Settling the Frontier

Land, Law & Society in the Peshawar Valley; 1500-1900

Publishing Date: Monday, November 29 2004

Author: Robert Nichols
Publishers: Oxford University Press

Dr Nichols is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's School of South Asia Regional Studies and this book appears to be an expansion of his doctoral dissertation. He has learned Persian, Pashto and Urdu and read widely in the literature of his period in those languages as well as thoroughly investigating British archival malerial in Peshawar, Lahore, New Delhi and London. His 14-page bibliography attests to the breadth of his reading in the official and semi-official publications of the British period and the post-Partition works of anthropologists, historians and political and socio-cultural theoreticians.

In his first four chapters the author describes and analyses the expansion and consolidation of Pakhtun settlements in the Peshawar valley, the development and enrichment of their ethnic identity and their reactions to Moghul, Afghan and finally Sikh domination. The fifth chapter deals with lhe penetration of Islamic ideas and Law and adjustments to them and the sixth describes the physical and agricultural setting. Finally, in his last chapter, Dr Nichols examines the political, social and economic impact of British rule locally through the records of setllement and revenue officers and the courts, and in the wider imperial context of expanding commercial linkages and strategic interventions beyond the Afghan frontier.

The geographical focus of Dr Nichols' research is lhe former Yusufzai Sub-division, now Mardan district. The Yusufzai; one of the most important of all Pakhtun tribes are divided equally between this intensively farmed and prosperous area, (thanks to British construction of the Swat canal irrigation systems), and the former protected States of Swat and Dir - Today thc 'provincially administered tribal areas' of Malakand Division. This study therefore richly illuminates the complex cross-border interactions which British frontier administrators had to subsume in their strategies for political control and development.

The author elucidates the Yusufzai capacity to resist and evade imperial domination and exploilation in all its aspects; military, administrative, economic, cultural, and ideological. By so doing he explains why both they and Pakhtuns generally are still struggling to adapt their traditional egalitarian and fiercely Islamic ethic to the norms of modern democracy. As he concludes: "Fifty years after the end of British colonial rule the legacies of lineage dynamics, imperially created inequities and structures of control developed by the colonial state continued to hinder the full implementation of twentieth-century nationalist ideals".

Dr Nichols amply supports this thesis in his first nine chapters describing British success in first conquering and then settling the Yusufzai of the Peshawar valley. In his final chapter; "Interpreting Resistance: the Fanatic and the Subaltern", his focus shifts to the unadministered tribal agency of Dir, Swat and Chitral. He seeks to demonstrate that the resistance to British hegemony resulting in the Malakand rising of 1897 was due neither to fanaticism; as the British then claimed, nor to proto-nationalist sentiment; as argued by the Subaltern School of historians. In his view, based on the reports and correspondence of officials on the spot, the Pakhtun or the tribal areas had legitimate practical objections to British interference, and the latter were there are not entitled to attribute their resistance to fanaticism. He may well be right, but by denying both the religious and the nationalist aspects of Pakhtun resistance he comes very close to condemning them to an increasingly anachronistic anarchism. As an earlier American writer has
put it "the Pathan were fighting primarily for the right to be free, (this) involved the right to do things that cannot continue to be done if any society is to survive indefinitely in modern times". (James W Spain; The Pathan Borderland
p. 198). Major Deane; Political Agent of the Malakand, faced the reality of mullah-inspired resistance to imperial rule in 1897 and General Musharraf; struggling today to establish the legitimacy of the Pakistan state has a very similar problem.