Aimal Khan and Darya Khan: the tribal leaders of the 1672 Khyber rising

At a glance

• Aimal Khan (اېمل خان, Aimal or Ajmal) and Darya Khan (دریا خان) led the tribes that closed the Khyber Pass against the Mughals in 1672 and were Khushal Khan Khattak's closest allies in the war that followed. [4, 8]

• Olaf Caroe, Raverty and Jadunath Sarkar call both men Afridi. Afghan writers cited in the Afridi article make Aimal a Mohmand of the Khoezai and Darya an Adam Khel Afridi. [4, 7, 8]

• On 21 April 1672 the Mughal governor of Kabul, Muhammad Amin Khan, advanced into the pass and lost his army. The Mughal chronicle says several thousand men fell; Sarkar, from Mughal writers, says ten thousand. [1, 7]

• Sarkar says Aimal crowned himself king and struck coins in his own name. [7]

• Both men were dead by the time Khushal lamented them in verse. Sarkar has the Afridi leader Aimal still at the head of a confederacy in 1678. [4, 5, 7]

Two leaders, three tribes

The man Mughal chroniclers and Sarkar write as "Acmal" or "Aimal" is Aimal Khan in Pashto verse. Sarkar spells it Acmal after Biddulph and says the Mughal writers Khafi Khan and the Maasir-ul-Umara have Aimal. [7] Raverty prints it "Ae-mal". [4] Darya Khan is the other name that always goes with it.

The sources do not agree on whom they belonged to. Raverty, in the memoir that opens his 1862 selection of Khushal's poems, calls them "chiefs of the Afridis". [4] Caroe says "two Afridi chiefs", and elsewhere "the Afridis under their maliks Darya Khan and Aimal Khan". His index lists "Aimal Khan, Afridi". [8] Sarkar writes that "the Afridis rose under their chieftain Acmal Khan" and later calls Darya Khan "Afridi" too. [7] Afghan historians, as the Afridi article reports them, name Aimal a Mohmand, of the Khoezai branch, and Darya Khan an Adam Khel Afridi. The names below follow the Afghan account, and the older English writers' differences are noted where they matter. The difference matters little to the story, because the Mohmand and Afridi fought together. Caroe says the force at the top of the pass was a confederacy of Mohmands and Safis with large numbers of Afridis and Shinwaris. [8]

Little is recorded of either man's life before 1672. Sarkar, Caroe and Raverty give no birth date, village or father for Aimal Khan and no family for Darya Khan. They appear as the men who commanded.

Why the Khyber closed in 1672

Three accounts give three starting points.

Sarkar, summarising Mughal writers, says the "tactless action of the faujdar of Jalalabad bred discontent among the Khaibar clans." [7] Caroe, working from Khushal's poems and Mughal sources, begins in the Kunar valley. Soldiers under Husain Beg, a subordinate of Muhammad Amin Khan, insulted a woman of the Safi tribe. The Safis killed three of them and refused to hand over the killers. Neighbouring tribes that held land grants were ordered to burn the Safi villages. They turned up, sent word to the Safis, and told them they had acted like men. Tribal anger spread from Kunar to Tirah. [8] The Venetian Niccolao Manucci, who was in Hindustan and wrote years later, puts it differently: Amin Khan, on reaching Kabul territory, demanded tribute from the Pathans, where other governors had kept their friendship. [2]

Money was part of it. Sarkar says that when talks opened at Ali Masjid the Afghans asked for a special payment on top of the restoration of their annual subsidies, and that the viceroys after Amin Khan kept the road open by paying regular pensions. [7]

Sarkar calls Muhammad Amin Khan the son of Mir Jumla; Caroe, the son of a diamond merchant from Golconda whom Aurangzeb had taken a fancy to. Caroe calls him dissolute and so overbearing that no one dared oppose his wishes. [7, 8] Sarkar says the same of his pride, and that his officers, when they at last warned him of the blocked road, "met with an angry rebuff." [7]

The battle in the pass, April 1672

The Maasir-i Alamgiri, the court chronicle written after Aurangzeb's death, gives the date. Amin Khan advanced on Sunday 21 April 1672 (3 Muharram), although he had news that the Afghans had blocked the Khyber. The chronicle says the troops fell into the disorder that had come to Akbar's army in the same pass, and that "horses, elephants and men were mixed up in confusion." Several thousand men lost their lives falling from the hills into the abyss. His son Abdullah Khan died. The Emperor had the news on 30 April. [1]

The place of the fight is told two ways. Sarkar has Amin Khan entrench at Ali Masjid, where the Afridis came down at night and cut him off from his stream. Men and animals began to die of thirst. The Khan opened talks, but the Afghans asked for a special payment on top of the old subsidies and he refused. He sent veterans under his son Abdullah up the gorge. Stones were rolled down from the Tartara peak overhead, the leaders were killed, and the army broke. [7] Caroe puts the barrier further up, at the Loargai plateau between Landi Kotal and Landi Khana, where the road starts to fall towards Afghanistan. The army camped at Jamrud. The Mohmand arbab of the Peshawar plain went forward with a jirga to ask for free passage and was refused. Amin passed Ali Masjid and the narrows beyond it without serious trouble, and at Loargai found breastworks across the defile. Caroe says the resistance "had been organized mainly under the direction of" Aimal Khan and Darya Khan, with stones and boulders piled ready. Both flanks of the Mughals lost their leaders. The breastworks held all day. A proposal to turn the position by the Tahtarra stream led the shattered army into a trap. [8]

The accounts of the loss differ in size, and each says where its figure comes from.

