Fonds SC23 - An Indo-Afghan Border Story: Unto us a Child is Born

1 file typed manuscript

The author and owner are unknown.

It is not known how the material came into the Society's collections.

'Unto us a Child is Born' - a manuscript documenting the story of the rise and fall of a supposed miracle or holy child in a village near the Indo-Afghan border. The narrator describes himself as a junior officer serving in an administrative capacity. The story is of interest to him for its potential disruption to the area as people took sides believing or negating the child, who showed his holiness by wanting his father rather than his mother. The incident occurred a little while after Halley's comet had been visible in the night sky which some took to be a portent. The matter died down once the child started preferring its mother.

The story would seem to be related by somebody in the nineteenth century, but the document is from the mid-twentieth century. There are no identifiers as to the author or the narrator, so it is possibly a transcription of an earlier text or a work of fiction.

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This material was catalogued by Nancy Charley, RAS Archivist, in 2022.