At every turn he found opposition. The political agent Cab, who still ruled the Malakand Agency with an iron grip, either threatened Khan’s workers openly or managed to subvert their work. One day he called the Nawab of Dir to his office to express his feelings about the district’s only school. “Look here,” he declared, “all this education is creating endless trouble for us. If you want to avoid getting yourself into difficulties, you’d better see that this school is destroyed as soon as possible.”
The nawab had the school demolished.

In December 1915 an influenza epidemic swept the province, and Ghaffar Khan two-year-old son, Ghani, fell dangerously ill. One cold afternoon Khan had spread his prayer rug alongside the cot of the unconscious child. After prayers, he looked up to see his young wife to enter the room. She walked solemnly around the cot and stopped at the child’s head. “O Allah!” she cried, her arms stretched out over the small figure. “Spare my boy’s life. Give his sickness to me.”

Walking around the cot once more, she repeated the prayer: “Lord, take this illness away from my innocent child and let me suffer in his place.”
As the first gray light brightened the room, the boy stirred and moaned softly. His fever had broken. But by then his mother was lying in bed next to the cot. Her body shook with fever throughout the afternoon and evening. By the next morning she had died.

Khan had his wife’s body taken to the burial ground dressed in her wedding robe and covered with flowers. Grief-stricken, he left his two boys with his mother and buried his sorrow in his work, touring the villages, teaching agriculture and sanitation, and starting more schools. He found solace in the faces of the poor and ragged villagers he loved to serve.

Gradually Khan had been enlarging his contacts with Muslim thinkers throughout the subcontinent. Now he began to hear about Gandhi and the nonviolent campaigns that were beginning to rouse the whole India. He responded immediately to Gandhi’s simple lifestyle and his insistence upon truth and nonviolence in all of life’s affairs. And he recognized in Gandhi-the Mahatma, the “great soul”-a kindred spirit, a seeker who was attempting to serve God by serving the poorest of his creation.

As Gandhi’s work and idea spread, Khan’s attempt at reforming and educating the Pathans took on new meaning: this was not only uplift, it was also the path to freedom. Buoyed, Khan redoubled his efforts. Between 1915 and 1918he visited every one of the five hundred villages in the settled districts of the Frontier. He sat with the men in the guest houses and spoke of sacrifice and work and forgiveness, and in the evenings he laughed with their children around the cooking fires. The villagers loved but did not quite understand this gentle giant of a man. He was not a mendicant-he did not take alms. And he was not a renouncing fakir-didn’t he own a village? Well then, what was he?

One afternoon in the mosque at Hastanagar a group of Khans from Charsadda finished their meeting with Ghaffar Khan in a high pitch of excitement. He had roused them and they felt grateful. Someone in the back stood up on the low wall and shouted into the din: Badshah Khan! The others heard it and picked up the call. Badshah Khan-the Khan’s Khan! That’s what this brave young reformer had become. The whole group of bearded faces took up the cry and let it thunder over the high walls of the mosque into the countryside. Badshah Khan! The King of Khans.

The name spread. If the Khans called him their badshah, there would be no arguments from the villagers. Ghaffar had to swallow his fate and bear this new title as Gandhi bore being called Mahatma. From now on, when he entered villages from Mardan to Kohat, he would be met by the cry: “Badshah Khan is coming! The badshah is here!”
The Pathans had their leader-and they had found him just in time. For the Frontier was about to erupt in the greatest explosion since the Frontier War of 1897.

This time the explosion was trigged not by enraged Pathans but by a slight, soft spoken Indian. Neither British nor Indians had seen anything quite like Gandhi. This once-dapper lawyer now dressed like a Gujarati peasant, ate like an ascetic, and talked at least as much about sanitary measures as he did about British exploitation. Millions followed him, but no one-not Indians, certainly not the British-claimed to understand him.
At the heart of Gandhi’s moment-and the source of much of the misunderstanding-was his notion of nonviolent resistance.

In countless speeches and articles, Gandhi instructed Indians in his bold, revolutionary approach. Nonviolence was not passive, he insisted: “Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission to the will of the evildoer, but it means the pitting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant.”
Dissatisfied with phrases like “passive resistance,” Gandhi coined his own term: satyagrah. The word combines satya, truth, with agraha, firmness. “Truth,” Gandhi explained, “implies love, and firmness engenders force. I thus began to call the Indian moment ‘Satyagraha’; that is to say, the force which is born of truth and love or nonviolence.”

