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THE PATHANS

550 B.C.—A.D. 1957

BY

OLAF CAROE

 

FOREWORD

This is a book I was bound to write, at some time or the other, having had the fortune to spend half a lifetime among Pathans. But with the passage of time, from 1947, memories receded and the purpose weakened. That the purpose revived was owing to the initiative and courtesy of the then Government of Pakistan who made it possible for me, after nine years’ absence, to revisit familiar scenes, meet old friends and make new ones, and put in order against the new foreground a store of knowledge and impressions acquired over more than thirty years. The result presented is wholly mine; the responsibility for each conclusion, for every emphasis, individual and unshared.

Tne voyage is long and the seas for the most part uncharted. For example, I have sought to cover more centuries before the Pathans embraced Islam than those which have since elapsed. If sometimes the touch may seem uncertain, the answer is that it is not easy for one navigator to encompass all the techniques, or indeed all the languages, needed to fit together a chart, or manage a crew, over a space of 2,500 years.

For the pre-Islamic period and the earlier Islamic centuries I enjoyed the devoted help of Dr. A.D.H. Bivar, formerly my aide-de-camp, sometime Scholar of Corpus, and lately Research Lecturer in Ancient History at Christ Church, Oxford. Without his enthusiasm ana expert scholarship this part of the book could never have taken so distinct a shape. With his aid I was able to interpret many original texts, Greek, Arabic, and Persian, and to apply the results of specialized numismatic and epigraphical studies. But here too — he would wish me to affirm — the conclusions are my own and may not always stand up to academic assault, if that be so, I must plead the licence of the non-specialist and a determination not to permit the wood to be obscured by the trees.

Much more than formal acknowledgement is due to my friends, Evelyn Howell, on whose earlier work hangs my picture of the tribes of Waziristan, Ralph Griffith, who knew the meaning of Pathan honour, and George Cunningham, ten years Governor in Peshawar, who read the whole work in manuscript and blessed it with the criticism which does not confound. From Pathans I received countless impressions of tradition and wisdom: memorable among these are Sayyid Abdul Jabbar Shah of Sitana, who died in 1956, and that grand old man, Muhammad Zaman Khan of Akora, descended from the most famous of Pathan poets.

To Mr. Zuberi, then Commissioner of Peshawar, and to Roger Bacon and his staff at Mardan, I am in debt for contributions to the study of that same poet, and to Mr. Ikramullah, then High Commissioner for Pakistan in London, both for light shed on some dark corners of history and for his unfailing encouragement in moments of doubt and difficulty.

In some sense this book was planned as the spark struck off by a century of clash and contact between Pathan and Englishman:   though critics, some of them constructive, have not been wanting, it has brought me a satisfying succs d’estime, has been acclaimed both as a work of literature and of scholarship, and has won me both a Doctorate of Letters at my own University of Oxford and a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature. Although deeply grateful for these honours, I have been even more concerned to stimulate the further study of Pathan writers of their own origin and in this respect too my efforts have had some success though the fact that this book continues to retain its place as a standard work would seem to indicate that further efforts are required.

When it was first written, there was little in the procession of Pathan history over the centuries to indicate the imminence of Russia, whether Tsarist or Soviet, from beyond the Oxus. Since publication the equipoise has been upset. The power and prestige of Britain in India, consolidating the strategic frontier established to the northwest by the Mughal Empire which preceded us, exists no longer, and the Afghan State, only established by Ahmad Shah in 1747, may not survive. Moreover, the Pathans are tied to Afghanistan by bonds of race, religion, and language, and any disturbance of the balance will have an effect both on the North West Frontier itself and in the partitioned Subcontinent as a whole. The Frontier peoples and the Afghans too are perhaps now more conscious of their Islamic ties than ever before. And, finally, any disturbance of the balance in this strategic part of Asia will affect the stability not only of the Subcontinent itself but of South Asia as a whole. Oil and communications are under threat.

Mr. George Chowdharay-Best and myself have therefore sought to attempt a fresh assessment of these issues in an epilogue appended to this volume.

O.C.

September 1980

NOTE

To those unfamiliar with the North-West Frontier the tribal pattern of the Pathans is hard to follow. A map showing tribal boundaries and locations will be found at the end of this book.

