Chapter 2
Children of the Prophet
The history of my people is full of victories and tales of heroism,
but there are drawbacks too. Internal feuds and personal jealousies
have always snatched away the gains achieved through vast
sacrifices. They were dispossessed only because of their own
inherent defects, never by any outside power-power who could oppose
them on the battlefield?
JIN THE BEGINNING, at least, the British had no intention of
creating an empire. One thing simply led to another. They had not
even gone to India for conquest. “Trade, not property” was the
official policy of the East India Trading Company when it was formed
in 1599, inaugurating Britain’s long association with India.
Nevertheless, the Company’s officers eagerly took advantage of the
opportunities for expansion that presented themselves, and by the
early part of the nineteenth century the Company’s board of
directors had become holders of the greatest imperial possession in
the world-the “jewel in the crown of the Empire”-India.
It all began because of a five pounds sterling change in the cost of
paper. That was how much the Dutch privateers who controlled the
Indian spice trade suddenly raised their price. Feeling the increase
unwarranted, a group of London merchants formed the East India
Trading Company in September 1599. Three months later Queen
Elizabeth signed a charter that granted the new company “exclusive
trading rights with all countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope for
initial periods of fifteen years.” In August 1600, the Company
landed its first ship on the west coast of India, near Bombay. The
Redcoats had come-on business.
Quickly gaining rights to trading depots near Bombay, Madras in the
south, and Calcutta in the east, the Company soon had ships bringing
to England great quantities of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk, and
muslin cotton, and then sailing back with English manufactured
goods. Local rulers, finding their presence profitable, welcomed the
traders.
Inevitably rivalries formed. The Company soon found itself forced
into local politics to protect its commercial interests. It hired
its own army of white mercenaries and Indian sepoys, and before
long, ambitious Company governors-in spite of official Company
policy-had seized control over land. Thus was set in motion an
irreversible process of conquest which led, ultimately, to the
Indian Empire.
In 1757 a young Company colonel, Robert Clive, defeated the army of
a local ruler in Bengal, opening northern India to the dominance of
British influence. Almost imperceptibly the Company’s officers were
turning from merchants to imperialists. Believing that “no greater
blessing may be confirmed on the native inhabitants of India than
the extension of British authority,” ambitious governors extended
their control to include Mysore and Travancore in the south,
Hyderabad and Maratha in Central India, and finally most of the
Deccan, Bengal, and the great Gangetic plain. By the early 1800s the
Company controlled three quarters of the Indian land mass and
possessed some seventy-five thousand British and Indian employees,
an army larger than any military force in continental Europe, and
annual profits that often exceeded the revenues of Great Britain
itself. Only the Royal Navy had more ships.
Along with spectacular success came corruption and
mismanagement-and, eventually, restriction. Politicians in London
grew uneasy with the somewhat indefensible fact that one hundred
million people were being ruled by the board of directors of a
private company. India had become the most stupendous commercial
enterprise in history. Gradually the British government curbed the
company’s monopolies and trading rights and made the
governor-general a virtual government appointee. The East India
Company became officially what it had long been in practice: an
instrument of British foreign policy.
Conquest was a heady wine, and by the early nineteenth century it
had become a habit which the empire builders in London and on the
Indian subcontinent found no reason to shed. They used out-right
invasion only after they had persuaded themselves-or at everyone
concerned. Annexation followed a pattern described by a critic of
British expansionism: “First an English Resident (often forced upon
the country), then advice urgently pressed, then complaint of
misgovernment constantly published, then interference, then
compulsion, then open annexation.”
No one was fooled. Trading missions to virgin Indian Territory
inevitably led to takeovers. “The evil is already done,” a local
chieftain told Alexander Burnes, the first Englishman to visit Sindh
along the Indus River. “You have seen our country.” He was right.
Ten years later, in 1843, the Company Governor-General, Lord Ellen
borough, ordered General Charles Napier “to pick a quarrel with the
amirs [of Sindh] and occupy their brigand-infested land.”
Occasionally the Company overreached itself in spectacular fashion.
One instance of crucial significance to the Pathans was the attempt
of Lord Ellen borough’s predecessor, governor-general Lord Auckland,
to remove the amir of Afghanistan,” Auckland created the “Army of
the Indus,” a staggering assemblage of fifteen thousand troops and
an equal number of horses, mules, camels, and elephants. On October
1, 1838, Auckland declared in a manifesto that the Afghan ruler had
“avowed schemes of aggrandizement and ambition injurious to the
security and peace of the frontier of India”-and invaded the
country. The First Afghan War thus opened with a particularly sweet
victory for the British, the first military success of the young
Victoria.
But success was short-lived. The Afghans, many of whom sere Pathans,
had not been defeated but had simply withdrawn to the safety of
mountain strongholds. In the winter of 1841 they stormed the British
Residency, killing the Resident and forcing the troops to evacuate.
