Guest lecture on The Tartan Turban (In Search of Alexander Gardner)

The Department of History organized a Guest lecture on History on 23 January 2017. The Guest Speaker on this occasion was John Keay, British Historian and Author, co-editor of the Collins Encyclopedia of Scotland and editor of the Royal Geographic Society's Encyclopedia of Exploration. Succoth, Dalmally, Argyll PA33 1BB, Scotland, UK.The guest was welcomed by floral greetings by the head of the Dept. Professor Sharad Rathore, who also gave a short introduction about him. The speaker started with the introduction of his book ‘The Tartan Turban’. Like the travels of Marco Polo, those of Alexander Gardner clips the white line between credible adventure and creative invention. Alexander was the nineteenth century’s most intrepid traveller. Contemporaries generally believed him and as with Polo, the investigation of Gardner’s story enlarged man’s understanding of the world and upped the pace of scientific and political exploration.

Before more reputable explorers notched up their own discoveries in innermost Asia, this lone traveller had roamed the deserts of Turkestan, ridden round the world’s most fearsome knot of mountains and fought, as the first American in Afghanistan, ‘for the good cause of right against wrong’. From the Caspian to Tibet and from Kandahar to Kashgar, Gardner had seen it all. At that time, the 1820s, no other outsider had managed anything remotely comparable. When word of his feats filtered out, geographers were agog. The author read out many interesting anecdotes from his book…keeping the perspective of a traveller in the colonial India .Neha Thakur, a student form the department accorded the formal vote of thanks to the speaker.