction, in the East;\nit was so thought that the Sikh Paja should disturb the peace\nof his kingdom in the Punjab.\n\nThe East India Company discovered a devoted \"servant\" of their's\nat Bushar, a merchant of Iran, who lived at Bombay, by the name\nof Mahdi Ali Khan, and who was an Indian subject. As the East\nCompany's view point was imperialist and megalomanic and they\nwere building and using their moral and material strength and\npower towards that end: in the like manner, their \"servant\"\nMahdi Ali Khan in Bushar, in addition to trade and business,\ninterested himself in politics; and by various manipulations of\ncraft related thereto managed to have an influence at the Persian\nCourt. In consequence of this, he arranged repeatedly to send Agha\nMohamed Shah and Fateh Ali Shah to the frontiers of the west-\ntern parts of Zaman Shah's kingdom, first to Meshad, then to\nNishapor and ultimately towards Herat. After a year an Eng-","chars":2238,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00017.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/17","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/17","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}