The Pathan Unarmed

Mukulika Banerjea

Publishing Date: Thursday, July 29 2004

Pathans are commonly associated with the full gamut of violence, from the domestic variety through tribal feud to armed resistance to outsiders. Accordingly, a peculiar interest attaches itself to the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God, often referred to as the Red Shirts, a Pathan organization which professed (and sometimes practised) non-violence in the North West Frontier province of British India during the 1930s and 1940s. The apparent paradox of the wolf behaving like a lamb is the puzzle which intrigues Mukulika Banerjea, an anthropologist from University Col1ege London, and which she endeavours to solve in this book, a mixture of history and anthropological inquiry, which is based on documents from the India Office Records, the National Archives in Delhi and the Nehru papers, and, more particularly, on interviews with more than 70 veteran members of the Khudai Khidmatgar organization. It was a bold and strange enterprise for a young Indian Hindu woman to venture into the Frontier province of Pakistan and interview elderly Pathans, and al1 credit to Dr Banerjea for her initiative and determination. Nevertheless, the nature of the study did impose some limitations on the author's freedom to pursue her inquiries without restraint.

Although there are several biographies and a species of autobiography of the founder of the Khudai Khidmatgar, Abd al-Ghaffar Khan, and some academic studies of the politics of the North West Frontier Province during the period concerned, and although these works include some information about the organization, there have been no studies specifical1y dedicated to the movement. A valuable part of this book, therefore, is the account of the organization and programme of the Khudai Khidmatgar. In some ways it is reminiscent of the Muslim Brotherhood with its emphasis on educational and social work and its training camps, although the prominent place given to spinning and grinding seeds recal1s the Gandhian ideas which strongly influenced Abd al-Ghaffar. Interestingly, the author compares the Khudai Khidmatgar to the Salvation Army, which was active in India during the 1920s and 1930s, and this comment also provides another link with the Muslim Brotherhood. Several previous writers have been led by the adoption of a distinctive uniform to compare the Khudai Khidmatgar with the many coloured shirt movements which abounded in the interwar period in Europe, the Middle East, India and elsewhere, and have remarked the choice of red as indicating an affection for communism. Banerjea rejects these comparisons. She regards red as the colour of the establishment or as symbolizing blood and sacrifice, and she points out that the original colour was brown, although red was more favoured subsequently. The association with communism she considers to be British propaganda designed, like the soubriquet Red Shirts, to discredit the Khudai Khidmatgar. She remarks, like previous writers, that the overwhelming majority of the Khudai Khidmatgars were poor peasants from the Peshawar valley and that neither wealthy khans nor landless labourers took part in the movement. She states that most members came from Peshawar and Mardan (presumably the tahsils), but unfortunately she does not attempt a tribal analysis. Nor does she discuss in any detail the links between the Khudai Khidmatgar and the inhabitants of the tribal areas beyond the administrative frontier, although the alleged activities of Khudai Khidmatgars among the neighbouring tribes formed an important element in British discussions at the time. One would like to have known more about the relationship between the Khudai Khidmatgar riots in Peshawar in April 1930 and the tribal incursions which followed that event.

The leadership of the organization was top heavy: officers and NCOs abounded in the military organization; khans ruled the jirgas which were the characteristic feature of the civil organization. In practice the organization was dominated by the figure of Abd al-Ghaffar, who exhibited the virtues of humility, austerity and virtue and whose charisma was acknowledged by his followers who saw him as a prophet who possessed magical powers. He kept firm control of the movement he had founded and, even when the organization was linked to the Indian National Congress, he ensured that the military wing remained separate and under his direct authority. Banerjea supplies an interesting chapter on the ideology of the movement which she sees as a mixture of Islam, Pakhtunwali and Gandhian non-violence, and argues that the three elements were not in conflict, indeed that non-violence was rooted in Islam and Pakhtunwali. Here seems to lie Banerjea's answer to the conundrum of why the Pathans practised non-violence. Readers must study her argument and decide for themselves whether they are convinced. Much depends upon how far one believes the Khudai Khidmatgars actually practised non-violence.

Banerjea insists on the non-violent character of the Khudai Khidmatgar protests. Like the Congress passive resisters, the Khudai Khidmatgar, she argues, were content to fight for freedom by performing a peaceful breach of the law and offering themselves for arrest. The British records tell a different story and, obviously, Banerjea had her own doubts about the extent to which the Khudai Khidmatgar eschewed violence. Her informants, when questioned about this matter, first insisted that all their activities were non-violent, but subsequently some conceded that there may occasionally have been violence under provocation from the security forces. Banerjea did not press them further. 'It was difficult to ask the Khudai Khidmatgars about lapses from non-violence and understandably they wished me to know only of their successes', she writes (p.122). She was plainly reluctant to press the question further. Moreover, there are times when the reader may well think that she was content to believe that the Khudai Khidmatgars truly practised non-violence, just as she is very ready to believe the tales of British atrocities against the Khudai Khidmatgars. These include sexual humiliation, castration, burning alive and so on, stories which come from the Khudai Khidmatgar informants or from Indian National Congress sources orfrom sympathetic Britons who relied on Khudai Khidmatgar informants. Several of these stories appear in the autobiography of Abd al-Ghaffar. One wishes that Banerjea had made more extensive use of British reports but she does not do so, and does not use the Peshawar police reports at all.

The book contains some general reflections on the relation of her work to anthropological theory and some remarks on history which are fairly disastrous as, for example, in the account of the first Anglo-Afghan war (p.36). One could say that a weakness of this interesting book is that the tensions between history and anthropology are never fully resolved; myths and legends are important, but so is what actually happened.

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