 

CONTENTS

Introduction

THE ORIGINS

550 B.C.-A.D. 1957 (H. 391)

·        I. The Genealogies

·        II. The Greek Historians

·        III. The Passing of Alexander

·        IV. The Birth of Pakhtu

·        V. Sakas, Kushans and Persians

·        VI. The White Huns

·        VII. Arab Expansion

VIII. Saffarids and Hindushahis

PART II

THE MUSLIM MIDDLE AGES

·        A.D. 1000-1707 (h. 39I—1119)

·        IX. Mahmud and the Khaljis

·        X. Sher Shah Sur

·        XI. Babur

·        XII. The Peshawar Tribes

·        XIII. Orthodox and Heretic

·        XIV. Akbar and the Tribes

·        XV. Khushhal Khan and Aurangzeb

PART III DURRANIS AND SIKHS A.D. 1707-1849 (H. III9-I266)

CHAPTER

·        XVI. Ahmad Shah

·       XVII. The Saddozais and Mountstuart Elphinstone

XVIII. Ahmad Shah Brelwi and the Sikhs

·        XIX. The Dost and the Peshawar Sardars

PART IV

THE BRITISH PERIOD AND AFTER

A.D. 1846-1957 (H. I263-I377)

·        XX. The Paladins

·        XXI. The Close Border Policy

·        XXII. Ambela

XXIII. Baluchistan and the Forward Policy

·        XXIV. Waziristan3

·        XXV. North-West Frontier Province

·        XXVI. The Pathan Renascence4

 

INTRODUCTION

There is a strange fascination in living among the Pathans. Many attempts have been made to catch and convey that feeling, but the spell is elusive. One secret of the hold of  the North-West Frontier is to be sought in the tremendous scenic canvas against which the Pathan plays out his life, a canvas brought into vivid relief by sharp, cruel changes of climate. Sometimes the assault on the spirit is that of stark ugliness and discomfort — appalling heat, a dust-storm across the Peshawar plain, the eroded foot-hills of Khaibar or Waziristan; more often it is an impression of beauty indescribable in its clarity and contrast with the barren emptiness that went before. The weft and warp of this tapestry is woven into the souls and bodies of the men who move before it. Much is harsh, but all is drawn in strong tones that catch the breath, and at times bring tears, almost of pain.

‘The life of a frontiersman is hard,’ wrote Ronaldshay, ‘and he treads it daily on the brink of eternity. Yet, despite its obvious drawbacks, the fact remains that these endless ranges of rugged rocks rising from lower levels do possess the power of inspiring in those whose lot is cast among them an extraordinary enthusiasm. ... I do not suggest that the average warden of the marches habitually subjects his feelings to this kind of analysis, but the circumstances of his life are such that he frequently experiences the species of spiritual exaltation induced by solitude amid the grandeur of nature, and such experience is one of the factors that go to make the magic of the Frontier.’

But the land was made for the men in it, not men for the land. For the stranger who had eyes to see and ears to hear, always as he drove through the Margalla pass just north of Rawalpindi and went on to cross the great bridge at Attock, there was a lifting of the heart and a knowledge that, however hard the task and beset with danger, here was a people who looked him in the face and made him feel he had come home. Yet, after a hundred years and more of close contact, the Pathan remains to the world, and even  to himself, something of an enigma. Many have spoken aild written of him and his country, but the surface has been scarcely scratched. There is need for a deeper ploughing.

In a word the truth is that the history of the Pathans has never been unrolled. There are tribal annals, there is legend, there is myth. There is also a wide and detailed record of brilliant achievement by Pathan captains and kings far from their own land, even to the rank of empire at Delhi. There is the uncertain Afghan Kingdom of the Durranis, but that was founded only two hundred years ago and is but an episode in a long story. Although the Pathans have stood for centuries in the corridors between Khurasan and the Indian sub-continent just at the very point where great civilizations have met and contended; although their mountain homes have been swept by conquering armies again and again, to rise like a breakwater from the sea; although the conquerors have passed on to found great empires — yet the Pathans who hold the gate have never been given a vision of their own story in perspective. In the modem sense there is no connected history of the Pathans in their own land, whether written by themselves or by any of those through the ages who passed by.

