The Pathans of India: Pashtun families and states

At a glance

• In India the Pashtuns are called Pathans. After the Lodi and Sur sultans, Pathan soldiers in Mughal service founded or took over states and towns from Bhopal and Tonk to Farrukhabad and Maler Kotla. [2, 4, 6, 7]

• Bhopal was founded by Dost Muhammad Khan, an Afghan from Tirah who reached Delhi in 1708 looking for employment; women ruled it in turn through much of the nineteenth century. [2, 3]

• Farrukhabad was founded in 1714 by Muhammad Khan Bangash, who was born in 1665 at Mau Rashidabad, in a Bangash colony that still stands there. [4]

• Tonk's first Nawab, Amir Khan (born 1768), came from a family of the Buner country by way of Rohilkhand. [6]

• Shahjahanpur was settled in 1647 by Afghans brought by Bahadur Khan, a Daudzai. At the 1901 census Pathans were 41,137 of its Muslims. [5]

• Hindustani districts counted Pathans by clan: Ghori, Yusufzai, Dilazak, Bangash. The gazetteers also warn that converts from other communities took the name. [4, 5]

From sultans to mansabdars

The Lodis and the Surs, told in The Lodi dynasty and Sher Shah Suri, gave Afghans land and rank in the plains. Pathans kept coming. Ridgway's 1910 handbook for the British army says they flocked into India from Sher Shah's reign on and found employment under Akbar and his successors. [12] They served as soldiers and as commanders holding a rank and pay (mansab), and the states below grew out of that service when Delhi's hold weakened after Aurangzeb died in 1707.

The Shahjahanpur gazetteer tells of two brothers. Diler Khan and Bahadur Khan were the sons of a Daudzai trader, Darya Khan, a soldier of Jahangir, and rose to high rank under Shah Jahan, holding the jagirs of Kalpi and Kanauj. In 1647, after a fight with local Rajput clans, Diler Khan was given fourteen villages and ordered to build a fort. [5] The same gazetteer says their father had taken a prominent part in the rebellion of Khan Jahan Lodi, so the family had been on both sides of the Mughal court. [5] The quarrel of the hill tribes with Delhi is told in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

Bhopal: Dost Muhammad Khan and the Begums

The Imperial Gazetteer says the founder of the Bhopal family was Dost Muhammad Khan, an Afghan from Tirah of the Mirzai Khel of the Barakzais, who came to Delhi in the first years of Bahadur Shah's reign (1708) in search of employment. [2] In 1709 he took a lease of the Berasia district and extended his lands from there. [2] A later British recruiting handbook (Ridgway, 1910) calls the family descendants of a Firoz Khel Orakzai, and the Imperial Gazetteer gives the same Firoz Khel name for the Afghan family that took Korwai, a smaller Pathan state in the same agency, in 1713. [9, 12] The sources do not agree on the clan, and a reader should say "from Tirah" and stop there.

The state gazetteer of Bhopal gives the beginning in detail. Dost Muhammad worked for a Raja of Sitamau and for other small Rajput chiefs, then took over Berasia on lease for Rs. 30,000 a year, sent north for his family, and from Jagdeshpur, which he renamed Islamnagar, took more of the country. Allied with Bhim Singh of Kotah in 1719, he received a high mansab. [3] He laid the foundation of the Fatehgarh fort at Bhopal on 9 Dhu al-Hijja 1135 (1722). [3] The Imperial Gazetteer gives 1728 for the fort and about 1740 for his death at sixty-six; the state gazetteer says the dates for him are much confused, gives 1139 AH (1726) for his death and says its corrected dates replace the Imperial volume's. [2, 3]

Dost Muhammad's heirs ruled with Hindu ministers beside their Afghan nobles. The Imperial Gazetteer names Baiji Ram under Faiz Muhammad Khan, and Chhote Khan under Hayat Muhammad Khan, and says Yar Muhammad Khan's widow Mamullah controlled the councils of the state for fifty years. [2] Wazir Muhammad Khan, a cousin of the Nawab, held Bhopal against the Pindaris and the Marathas from 1807, and in 1813 the town was defended for eight months against the combined forces of Gwalior and Nagpur. [2]

Then came the Begums. Wazir Muhammad's son Nazar Muhammad Khan was killed by the accidental discharge of a pistol soon after the treaty of 1818, and his widow Kudsia Begam held the regency until 1837. [2] Her daughter Sikandar Begam was regent from 1847 and ruled in practice until she died in 1868. [2] Sikandar's daughter Shah Jahan Begam was recognised as chief in 1844 and installed in 1868, and Shah Jahan's daughter Sultan Jahan Begam succeeded in 1901. [2] The Imperial Gazetteer says Sikandar Begam rendered signal service to the British in 1857 and received Berasia in 1860 for it. [2] That is the British account of her loyalty.

