Chapter 7
O Pathans!
One learns a good deal in the school of suffering. I wonder what
would have happened to me if I had had an easy life, and had not had
the privilege of tasting the joys of jail and all it means.
THE BRITISH did not want to punish Khan, they said. They merely
wanted to persuade him to their point of view. Yet they classed him
as a criminal rather than as a political prisoner, and began his
prison term with two months in solitary confinement.
When he returned to his regular cell, Khan found his brother waiting
to see him. The two men fell into each other’s arms. Dr. Khan Saheb,
as he was now universally known, had just returned from England,
having served as a medical officer in the British Army in Europe.
Transferred to the Frontier, he was ordered to join an expedition
against the Waziris-and promptly resigned.
The two chatted, then embraced again. Dr. Khan Saheb handed over a
note from the chief commissioner. He bore Ghaffar Khan no ill will,
it said, and was ready to commute his sentence. He could go free. He
would even be allowed to run his school. Nut he could not tour the
villages. If he agreed to this condition, he could walk out with his
brother very afternoon.
Khan read the note. He looked at Khan Saheb, then back at the note.
Abruptly he tore the paper into small pieces and dropped them on the
ground.
Dr. Khan, the physician, looked at his younger brother. The pale
cheeks were already sunken, the eye dark-ringed. Signs of scurvy
showed in the skin. He tried to reason with him, but Ghaffar only
shook his great bearded head.
The next week Khan’s hands and feet were shackled, an iron ring was
locked around his neck, and he was transferred to the prison for
habitual criminals in Dera Ismail Khan. Since he was not prepared to
cooperate with his majesty’s government, he would be treated
accordingly: as a dangerous criminal. From the iron ring hung a
small identity disk with his name and sentence stamped upon it, and
his crime-sedition.
At Dera Ismail Khan he was again placed in solitary confinement-and
given forty pounds of corn a day to grind.
It was an offense to keep food in one’s cell, but a fellow Pathan
from Utmanzai slipped Khan a few pieces of gur, sugar candy, as a
gesture of fellowship. Khan was looking at the gur when the guard
told him the superintendent was coming.
What should he do with the gur? He didn’t have time to eat it.
Hastily he slipped it under his blanket. But what if the
superintendent inspected his bed? Where could he hide anything?
The superintendent entered, talked with him for a moment, then left.
As the door slammed closed, Khan reached for the gur and threw it
out the window. He resolved on the spot that he that he would never
break the regulations again. Subterfuge created fear and fear made a
prisoner hostage. He had seen it happen to fellow prisoners too many
times: they broke the rules, then had to bribe the jailer to escape
punishment. It cost them their self-respect. Khan made up his mind
that it would not happen to him.
The jail at Dera Ismail Khan was a nightmare of corruption. The
British superintendent spoke only English, so the prison had fallen
under the control of his deputy jailer, a petty tyrant named
Gangaram who had turned the institution into an efficient machine
for making money. A prisoner’s treatment depended solely on his
ability-and willing ness-to bribe deputy jailer. If a prisoner was
to survive his sentence, privileges must be purchased.
Khan refused to pay. “Give him the money,” one of Gangaram’s agent
implored, “and he will get you out of solitary.”
Khan shook his head.
“Your fellow Peshawaris are ashamed to have you in solitary grinding
corn like a murder. They’ll pay the money for you.”
“I was sent here in the first place,” Khan said, “because I refused
to pay the security. Why should I bride Gangaram to secure good
treatment, if by bribing the British I could walk right out?”
The Agent shook his head. Even honor could be carried too far. He
too was a Peshawari; he did not want to see the Badshah suffer.
Yet Khan example touched both the prisoners and the guards, who had
succumbed to the poisoned atmosphere. One day he was grinding his
allotment of corn when a guard told him he could stop.
“You are the only one in this prison who here on behalf of God. How
could I justify myself before him if I made you grind corn?”
Khan stopped grinding, but when the guard left the resumed. The
guard was watching him through the slot in the door and came back to
the cell. “I allowed you to stop,” he said, some what indignant.
“Why are you still grinding?”
Khan pointed to the prisoner in the next cell. “Do you see that man?
He is a robber and murdered and you have him grinding corn. Why
should I mind grinding for my cause, which is pure and holy?”
The guard shook his head.
“You are a good man,” Khan said. “Why have become part of this evil
system?”
“I must feed my children.”
Khan went back to grinding the corn. A few days later he found he
had a different guard. The first man, he was told, had found another
job.
Since most of the prisoners were Pathans, they could not avoid being
moved by the refusal of their badshah to become corrupt. Those who
had avoided the crushing prison work through bribes stopped their
payments at Khan’s urging and accepted the work as honorable penance
for their crimes. Most of the quarreling among them stopped.
Seeing his income dwindle, Gangaram complained to the
superintendent. This Badshah was causing trouble in the workshop,
and Gangaram would not be responsible for discipline as long as he
remained. “The superintendent,” Khan recalls, “was convinced that
Gangaram was lying. But an Englishman can be persuaded to do
anything for the sake of preserving discipline. Gangaram, after all,
had not failed him in preserving law and order.”
Without his knowing it, Gangaram’s interference probably saved
Khan’s life. “It was by the grace of God,” he remarked later, “that
I was transferred to Dera Ghazi Khan. Otherwise I might not have
survived.” The four months in solitary had broken his health. He had
lost fifty pounds and contracted scurvy and pyorrhea.