What, for instance, is the difference between Afghan and Pathan? Who and what are they, and what their origins? What has been their social and political organization through the centuries, and have they succeeded in establishing a State? What is their language and what their literature? And how have they stood to the uncounted powers and principalities which at various periods of history have pressed upon them? What in the past has been their influence on affairs, what are their auguries for the future? These and a host of questions remain unanswered.

I do not wish to anticipate conclusions here. Distinction and definition will emerge in due place as the story unfolds. But something should be said on the use I shall make of the terms Pathan and Afghan, often loosely employed by themselves as synonymous.

When we come to examine origins, it will be found that a clear distinction can be drawn between those who inhabit plains and open plateaux on the one hand and the highlanders on the other. The former have always been regarded as the senior branch of the race and peculiarly entitled to the Afghan name. They again can be broadly divided into (1) the Western Afghans, of whom much the most important are the Abdalis (now known as the Durranis)  and the Ghaljis (Ghilzais modo Persico), and (2) the Eastern Afghans, namely the Yusufzais and other kindred tribes of the Peshawar plain and the valleys to the north of it.

The Western Afghans have been subject in history to certain Persian influences which have affected the Durranis even to their language. Their contacts and development lay with the Safawi Empire of Persia, and Herat and Kandahar were their cultural centres. The Eastern Afghans, whom Elphinstone and other early writers called ‘Berdooraunees’, are less amenable to the Persian tradition, partly because their contacts lay with the Mughal Empire which ruled from Delhi in Peshawar and Kabul. But both, Eastern and Western, are equally entitled to the Afghan name, which has a connotation far wider than that of a subject of the modern Afghan State, founded only in 1747.

In between the Eastern and the Western Afghans, and to some extent keeping them apart, are interposed the highlanders. These include most of the famous names of the North-West Frontier. Afridi, Khatak, Orakzai, Bangash, Wazir, Mahsud, Turi — all these strike a chord in countless memories. The dialects of these tribes have something in common, and all are presented in genealogical legend as descended from a foundling common ancestor named Karlanri, not in the true Afghan line. These are preeminently the Pakhtuns, or Pashtuns. They are the tribes who never fell under the effective sway of any recorded imperial authority and now form the backbone of the so-called tribal belt.

These hill Pathans — the appellation Pathan is the Indian variant of Pukhtanah, the plural of Pakhtun — have always traded with the cities and towns towards the Indus, and not with Kabul or Ghazni to the west. Consequently their links with the Eastern Afghans of the Peshawar Valley have been much closer than with the Durranis or other tribes inhabiting the country to the west, which they know as Khurasan. Conversely the Eastern Afghans feel an undoubted sense of identity with the hill-tribes, a sense which has hardly as yet attained to any concept of unity but transcends tribal particularism. In a very broad way, and with some local exceptions, the Eastern Afghans and the highland Pukhtanah, their brethren, all live east of the Durand Line, within Pakistan as the successor State of the British in India.

It is chiefly of these, the Eastern Afghans and the highland Pukhtanah, that I write in this book, but without exclusion of their Afghan affinities. Sher Shah, Pathan emperor of Delhi in tke sixteenth and the Khatak poet Khushhal in the seventeenth century, spoke of them as the men of Roh.

Yet another distinction is necessary at the start. Every student of current political jargon is confused by the variants Pakhtun and Pashtun. It is common and confusing practice to refer to the language Pashtu spoken by Pukhtanah in an imaginary Pashtunistan. There are two main variants of the language of the Pathans — and Afghans, when they are not Persian-speakers — the Pakhtu spoken by the north-eastern tribes, and the Pashtu by those to the south-west. (There are of course many other differences in the two main variants in addition to that of kh, sh.) The line of division between the two runs roughly east and west from the Indus just south of Attock through Kohat, up the Miranzai Valley to Thai, and thence south of the Kurram River to Hariob and the Shutar-gardan pass. North-east of that line the hard language is spoken. This is the tongue of all the Peshawar tribes, of Dir, Swat, Buner, and Bajaur, of the Afridis, Orakzais, Shinwaris, Bangash and Turis.

South-west of the line and speaking the soft variant are all the Durranis, almost all the Ghaljis except a few near Jalalabad, all the tribes in Khost and Waziristan, as well as the tribes of Bannu and the Derajat, many of them with Ghalji affinities. The Pathan tribes of Zhob and other parts Baluchistan close to Kandahar also speak the soft variant.

