Charsadda and Hashtnagar: ancient Pushkalavati and the Swat river plain

At a glance

• Hashtnagar ("eight cities") is the plain on the left bank of the Swat river north-east of Peshawar, in Charsadda District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its eight villages are Tangi, Sherpao, Umarzai, Turangzai, Utmanzai, Rajjar, Charsadda and Prang. [1, 3]

• Under the Charsadda mound called the Bala Hisar lie the remains of Pushkalavati, a capital of Gandhara that Alexander's troops besieged in 327 BC. [4, 5]

• The Muhammadzai of Hashtnagar hold the plain. Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) and his brother Dr Khan Sahib came from Utmanzai. [1, 6]

• The 2023 census counted 1,835,504 people in Charsadda District, against 1,610,960 in 2017, and about 99.7 per cent gave Pushto as their mother tongue in 2023. [8]

Where it lies

Charsadda stands on the left bank of the Swat river, about 16 miles north-east of Peshawar as the crow flies and 20 by the road the British built in 1893. [1] Wheeler, who dug there in 1958, describes it as one of a group of small towns beside the many channels of the Swat, three miles above the river's junction with the Kabul, in a sea of sugar-cane. [4] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 gives Hashtnagar an area of 303 square miles: a strip of rich clay soil reaching ten miles east of the Swat, from the Utman Khel hills in the north to the Kabul river in the south. [2, 3]

The Swat river runs in several branches here. The gazetteer of 1897-98 names two of them, the Zindai, which watered Hashtnagar, and the Shambor, which watered Hashtnagar and the Doaba between the two rivers. [1] On the far side of the Swat lies the Doaba, held by the Gigiani and the Mohmand; to the north are the hills of the Utman Khel, with whom the Hashtnagar villages quarrelled for centuries. [1, 2] The district town the British ruled from was Peshawar, the subject of its own article.

The name and the eight towns

Hashtnagar is Persian for "eight cities", and the people explain it so. The gazetteer of 1897-98 lists the eight: Tangi, Sherpao, Umarzai, Turangzai, Utmanzai, Rajjar, Charsadda and Prang. [1] Alexander Cunningham doubted the tidy explanation. He thought the name a twisting of Hastinagara, "city of Hasti", the town of the chief whom Arrian calls Astes, because a Persianised Muslim population would have found the Sanskrit word unintelligible. [1, 3] The Imperial Gazetteer adds that Raverty gave an older form, Ashnagar. [3] Caroe, writing of Babur's memoirs, gives the name as "Ashnaghar". [6]

Pushkalavati and the Bala Hisar

The great mound beside Charsadda, the Bala Hisar ("high fort"), rises 60 feet or more above the plain. [4] Cunningham identified Charsadda and Prang with Pushkalavati, the "city of lotuses", which Arrian calls Peukelaotis; Wheeler wrote in 1962 that the identification was undisputed. [3, 4] Marshall dug a series of holes in the top in 1902-3, and in 1882 a company of sappers had dug for twelve days. [2, 4]

Wheeler's season of November and December 1958 cut a trench more than 60 feet deep down the eastern face. [4] He read the sequence as a city founded after the Achaemenid Persians took Gandhara, in the sixth century BC. In 327 BC, he wrote, it was ringed by a wall and ditch, and the Macedonian siege that Arrian describes, thirty days against Hephaistion's division before Alexander came to take the surrender, fits a place so defended. [4] His trench met a ditch about 320 yards long that had been refilled soon after it was dug, and he linked it to the slighting of the defences. [4]

Beside the Bala Hisar the Pakistan Air Force photographed a second mound, Shaikhan, and the picture showed streets forty yards apart and the outline of a stupa. Wheeler took it for a later city laid out on a Greek grid like Sirkap at Taxila, and thought Pushkalavati was moved there in the second or first century BC. [4] Of the Bala Hisar itself he wrote that it was never wholly deserted: some use continued in Buddhist times and later, and that the Durranis may have kept a police post on it, which the Sikhs may then have used. [4] When Hiuen Tsang passed in about AD 630 he judged Pushkalavati much smaller than Peshawar, and the Imperial Gazetteer records that the city had by then lost its place as capital of Gandhara to Peshawar. [2, 4]

The date of the beginning is disputed. Reinhard Dittman argued in 1984 that Wheeler's foundation date might be up to a thousand years too late. Excavations from 1994 by the universities of Peshawar and Bradford, directed by Professors Ishan Ali, Taj Ali, Robin Coningham and Abdur Rehman, gave absolute dates from stratified deposits for the first time and confirmed that the Bala Hisar was first occupied in the second millennium BC. [5] The project describes a sequence 24 metres deep, running from the middle of the second millennium BC to the later first millennium AD. [5]

