Chapter 8
The Pathan Mystique
Is not the Pathan to love and reason? He will go with you to hill if
you can win his heart, but you cannot force him even to go to
heaven. Such is the power of love over that Pathan
BRITISH REPRESSION notwithstanding, the greatest obstacle in Badshah
Khan’s path was still the cult of revenge and violence that pervaded
society. The power of this centuries-old code of honor made it
almost impossible for a man to allow insults or wrong to go
unanswered, regardless of the suffering that followed.
And suffering followed for everyone. Families were left fatherless;
neighbors lived in fear of each other; life itself was shot through
with uncertainty. Yet the mystique of the avenging hero remained the
primary source of Pathan romance, poetry, and even status, thought
it wedded Pathans to unending tragedy.
No one felt these contradictions more strongly than Badshah Khan,
and no one was more aware of the price Pathans were paying for their
infatuation with violence. They had been dispossessed of their
freedom, he held, only because of their own self-destructive
tendencies.
The contradictions of the Pathan mystique are almost impossible for
an outsider to comprehend, although they touch every thing that
makes up life on the Frontier-custom, values, the daily round. “The
Pathan is not easy to love,” wrote Badshah Khan’s eldest son, Ghani.
“He takes a lot of knowing. He loves fighting-but hates to be a
soldier. He has great ambition and no patience that is why he
usually dies young.”
To illustrate the depth of which revenge and violence have
penetrated Pathan culture, Ghani tells a story form his youth which
shows that not even Badshah Khan, family was immune to the glamour
of badal or revenge. The story conveys better than any cold analysis
can tangle of values and emotions that makes up the Pathan mystique.
It begins one morning in 1925, when the body of local outlaw-hero
was found next to Behram Khan’s water mill outside Utmanzai. The
body was that of Atta Khan, a notorious renegade whom the village
boys had lionized. He had been shot twice by his best friend,
Murtaza.
Ghani was only twelve years old at the time, but he recalls being
pleased to hear bout Atta’s death. “I had always hated Atta,” he
writes,
In spite of his fine looks and the stories of superhuman daring that
were told about him, because he had killed a dear old man, the
father of one of my school friends. I was too young to know then
that the dear kind old man owed a debt of blood from the days of his
youth. He sowed in youth and Atta grew up to make him reap in his
old age. For the blood of a Pathan cannot be paid for except with
blood.
This dear old man was young and reckless once and had trampled
underfoot the rights of some of some weaklings. But the weaklings
produced Atta. He grew up. He saw his mother hand down her head in
shame, he saw his brothers look at the ground when certain things
and people were mentioned. He understood that he must kill the dear
old man. He was too young, too handsome, and too strong for shame.
So Atta picked up his gun and blasted that shame out of this world
and thus established his right to be taken notice of and respected.
Now the wheel of badal had turned again, and it was Atta who paid.
It took several platoons of police and a hundred villagers to
capture Murtaza, Att’s murderer, and his gang in the hills. Bullets
zinged from the rock walls and everyone ducked for cover. Finally
Murtaza ran out of ammunition. He stood up, threw his rifle into the
well, and stepped out into the sunlight-hands high and grinning.
Late that afternoon, Ghani recalls, a squad of policemen escorted
Murtaza back into Utmanzai. The village exploded. Now that Atta was
dead, Murtaza was the new hero. After all, Atta had killed a lot of
good Khans. What did it matter if Murtaza was a robber? Wasn’t be
brave? With Atta dead, the villagers who had worshipped him for so
long now remembered all his crimes and-with typical Pathan
volatility-turned their adoration on the man who had killed him.
Ghani watched Murtaza enter Utmanzai surrounded by a score of
policemen, his hands and feet manacled a bandage around his forehead
where a bullet had grazed it. Still grinning, Murtaza walked with
the swagger of a war hero. He laughed, winked at his admirers, and
cracked jokes. This was his hour.
At one point, Murtaza stopped the whole parade with a raised palm
and barked out orders: cold drinks for everyone! The villagers
cheered. Even the police relaxed while they sipped their drinks.
And Ghani beamed. Wasn’t Murtaza his relative? “I was proud to tell
the other village boys that he was a distant cousin of mine.”
Finally the cloud of admiring villagers, police, horses, and
captives spilled out onto the main road and headed for the jail.
Ghani joined the mob to escort the new hero to his future-a sentence
of twenty years in prison.
One winter night, many years after the murder at the mill, Ghani was
setting before a fire when he heard a whisper at his door.
“Where are you, friend?”
Ghani opened the door. It was Murtaza Khan – dust-caked, ragged, a
gun slung over his shoulder. “You would never think of letting him
into your room,” Ghani writes, “but I opened the door and my heart
to him because I knew him and his father knew my father and his
grandfather my grandfather.”
There, by the fire, he ventured the question he had wanted to ask
for many years: Murtaza, Atta was your best friend. What made you
kill him?”
“It was my uncle,” Murtaza replied- “the one I hated and still do. I
was an outlaw with a band of brave followers. I was his pet. He
feasted me and supported me because I intimidated his powerful
rivals for him and added to his importance in the eyes of the
English rulers. I thought he loves me because I was his flesh and
blood, the son of his brother-and I returned his love with sincere
respect and devotion.
“One evening he sent for me. Out of my hideout in the bitter cold I
went to the warmth of my grandmother’s hearth. He came-my uncle-and
related a long story of how Atta had conspired with his enemies to
murder him. He held my feet and wept. He implored me to save him and
the family honor. I refused.
“Then my aunt joined in. she looked at me with deep sorrowful eyes
and asked if I would stand by and see father’s brother killed. ‘He
is old and angry,’ she said, ‘and you are young and strong. Do you
owe nothing to the family that brought you into the world and gave
you its name and prestige? Your father, Abdullah, never shirked a
nasty job. He was born a khan and lived like a khan and died like a
khan.’
“That finished me,” said Murtaza. “I promised to do it.”
“Where you afraid of him?” asked Ghani.
“My friend,” Murtaza said coldly, “I have never feared anything
except death by disease. But an outlaw is always afraid. There are
too many enemies who will pay for his death.
“Anyway, I hated killing Atta, and I hated my uncle for making it
impossible for me to do otherwise.”
He shivered, and I look of agony came into his brown eyes. “I wanted
to put the world between him and me but I have never succeeded. He
is always with me, the living Atta. He talks and laughs, bravely and
recklessly….
“I tried to shoot that uncle of mine to pay for it,” Murtaza added,
“but I could not. So my uncle had a long life, and I a sad
conscience.” He smiled bitterly and shrugged his shoulders: “Atta
was going to kill my uncle if I had not killed him first. But come,
friend,” he said to Ghani, “play us a tune.”
Ghani picked up his sitar and said no more. There was no need to. I
knew. I too was a Pathan.”
Beneath the blustery surface of the Pathan lies a proud nature and
simple need. Too often impoverished, Ghani writes,
He would rather steal than begs, because he is a man and not a worm.
He looks at the torn clothes of his beautiful young wife and the
hungry eyes of his child. He picks up his rifle… He would rather
face the anger of God and man than the shame and disgrace of
poverty. That is why I love him in spite of his thick head and vain
heart.
Ghani’s sharp eyes catch both the splendor and the tragedy of the
Pathan spirit: “His violent nature, strong body and tender heart
make a very unstable combination for living, but an ideal one for
poetry and color.” He goes on:
Let us go his valley in Dir. There he is-walking towards us, of
medium height and sensitive builds. He has long locks, neatly oiled
and combed, wrapped in a red silk kerchief which is twisted round
the head like the crown of Caesar. He wears a flower in his hair and
collyrium in his eye. His lips are dyed red with walnut bark. He
carries his sitar in his hand and his rifle at his shoulder. You
would think he is very effeminate until you looked at his eyes. They
are clear, many and bold. They do not know fear…..
