The Yusufzai were of special interest to me as the first of the Pathan peoples to come into contact with the British when the East India Company pushed northwards across the Punjab in the 1840s. Because the British came to the Vale of Peshawar as conquerors of the Sikhs, who had long oppressed the Pathans, the Yusufzai greeted them as liberators when they took over from the Sikhs as governors of Peshawar city and began administering the surrounding countryside. The young British officers who came to speak to their tribal chiefs and clan leaders, the khans and maliks, were polite and friendly. Indeed, so upright and honest were they in their dealings that they were credited with a facial deformity that made it impossible for them to lie. These early political officers were also keen to know more of the ways of the Yusufzai and, moreover, they were recognised by the Pathans as Ahl al-Kitab, People of the Book, who shared with them the revelations of the early prophets – unlike the Sikhs, who were heathen kaffirs and proven enemies of Islam.
The first agent of the British East India Company to arrive in these parts was the political envoy Mountstuart Elphinstone, leading an embassy to the Amir of Kabul in 1809. He found a lot to admire in the character of the Yusufzai and the other Pathan tribes: ‘They are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent.’ But Elphinstone came to Peshawar as a guest and potential ally, whereas the Britons who followed in his footsteps were agents of what is now termed imperial expansionism but was at the time called the Forward Policy, the extension of British India’s frontier beyond the Indus so as to leave no political vacuum for any other imperial power – such as France or Russia – to occupy. To Harry Lumsden and his fellow politicals the Pathans were potential subjects, and their strengths and weaknesses were seen in that light. Working alongside Lumsden at Hoti Mardan for many years was Dr Henry Bellew, attached to the Corps of Guides as their surgeon. Bellew was an outstanding linguist and got to know the Yusufzai well, later compiling an ethnographic study still regarded as a classic of its kind. Like Elphinstone before him, the doctor was impressed by the Pathans’ rugged individualism. ‘Each tribe under its own chief is an independent commonwealth,’ he wrote, ‘and collectively each is the other’s rival if not enemy… Every man is pretty much his own master. Their khans and maliks only exercise authority on and exact revenues from the mixed population… They eternally boast of their descent, their prowess in arms, and their independence, and cap all by “Am I not a Pakhtun?”’
What Bellew and other British officials also discovered was that Pathan pride went hand in hand with Pathan violence. ‘It would seem that the spirit of murder is latent in the heart of nearly every man in the valley,’ observed Judge Elsmie when he came to write his Notes on some of the Characteristics of Crime and Criminals in the Peshawar Division of the Punjab, 1872 to 1877. ‘Murder in all its phases: unblushing assassination in broad daylight, before a crowd of witnesses; the carefully planned secret murder of the sleeping victim at dead of night, murder by robbers, murder by rioters, murder by poisoners, murder by boys, and even by women, sword in hand… Crime of the worst conceivable kind is a matter of almost daily occurrence amongst a Pathan people.’
The Yusufzai settled in the Vale of Peshawar and elsewhere in the plains could be coerced into paying taxes and accepting British authority, provided it was not too heavy-handed. However, their fellow-tribesmen in the mountains took a very different view. Like all the larger Pathan tribes, the mountain Yusufzai in Swat and Buner were divided into numerous sub-tribes and clans that were constantly at each other’s throats, but the moment the British so much as threatened to encroach these same sub-tribes and clans at once put aside their feuds to unite under one banner. They had united to resist the best efforts of the Great Mughal, Akbar, and they did the same with the British. There are places in those mountain strongholds overlooking the Vale of Peshawar whose names came to resonate loud and long in the British public consciousness because of pitched battles fought and hard won, among them ‘Ambeyla’ and ‘Malakand’.
Dr Bellew saw the mountain Yusufzai at their best and worst, and, after many years of bitter, first-hand experience, concluded that their worst was pretty awfuclass="underline"
The circumstances under which they live have endowed them with the most opposite qualities – an odd mixture of virtues and vices. Thus they are hardy, brave and proud; at the same time they are faithless, cunning and treacherous. Frugal in their own habits, they are hospitable to the stranger, and charitable to the beggar. The refugee they will protect and defend with their lives, but the innocent wayfarer they will plunder and slay for the pleasure of the act. Patriotic in a high degree, and full of pride of race, yet they will not scruple to betray for gold their most sacred interests or their nearest relations… Under no authority at home, they are constantly at feud with each other, and hostility with their neighbours. Murder and robbery are with them mere pastimes; revenge and plunder the occupation of their lives… Secure in the recesses of their mountains, they have from time immemorial defied the authority of all the governments that have preceded us on the frontier.
The British soon concluded that not just the Yusufzai of Swat and Buner but all the Pathans in the mountains were best left alone. Recognising them to be well-nigh ungovernable, the British Government of the Punjab devised a system that reflected the realities of the situation. British rule was deemed to extend to the foot of the mountains and this was termed the ‘Settled Areas’; all the tribespeople who had their villages in this area were expected to pay their taxes and follow the Indian Penal Code, with some minor modifications. Beyond this belt of settled land was a second strip that extended deep into the mountains to the north and west; this became known as the ‘Tribal Areas’. Not until 1893 was a set frontier established between Afghanistan and British India, when the Durand Line was drawn up by a senior British official in consultation with the Amir of Kabul; today it forms the agreed frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This British legacy cuts right through Pathan territory and is arguably the most porous border in the world – and the most difficult to police. It always has been, and still is, a no-go area for outsiders.
After wandering over the battlefields of Ambeyla (not to be confused with the town of Amballa, of which more later) and Malakand I moved on westwards to the hill country of Hazara. I had said my goodbyes to Rahimullah Yusufzai and was now travelling in a vehicle provided by another authority on frontier matters and tribal history, Bashir Ahmad Khan, former political officer and diplomat, whose Yusufzai Swati ancestors had long ago crossed the Indus to claim the delightful Mansehra Valley in upper Hazara. As well as briefing me before I set out, the ever-generous Bashir Khan had also provided me with a detailed set of notes on what I was to look out for.
To get to Hazara I had to skirt the mountains of Buner, which as they approach the Indus Valley push southwards into the Vale of Peshawar to form a large spur shaped like a closed fist. This is the Mahabun Mountain: more accurately, a massif some thirty miles wide and fifteen deep made up of a jumble of mountain peaks linked by jagged ridges and riven by steep-sided valleys (see Map 2, ‘The Peshawur Valley’). Before the Muslim conquests it was venerated by Buddhists as Udiyana, the Paradise Garden, and by Hindus as the Great Forest (Mahaban), a favourite retreat of sages and hermits. Among Muslims, too, it had come to be regarded as a place of particular sanctity, so that many pirs (holy men) had been drawn to settle there. ‘It forms an important and striking feature on that part of the frontier,’ wrote John Adye, one of the first British officers to penetrate this mountain fastness in 1863: