Abstract
Based on previously unreferenced archival evidence, as well as Pukhtun oral testimonies collected during field research in Swat, this essay brings forth a chapter within the missing history of resistance on the North-West Frontier of British India. Moving beyond what might appear as the perception of resistance as merely yet another episode of armed revolt on the Frontier (1897 uprising in Swat), an array of complex dynamics is uncovered that was at play within the lived historical reality of colonial resistance. As such, this examination does not just push against caricatured colonialist images but also problematizes a potentially useful area of inquiry, that of millenarian movements as violent social protests against the conditions of colonial rule.
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Notes
- 1.
The North-West Frontier fits the model of “Zomia” as described by James Scott and the Pukhtuns offer an illuminating example of people who were successful in warding off the state. See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 2.
Akbar S. Ahmed, Millennium and Charisma among Pathans: A Critical Essay in Social Anthropology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 105.
- 3.
FATA, viewed as a semiautonomous area (especially the political agencies), is comprised of seven political agencies and six Frontier regions. The political agencies include Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan and the Frontier regions Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu, Tank, Dera Ismail Khan and Lakki Marwat.
- 4.
The Earl of Northbrook, House of Commons, March 7, 1898. Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 1898 (contained in the India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library, London, UK).
- 5.
Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 89.
- 6.
Lionel James, Indian Frontier War: Being an Account of the Mohmund and Tirah Expeditions (London: Heinemann, 1898), p. 4.
- 7.
While there is a growing body of works that challenges such notions (Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Benjamin D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)), this criticism is mainly directed towards the literature dealing with rebellion and warfare directly or indirectly. Recently, there is starting to be a small shift with the appearance of some scholarly works that challenge such orientalist colonial notions. See, for example, Gavin Rand, “From the Black Mountain to Waziristan: Culture and Combat on the North-West Frontier,” in Kaushik Roy and Gavin Rand (eds.), Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 131–156 and Mark Condos, “‘Fanaticism’ and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 58, no. 3 (2016), 717–745. However, too often there is a steady ongoing publication of works that continue to reproduce such constructs. See, for example, Charles Allen, God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009). See also Jules Stewart, The Savage Border cited below.
- 8.
Churchill accompanied the Malakand Field Force as a war correspondent and went on to publish his accounts as articles which subsequently appeared as his first book titled, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Winston B. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (London: Longmans, Green, & Co. Ltd., 1898). Because of his later fame this work has been cited as particularly authoritative even though it is well in keeping with numerous other colonial accounts of the period. Predictably, Con Coughlin’s recent account of Churchill’s first war provides juicy details on young Churchill and his unsavoury actions in Malakand, reproducing the ongoing uncritical narrative of the war, dutifully tending to imperial tradition and sensationalism through inane sweeping parallels between tribes Churchill fought and the Taliban of contemporary Afghanistan/Pakistan. Con Coughlin, Churchill’s First War: Young Winston and the Fight against the Taliban (London: Macmillan, 2013).
- 9.
Diary of Political Agent from 30 July to 11 August. Proceedings of the Government of India (hereafter PGOI) (National Archives of India, New Delhi, India) (hereafter NAI).
- 10.
Government of India. Army. Intelligence Branch, Frontier and Overseas Expeditions from India. Vol I. Tribes North of the Kabul River (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1910).
- 11.
H. L. Nevill, Campaigns on the North-West Frontier (London: John Murray, 1912), pp. 249–250.
- 12.
Jules Stewart, The Savage Border: The Story of the North-West Frontier (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007), p. 82.
- 13.
Ahmed, Millennium and Charisma among Pathans, p. 105.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 107.
- 15.
There is a considerable body of literature on such movements using terms such as “revitalization,” “nativist,” “messianic,” “revivalist” and “millennial.” Michael Adas’ study includes the Maji Maji rebellion which he groups amongst five other rebellions that occurred from 1825 to 1932. Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements against the European Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Guenter Lewy in a section on revolutionary millenarianism has briefly discussed the Mahdia of Sudan which he groups with revolts such as the Taiping Rebellion and the Cargo Cults of Melanasia. Gunter Lewy, Religion and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). See also Anthony F. Wallace, Revitalization Movements (New York: Irvington, 1991) and Bryan R. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
- 16.
F. K. Interview with author, 1995.
- 17.
From Deane to The Government of India, PGOI, Secret Frontier, 1898 (NAI).
- 18.