• The Maasir-i Alamgiri: "several thousand" men fell from the hills. [1]

• Sarkar, quoting a Mughal source: ten thousand killed in the field, more than two crores of rupees in cash and goods taken, and twenty thousand men and women captured and sent to Central Asia to be sold. Amin Khan's mother, wife and daughter were taken; he ransomed them, but his wife, ashamed, would not return and took the veil at a saint's tomb. His son Abdullah and his son-in-law Mirza Sultan were among the dead. [7]

• Caroe: Amin Khan and four others were the only survivors, and the tribesmen, "through the mouth of Khushhal", claimed a Mughal loss of 40,000. Caroe thinks Khushal, who had marched with the army more as a hostage than a soldier, probably went no further than Jamrud. [8]

• The Imperial Gazetteer: an army of 40,000 men annihilated, with the treasure, elephants, women and children. [6]

• Manucci: 40,000 horse and 200,000 foot, with baggage, and the loss of the whole family. He adds that Amin Khan survived by dressing as a Pathan, and that his secretary Muhammad Riza sat on the elephant in his place and was killed. [2]

Both Sarkar and Caroe agree that Amin Khan reached Peshawar alive, and Manucci says the commandant would not open the gate at night until men had checked his face by torchlight. [2, 7, 8] Manucci also tells that the hillmen, not knowing what they had taken, gave away gold coins as if they were base metal. [2]

Khushal's verse gives the tribal count. In Raverty's translation:

The first fight was at the higher back of Mount Tatarah,

Where forty thousand Mughals were scattered like chaff.

When their sisters and daughters fell into the bonds of the Afghans.

With horses and camels, elephants and baggage, string after string. [4]

Biddulph's version of the same lines reads "forty thousand Moghal foe". [5] The forty thousand is a poet's number, and the Gazetteer repeats it as the size of the army.

The king of the Khyber

Sarkar is the one writer read here who gives Aimal Khan a royal title. In his words, the Afridi chief was "a born general, who crowned himself king, struck coins in his own name, and proclaiming war against the Mughals, summoned all the Pathan clans to join the national movement." The following was "more numerous than ants and locusts." [7] Sarkar cites no document for the coins. Later he calls him "the Afridi pretender" and "that self-styled king". [7] Khushal, who named him a fellow chief and not a king, never calls him a king in the verses read here.

After the Khyber, 1672 to 1675

The Emperor sent Fidai Khan to Peshawar, degraded Amin Khan to Gujarat, and recalled Mahabat Khan for a fourth term. Sarkar says Mahabat made a secret arrangement that neither side would molest the other and reached Kabul by the Karapa route after bribing the tribes. The Maasir-i Alamgiri also says he went to Kabul "by a secret understanding" with the Afghans. [1, 7] Manucci says the Pathans let him through because he was a prudent man who kept their friendship. [2]

Aurangzeb then sent Shujaet Khan, the former Ra'dandaz Khan, with Maharaja Jaswant Singh in support. Shujaet left Court on 17 November 1673. [1] In February 1674 he crossed the Gandab and climbed to the saddle of the Karapa pass. Sarkar tells of a night of rain and snow, stones, arrows and bullets from the heights on both sides, and Shujaet's death in the front rank at dawn. Five hundred Rathors under Jaswant came up and brought out the remnant, and three hundred of them died doing it. [7] The Maasir-i Alamgiri says he fell in the fight as "Providence had willed it otherwise." [1] Manucci dates his death to 24 February 1674. [2]

Khushal wrote the battle into his war ballad, and Raverty's and Biddulph's translations credit Aimal by name. Raverty has: "And then came Jaswant Singh and Shujaaeat Khan, Of whom, Ae-mal Khan plucked up the roots at Gandab." [4, 5]

The ballad also lists a fight at the fort of Nowshera, and Caroe says that in 1674 Khushal and Aimal Khan took the fort together. [4, 8] In June 1675 Mukarram Khan, sent against the Afghans near the saddle of Khapash, in Bajaur, was lured by a small band, then attacked by two large forces that had lain hidden "in the waist of the hill." His young brother Shamshir Khan and Mir Azizullah died with many others, and the survivors reached the Mughal post at Bajaur. [1, 7] Khushal says Aimal "scattered to the winds" Mukarram and Shamshir at Khapash. [4, 5]

Caroe dates Gandab to 1673 and Khapash to 1674. The Mughal chronicle and Sarkar, whose dates rest on it, put them in February 1674 and June 1675, and the dates here follow them.

