Captain Sir Alexander Burnes (16 May 1805 – 2 November 1841) was a Scottish traveller and explorer who took part in The Great Game. He was nicknamed Bokhara Burnes for his role in establishing contact with and exploring Bukhara, which made his name.[1]
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He was born in Montrose, Scotland, to the son of the local provost,[1] who was first cousin to the poet Robert Burns.[2] At the age of sixteen, Alexander joined the army of the East India Company and while serving in India, he learned Hindustani and Persian, and obtained an appointment as interpreter at Surat in 1822. Transferred to Kutch in 1826 as assistant to the political agent, he took an interest in the history and geography of north-western India and the adjacent countries, which had not yet been thoroughly explored by the British.
His proposal in 1829 to undertake a journey of exploration through the valley of the Indus River was not carried out for political reasons; but in 1831 he was sent to Lahore with a present of horses from King William IV to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The British claimed that the horses would not survive the overland journey, so they were allowed to transport the horses up the Indus and used the opportunity to secretly survey the river. In the following years, in company with Mohan Lal, his travels continued through Afghanistan across the Hindu Kush to Bukhara and Persia.
The narrative which he published on his visit to England in 1834 added immensely to contemporary knowledge of these countries, and was one of the most popular books of the time. The first edition earned the author £800, and his services were recognized not only by the Royal Geographical Society of London, but also by that of Paris. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the same year. [3] Soon after his return to India in 1835 he was appointed to the court of Sindh to secure a treaty for the navigation of the Indus and in 1836 he undertook a political mission to Dost Mahommed Khan at Kabul.
He advised Lord Auckland to support Dost Mahommed on the throne of Kabul, but the viceroy preferred to follow the opinion of Sir William Hay Macnaghten and reinstated Shah Shuja, thus leading to the disasters of the First Afghan War. On the restoration of Shah Shuja in 1839, Burnes became regular political agent at Kabul,[4] and remained there until his assassination in 1841, during the heat of an insurrection. The calmness with which he continued at his post long after the imminence of his danger was apparent, and the ferocity with which he fought after the killing of his political assistant Major William Broadfoot (killing six assailants in the process),[5] won him a heroic reputation.
It came to light in 1861 that some of Burnes' dispatches from Kabul in 1839 had been altered so as to convey opinions opposite to his, but Lord Palmerston refused after such a lapse of time to grant the inquiry demanded in the House of Commons. A narrative of his later labours was published in 1842 under the title of Cabool.
He is commemorated in the name of the Rufous-vented Prinia Prinia burnesii.