One tribe only is split in half between the two, the Khataks. The main body of this tribe, living south of Kohat, speak Pashtu, but the Khataks of Akora and Mardan, round about Khushhal Khan’s time, became assimilated to the Yusufzais and now speak Pakhtu. Most texts of the poems of Khushhal Khan Khatak, the most renowned of Pathan poets, were edited and lithographed in Peshawar, and are therefore in Pakhtu. But his descendants affirm that Khushhal’s original script was in Pashtu — a tradition supported by the historical fact that his tribe’s encroachments into the Yusufzai country, and their assimilation to Yusufzai ways, took place no earlier than Mughal times. We may accept the Khataks own tradition that originally they were all Pushtanah, speaking the soft variant of the language. Nevertheless the later emergence of the northern Khataks as Pukhtanah is not without its significance as demonstrating the assimilative power of Pakhtu over Pashtu.

The geographical distribution of the two forms of the language has resulted in a Peshawar predilection for Pakhtu — in fact the city is known as Pekhawar — while the Durranis, when they use the language, insist on Pashtu. There is some reason to hold that the Durrani preference for the soft variant may have unduly weighed in the scale of academic discussion as to the classical or older form of the language. Since the point has a bearing on the early history of the Pathans, it is important to keep it clearly in mind. And I propose in this book, seeing that Pakhtu is the language of Peshawar, to refer to it by that name unless the context demands otherwise.

There is a further tribal distinction, which almost follows the line of division between Pakhtu and Pashtu in the Karlanri hilltribes. The Pakhtu-speakers wear their hair clipped short, often shaved; the Pashtu-speakers, except in the sophistication of towns, favour a chevelure falling around the ears, varying from the neatly combed and curled bob of the Khatak soldier to the ragged ringlets of the Mahsud or Wazir. This long bobbed style is known as the tsanrai, cut clean at the ear but shining and curled above it, parted in the middle and sometimes held in place with little wooden clips. And, for greater interest, it is the men of the long hair, the speakers of Pashtu, and they alone, who dance, the tsan-rai spinning as they whirl around. Peter Mayne’s recent book carries a haunting description of such a scene — the stir and throb of beating drums, the dust, the wild eyes, the flickering fire and flashing swords, the elation. Khataks, Mahsuds and the tribes of Khost are pastmasters at this art.

Geographically the Pathan country is hard to describe, even with a map. It is best seen as a long narrow fortification running parallel in two belts, first a moat and then a rampart, along the line of the Indus which here runs almost north and south, with a slight trend towards the west. Towards the south the rampart stands back much further from the river. Behind the rampart begins the great Iranian plateau which, except through the Sulaiman Mountains, has no drainage to the sea.

The first belt is made up of plains and valleys along the river; the second, standing over the valleys, is the great transept of the Sulaiman Mountains running southward from its apex in the mighty ranges of the Hindu Kush where they culminate on Tirich Mir. At many points this transept thrusts forward fingers towards  the Indus, fingers which even cross the river more than once. Nestling between the fingers are the valleys of which the most beautiful and fertile, as well as the largest, is the plain of Peshawar. Further south are other plains-lands, Kohat, Bannu-Marwat and the Derajat, sometimes known as the Daman. North of Peshawar are no more plains, but a tangle of alpine mountain and valley rising to the snows of the Hindu Kush.

The Sulaiman chain runs roughly north-east and south-west, but has many divagations. The most important of these is in its highest part, the Sufed Koh, where it rises in the Sikaram peak north of the Kurram to over 15,000 feet and, running due east and west, forms part of the Durand Line. This escarpment of the Sulaiman system is the geographical eastern’front of the Iranian world, turned towards India. Across it there has been much ebb and flow, but in the result the Iranian scene, and Iranian man, have spilled beyond this eastern limit and prevail as far as the Indus, and even beyond — some would say up to Lahore. But to him who approaches from Lahore the unmistakable change of atmosphere is felt, as I have said, at Margalla, forty miles before the crossing of the Indus and close to the site of ancient Taxila. Here he will smell the scents of the homeland as a voyager putting out from France knows he is in England when he sights the cliffs of Dover. This is the Pakhtun Khwa, the land of the Pathans.