Far from a passive submission to evil, Satyagraha implied a dynamic resistance to personal, social, economic, and political exploitation. But it used the weapon of love. “Satyagraha is soul force, pure and simple,” Gandhi said. And one who practices Satyagraha-a satyagrahi-arms himself or herself with an “indomitable will,”the capacity to accept suffering on an opponent. “It seeks to liquidate antagonisms,” Gandhi wrote, “but not the antagonists themselves.” Yet it must never give way in the face tyranny or exploitation.
“There is no time-limit for a satyagrahi nor is there a limit to his capacity for suffering,” Gandhi concluded. “Hence there is no such thing as defeat in satyagraha.”

At the war’s end, Gandhi had been back in India only three years. Yet he had already captured leadership of the Indian National Congress party, transforming it from a debating society for urban intellectuals to an active political movement with mass support. Now, in the early months of 1919, Gandhi was about to lead the country into its first revolt against British rule in fifty years-and it was to be conducted without violence.

The British, fearing unrest, had failed to remove wartime restrictions when the war was over. Instead in March 1919, parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts, making wartime emergency restrictions the law of the land. After shedding their blood to save the Empire, Indians found themselves thanked by the most repressive laws since the so-called Mutiny of 1857.

Gandhi called for hartal-a day of compete fasting and prayer. The whole country responded. Buses and trains stopped running. Shops, government offices, and factories did not open. Whole cities closed down.

On the Frontier, Peshawar was virtually deserted while thousands of Pathans gathered in Utmanzai. Even Behram Khan was drawn in. it was the first political meeting he had attended in his life, and he listened with pleasure as his son urged the great gathering to resist British tyranny.

The British listened too. The Frontier government declared material law, arrested Ghaffar Khan, and sentenced him-without a trial- to six months in prison. They kept his feet shackled in a pair of iron too small for his great legs, cutting the ankles to the bone and scarring them permanently.

At Utmanzai the government left a different kind of scar. Troops surrounded the village, herded the villagers at gunpoint-men, women, and children-into the compound of Khan’s school, and ordered them to sit down. Machines guns were mounted on the grounded and loaded. While the villagers prayed, soldiers aimed the guns at their front ranks and waited.
The commanding officer raised his arm. “Prepare to fire!” Shrieks filled the air.

But the guns did not fire. Instead the troops rushed at the dazed villagers, stripped them of their valuables, and then sacked their homes. Everything that could be carried was loaded onto wagons and driven away.

While the soldiers worked, the British commissioner lectured the villagers. In broken, stumbling Pushto he told them their rebellion would cost the village thirty thousand rupees. Seventy hostages-including Behram Khan-were escorted to the Peshawar prison, to be released only when the fine was paid in full.

Ghaffar Khan must have been pleased but puzzled to look up and see his formerly apolitical father walking over to him in the prison yard. For his own part, Behram Khan was overjoyed. He thought they had hanged his youngest son-but there he was! The old Khan’s three months’ stay in prison was an unintended gift, he chortled: how lese would he have seen his boy?

Released at the end of six months, Khan discovered that his parents had found him another bride. He was surprised; he had not thought to remarry. Dutifully he started for Peshawar to buy some wedding clothes. But he was a badshah now, and thus never far from the Frontier official’s mind. Before he could reach Peshawar, he was arrested again and locked in a small cell, with two lice infested blankets for protection against the severe autumn cold.
At the end of the week he was released. “Why did you arrest me?” Khan asked the British commissioner,

“I was investigating your case,” the commissioner replied briefly. He was writing a report and did not bother to look up.
Khan persisted. “Why didn’t investigated my case before you had me arrested?”
“I decide whether to investigate first or to arrest first.”
“But I am a human being,” objected Badshah Khan. “Think of my position. You put me to great trouble for no reason.”

The Englishman’s hand stopped writing. His eyes turned up and for a long, tense moment he looked at the tall figure spotted with grime, nothing the fringe of dark hair along the jaw and the bare, cold feet tinged with blue.
The commissioner’s face relaxed. He turned back to his writing.
“What’s all this talk of your Position?”

Remarried and settled again with his wife and boys, Khan next guided the creation of the Anjuman-e-Islah-ul-Afghena, a non political missionary organization that encouraged economic, social, and educational improvements in the Frontier. He particularly stressed Pathans’ taking to professions other than agriculture, since there was not enough land to support them all as farmers. He even opened a shop at Utmanzai to set an example to fellow tribesmen.

In 1920, Muslims throughout India protested British policies toward Turkish caliph by immigrating en masse to Afghanistan. Thousands of Pathans joined the vast pilgrimage and Khan went with them. Soon, however, it became apparent that exile would be a mistake. He returned to the Frontier to continue his reform work.