For a glimpse into such politics especially leading to the emergence of the state of Swat, see Sultan-I-Rome, Swat State (1915–1969) From Genesis to Merger: An Analysis of Political, Administrative, Socio-Political, and Economic Developments (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 19.
I have explored this connection in Waziristan during the 1897 revolt. See Sameetah Agha, “Deciphering the Maizar Military Tribunal, 1897: Civil-Military Tensions and Pukhtun Resistance on the North-West Frontier of British India,” in Kaushik Roy and Gavin Rand (eds.), Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 157–182.
- 20.
Note by E. H. S. Clarke, July 28, 1897. PGOI, K. W., September 1897 (NAI).
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Extract from Diary for the Week Ending July 4, 1897 PGOI (NAI).
- 23.
One informant actually brought this up during an interview by stating: “In our region we don’t have any tradition of ‘Nawabi’. It was artificially made up by the British as a bribe…” (B. K., Swat, 1995).
- 24.
From Major H. A. Deane, C. S. I., Political Agent for Dir, Swat and Chitral, To The Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign Department, July 21, 1897, PGOI, Foreign Frontier, September 1897 (NAI).
- 25.
Note by E. H. S. Clarke, July 28, 1897, PGOI, K. W., September 1897 (NAI).
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Kalaband means bound or encircled. Hermuz Khan, interview by author, May 1995, Buner.
- 28.
Diary of Political Agent for the week ending September 26, 1897 (NAI).
- 29.
The Pashto term used was bepardah.
- 30.
Mirat referred to a family left without male heirs. They were considered to have lost status and their property redistributed.
- 31.
Kashkar refers to Chitral. F. K., May 1995, Swat.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Recited by F. K.
- 35.
Extract from the Confidential Diary No. II of the District Superintendent of Police, Kohat, for the week ending July 31, 1897, PGOI, K. W., September 1897.
- 36.
For a discussion of these groups, see A. H. Mcmahon and A. D. G. Ramsay, Report on the Tribes of Dir, Swat and Bajour together with the Utman Khel and Sam Ranizai (Peshawar: Saeed Book Bank, 1981). McMahon describes the Saiads, Mians, Akhundzadas and Sahibzadas as those claiming lineage from a spiritual personage of the past “whose sanctity and importance has conferred a religious status on his descendants.” It is illuminating that at the same time he states that these “religious classes need not and seldom do occupy themselves with religion” (pp. 20–21). A relevant classic study is Frederik Barth, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans (London: Athlone Press, 1959). For another perspective from Akbar Ahmed, see Akbar S. Ahmed, Religion and Politics in Muslim Society: Order and Conflict in Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also Benjamin D. Hopkins and Magnus Marsden (eds.), Beyond Swat History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
- 37.
From the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar to the Commissioner and Superintendent, Peshawar Division, August 8, 1897, PGOI, K. W., 1897. (NAI).
- 38.
McMahon, Report on the Tribes of Dir, Swat and Bajaur, p. 27. Cited here as a reprinted book, the report was originally a confidential government document written in 1901.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
McMahon, p. 27.
- 41.
Haji Nawab Khan participated in the attack on Malakand in 1897. He was a young boy at the time and carried a flag like many other young boys for Sartor Fakir when he was mobilizing people. In his own words he was of the age when “hair on his face had started to grow.” He was between 110 and 115 years old at the time of interview in 1995. Haji Nawab Khan, interview by author, April 28, 1995, Swat.
- 42.
Haji Nawab Khan, interview by author, April 28, 1995, Swat.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Georges Balandier, Political Anthropology (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1970), p. viii.
- 45.
Focusing on the Jamaat-I Mujahidin in the early twentieth century and the Mujahideen anti-Soviet movement (1978–1985), Sana Haroon provides a compelling view that challenges the idea of “Islamic religiosity and valor as foundational principles of tribal order in the Pashtun highlands both in the Jamaat-I Mujahidin’s own time and in the later twentieth century.” Sana Haroon, “Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderland,” in Nile Green (ed.), Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), pp. 145–162 (p. 145). Instead, the “definition and organization of community in the Pashtun region and the work of religious leaders among them were inextricably intertwined with the colonial cartographic demarcation of a military frontier” (p. 146). See also Haroon, Frontier of Faith (full citation given in note 4 above); Benjamin D. Hopkins, “Islam and Resistance in the British Empire,” in David Motadel (ed.), Islam and the European Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 150–169.
- 46.
H. Woosnam Mills, The Pathan Revolt in North West India (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1897), p. 34.