Later, after crossing the splendid river swirling through the gorge at Attock, he will find himself in a spreading vale, watered by many streams and surrounded by an unbroken girdle of mountains. The hills that stand around Peshawar not only look like a ring; they are actually set on the map in a circle, almost complete but for one segment in the south-east where the valley-lands slope to the banks of the Indus. This valley has four doors, one by which we have entered without, need to cross a pass, and three of exit over the mountains. These three are the passes of Khaibar, Kohat and Malakand. The Khaibar lies straight ahead to the west, opening beneath the prominent cone of Laka Sar in the Tahtarra range. It leads to Moscow by Kabul. The Kohat pass — known always as the Darrah, or the Pass — is in the south-west. It crosses the knuckle of the finger which closes the ring to southward and carries the lateral road which gives access to the southern districts of the Frontier. The Malakand is to the north. It pierces the first range and opens the way into the paradise of Swat, leading thence  by alpine forest and rushing torrent past Dir and Chitral on to the Pamirs and China.

Two great rivers, the Kabul and the Swat, cleave the western segment of the circling hills by gorges too narrow for roadways. On entering the valley the two rivers split into five channels, which reunite lower down to form the Landai — the Short River — and pour their Central Asian waters into the Indus just above Attock. The volume of the united stream is nearly as big as that of the Indus itself. The course of the Swat River presents a geographical phenomenon. Just north of Malakand, where it is separated from the Peshawar plain by only one low range, it flows from east to west. But, failing to break through here, it enters a series of deep gorges through which it runs in a U-curve, and after receiving the Panj kora in due course enters the plain from the west, flowing in an opposite direction. What nature failed to do man has done. The Malakand is pierced by a tunnel carrying the Swat water direct into the valley for irrigation and supplying waterpower to run the Frontier industries.

In such a land the variations of climate and scene are extreme. In winter and spring nothing can be more delightful than the lower valleys and plains. The genial winter sun shines, the breeze blows clean and sharp from the snows, it is a joy to live. In a land of streams and rivers villages nestle half hidden in groves of sheltering trees. Broad stretches of verdant wheat, barley and clover, alternating as the seasons change with giant crops of sugarcane and maize, spread a picture of rural plenty, to be equalled possibly but never surpassed in the length and breadth of Asia. There is an intimacy about these scenes which grows the more frequently they are visited.

In the north the great plain of the Yusufzai Samah, once arid waste, has been turned into fertile corn-lands watered by canals. Close under the hills, and side by side with canal-irrigation, the old indigenous well-cultivation proceeds, the shaded wells, the creaking wheels, the plodding oxen — dear, familiar places, lending the countryside the charm peculiar to this ancient form of husbandry.

The Khatak fringe of hills to the south is bare and rather commonplace, but provides a platform for what must be the most extensive mountain panorama in the world. Distance and perspective is given by the sixty miles of the Peshawar plain which, lying in the foreground like an Attic stage, leads the eye on to a vast back-curtain of everlasting snow. Seen from Cherat in the cold, clear light of a winter day, the great plain with its converging rivers and rectilinear canals — both shot to silver here and there as the day revolves — this and the amphitheatre of surrounding hills, backed in the north by the chain of giant mountains, provide a prospect of splendour not easily forgotten. In the far north sprawls the mass of Tirich Mir; north-east, perhaps 120 miles away, the mighty breast of Nanga Parbat, stark and gleaming, challenges the sky.

In summer, though still verdant with the crops of the season — maize, millet, rice and growing cane — the valleys swelter in a steamy heat as uncomfortable as any in the world. The unwatered tracts and the thorny half-deserts of the lower hills at that season provide a foretaste of the regions of the damned. Yet such is the sharpness and salt of contrast that at the very height of the hot weather a few hours’ journey will take the sufferer to forest glades and alpine pastures where he can find again the climate of an English summer.