This son of the bravest tribe of Pathans never takes cover in a
fight and laughs and sings when he is frightened. He will soon die
fighting, for he knows only how to love and laugh and fight and
nothing else.
“The coward dies,” the boy’s mother tells him, “but his shrieks live
long after.” So the boy learns not to shriek. He is shown dozens of
things dearer than life so that he will not mind either dying or
killing. He is forbidden colorful clothes or exotic music, for they
weaken the arm and soften the eye. He is taught to look at the hawk
and forget the nightingale. It is a perpetual surrender-an eternal
giving up of man to man and to their wise follies.
The Pathan learns to surrender himself to the will of the tribe in
an act that will, most probably, demand total self-effacement. This
is how he learns the two supreme arts of Pathan life: how to kill
and how to die. Through these he becomes most fully a Pathan. Thus a
violent death is almost assured-and, in a way, sought. For this is
the surest path to Paradise: dying with his rifle smoking and, if he
can manage it, a smile on his face. He does not ask for more. “One
day he goes out,” Ghani says,
And never comes back. He has laughed his way into a bullet that was
fired by another of his own blood and race. His wife inherits from
him a moment of joy, two sons, and a lifetime of sorrow. She hangs
up his rifle and sitar for his sons. She learns to hide her tears
when she hears a love song in the evening. She worships her elder
son because he looks like his father and the younger one because he
smiles like him. “What was our father like?” the boys ask. She
cannot tell them that he was a great doctor, or a philosopher or a
priest. She says he was a great man and a great fighter and she
sings to them the song that was made about that fight, the fight in
which their father died wit his three brothers and five cousins:
It was a cursed day, bleak and cold,
It was the last day of spring….
“He must shoot,” Ghani writes of the Pathan whose honor has been
violated. “He has no alternative. If he does not, his brothers will
look down upon him, his father will sneer at him, his sister will
avoid his eyes, his wife will be insolent and his friends will cut
him off. He must shoot. Atta had to kill his people’s tormentor.
Murtaza had to kill Atta, his best friend. “Revenge and Death,”
Ghani concludes. “Death and Revenge-always and forever.”
The Pathan was not a wanton killer but a victim of his own distorted
sense of honor. That made him easy prey for subversion-and no one
knew it better than the British. One standard of the Raj’s Forward
policy was to divide the Pathans against themselves. “The sole role
of the political department of the Government of India,” Ghani
argues,
Was to try to teach the hawks of the Khyber the wretched ways of the
crow and the vulture. It seduced the lowest and the greediest of the
tribes and gave them importance and brought them influence….
The British succeeded beautifully. The Pathans were too busy cutting
one another’s throat to think of anything else.
There was blood and darkness everywhere. The Empire was safe and the
Pathan damned.
But then, as Ghani says, something happened-something not unlike a
miracle in that tangled, centuries-old net of death and revenge. The
miracle was Ghani’s father. The genius of Badshah Khan saw Pathan
violence for what it was-a consequence not of bloodlust but of
ignorance, superstition, and the crushing weight of custom. Beneath
the violence and ignorance, Khan saw men and women capable of
extraordinary self-effacement, endurance, and courage. He knew his
task: to educate, to enlighten, to lift up, to inspire. With
understanding, he saw, the violence and venality would fall from the
Pathan character like dead limbs from a tree. It was his job to
wield the axe.
“Badshah Kahn Is really the Politics of the Pathans,” Ghani
concludes:
He understands the Pathans and the Pathans understand him-and you
cannot understand either unless you are a Pathan. When you see him
next, look into his kind brown eyes and you will know more about
Pathan politics than I could tell you in a thousand chapters. For
the holiest and the finest in a man is as inexpressible as stardust
and moonlight.
Badshah Khan has discovered that love can create more in a second
than bombs can destroy in a century; that the kindest strength is
the greatest strength; that the only way to be truly brave is to be
in the right; that a clean dream is dearer than life itself. These
are the things he has taught the Pathan. |
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