Mythologized aspects of the Great Game A. Vescovi argued that Kipling's use of the term was entirely fictional, "...because the Great Game as it is described in the novel never existed; it is almost entirely Kipling's invention. At the time when the story is set (i.e. in the late Eighties), Britain did not have an intelligence service, nor an Ethnographical Department; there was only a governmental task force called 'Survey of India' that was entrusted with the task of charting all India in response to a typically English anxiety of control." Two authors, Gerald Morgan and
Malcolm Yapp, have proposed that The Great Game was a legend and that the British Raj did not have the capacity to conduct such an undertaking. An examination of the archives of the various departments of the Raj showed no evidence of a British intelligence network in Central Asia. At best, efforts to obtain information on Russian moves in Central Asia were rare,
ad hoc adventures and at worst intrigues resembling the adventures in
Kim were baseless rumours, and that such rumours "were always common currency in Central Asia and they applied as much to Russia as to Britain". After two British representatives were executed in Bukhara in 1842, Britain actively discouraged officers from traveling in Turkestan. Gerald Morgan also proposed that Russia never had the will nor ability to move on India, nor India the capability to move on Central Asia. Russia did not want Afghanistan, considering their initial failure to take Khiva and the British debacle in the First Anglo-Afghan War. To invade Afghanistan they would first require a forward base in Khorasan, Persia. St. Petersburg had decided by then that a forward policy in the region had failed but one of non-intervention appeared to work. Sneh Manajan wrote that the Russian military advances in Central Asia were advocated and executed only by irresponsible Russians or enthusiastic governors of the frontier provinces. Robert Middleton suggested that The Great Game was all a figment of the over-excited imaginations of a few jingoist politicians, military officers and journalists on both sides. Whereas the Great Game between Russia and Britain was codifying imperial spheres of influence at their frontiers, the supposed Great Game between Russia and Japan did not end up in a similarly defined frontier, with
warlord states and
Honghuzi emerging through the period.
Role of legends and mysticism in the Great Game Several scholars have focused on the role of legends and mysticism (sometimes interpreted as a form of
Orientalism that was prominent in the late 19th and early 20th century), during the Great Game and in its aftermath. Some writers such as
Karl Meyer and
Shareen Brysac have connected the Great Game to earlier and later expeditions in Inner Asia, predominantly those expeditions by British, Russian, and German orientalists. Robert Irwin summarizes the expeditions as "
William Moorcroft, the horse doctor with a mission to find new stock for the cavalry in British India;
Charles Metcalfe, the advocate of a forward policy on the frontier in the early 19th century;
Alexander 'Bokhara' Burnes, the foolhardy political officer, who perished at the hands of an Afghan mob;
Sir William Hay Macnaghten, the head of the ill-fated British Mission in Kabul (and a scholar who produced an important edition of
The Arabian Nights);
Nikolai Przhevalsky, the explorer who gave his name to a hard-to-spell horse;
Francis Younghusband, the mystical imperialist;
Aurel Stein, the manuscript hunter;
Sven Hedin, the Nazi sympathiser who seems to have regarded Asian exploration as a proving ground for the superman;
Nicholas Roerich, the artist and barmy quester after the fabled hidden city of
Shambhala." The founder of
Theosophy, esotericist
Helena Blavatsky, has also been connected to the Great Game, with her Himalayas-inspired
Western mysticism both critiquing, and falling for, two forms of
Orientalism by the British and Russian Empires, as they competed to define and claim "the Orient". Blavatsky would be referenced by the poet
Velimir Khlebnikov, who argued that Britain and Russia had both taken traits from the
Kazan Khanate and
Mongol Empire respectively, in their colonial struggle over Asia. Blavatsky would also refer to Russia's double-layered conception of itself as a European power in contrast to Asia as well as an empire based in Asia; meanwhile, she would also "consciously appropriate" British rhetoric on Russia in labelling herself a "Russian savage". Both Blavatsky and Khlebnikov claimed
Kalmyk ancestry in imitation of the traditionally nomadic culture. Scholar Anindita Banerjee argued this shows a "deconstruction" of national identities by identifying with a "religious, geographic, and ethnic other", relevant to the diversity of Central Asia and India and the frontier that existed between the British and Russian Empires. According to the scholar Andrei Znamenski, Soviet Communists of the 1920s aimed to extend their influence over Mongolia and Tibet, using the mythical Buddhist kingdom of Shambhala as a form of propaganda to further this mission, in a sort of "great Bolshevik game". The expedition of Russian
symbolist Nicholas Roerich has been put in context of the Great Game due to his interest in Tibet, Although Roerich did not like the Communists, he agreed to help Soviet intelligence and influence operations due to a shared paranoia towards Britain, as well as his goal to form a "Sacred Union of the East" called Roerichism. In the early 1920s, Roerich asserted that beings from an
esoteric Buddhist community in India told him that Russia was destined for a mission on Earth. That led Roerich to formulate his "Great Plan," which envisaged the unification of millions of
Asian peoples through a religious movement using the Future Buddha, or
Maitreya, into a "Second Union of the East." There, the King of Shambhala would, following the Maitreya prophecies, make his appearance to fight a great battle against all evil forces on Earth. Roerich understood that as "perfection towards Common Good." The new polity was to include southwestern
Altai,
Tuva,
Buryatia,
Outer and
Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, with its capital in "Zvenigorod," the "City of Tolling Bells," which was to be built at the foot of
Mount Belukha, in Altai. According to Roerich, the same Mahatmas revealed to him in 1922 that he was an incarnation of the
Fifth Dalai Lama. ==Other uses of the term "Great Game"==