For further contrast, in many tracts at certain times of the year there is a stark ugliness, well described in that same recent book  as ‘a sullen hate, not the keen, glittering hate that everyone enjoys . . . mountains brown like snuff, ten-thousand foot mounds with the track snaking its way through for mile on heavy mile’. That was written of the road to Kabul, but it might apply equally to some journeys through Waziristan or in the desolation of Zhob. But then, suddenly, the landscape opens out — there is a trickle of water, a group of trees, a garden — and there comes a sense of rare fulfilment. To get that feeling a man should travel north from the burning boulder-strewn hills and torrent-beds of Thai in Lower Kurram. In a couple of hours he may find himself dreaming in paradise beside the planes and willows that line the streams tumbling with the noise of constant water from the snows of the mountain-wall above Parachinar.

The western of the two belts of territory making up this Frontier lies wholly in the mountains between the administered border and the political boundary known as the Durand Line. Part of it indeed overlaps the Durand Line. It starts with the escarpment mentioned and rises to highlands in some places carrying peaks from 10,000 to 16,000 feet in height. Almost everywhere the foothills are bleak ahd uninviting, hard and craggy,  splintered by frost and blistered by furnace heat according to the season. But tucked away in the mountain recesses are valleys of great beauty and fertility, vying in the north even with Kashmir. Through this territory go seven main routes, which figure in history as corridors of invasion and commerce between the Indus plains and Central Asia. Two of these, the Khaibar and the Malakand, we know. The others from north to south are the Gandab route through Mohmand country, the Bangash or Paiwar route by Kurram, the Gumal and Tochi routes through Waziristan, and the Bolan route by Quetta. All of these, except the last, though used by tribal caravans, are closed to regular international traffic. The Mohmand, Bangash, and Tochi routes are indeed served by roads from the plains which penetrate to points well up the valleys but do not cross into Afghanistan. Even the Malakand road, stretching as far as Chitral, cannot be regarded as an international highway; it is not passable by vehicles into Russia or China.

The authority of the various empires which claimed in the past to rule this Frontier really only extended to control over the plains and one or two of the passages through the mountains. Only the greater Mughals seem to have thought it worth their while to make a serious attempt to bring the hill-tribes under domination as subjects, and, as we shall see, they failed. Even passage by a main route through the mountains had often to be asserted by force and with difficulty against the refractory tribes which held the road in use at the time. An understanding of this fact explains the escape of this tribal belt as a whole from subjection to any external power — a freedom symbolized by the failure to impose in it any taxation. This, too, is the reason why a tribal form of society has persisted in a country which lay across the passage of countless invaders, including Alexander, Chingiz Khan and Tamerlane, the most famous conquerors in all history.

But there is another side to this medal. This very freedom, enjoyed over the centuries by the heart-lands of the Pathan, denies to the enquirer all the usual raw material of history. Until 1747 there was no local principality; therefore there are no records or coins except those of the empires on whose fringes the tribal belt lay. Even the language oi the Pathans does not seem to have been reduced to writing until the fifteenth century, and there is no extant literary work known to be genuine earlier than the seventeenth. Therefore there are no chronicles available until relatively modern times. The Pathans did not build monuments or write inscriptions in their own country. Therefore there is no epigraphical material. It follows that the historian must rely on stray and chance material available in the records, inscriptions, literature, monuments and coins of the many dynasties and peoples whose path took them across the territories where the Afghans and Pathans now dwell, wherever possible adjusting the results of his labour to the record and tradition, often oral, of the Pathans themselves. The most he can hope to do is to blaze a trail which others, with growing knowledge, may follow and improve.

The prologue is spoken and the curtain goes up. I must not further delay the play. One thing only would I add here. The persistence of the Pathan tribal tradition has produced a society at all levels, starting from the nomad and herdsman, through the articulated tribe and the sponsors of an Asian dynastic principle, to the modern lawyer, engineer, doctor, administrator and politician. Standing over against the tribal village and the tents of the caravan are men for a century imbued with Western thought and now reaching forward to that synthesis of values which Pakistan strives to attain. All these stages of social and political development can be seen today, side by side and superimposed one on another, by anyone who cares to move in a twenty-mile radius around Peshawar. By so doing it is possible to enjoy daily a bodily translation into earlier phases of human society and life — a wonderful occasion for anyone endowed with historical instincts. We have here what John Morley called a congeries of peoples engaged in a long march through the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth. To be in a position to observe all this, relatively undisturbed by the influences of our complex life, is a vastly exciting experience.

It is a part of the magic of the Frontier.