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The Northwest Frontier Province The Northwest
Frontier Province. The Vale of Peshawar. Gandhara. Afghania. Sarhad ("frontier"),
as it's known in Pashto. The land of the Pathans. Where do I begin? Of the four
peoples that mix in my blood -- Pathan, English, Japanese and German -- the
only one that I have felt accepts me as their own are the Pathans. For they
implicitly believe in the one-drop rule. That is, as long as the drop comes
from the father, and as long as you are Muslim and speak Pashto, then that
drop of Pathan blood overwhelms all else and makes you a Pathan -- even if
like me you hardly look like one and speak Pashto with an odd accent. So, I
suppose I am a Pathan. Where ever you
run into Pathans outside their native lands, they insist on overpowering
embraces and subject you to an infinity of burdensome hospitalities and
kindnesses. Along with several-hundred-gun-Kalashnikov salute. OK, the last
part isn't true. Once, my fiancée hired an Afghan emigré, a builder, to do
some repairs at her house. When I greeted him in Pashto, he was so overjoyed
to meet a 'brother' that later he refused to accept the fee he was going to
charge my fiancée for his labours. My earliest
memory of the Frontier wasn't such a good year for the family. The cataclysm
of the Bangladesh War only a year past, Prime Minister Bhutto père had just conducted a
mass indiscriminate purge of the Pakistani army officer corps, blaming them
for the loss of East Pakistan. At least a dozen of my relatives got the axe,
including my two great-uncles. Everyone was demoralised. But I, the
latest addition to the tribe, cheered them up. I was immediately snatched
from my appalled mother's arms and to her horror paraded everywhere in
Mardan. This town
outside Peshawar has substituted as our family seat since the turn of the
century when my great-grandfather was forced to flee
Afghanistan for political reasons to the safety of British India. And many of
the Pathan townsfolk either work for us or belong to the same tribe. In the large
green field behind the family house congregated perhaps a thousand people.
Pulling by an arm your young, weeping and reluctant narrator, great-uncle
Jahangir mounted a platform and addressed a muster of the Pathan townsfolk.
According to my parents' recollection, he presented to the gathering their
new son and fabricated on the spot some unreasonably long string of names
which I do not actually bear. The crowd roared my enhanced name in the
standard Pathan acclamation, repeating half a dozen times. But now you can imagine where my
insufferable behaviour comes from. Hemmed in by the
Khyber Hills to the west, the Hindu Kush mountains to the north, the Bolan
Hills to the south, and the Indus River to the east, the piece of land known
throughout history as the Vale of Peshawar was once part of Afghanistan and
today remains one culturally. At any embassy of the defunct but
internationally recognised non-Taliban Afghan state, you will find that its
political map includes the Vale of Peshawar. So, between Indian maps showing
all of Kashmir inside India and Afghan maps biting a chunk out of the
northwest, there isn't much left of Pakistan.... The Vale of
Peshawar has also been a buffer between Afghanistan and historical India. In
British times, it was said, once you crossed the Indus, you left India and
found yourself in Afghan country. But the other Afghans looked upon the
valley beyond the Khyber as a bit different from the rest of their land.
First of all, it's much flatter, lower, more humid and more fertile than
Afghanistan, which is basically an arid, dusty, barren plateau. Besides, the
natural barriers have made sure that the Vale has never been possessed by one
ruler for too long: it would be conquered now by an empire in India, now
regained by Afghanistan, now overrun by some Central Asian potentate. The last
conquerors were of course the British. It was they who formalised the
boundary between the modern Afghanistan and British India along the Khyber
Hills to the west of the Indus. The so-called Durrand Line remains to this
day the internationally recognised frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On this district map of the NWFP,
you will notice
that a couple of districts which are today contained within the Northwest
Frontier Province lie outside of the Vale of Peshawar For example,
those bits of the province which lie to the west of the Indus River --
Mansehra, Abbottabad (Hazara) and part of Kohistan -- are inhabited primarily
by Punjabis or Saraikis. Part of the former Sikh Empire, these districts were
supposed to be sold to the Maharaja of Kashmir, but he ran out of money. So
the British just attached them to the NWFP. In addition, the Chitral district at the northernmost tip of the NWFP is part of ancient Kafiristan, now called Nuristan, the land that inspired Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King. Its location within the Hindu Kush range kept it free from conquerors until the 1890s, when it was partitioned between the British and the Afghans. On the Afghan side, the last remnant of the pre-Islamic, pre-Hindu, pre-Buddhist indigenous religions of the subcontinent was extinguished by forced conversion. But on the British/Pakistani side, it survives to this day among the 2000 or so pagans of Chitral. Invariably, they claim descent from Alexander the Great. An Excursus on the Tribal Areas Finally, on the
provincial map of Pakistan below (click the picture),
you'll find an
area light-purple in colour to the left of the NWFP, along the Durrand Line.