How the Muhammadzai came to hold the plain

Before the Pashtun clans arrived, Caroe writes, Hashtnagar belonged to Dehqans (a word he glosses as villagers or tenants) who owed allegiance to the Swat sultans; the Imperial Gazetteer calls them Shalmanis, a Tajik people, subjects of the Sultan of Swat. [3, 6] The Pashtun account, as Caroe tells it from the Yusufzai side, runs like this. After the Timurid governor of Kabul killed their chiefs, the Yusufzai and Mandanr went east and the Dilazak offered them the Doaba and, beyond it, Hashtnagar (Ashnaghar) if they could win it by the sword from the Dehqans. The Muhammadzai and the Gigiani had stayed behind in Nangarhar. The Gigiani later begged land and were given the Doaba. Soon after, the Dehqans under Mir Hinda were driven out and Hashtnagar was assigned to the Muhammadzai. [6] Caroe adds that he finds the tradition very hard to believe in its details, since the Yusufzai are said to have given the finest irrigated land to others. [6] The story is told at greater length in the article on the Yusufzai, and the clan is described on its own page as the Muhammadzai of Hashtnagar, a different line from the Muhammadzai of Kabul. The Doaba went to the Gigiani. [6]

Babur's memoirs mention Hashtnagar. The Dilazak advised him to raid it, Caroe writes, but the raid disappointed. [6] In Akbar's reign the Roshani movement found a following there. The gazetteer says Pir Roshan, after his release from captivity, made Hashtnagar his seat, and that his son Kamal-ud-din was captured there and held in India until he died. [1] The leader of the movement has an article of his own.

Under the Sikhs Hashtnagar was a grant (jagir) to one man. The gazetteer records that the Barakzai sardars of Peshawar assigned it to Sayyid Muhammad Khan, and that after the death of the Sikh general at Peshawar the Sikhs confirmed him in it, at a nominal value of Rs 1,50,000. With Hashtnagar in the sardars' hands, it says, Ranjit Singh avoided contact with the Muhammadzai, "amongst whom were many turbulent and discontented Chiefs". [1] In 1829 the reformer Sayyid Ahmad turned on Hashtnagar, where Sayyid Muhammad fled at his approach. [1] After the British took the Peshawar valley in 1849, Major Lawrence was appointed Deputy Commissioner in April of that year and the first summary settlement followed in 1850. [1]

The new rulers did not find the plain quiet. In April 1852 Ajun Khan, a leading man of Tangi, came down from the Utman Khel hills by night with a band and murdered the tahsildar at Charsadda; the Utman Khel villages along the border were destroyed in reply. [1] In December 1876 a gang of Utman Khel attacked labourers at the head-works of the Swat canal near Abazai and killed six. [1] The gazetteer blames arrears of revenue in Hashtnagar on the "turbulent and lawless character" of many of its richest men. [1] Of all the tribes in the district, it says, the Muhammadzai were the "most manly and plain spoken", probably because they stayed independent longest. [1]

Who lives there, and how many

The gazetteer of 1897-98 describes the people of Hashtnagar as Muhammadzai Pathans, in sections named for the villages. [1] The Imperial Gazetteer says the same of the tract in 1908, and records that Charsadda's trade was largely in the hands of Hindus, though Muslim farmers were the majority. [2, 3] The Doaba across the river was Gigiani and Mohmand country. [2]

Population figures need their years. The Imperial Gazetteer gave the whole of Charsadda tahsil 142,756 people in 1901, with Charsadda and Prang together at 19,354 and Tangi at 9,095. [2] The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics counted the modern Charsadda District at 1,610,960 at the census of 2017 (1,340,756 rural, 270,204 urban) and 1,835,504 at that of 2023. In 2017 the district's tehsils had 804,843 (Charsadda), 426,165 (Tangi) and 379,952 (Shabqadar). [8] In the 2023 mother-tongue table 1,828,826 of the 1,835,136 people it tabulates gave Pushto as their language, about 99.7 per cent. [8] These are census counts. The district is larger than old Hashtnagar; it also includes Shabqadar tehsil.

Speech

The gazetteer of 1897-98 says that the Pashto of Hashtnagar and Yusufzai "is noted for its purity, both of idiom and pronunciation". It is the northern or hard dialect, with kh in place of sh and the hard g in place of the softer sound of the southern speech. [1] The same pattern is described in Pashto dialects: soft and hard speech.