- 47.
Ibid, p. 36.
- 48.
Adas, Prophets of Rebellion, p. xxiii.
- 49.
While the conceptual insights and interpretive approaches provided by Guha were groundbreaking and opened up new pathways for subsequent generations of scholars, his most celebrated study is not an example of a counter-history. From his account we do not know who the actors were, nor their relationships, nor the details of the events that made up the peasant insurgency. In the noble project to give the subaltern “agency” and rescue them from the “pre-political” void of history, the “peasant” emerges as a singular, undifferentiated entity lacking a committed reconstruction of the full realities of their own complex politics. Redress of these limitations may be of little urgency in formulating and substantiating powerful revolutionary theory, but is fundamental to understanding insurgencies in all their historicity. Confronting such historiographic limitations requires both a vigilant countering of expectations and an ever-resourceful dedication towards what relevant omitted realities we might reconstruct (see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983)).
- 50.
John Iliffe, “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion,” The Journal of African History, 8, no. 3 (1967), 495–512; Gilbert Gwassa, “Kinjikitile and the ideology of Maji Maji,” in Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo (eds.), The Historical Study of African Religion (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 208–218; Patrick M. Redmond, “Maji Maji in Ungoni: A Reappraisal of Existing Historiography,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 8, no. 3 (1975), 407–424; Marcia Wright, “Maji Maji: Prophecy and Historiography,” in David Anderson and Douglas Johnson (eds.), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (London: James Currey, 1995), pp. 412–442. Thaddeus Sunseri, “Famine and Wild Pigs: Gender Struggles and the Outbreak of the Maji Maji War in Uzaramo (Tanzania),” The Journal of African History, 38, no. 2 (1997), 235–259.
- 51.
Jamie Monson, “Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918,” The Journal of African History, 39, no. 1 (1998), 95–120.
- 52.
Felicitas Becker, “Traders, ‘Big Men’ and Prophets: Political Continuity and Crisis in the Maji Maji Rebellion in Southeast Tanzania,” The Journal of African History, 45, no. 1 (2004), 1–22.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 20.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 55.
John Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958); Robert L. Solomon, “Saya San and the Burmese Rebellion,” Modern Asian Studies, 3, no. 3 (1969), 209–223; Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1965); Michael Adas, “Bandits, Monks and Pretender Kings: Patterns of Peasant Resistance and Protest in Colonial Burma, 1826–1941,” in Robert P. Weller and Scott E. Guggenheim (eds.), Power and Protest in the Countryside: Studies of Rural Unrest in Asia, Europe, and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), pp. 75–105; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
- 56.
The revolt was a case study in Scott’sMoral Economy of the Peasant where he does not discuss its religious nature. However, in “Protest and profanation” he characterized it as millennial. See James C. Scott, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition, Part II,” Theory and Society 4, no. 2 (1977), 211–246.
- 57.
James C. Scott, “Protest and profanation,” 1977, Part II, p. 239.
- 58.
James C. Scott, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition, Part I,” Theory and Society 4, no. 1 (1977), 1–38, p. 22.
- 59.
Adas, Prophets of Rebellion.
- 60.
Patricia M. Herbert, The Hsaya San Rebellion (1930–1932) Reappraised (Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1982).
- 61.
Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), p. 26.
- 62.
While some scholars attempted to continue in the direction opened by Herbert’s study (see for instance, Parimal Ghosh, Brave Men of the Hills: Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825–1932 (London: Hurst, 2001), Aung-Thwin has demonstrated in his work that the narrative of the Saya San rebellion beyond its colonial construction is about how that “event” was recorded and legitimated for the archive and “how that archive preserved that narrative for historians in their histories” (Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King, p. 34). See also Maitrii Aung-Thwin, “Structuring Revolt: Communities of Interpretation in the Historiography of the Saya San Rebellion,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 39, no. 2 (2008), 297–317.
- 63.
See Aung-Thwin, “Structuring Revolt.” In instances where scholars have scrutinized sources, how they have been interpreted and sought the necessary evidence we see the emergence of counter histories of insurgents. An outstanding example of such work is James Belich’s work on the British-Maori wars. See James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict: The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990).
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Agha, S. (2019). Demystifying “Millenarianism”: Oral Historical Evidence of Pukhtun Resistance and Colonial Warfare in the North-West Frontier of British India. In: Domingos, N., Jerónimo, M.B., Roque, R. (eds) Resistance and Colonialism. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19167-2_2
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