The prison at Dera Ghazi Khan, almost three hundred miles south of
Peshawar, was a detention center for political prisoners from the
Punjab, a state with a history of active resistance to British rule.
There Khan came in contact with many leaders of India’s independence
moment. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims held discussions and studied
each other’s scriptures. It proved an unexpected and rich education
for the young Badshah. In addition, both the climate and the food
were better, and the superintendent was a good Muslim who respected
Khan’s mission. A dentist was brought into extract Khan’s diseased
teeth and refused payment. “You are jailed because of your love for
our country,” he explained. “I cannot match your sacrifice. Let me
do this much.”
In 1923, while Khan was still in prison, he learned that his mother
had died. No one had told him; he came across the news in the paper.
It was a terrible blow. “She had been most keen on visiting me in
jail,” Khan wrote,
But she was very old, and Dera Ghazi Khan was far away and the Indus
lay between us. To spare her discomfort and trouble, I always
entreated her not to come for the interview. But, alas, I did not
know that the almighty was soon to take her away from me!...
When I went to my village on my release, my sister told me that my
spoke of me when she breathed her lost: “Where is Ghaffar?” With my
name on her lips, she passed away.
During Khan’s three years in prison, India underwent great
struggles. Gandhi’s noncooperation moment, launched in earnest at
the Nagpur session of Congress in 1920, gained momentum rapidly.
Indian lawyers abandoned their practice in the British courts,
students left English-run schools and universities, prominent
Indians returned their honorary medals and titles, and villagers
even refused to pay taxes. The movement swept the country like a
grass fire in a dry wind. By January 1922, thirty thousand Indians
had been jailed. Even conservative Indians began to reflect that
Gandhi had been right: nonviolence could bring them complete
independence.
Not all Indians, however, remained nonviolent. In some cities
telegraph wires were cut, British buildings were burnt, officials
assaulted. On February 5, 1922, an Indian crowd went out of control
in the small village of Chauri Chaura and killed a dozen policemen.
Gandhi stopped the movement. He embarked on a fast and ordered all
noncooperation to cease.
The Indians were stunned. They had come so close, it seemed; victory
was so near. But Gandhi was adamant. He did not want victory through
violence. “It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness,”
he wrote, “than to be guilty of denial of our oath and to sin
against God. It is a million times better to appear untrue before
the world than to be untrue to ourselves.”
The British, gladly accepting the windfall, had Gandhi arrested.
This time he was accorded a trial, in which the enthusiastically
pled guilty to all charges of sedition and tendered a bitter
appraisal of Empire. He was sentenced to six years in prison-and the
first Indian civil resistance movement collapsed. With Gandhi in
jail, India quieted down again. But her people had not lost faith in
their leader. They were waiting.
Ghaffar Khan was released from prison in 1924 and immediately went
home. He found to his delight that his imprisonment and suffering
had actually strengthened his movement and fired the hearts of his
people. His azad school in Utmanzai had flourished and his service
organization was as active as ever. Teachers and students had used
immunity in the mosques to talk to the Pathan villagers. Even Khan’s
nine years old son, Ghani, had joined in. “O people!” he would cry
out. “Go and ask this government why they are keeping my father a
prisoner! Go and ask them what crime he has committed!” At Utmanzai
a meeting was called and thousands of Pathans gathered to welcome
their Badshah back. There were people from Mardan, Kohat, and
Peshawar, and some swatis from the north. Even a few Mohmands had
slipped down from Bajaur to see their Badshah again. Aged Behram
Khan, congenial and peppery, poured out buckets of tea spiced with
crushed cardamom seeds. The huge crowd whooped and chortled. How had
their Badshah escaped the gallows? God himself must watch after him!
Even with sunken cheeks and then shoulders, khan was still a regal
figure. His people wanted him to speak. Khan protested: this was a
celebration, not a rally. But the gathering would not be denied. A
speech!
The tall Khan rose and looked out over the bobbing, beard faces.
Hoots and whistles! Thunder! He felt the glow from a thousand
grizzled faces and watched the bluster melt from their eyes. He told
a story:
One day a lioness attacked flocks of sheep. She was pregnant, and
during the attack she gave birth to a cub. In the course of birth
the lioness died, and her cub was left to grow up with the flock of
sheep. It learned to graze and even bleat.
One day a lion from a forest attacked the flock and was surprised to
see a lion cub running away from him, terrified and bleating the
sheep. Outraged, he managed to catch the cub and draw it away from
the flock, down to a nearby a river.
“Look in the water!” he commanded the cub. “You are not a sheep; you
are a lion! You have nothing to fear. Stop bleating like a sheep and
roar!”
Khan waited. The gathering was still. He felt his strength again.
“O Pathans!” he boomed, “So also I say to you. You are lions, but
you have been brought up in slavery. Stop bleating like sheep. Roar
like lions!”
The Pathans roared. They roared again. The sprawling crowd sent up a
thunderclap that exploded over the valley and broke against the
ridges of the Khyber. These Pathans were happy. As the sun fell
beyond the bare hills they returned to their villages full of spiced
tea and laughter. Their Badhsah had returned-and with him, the
promise of better days. |
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