Abstract
On Christmas Eve 1931, Indian Police battalions, accompanied by units of the Indian Army and the Royal Air Force, entered Peshawar and all other urban centers of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in order to arrest the leadership of the regional nationalist movement. By Christmas morning the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or the “Red Shirts” as the British referred to them, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, his brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, and a number of other nationalist leaders had been detained and deported from the province on a special train. Meanwhile, military columns spread throughout the NWFP, marching at night, and rounding up entire villages in dawn raids.1 These raids, carried out on a day which, as the then Deputy Commissioner for Peshawar, Olaf Caroe, put it, “nobody, however suspicious, would expect a British authority to proceed to stringent action,” constituted the first salvo in a two-year campaign of attrition against the nationalist movement in the province.2
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Notes
Letter from H. W. Emerson (Secretary, Home Department, Government of India) to W. R. Hay (Chief Secretary, NWFP), 27 April 1932, National Archives of India (NAI) HOME (POL.) F. 40/5/1932. For state sanctioned violence in India during this period see Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (Abingdon, 2010).
Sir William Barton, KCIE, CSI, “The Problems of Law and Order Under a Responsible Government in the North-West Frontier Province,” in the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 19, 1 (1932), pp. 5–21.
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), pp. 10–11.
On Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience campaign of 1930–1934 see e.g., Judith M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience: The Mahatma in Indian Politics, 1928–1934 (Cambridge, 1977) and
Donald Anthony Low, Britain and Indian Nationalism: The Imprint of Ambiguity, 1929–1942 (Cambridge, 1997), Chapters 2 through 5.
Quoted in Carl Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative Party and the 1935 Constitution (New Delhi, 1986), p. 63.
See Indian Round Table Conference: 12 November 1930–19 January 1931, Proceedings (Calcutta, 1931) and Robin J. Moore’s The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917–1940 (Oxford, 1974).
Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 1994), p. 281.
See John W. Cell, Hailey: A Study in British Imperialism, 1872–1969 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 182–183.
Caroe was quite honest about his combativeness in his unpublished memoirs. See also comments by Fraser Noble in Parshotam Mehra, The North-West Frontier Drama, 1945–1947: A Reassessment (New Delhi, 1998), p. 59, and Minute to Sir Saville Garner (Permanent Under-Secretary, Commonwealth Relations Office) from Algeron Rumbold (Commonwealth Relations Office), 19 July 1949, IOR L P&S 12/1417.
See David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920–1932 (New York, 1982), pp. 252–258.
NWFP Fortnightly Report for the Second Half of December 1931. See also Abdul Ghaffar Khan, My Life and Struggle: Autobiography of Badshah Khan as Narrated to K. B. Narang (Delhi, 1969), pp. 146–148. The arrests were made under Regulation III of 1818, which allowed the Government to deport the accused to prisons in India without trial (Rittenberg, Ethnicity, p. 118).
The son of the Anglican Bishop of Sierra Leone, Elwin began his career as Oxford, where he was appointed Vice-Principal of Wycliffe Hall in 1926 and lecturer at Merton the following year. He then set out for India as a missionary. He soon became a follower of Gandhi and a self-taught anthropologist, studying India’s tribal populations. At independence Nehru asked him to stay on and advise the Government of India on Tribal policies –especially in the North-East. See Verrier Elwin, The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin: An Autobiography (New York, 1964) and
Ramachandra Guha’s excellent Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India (Chicago, 1999).
Given the British predilection towards dividing their subjects into “feminine” and “masculine” categories, the apparent use of sexual humiliation against Pathan men in striking. For more on gender and state sanctioned violence in colonial India, see Robert McLain, Gender and Violence in British India: The Road to Amritsar, 1914–1919 (Basingstoke, 2014).
See Amit Kumar Gupta, North-West Frontier Province Legislature and Freedom Struggle, 1932–1947 (New Delhi, 1976), pp. 27–32.
Speech by Sir Samuel Hoare, 28 January 1932, quoted in Nripendra Nath Mitra (ed.), The Indian Annual Register, January–June 1932: An Annual Digest of Public Affairs of India Recording the Nation’s Activities Each Year in Matters Political, Economic, Industrial, Educational, Social, Etc. (Calcutta, 1932), p. 414.
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© 2015 Brandon Marsh
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Marsh, B. (2015). “The Forbidden Land”: The British, Frontier Nationalism, and Congress, 1931–1934. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_7
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