On January 6, 1842, the British force of forty-five hundred troops
and twelve thousands camp followers set out from Kabul for the
frozen passes that led back to India. Afghan and Pathan tribesmen
swept down on the column, routing the entire army. On a freezing day
in mid-January Dr. William Brydon, a medical officer with the army
and its sole survivor, rode into Fort Jalalabad, only half alive.
“Thus is verified,” wrote a civilian captive who was later rescued,
“what we were told before leaving Kabul: that Muhammad Akbar would
annihilate the whole army except one man, who should reach Jalalabad
to tell the tale.”
The next summer an army of Retribution forced its way back into
Kabul long enough to set on fire, then marched “as swiftly as
terrain and dignity permitted” over the passes of the Safed Koh and
back into British India. The governor-general announced, in as
imperious a manner as he could muster under the circumstances, that
he “would leave it to the Afghan themselves to create a government
amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.”
Though the defeat did clip the pride of the Empire momentarily, it
did not clip it wings. Before the decade was out, the Company’s
armies had won two wars with the Sikhs, annexed Sindh, the Punjab,
and Rajputana, and inherited from the Sikhs the nettlesome but
strategic strip of land between the Indus and the Afghan border that
came to be called the North-West-Frontier.
By the mid-1850s the East India Trading Company had become what
amounted to a sovereign power. Only the emperor of China and the
czar of Russia ruled over more people than the Company’s
governor-general.
In 1857 the Indian army rebelled against its British officers, and
in the rising that followed the British very nearly lost India
altogether. The “Great Indian Mutiny,” as the British called it,
caused enough bad feeling for the company in London that it was
dissolved by royal decree in 1858 and its responsibilities handed
over to the queen-empress herself. “John Company,” as it was called,
passed into history, and the British Raj was born-or at least made
official.
For the British there would be more victories, a few setbacks, and
nothing but trouble on the North-West Frontier. But the four decades
between the Mutiny and the Diamond Jubilee saw a steady expansion of
Great Britain’s possessions in India and the consolidation of old
ones. In 1897 of the 372 million subjects of the Empire, 308 million
lived in India. With seemingly limitless raw materials and millions
of consumers for British manufactured goods, India was unlike any
other part of the Empire. It had been in British hands for so long
that it was part of the national consciousness. Many Indians had
come to value the status and material benefits the Empire gave them
as subjects.
India, future must have looked supremely bright during the Jubilee
summer, especially from the windows of the viceroy’s palace in
Simla. The lessons of the “Mutiny” had been well learned, and the
Indian army had since proven its loyalty more than once. The country
was at peace. Even the Frontier had been quiet for a few years.
July 28, 1897, was hot on the Frontier and the sun was almost
straight overhead as Behram Khan and Ghaffar walked down the main
street of Utmanzai, past the shops of traders and craftsmen that lay
on either side. A month had passed since the Jubilee. The street was
quiet; most of the villagers had gone to their fields. They passed
the shoemaker, the two brothers working a large loom made from
poplar branches, then the potter, then the coppersmith. Each of them
nodded as the khan walked by.
“Pa kher rale?” they pealed from behind wide smiles. “How are you?”
“Stre mashe,” khan called back with a smile. “Stre mashe: I hope you
are not tired.”
Behram Khan would have stayed to talk had he not wanted to get home.
These craftsmen were his equals: all Muslims, despite differences in
wealth and status, are equal according to Islamic law. He might
easily have spent the evening sitting around a water pipe, smoking
tobacco with the shoemaker or the coppersmith. But now he kept on
walking.
He was coming from the village guest house, where travelers from
Swat and Bajur had brought portentous news. All month the Khan had
been hearing that trouble was brewing in the north. Now it seemed
imminent. Mullah Mastun had succeeded in raising a large army of
followers, and no one knew what might happen next. From what these
travelers were saying. Violence could break out any moment. Behram
Khan wanted to talk the matter over with his family.
The Khan and his son approached the old defense wall of Utmanzai.
Children scurried past them across the wide lane, seeking narrow
strips of shade to rest in below the wall. With their watchtowers,
Pathan villages often looked like walked medieval cities. From the
square windows of the lookout towers a flintlock rifle could blaze
away at an approaching enemy. In a land where families were often
embroiled in long –running vendettas with their neighbors, even some
houses had watchtowers.
Some older boys had climbed the crumbling wall beside the gate.
“Hey, Ghaffar!” they called as the khan’s son passed. He shot them a
smile and watched them jump into the commons, where goats and a milk
cow browsed the summer stubble.
Outside town the khan and his son followed the river. Tow boys
rinsing a water buffalo in knee-deep water paused long enough to
wave. The rustle of poplar leaves in the slight breeze mingled with
the distant murmur of the village muezzin, calling the faithful to
prayer. “Allahu Akbar!” came the liquid tone. “God is great!”
It was time for the midday prayers. “Go on head,” the khan told his
son. “I’ll be home shortly.” Stretching his prayer rug next to a
poplar, he knelt and faced Mecca.
