1 TRIBE and STATE in WAZIRISTAN 1849-1883 Hugh Beattie Thesis

1 TRIBE AND STATE IN WAZIRISTAN 1849-1883 Hugh Beattie Thesis presented for PhD degree at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies 1997 ProQuest Number: 10673067 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673067 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 2 ABSTRACT The thesis begins by describing the socio-political and economic organisation of the tribes of Waziristan in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as aspects of their culture, attention being drawn to their egalitarian ethos and the importance of tarburwali, rivalry between patrilateral parallel cousins. It goes on to examine relations between the tribes and the British authorities in the first thirty years after the annexation of the Punjab. Along the south Waziristan border, Mahsud raiding was increasingly regarded as a problem, and the ways in which the British tried to deal with this are explored; in the 1870s indirect subsidies, and the imposition of ‘tribal responsibility’ are seen to have improved the position, but divisions within the tribe and the tensions created by the Second Anglo- Afghan War led to a tribal army burning Tank in 1879. The contrast is drawn with the relatively good relations which were established with many of the Darwesh Khel Wazirs, some of whom had begun to graze flocks and cultivate land in the Bannu district on the north Waziristan border. However, clumsy handling of the latter led to a serious crisis in 1870, and the resulting efforts to improve tribal management are described. In conclusion, the nature of British frontier policy in Waziristan in this period is analysed, and the strategic, political, economic and cultural influences upon it examined; in particular ideas about how the tribes were organised and could be handled are investigated. Actual techniques of tribal management are described and their effectiveness assessed. Tribal reactions are briefly explored; the difficulties experienced with them are seen to have been due to factionalism and a general clash of cultures, as much as to their poverty. The relationship between the tribes and the government in Kabul in this period is also discussed. The implications for the general question of relations between ‘tribe’ and ‘state’ are briefly assessed, and the dialectical quality of the relationship emphasised. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction - p. 3 Chapter One - Waziristan and the tribes, and the first p. 11 contacts with the British Chapter Two - The Government of India and South p. 41 Waziristan 1849-1870 Chapter Three - The Government of India and South p. 75 Waziristan 1870-1878 Chapter Four - The Government of India and South p. 107 Waziristan 1878-1883 and postscript Chapter Five - The Government of India and the tribes on p. 137 the North Waziristan border 1847-1860 Chapter Six - The Government of India and the tribes on p. 162 the North Waziristan border 1861-1872 Chapter Seven - Tribal Management in Bannu and on the p. 195 Upper Miranzai border in the 1870s Chapter Eight - Tribe and State in Waziristan p. 218 1849-1883 (Part 1) Chapter Nine - Tribe and State in Waziristan p. 246 1849-1883 (Part 2) Chapter Ten - Conclusion p. 270 Maps - p. 279 Appendices - p. 282 Charts - p. 293 Glossary, Footnote Abbreviations - p. 296 Bibliography - p. 300. 4 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND - Aims and scope - There has been growing awareness in recent years that ‘tribe’ and ‘state’, at least in the Middle East and Central Asia, form a single system, and increasing interest in the complex interaction between them. Some of the forms this has taken in Iran and the Arab world have been explored, but although it lasted for nearly a hundred years, and for much of the period is relatively well-documented, there has been very little detailed analysis of the relationship between the Government of India (referred to below as the G.O.I.) and the Pashtun tribes on the north-west frontier. As regards the published work on the frontier in this period, the various contemporary reports and histories, such as those by Temple, Paget and Wylly, tended to concentrate on the military aspects of the encounter, and focused on the raids, expeditions and often daring and dramatic ways in which the tribes tried to resist the growing British penetration of their territory.1 This is also true of most of the biographies of and autobiographies by men who actually served on the frontier, which rarely looked very far beneath the surface glamour and excitement.2 Nor has the relationship between tribe and state on this border been explored in much detail since. The standard English-language accounts of the Pashtuns give sketchy and anecdotal accounts of British relations with the tribes and superficial analyses of their organisation.3 The historical accounts of the British period on the frontier by Davies, Baha and Yapp are much more valuable, but they have been either like Davies’s very general, or confined to a limited period like Baha’s, and in the case of Yapp’s to one particular area as well.4 It should be noted that studies of the foreign relations of the G.O.I. with the countries to the north-west, for example those by Ghose and Chakravarty, also contain some brief references to tribal policy, just as histories 1 R. Temple, Report showing the Relations of the British Government with the Tribes on the North-West Frontier of the Punjab (Lahore, 1865), W.H. Paget, A Record of the Expeditions against the North-West Frontier Tribes (Calcutta, 1874), H.C. Wylly, From the Black Mountain to Waziristan (London, 1912) For example, R.I. Bruce, The Forward Policy and its Results (London, 1900), H.B. Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier (London, 1851), G.W. Forrest, Life of Field-Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain (London, 1909), P.S. Lumsden and G.R. Elsmie, Lumsden of the Guides (London, 1899), E.G. Parry, Revnell Tavlor A Biography. (London, 1888), L.J. Trotter, The Life of John Nicholson Soldier and Administrator (London. 1898) 3 Sir W. Barton, India’s North-West Frontier (London, 1939), J.G. Elliott, The Frontier 1839-1947 (London, 1968), O. Caroe, The Pathans (Karachi, 1983), J.W. Spain, The Pathan Borderland (The Hague, 1963). M. Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (reprinted Karachi, 1972) is an important exception. 4 C.C. Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier (second edition, London, 1975), L. Baha, North West Frontier Province Administration under British Rule 1901-1919 (Islamabad, 1978), M. Yapp, “Tribes and States in the Khyber, 1838-1842”, in R. Tapper, ed., The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan. (London, 1983 5 of Afghanistan, such as those by Gregorian and Fraser-Tytler, mention the Kabul government’s relations with the frontier tribes.5 So far the unpublished academic work on the Sind and Punjab frontiers in the second half of the nineteenth century, like Heathcote’s account of British relations with Kalat in the mid-nineteenth century and Harris’s study of the Forward Policy, though it contains some relevant discussion, has tended to look at developments on the Frontier from the point of view of imperial strategy and defence.6 More recently, Christensen has combined historical and social anthropological approaches to produce an account of socio economic and political change in Afridi society during the British period on the frontier as a whole. Dutta has done something similar for Baluchistan in the later nineteenth century, and a recent thesis by Noelle describes the relationships Dost Muhammad Khan was able to build up with the different groups within his territory, including some of the frontier tribes, and is a valuable addition to the literature.7 However, it remains the case that there has been little detailed examination of developments along the frontier in the British period as a whole, and very little indeed of the first thirty or forty years, when the wider strategic issues were less important. In particular, apart from Howell’s study of relations with the Mahsuds which does not deal in much depth with developments before about 1890, virtually nothing has been written specifically about Waziristan.8 Given that the tribes of Waziristan posed one of the principal challenges to British supremacy along the north-west frontier from 1848 to 1947, and that in military, political and economic terms a very considerable effort went into meeting that challenge, this is perhaps a surprising omission. The greater part of this thesis therefore consists of a detailed account of relations between the G.O.I. and the tribes of Waziristan, in particular the Mahsuds and the Darwesh Khels, in the supposed heyday of the ‘close border’ policy, the period from the annexation of the Punjab in 1849 to the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80), based on the records of the British Indian government in the India Office section of the British Library in London, as well as ideas taken from social anthropological studies of Pashtun social organisation in 5 S. Chakravarty, From Khvber to Qxus (New Delhi, 1976), D.K. Ghose, England and Afghanistan. A Phase in their Relations (Calcutta, 1960), V.

Load more