Fields, canals and trade

Hashtnagar has long been farmed. The gazetteer divides its land into the shorgira, lands along the Swat watered by cuts from the river, and the maira, the high plain to the north and west. [1, 3] The Swat River Canal later crossed the maira. Caroe says that canals, cane and tobacco have made the Samah (the Yusufzai plain) and Hashtnagar "the finest agricultural areas in all the breadth of Pakistan". [6] In good years, Captain Hastings wrote in his settlement report, quoted in the gazetteer, wheat and barley went from Hashtnagar and Yusufzai chiefly to independent territory. [1] Wheeler noted in 1958 that nomads from beyond the mountains still arrived each November and left in spring. [4]

The graveyards are as striking as the fields. The gazetteer names the largest in the district as the one along the high bank in Hashtnagar from Sherpao to Prang, some eight miles with hardly a break. [1] Wheeler wrote in 1958 of towns sprawling beside "dusty highways and endless Muslim cemeteries". [4]

Utmanzai and the Khan brothers

Utmanzai is 18 miles from Peshawar and 16 from Mardan by the gazetteer's reckoning. In 1897-98 it was unwalled, with a ferry over the Swat and a school run by the Church Missionary Society. [1] It is best known as the home of two brothers. Olaf Caroe calls them the sons of a Muhammadzai khan in Utmanzai, "of well-to-do land-owning stock": Dr Khan Sahib, who took a medical degree in England, and the younger Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who dressed all his life as a village Pathan of the old school. [6] Eusufzye calls Utmanzai the hometown of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement. [9] Bacha Khan's sons are the poet Ghani Khan and the politician Khan Abdul Wali Khan. Turangzai, another of the eight, was the home of the Haji Sahib of Turangzai, who ran village schools with Bacha Khan.

Charsadda also gave the movement its poets. Abdul Malik Fida of Pranghar wrote a poem on the shooting at Babra that, as his article records, moved Bacha Khan to tears; the movement's writers are gathered in Poets of the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Babra, 12 August 1948

On 12 August 1948 Khudai Khidmatgar men, women and old people marched from Utmanzai towards Babra in Charsadda. Police fired on them. The accounts disagree on why, and on how many died.

Bacha Khan had been arrested on 15 June 1948 near Kohat and sentenced to three years' rigorous imprisonment. [7] Khan Shehram Eusufzye, writing in The News on Sunday in 2018, says the provincial ordinance of June 1948 let the government detain anyone indefinitely, and that the governor said it was issued on the special orders of the Governor General, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. [9] Naeemullah Khan dates the ordinance to 8 July 1948. [7] The provincial government's account is in Qayyum Khan's words to the assembly in September, as Eusufzye reports them: "I had imposed section 144 at Babara. When the people did not disperse, firing was opened on them. They were lucky that the police had finished ammunition; otherwise not a single soul would have been left alive and if they were killed, the government would not have cared about them." [9] Naeemullah Khan reports that official sources gave fifteen dead and fifty injured. [7]

The Khudai Khidmatgar account comes from Dost Muhammad, then 20, who marched with his two brothers and later told the Express Tribune of it. He said the marchers were unarmed. Abdul Rauf of Sardehri, leading the guards, said the assistant commissioner warned him not to go on; Rauf answered that the procession was peaceful and would go to the Ghazi Gul Baba mosque for a meeting. Then, Dost Muhammad said, the son of the Salar (the movement's local commander) misunderstood the argument and attacked the official, who thought he had been stabbed and ordered the police to open fire; women carrying the Quran on their heads were shot, he said. He put the dead at more than six hundred; others, he said, gave four hundred, and official accounts half of that. [10] Eusufzye also says six hundred were killed and that hospitals were told not to admit the wounded. [9] Naeemullah Khan writes that "hundreds" died by local accounts. [7]

The provincial government declared the Khudai Khidmatgar unlawful in mid-September, and its headquarters at Sar-i-Daryab was blown up. [7] On 20 March 1954 Bacha Khan told the assembly that Pakistan was his country, and asked for a tribunal into the question of loyalty and into the "general massacre, arson and loot" at Charsadda. [9] The sources read report no such tribunal. The widely held view is that unarmed marchers were shot and that hundreds died; fifteen is the official figure. The article on Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan gives his ministry's side and the partition article the background.

Charsadda in the 2010s

Charsadda has been a target in the long fighting in the province. Dost Muhammad, the same eyewitness, was shot dead in the Awami National Party office at Utmanzai in the week before 4 July 2015; the Express Tribune reported that he had lost about seventy of his closest companions in the years of the war against militancy. [10] On 20 January 2016 gunmen climbed the wall of Bacha Khan University at Palosa, about 15 kilometres south-east of Charsadda town, and Dawn's first report counted 20 dead, students, a teacher and guards. The attackers were killed by security forces, and a faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed it. [11]

Places to know

• The Bala Hisar, a mound 60 feet or more high beside Charsadda, with the excavation scars of 1903 and 1958. [4]

• Shaikhan, half a mile long, north-north-east of the Bala Hisar, a town-plan seen from the air. [4]

• Mir Ziarat and the mounds of Shahr-i-Napursan, east of the Swat, where Marshall dug in 1903. [4]

• Rajjar, two miles north-east, where the gazetteer reports a mound with the ruins of a fort, a Hisar. [1]

• Utmanzai, Bacha Khan's village, and Babra, where the marchers were shot in 1948. [9, 10]