“I can perfectly recollect my first interview with him. He walked into Cooper’s reception room one morning, a most peculiar and striking appearance, clothed from head to foot in the 79th tartan but fashioned by a native tailor. Even his pagri [turban] was of tartan, and it was adorned with an egret’s plume, only allowed to persons of high rank. I imagine he lived entirely in native fashion; he was said to be wealthy, and the owner of many villages.”
This is the account that the civil servant Frederick Cooper gave when he was visited by Alexander Gardner in Srinagar in 1864. Gardner, pictured above, is perhaps the most adventurous and mysterious figure to ever ‘go native’ in India.
His nationality is a guessing game at best – Irish, American, perhaps even part Aztec. Those travel accounts that survive, through Gardner’s work or that of his peers, are mired by inconsistencies. And his stories are incredulous, to say the least. But as the Scottish historian John Keay finds in the ‘The Tartan Turban: In Search of Alexander Gardner’, the first biography to be written exclusively on Gardner, reality can be stranger than fiction.
Gardner had suffered a serious wound to this throat, and his voice was husky croak, made possible by clamping the wound shut with a pair of pliers.
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