Abstract
In early April 1930, the Viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, visited the NorthWest Frontier Province (NWFP). Hosted by the Chief Commissioner of the province, Sir Norman Bolton, the tour appeared to be a success. Upon Irwin’s return to Simla, Bolton wrote to the Viceroy, thanking him for his visit and commenting on the “tranquility” of the province, which he chalked up to the “level headed loyalty of the people.”1 Within a week of his letter to Irwin, the Frontier was ablaze. By the end of April, the NWFP had witnessed mass shootings in Peshawar, the occupation of the city by local nationalists, the mental collapse of the Chief Commissioner, a mutiny within the Indian Army, a revolt throughout the rural areas of the Peshawar District, and threatening noises from the trans-border tribes. By August, Irwin informed the Secretary of State for India that “the whole of Peshawar District … must be considered in [a] state of war.”2
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Notes
Although the concerns about a Soviet invasion were driven by London, Delhi was also worried about internal communism. See Lester Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut (New York, 1972). For the Indian intelligence service’s longstanding interest in internal and external communism see
Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904–1924 (London, 1995).
Abdul Ghaffar Khan, My Life and Struggle: Autobiography of Badshah Khan as Narrated to K. B. Narang (Delhi, 1969), p. 58.
Quote from the Anjuman’s official publication, Pakhtun, October 1928, in Stephen Alan Rittenberg, Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Pakhtuns: The Independence Movement in India’s North-West Frontier Province (Durham, North Carolina, 1988), p. 70.
Sir Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550BC–AD1957 (London, 1958), Chapter 26.
Interview with unnamed Khudai Khidmatgar veteran in Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North-West Frontier (Delhi, 2001), p. 53.
See Leon B. Poullada, Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929: King Amanullah’s Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, 1973) and
Roland Wild, Amanullah: Ex-King of Afghanistan (London, 1932).
Humphrys to Government of India, 27 November 1928, TNA FO 371/13290. Tribesmen entered the city and threatened the British Legation. In February, Humphrys decided to evacuate the Legation, prompting history’s first airlift in which over 500 people were flown out of Kabul in Victoria bombers (See Anne Baker, Wings Over Kabul: The First Airlift (London, 1975)).
See Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 83–91. For a recent interpretation of the Sarda Act, see
Mrinali Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of India (Durham, North Carolina, 2006), Chapter 4.
NWFP Fortnightly Report for the First Half of October 1929, L P&J 12/9. The fact that Congress sponsored the Sarda Act was inexplicably ignored. This was fact that he was, as his former subordinate, K. P. S. Menon, put it: “not one of the world’s workers.” Menon, a future Foreign Minister of India and one of only two Hindu Indians in the Political Service in the 1930s, noted that Metcalfe’s work day consisted of mornings only, and not even mornings on Monday and Thursday when he rode to the Peshawar hounds (see Kumara P. S. Menon, Many Worlds: An Autobiography (Bombay, 1965), p. 92).
See Norval Mitchell, Sir George Cunningham: A Memoir (Edinburgh, 1968), Chapter 3.
The policemen were likely aware of the Chauri-Chaura incident in February 1922, when a crowd of peasants in the United Provinces attacked and burnt a police station, killing the 23 policemen inside. See Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley, California, 1995).
Patel Report, p. 5, and Allah Bukhsh Yusufi, The Frontier Tragedy: An Account of the Inhuman Acts of Repression and Terrorism, Blockades, Loot, Incendiarism & Massacres –Through Which the People of the North-West Frontier Province Have Had to Go During the Present Disturbance (Peshawar, 1930), p. 25.
See, for instance, Howell’s account of his stealthy midnight disarmament of a Mahsud militia as Political Agent, South Waziristan, in 1907, in Evelyn B. Howell, Mizh: A Monograph of Government’s Relations with the Mahsud Tribe (Simla, 1931).
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© 2015 Brandon Marsh
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Marsh, B. (2015). “A Considerable Degree of Supineness”: Nationalism and the British Administration, 1928–1930. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_5
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