The school caught on. He was ready now to expand the Azad School at Utmanzai to include secondary students, and he found eager, bright young Pathans for teachers.
In 1920 the Indian National Congress party met at Nagpur and, for the first time, openly resolved to fight nonviolently-for complete self-rule. Khan attended the historic session, his first Congress meeting, and felt deeply attracted to Gandhi. But his diffidence kept him in the background. Politics did not attract Badshah Khan. The endless decisions, the display of temper and ego, only repelled him. He preferred quite work in the villages.

As his success among the villagers increased, his disfavor with the British grew. Sensing a momentum building among the Pathans, they harassed some of Khan’s teachers with threats of jail and offered others higher-paying jobs in British schools. Many quit. Activities and ideas which could be tolerated and even encouraged in greater India alarmed the military officials of the Frontier. As the Frontier went, its officials argued, so did India.

Chief Commissioner Sir John Maffey knew Behram Khan. He asked him to come to his office in Peshawar. “I have noticed,” he said, “that your son is touring the villages and opening schools.” He knew Behram Khan to be acautious man. “I have also noticed that other people stay quietly at home and don’t bother about these things.”

True enough, the old man observed. He himself couldn’t understand the boy’s ways.
“Would you kindly ask your boy to give up these activities? Till him to stay at home like other people.”

Behram Khan agreed. Straightaway he confronted his youngest child. Why couldn’t he stay at home like everyone else? He had a beautiful new wife and strong boys. He had his village to over see. Why all this activity?

Ghaffar knew his father better than the old khan knew himself. “Father,” he began, “if every body else stopped doing lemundz-the daily prayers-would you advise me to follow their example?”

“Good forbid!” the old man said. “Lemundz is a sacred duty.”
“To my mind,” Badshah Khan said, “educating the people and serving the nation is a sacred duty as prayer.”

Pathan honor had been stirred. Behram Khan felt the full weight of his son’s conviction. Honor could not be trifled with. “Son,” He said with gravity, “if it is so sacred a duty, you must never give it up!”

Behram Khan sent his regrets to Chief Commissioner Maffey in Peshawar. Pathans could not possibly give up their religion and sacred duties for his sake.

But the Commissioner was not one to be put off. He sent for Ghaffar. “What guarantee is there that your organization will not be used against the government and its interest?” he said bluntly.

“You must trust me,” Khan rejoined.
“No,” the commissioner shot back. “You must apologize and give a bond that you will not do it again.”
Khan stiffened. “Give a security that I shall cease to love and serve my people?”
“This is not service,” came the reply. “This is rebellion.”
A few days later Khan was arrested-for spreading education among impoverished and illiterate people. He writes:

When I was arrested, I was not put in a lock-up, as is usual when one is awaiting sentence, but I was put in the criminal’s cell. When the door was opened a most odious smell met my nostrils. The source of it was a clay chamber pot full of the last occupant’s excrement lying in a corner. I told the prison officer that I could not stay in such a dirty cell, but he said coldly: “You are in prison, you know!” and pushed me inside.

My cell was bitterly cold because it faced the north and never got any son. I was given three blankets and a piece of gunny sacking which were no protections against the cold.
After I was put in prison my friends were also arrested. We were kept locked up day and night. Our food was showed in through a barred opening in the door. The result of this cruel treatment was that most of my colleagues decided to furnish security. But Abdul-Qayyum and I refused to do that.

After ten days, Khan was taken before the deputy commissioner and locked inside a docket with iron bars. Looking at the tall, muscular Pathan, the Englishman expressed his disbelief about Khan’s professed nonviolence. Khan told him it was because of Gandhi.

“And what would you have done,” the deputy commissioner prodded, “if you hadn’t heard of Gandhi?”

Khan placed his large hands around two of the bars and slowly pulled them apart. “That is what I would have done to you,” he said without a smile.

The deputy commissioner was not amused. He asked the attending policeman what offense the prisoner from Utmanzai had committed. “He has opened his own schools,” came the reply, “and gone on pilgrimage to Afghanistan.”

The deputy commissioner exploded. “He left the country? And you allowed him to return?”
Before the policeman could explain, Khan cut him off. “First you take our country from us and now you won’t even let us live in it?”

Such impudence from a Pathan, before an official representative of His Majesty’s justice, was too much to be borne. “Take him out of my sight,” the deputy commissioner answered. “I’m sentencing him to three years’ imprisonment.”

He looked up. Khan stood immobile, his eyes fixed on the Englishman. “At hard labor,” the deputy commissioner added.