The Man Who Would Be King

"The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) is a story by Rudyard Kipling about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was first published in The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales (1888); it also appeared in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (1895) and numerous later editions of that collection. It has been adapted for other media a number of times.
The narrator of the story is a Victorian journalist, correspondent of The Northern Star in India during the British Raj: Kipling himself, in all but name. Whilst on a tour of some Indian native states, in 1886, he meets two scruffy adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Tolliver Carnehan. Softened by their stories, he agrees to help them in a small errand, but later he regrets this and informs the authorities about them, which prevents them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later, the pair appear at the narrator's newspaper office in Lahore, where they tell him of a plan they have hatched. They declare that, after years of trying their hands at all manner of things, they have decided that India is not big enough for them, so they intend to go to Kafiristan and set themselves up as kings. Dravot, disguised as a priest, and Carnehan, as his servant, will go to the unexplored region armed with twenty Martini-Henry rifles and their British military knowledge. Once there, they plan to find a king or chief and help him defeat his enemies before taking over for themselves. They ask the narrator to see books, encyclopedias, and maps about the area as a favour, both because they are fellow Freemasons and because he spoiled their blackmail scheme. In an attempt to prove that they are not crazy, they show the narrator a contract they have drawn up between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol until they are kings.
Two years later, on a scorching hot summer night, Carnehan creeps into the narrator's office. He is a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags who has trouble staying focused, but he tells an amazing story: he says he and Dravot succeeded in becoming kings. They traversed treacherous mountains, found the Kafirs, mustered an army, and took over villages, all the while dreaming of building a unified nation or even an empire. The Kafirs were impressed by the rifles and Dravot's lack of fear of their pagan idols, and they soon began to acclaim him as a god and descendant of Alexander the Great; they exhibited a whiter complexion than the natives of the surrounding areas ("so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends"), implying an ancient lineage going back to Alexander and some of his troops themselves. Dravot and Carnehan were shocked to discover that the Kafirs practiced a form of Masonic ritual, and their reputations were cemented when they showed knowledge of Masonic secrets beyond those known by even the highest of the Kafir priests and chiefs.
The schemes of Dravot and Carnehan were dashed, however, when Dravot, against the advice of Carnehan, decided it was time to marry a Kafir girl—kingship going to his head, he decided he needed a queen to give him a royal son. Terrified by the idea of marrying a god, the girl bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her during the wedding ceremony. Seeing him bleed, the priests cried that he was "Neither God nor Devil but a man!" and most of the Kafirs turned against Dravot and Carnehan. A few of their men remained loyal, but the army defected and the two kings were captured. Dravot, wearing his crown, stood on a rope bridge over a gorge while the Kafirs cut the ropes, and he fell to his death. Carnehan was crucified between two pine trees, but, when he survived this torture for a whole day, the Kafirs considered it a miracle and let him go. He then slowly begged his way back to India over the course of a year.
As proof of his tale, Carnehan shows the narrator Dravot's severed head and golden crown before he leaves, taking the head and crown, which he swears never to sell, with him. The following day, the narrator sees Carnehan crawling along the road in the noon sun with his hat off. He has gone mad, so the narrator sends him to the local asylum. When he inquires two days later, he learns that Carnehan has died of sunstroke. No belongings were found with him.
Kafiristan was recognized as a real place by at least one early Kipling scholar, Arley Munson, who in 1915 called it "a small tract of land in the northeastern part of Afghanistan," though she wrongly thought the "only source of information is the account of the Mahomedan traders who have entered the country." By then, Kafiristan had been literally wiped off the map and renamed "Nuristan" in Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's 1895 conquest, and it was soon forgotten by literary critics who, under the sway of the New Criticism, read the story as an allegory of the British Raj. The disappearance of Kafiristan was so complete that a 1995 New York Times article referred to it as "the mythical, remote kingdom at the center of the Kipling story."
As the New Historicism replaced the New Criticism, scholars rediscovered the story's historical Kafiristan, aided by the trail of sources left in it by Kipling himself, in the form of the publications the narrator supplies to Dravot and Carnehan:
In addition to Kipling's acknowledged sources, a number of individuals have been proposed as possible models for the story's main characters.