Aurangzeb at Hasan Abdal

After Shujaet's death Aurangzeb decided to go north himself. The Maasir-i Alamgiri has him set out on 7 April 1674. [1] Sarkar says he reached Hasan Abdal, between Rawalpindi and Peshawar, on 26 June 1674 and stayed about a year and a half. A large army and artillery came with him. He sent Aghar Khan to clear the Khyber and Prince Akbar with the minister Asad Khan to Kabul by way of Kohat, and removed Mahabat Khan on suspicion of having let Shujaet die. [7] Khafi Khan, in the Muntakhab al-Lubab, places Aurangzeb at Hasan Abdal "on his march against the Afghans" in the seventeenth year of his reign and has him back in the capital at the end of the eighteenth or nineteenth. [3] Manucci says the campaign lasted twenty-six months without the Emperor gaining the least advantage over the Pathans. Sarkar thinks the situation had improved enough by the end of 1675 for him to leave, and notes that Manucci and Khushal both say he went home in failure. [2, 7]

Aghar Khan beat off a night attack by Mohmands and their allies, killed 300, took 2,000 captives, then fought forty thousand Afghans near Ali Masjid, where he was wounded. Sarkar says he alone of the Mughal generals was uniformly victorious, and that Afghan mothers hushed their babies with his name. [7] Sarkar says many clans were won by presents, pensions, land grants and posts for their headmen. The Bangash joined the Emperor. Khushal's son Ashraf entered Mughal service. [7] Sarkar, from the court news-letters, reports that "Dariya Khan Afridi's followers" promised, at the end of August 1674, to bring the head of Acmal, the Afridi pretender, if their past misdeeds were forgiven. [7] It is the one place where Darya Khan's men appear apart from Aimal's.

What became of them

Here the sources part.

Raverty says that Aurangzeb found force unavailable and tried gold, that some of the small clans were drawn off, and that Aimal Khan and Darya Khan, Khushal's "most powerful, and most trusty supporters", had already been removed by death before the effect was seen. [4] Khushal himself mourned them in verse that Biddulph and Raverty both translate. In one poem, written when old age had reached him, he says the Mughals have given up the sword for the pen and now use "gold and fair promises" on the Pathans, and:

Acmal and Darya Khan, both have passed away nobly in honour:

Ever in grief and sorrow is Khush-hal at the loss of them both. [5]

In another: "Gone are Acmal Khan and Darya, who had good judgment; Now Khush-hal alone stands in the Mogul's way." [5] Sarkar quotes that couplet too. [7]

Sarkar's narrative runs differently. In his account Amir Khan, made viceroy of Kabul in 1677 and arriving in 1678, first attacked "Acmal's troops in the Jalalabad district" and failed, and then used diplomacy. He had Aimal's followers ask him to divide the conquered land among them. Aimal answered, "How can a small territory be divided among so many men?" His followers left in anger, and when he did divide it he favoured his own clan and the rest deserted. "When that self-styled king died, the Afridis made terms with the empire." [7] Sarkar gives no date for Aimal's death. On Sarkar's account he outlived Shujaet and Mukarram. On Raverty's he did not outlive the war's early years. The sources read here do not settle which is right, and none gives a place or cause for either man's death.

Caroe sums up the Emperor's method: "What the Emperor had failed to do by force of arms he later achieved to some extent with gold." [8] Sarkar quotes Aurangzeb's phrase for it, "breaking two bones by knocking them together". [7] The Khyber road was kept open by regular pensions to the hillmen, and Sarkar credits the Afridis and Khataks with draining the best Mughal troops from the Deccan while Shivaji took Golconda, the Carnatic and Mysore. [7]

Sarkar says Khushal kept the flag of Pathan freedom flying alone until his own son betrayed him to the enemy, and Raverty dates the betrayal of Khushal's son Ashraf by his brother Bahram to 1681. [4, 7] His life from 1672 is told in Khushal Khan Khattak: poet and chief, and the wider story of the Mughals and the hills in the Mughal frontier article.

How they are remembered

Khushal made them known. Caroe says their names "appear constantly in Khushhal's poems and other works as the heroes of the Pakhtuns of those days." [8] In the war ballad Biddulph has Khushal pray: "Acmal Khan and Darya Khan from death God preserve them, Never have they failed me at the time of need." [5] Raverty has: "Ae-mal Khan and Dar-ya Khan from death preserve them! Were neither of them, at fault, when opportunity occurred." His footnote reads: "These are the Afridi chiefs, who aided Khushhal in his wars with Aurangzeb." [4]

The couplet where Khushal puts them in God's court is not the same in every version. Caroe's translation of the line has "Aimal Khan and Darya Khan are present in His court". Biddulph's reads "Darya Khan and Darweza both are present in His Court". [5, 8] The three translators work from Pashto texts; the sources read here do not say why the second name differs.

For the Mughals, the Khyber disaster was the worst in the pass since Akbar's day. Sarkar says it had to be set beside Birbal's defeat of a hundred years before, and that it raised the Afridi leader's prestige and drew recruits to his banners. [7] The pass the Afridis closed in 1672 is the same one described in the Khyber Pass article.