Ghaffar’s father seldom missed the five daily periods of prayer,
even when it meant stopping in his fields and spreading his prayer
rug between two rows of sugar cane. He belonged to the clan of the
Mohammadzais-“sons of Mohammad.” To Behram Khan, this brought the
responsibility to live in the light of the Prophet’s word.
He was as blue-blooded a Pathan. Badal, its strict code of revenge,
obligated the Pathan to avenge the slightest insult. For centuries
badal had set brother against brother, family against family, clan
against clan. The Reverend T.L. Pennell, a respected physician who
was running a missionary hospital in Bannu at the time of the
jubilee, wrote about how deeply badal had entered into the Pathan
mentality. “Revenge is a word sweet to the Pathan ear,” he explains,
“and even a revenge satisfied by the culminating murder is the
sweeter if the fatal blow, preferably on some dark night, is so
managed that the murder man has a minutes of life in which to
realize that he has been outwitted.”
The Reverend Pennell describes one Waziri Pathan who had lost his
sight at the hands of his enemies. He had come to the mission
hospital and begged the doctor to restore his sight for just one
day: “Oh, sahib, if you can give me some sight only just long enough
to go and shoot my enemy, then I shall be satisfied to be blind all
the rest of my life.” When the doctor tried to talk to him of the
“Gospel of goodwill and forgiveness,” the Waziri “would shake his
head and sigh: ‘No, that teaching is not for us. What I want is
revenge-revenge!’”
Once a bloodletting had set the wheel of vengeance in motion, only
the annihilation of the other party could bring it to a stop, for
obligations of badal passed from father to son. One vendetta in the
province had claimed more than a hundred lives, yet no one could
remember how it started.
There was no escape. If a man could not avenge an enemy’s insult
with his blood, what kind of a man was he? How could he face his
clan or wife? To die seeking revenge was more honorable.
Behram Khan thought otherwise. He made no enemies; he avoided feuds.
He did not like the taste of revenge. He was known throughout the
district for a most un-Pathanlike quality: forgiveness. He had
received his share of insults, and there were those who had taken
advantage of his trusting nature. But honor, he believed, could be
gained in ways more enduring and more pleasing in the eyes of God.
He chose to forgive rather than seek revenge-a decision that must
have deeply influenced the character and career of his youngest son.
Behram Khan perplexed the tribesmen of his villages-what kind of a
khan was this?-but knew instinctively that he was a man to trust. At
the harvest, villagers handed over their savings to him for
safekeeping and did not ask for any assurance.
Even the British liked this khan who bore no grudges. He had never
given them service, as had most of the other khans of the area, but
he was honest and he respected them. They sought his advice on
delicate matters, and they did not complain when he confused such
exotic names as O’ Malley and Warburton and Short. They assumed-and
they were right-that this khan would not intend an insult.
His prayers finished, Behram Khan walked to the farmhouse. His wife
and youngest son were in the courtyard.
“Here, Ghaffar, today’s dodai.”
Ghaffar’s mother handed the boy two flat chunks of bread. He sat
down cross-legged on a small pillow, scooping smooth green
dal-cooked split peas-into his mouth with his right hand.
As the boys and their father ate, Ghaffar’s mother sat to one side
asking about the village. Purdah, the isolation of women from male
society, was strict among the Pathan gentry. Ghaffar did not like
his mother’s isolation and he made a point of remembering bits of
news he gleaned in the village. Today, however, it was his father
who did the talking. His mother’s face turned ashen at the news of
another rising. She had seen firsthand the dreadful costs of war.
Every Pathan had.
Ghaffar's mother was a pious woman whose daily prayers, even as a
girl, often turned into long periods of silent prayer. It was not
her dark beauty alone that had drawn young Behram Khan to her; her
vein of piety was a treasure he wanted his children to have. He did
not pretend to understand her moods of prayer, but he had come to
look upon them with awe. Sometimes Ghaffar would rest his hand on
her shoulder until its warmth brought her back, eyes wide and wet,
as though returning from a long, winged flight.
Perhaps because he was her youngest, Ghaffar and his mother had
formed a deep attachment. She knew he had a temper-he was a
Pathan!-but but he was a pure, truthful boy. No one understood as
she did the solemn moods that would steal over him while sitting
under the shishim tree, saying nothing, or peering into the flames
of the cooking fire until it cooled to ashes.
Even Behram Khan did not understand this independent, abstracted boy
who preferred the company of sweepers and spent too much time along
the river. But whenever his patience wore thin, his wife always
reassured him. “He is a strong boy,” she would say confidently. “He
is a badshah, a king.”
“Lord, Lord,” Behram Khan would mutter, tugging at his beard. But if
his wife said so, the boy turns out all right.
Later that afternoon, or perhaps not until evening, word would have
reached Behram Khan that the trouble in the north had already begun
the day before. The first reports were clouded but encouraging: an
enormous force of Pathans was attacking the British forts at
Chakdarra and Malakand and slaughtering the armies of the Queen. The
small contingents of soldiers could not possibly hold out. Mullah
Mastun had apparently been right: the day of their deliverance had
come. |
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