The Control At The Romanate At Meshed Analysis

The Control at the consulate at Meshed in 1887, Colonel Charles MacLean, employed Asian personnel in dangerous work. He reported that two messengers had been arrested in Merv, a small oasis settlement in Russian Central Asia. Agents I and J were compromised and had to be discharged. An agent in ring C went missing in November 1888 after being dispatched to get photos of Russian guns, troops and barracks.

According to MacLean's records, there were systematic searches at the border, and despite precautions such as using invisible ink in messages, more agents were going missing. The consuls' duties in Meshed were dominated by monitoring relations between Afghanistan and Persia, but they also involved keeping a close watch on Russian

The maintenance of British rule in India depended upon the acquiescence and participation of the ruled."30

Kipling's India reveals the depth of concern about the threat to the Raj from the native population, which lingered beneath the surface long after the traumas of the Indian Mutiny. The police were tasked to detect subversion they would achieve varying degrees of success but the authorities were also eager to influence the elites, the potential leaders of revolt, and, where possible, to shape public opinion. As C.A. Bayly argues: "the idea was to regulate the means of communication so as to establish an empire of opinion".31

The settings in Kipling's work are precisely at the margins of authority in the information order, seeking out the sinister hidden hand of rebels and foreigners. More than that, the assumption of Kipling's India is that disorder itself is threatening, with no acknowledgement of the inherently undemocratic nature of British colonial rule that would make protest necessary. Indeed, there was a tendency to conflate protest and threat and to see all pubic expressions of anger and frustration as indicative of latent native