Abstract
In the aftermath of the Frontier uprising of 1930, British policies in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) became a source of heated debate in both India and Britain. Indian nationalists and their allies lambasted the Government of India’s use of excessive force in the settled districts of the Frontier, arguing that this illustrated the fundamental violence that underwrote Britain’s Indian Empire. This criticism, combined with the magnitude of the nationalist movement on the Frontier, convinced the British administration of the need to extend reforms to the NWFP, which brought the administered districts into the All-India political sphere. No longer a “forbidden land,” as one nationalist critic called it, cut off from the rest of India, the Frontier assumed a key role in the constitutional wrangling of the 1930s.1
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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. 10.
Cuthbert Collin Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier 1890–1908: With a Survey of Policy since 1849 (Cambridge, 1932), p. 27.
For British views on the Mohmands, roughly analogous to Evelyn Howell’s Mizh see William Merk, Report on the Mohmands (Lahore, 1882).
Sir William Barton, India’s North-West Frontier (London, 1939), p. 87.
For more on the 1927 Mohmand blockade, see Sana Haroon, Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York, 2006), pp. 138–144.
On the RAF in this period, see David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919–1939 (Manchester, 1990).
Charles Townshend, “Civilization and ‘Frightfulness’: Air Control in the Middle East between the Wars,” in Chris Wrigley (ed.), Warfare Diplomacy and Politics: Essays in Honour of A .J. P. Taylor (London, 1986), p. 143.
Note by Sir Ralph Griffith, KCSI, CIE, Governor of the North-West Frontier Province, 28 June 1933, L P&S 12/3143. For the Government of India’s financial crisis in the inter-war period, see Brian R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India (London, 1979).
See Alan Warren, Waziristan, the Faqir of Ipi, and the Indian Army: The North West Frontier Revolt of 1936–1937 (Karachi, 2000), p. 59.
The Chief Commissioner, Sir Steuart Pears, responded in part to this threat with a request that a new official, Lieutenant-Colonel D.G. Sandeman, be appointed to coordinate intelligence activities on the Frontier (See Christian Tripodi, Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and the Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947 (Farnham, 2011), pp. 176–179).
Cutting from Jugend, 3 September 1933, L P&S 12/3190. As an effort to scare the German people about the need for rapid rearmament and full-scale air force, the Munich chapter of the Reich Civil Defence League staged a mock air raid over the city in August 1933. A number of low flying aircraft dropped “paper bombs” weighted with small bags of sand. In the aftermath, Nazi Stormtroopers swarmed the city in gas masks, clearing “debris” and attending to the “wounded” (see David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (New York, 1997), p. 300).
For the Waziristan campaign of 1936–1937, see Government of India, Official History of Operations of the North-West Frontier of India, 1936–1937 (Delhi, 1938);
Milan Hauner, “One Man Against the Empire: The Faqir of Ipi and the British in Central Asia on the Eve and During the Second World War,” in the Journal of Contemporary History, 16 (1981), pp. 183–212; and Warren, Waziristan.
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles E. Bruce, Waziristan, 1936–1937: The Problems of the North-West Frontiers of India and Their Solutions (Aldershot, 1938).
Davies had served on the Western Front in the First World War. After being shot through a lung he was sent to India in 1918 to wait out the war as a captain in the 2/1st Gurkha Rifles. Davies was still with the regiment when the Third Anglo-Afghan War erupted and he saw several years of service on the Frontier. When he returned to England and took up an academic career, first at SOAS and later at Oxford, he parlayed his Frontier service into a study of Frontier policy in the 1890s and 1910s. The Problem of the North-West Frontier, which was the first work on the Frontier by a non-official who had access to official records in the India Office, remains a masterwork (Cyril Henry Philips, “Cuthbert Collin Davies: A Tribute,” in Donovan Williams and E. Daniel Potts, (eds), Essays in Indian History: In Honour of Cuthbert Collin Davies (New York, 1973), pp. vii–ix).
Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier, p. 179, quoted in Mohammad Yunus, Frontier Speaks: With a Forward by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (Bombay, 1946), p. 83.
Charles F. Andrews, The Challenge of the North-West Frontier: A Contribution to World Peace (London, 1937), pp. 65–66.
See, for instance, Jagat S. Bright, Frontier and its Gandhi (Lahore, 1944).
Note by Sir George Cunningham (Governor, NWFP), 20 June 1939. A full report of Gandhi’s tour can be found in Pyarelal Nair’s A Pilgrimage for Peace: Gandhi and Frontier Gandhi Among the N.W.F. Pathans (Ahmedabad, 1950). Dinanath G. Tendulkar provides a full account of both Gandhi and Nehru’s Frontier tours in Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Faith is a Battle (Bombay, 1967), pp. 217–288.
See J. C. Walton to Sir Findlater Stewart, 20 November 1937, L P&S 12/3251; Carl Heath, The North-West Frontier of India (London, 1937), L P&S 12/3251; J. C. Walton to Sir Findlater Stewart, 22 November 1937, L P&S 12/3251.
See Norval Mitchell, Sir George Cunningham: A Memoir (Edinburgh, 1968). See also
G. Leslie Mallam and Diana Day, A Pair of Chaplis and a Casssock (London, 1978), Mallam Papers; and
Fraser Noble, Something in India (London, 1997).
Lord Halifax (Irwin) to Lord Templewood (Sir Samuel Hoare), 13 July 1953, Templewood Papers E240/76. For Linlithgow’s momentous Viceroyalty, see Gowher Rizvi, Linlithgow and India: A Study of British Policy and Political Impasse in India, 1936–1943 (London, 1978); and
John Glendevon’s sympathetic study of his father, Viceroy at Bay: Lord Linlithgow in India, 1936–1943 (London, 1971).
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© 2015 Brandon Marsh
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Marsh, B. (2015). “A Welcome Weapon of Criticism”: Tribal Policy and Its Discontents, 1930–1939. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_9
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