Not technically part of the Frontier Province, but popularly mistaken as one
and the same, these Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are a
confederation of seven autonomous tribal "agencies" that straddle
the Afghan/Pakistani border. Whereas the "settled Pathans" live in
the Frontier province of Pakistan, their cousins, the famous "Pathan
tribals", live apart in the FATA. Naturally, this
system was set up by the British, but they were forced to do so as a result of
their inabilty to conquer the feisty and violent Pathan tribals. So, instead
of subjecting them to rule from Delhi, the British decided to leave them
alone within their own domains and appointed an "agent" in each
tribal area who represented British interests. This was not such a bad
arrangement, for not only did the tribals get to do whatever the hell they
wanted within their own borders, but also the British got a valuable buffer
between their Indian domains and the volatile Afghan state -- by whom the
Pathan tribals were no more willing to be ruled than by the British. The Pakistani
government inherited this arrangement from the British and continues to send
"agents" to the seven tribal areas. To this day, neither Pakistani
law nor anything other than tribal law applies in these places, and no one
other a Pathan is allowed to set foot within their confines. If a non-Pathan
even inadvertently trespassed into these tribal areas and got shot by a
sniper, the Pakistani police would do nothing, for the matter would be
outside their jurisdiction and they are prohibited from violating the tribal
boundaries. (Usually the tribal authority is quite responsible about
punishing such behaviour.) The only tribal area open to non-Pathans is the
Khyber Agency, through whose territory runs the Khyber Pass. The importance
of the FATA was underscored by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for
Pakistan, the USA and the Arab world could not have supplied the anti-Soviet
Afghan resistance without the tribals. The forbidding Afghan-Pakistani border
is made as porous as a sieve by mountain passes in the FATA, which are
allegedly known only to Pathans. Whether settled or tribal, whether Pakistani
or Afghan, the Pathans have always moved freely between the two countries as
a result of this knowledge. And this was exploited to transport American aid
and weaponry to the Afghan resistance. In the past, I
have been inside two of the tribal areas (Bajaur and Khyber), and I'm
reliably told they are all the same: brown, arid hills with no organised
settlements, just a series of small military fortifications that house
several families each, along with their farms and livestock. These
fortification-households are linked by common tribal affiliation, but the
only kind of government each tribal area has got is an ad hoc council of
elders from each fortification. Life inside is
an astonishing combination of primitiveness and modernity. As I think I made
clear in the Iran segment of the travelogue, Islam does not require that a
woman be hidden away completely -- her face can be showing. But in these
tribal areas, older customs predominate over Islamic injunctions and women
disappear completely behind tent-like veils (burqa). Moreover, the
tribals are constantly feuding in the bloodiest way, especially over women.
One man may merely glance at another's (completely hidden up) wife or
daughter, and the other's hands invariably reach for the gun. Such feuds are
often inherited:
at least one hears such tall stories as how a Pathan man in London gets his
throat cut while he sleeps, in revenge for some bawdy insinuations an
ancestor of his had made a century earlier about the wife of the revenger's
own ancestor. On the other
hand, the tribal chieftain may be modern enough to send his sons to Stanford
or Cambridge, who might return home to improve gun or drug manufacture in his
tribal agency, or bring home computers to keep the tribal accounts. Inside
one mud fortification in Bajaur where I was invited, I saw satellite dishes
receiving CNN emissions as well as technicians in shalwar qamis eagerly
modifying US- or Chinese-made guns. [ unfinished -- amalgate with the "Short History of the Pathans" ]
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