Farrukhabad: the Bangash nawabs

The Farrukhabad gazetteer says Muhammad Khan Bangash was born in 1665 at Mau Rashidabad, in a Bangash colony that still stood around the place, and that his father-in-law Qasim Khan Bangash was killed near the site of the city. [4] At about twenty he joined the Pathan bands that went to Bundelkhand each year to hire out their services. In 1712 Farrukhsiyar invited him from Khajuha; he joined the prince with 12,000 men and fought in the van at Samogarh near Agra, where Jahandar Shah was routed. [4] He was rewarded with the title of Nawab and land. He founded Kaimganj, named for his eldest son Qaim Khan, and Muhammadabad, and in 1714 laid the foundations of Farrukhabad on a grant of fifty-two villages. [4]

He was governor of Allahabad and of Malwa in turn and fought the Marathas at Gwalior and Sironj. He died in 1743, aged eighty by the gazetteer's account, and his lands were popularly said to run from Koil in the north to Kora in the south. [4] He made, the gazetteer says, about 4,000 chelas, Hindu boys he raised as Muslims, and many Muslim Rajput families in the district descend from them. [4]

The next generation lost most of it. In September 1748 an imperial warrant named Qaim Khan, the eldest son, governor of Rohilkhand, on the promise of Safdar Jang, the wazir of Awadh, who at the same time secretly encouraged the Rohillas to resist. [4] Qaim Khan marched against the Rohillas, whose story is in The Rohillas of Rohilkhand, and on 22 November 1748 he was killed in a ravine between Daunri and Rasulpur, near Budaun, with most of the Bangash leaders. [4] The Shahjahanpur gazetteer gives the following year. [5] Safdar Jang then took the Bangash country. The mother of the family, the Bibi Sahiba, escaped and raised the Pathans under Qaim Khan's brother Ahmad Khan, who fought the Awadh army at Khudaganj in 1750. [4]

In 1857 the Bangash Nawab, Tafazzul Husain Khan, was enthroned on 18 June as head of a government that held the Farrukhabad district. He surrendered in January 1859, was condemned to death, and had the sentence suspended on condition that he leave British territory for ever. He was sent to Aden and across the Arabian frontier towards Mecca. [4] Muhammad Hayat Khan's Hayat-i-Afghani (حیات افغانی), in its Pashto translation published at Kabul, says that many Bangash live in the districts of Hindustan, above all in Farrukhabad, whose Nawab is of the tribe, and that Tafazzul Husain was driven out and is now in Mecca. [1]

Tonk: Amir Khan

The Imperial Gazetteer says the ruling family of Tonk are Pathans of the Buner tribe. In Muhammad Shah's reign Taleh Khan left Buner and took service with Ali Muhammad Khan, the Rohilla leader; his son Haiyat Khan held land in Moradabad, and in 1768 Amir Khan was born. [6] The gazetteer says he began as a small mercenary leader and by 1798 commanded a large army in Jaswant Rao Holkar's service. [6] It says the two agreed to share conquest equally and that Sironj came to him in 1798, Tonk and Pirawa in 1806, Nimbahera in 1809 and Chhabra in 1816. [6] The gazetteer says the British offered in 1817 to guarantee his lands if he disbanded his army of fifty-two battalions of infantry and a body of Pathan cavalry, and that a treaty followed in November. [6] He died in 1834. Ridgway's handbook also calls him a Rohilla. [12]

Tonk was a Pathan state among non-Pashtun subjects. In 1901 the Imperial Gazetteer counted 273,201 people, of whom 17,500, about 6 per cent, were Pathans, and more than 82 per cent were Hindus. [6] The gazetteer says Amir Khan's grandson Muhammad Ali Khan forbade the building or repair of Hindu temples and was deposed by the British in 1867 after he abetted an attack on the uncle and followers of the Thakur of Lawa. [6]

Maler Kotla: the Sarwani of Daraban

Maler Kotla in the Punjab is a Pathan state surrounded by Sikh ones. The Imperial Gazetteer calls its Nawabs Afghans who held positions of trust in Sirhind under the Mughals. [7] Ridgway names the reigning family as the Saripal clan of the Sarwani section. [12] Hayat Khan's Pashto text gives the family's own account: Shaikh Sadr al-Din, called Sadr Jahan, of the Sarwani (سرواڼی) of Daraban (درابڼ), a pious man, went east, reached Maler (مالیر) on the bank of a Sutlej channel, and, as the family tells it, married a daughter of Sultan Bahlul Lodi. [1] Among the later chiefs, Hayat Khan names Bayazid Khan, who built a brick-walled fort with a moat beside Maler, the kotla that gave the town its second name, and then Sher Muhammad Khan. [1]

Two accounts of Sher Muhammad Khan are told. Hayat Khan writes that he went with the army of the Sirhind governor against the Sikh Guru Gobind Singh, by order of the king at Delhi. [1] The local remembrance, as Akshay Chavan summarised it in 2020, is the Haa da Naara, the cry of "Haa": in 1705 Sher Muhammad Khan, alone in the court of Wazir Khan at Sirhind, protested the sentence passed on the Guru's two young sons and walked out. The boys were killed anyway, and a gurdwara near the palace commemorates the protest. [13] Both are reports, written long after.

The state fought a long feud with Patiala after Jamal Khan was killed in battle in the eighteenth century. In 1794 Bedi Sahib Singh proclaimed a religious war on the Muslims of Maler Kotla, defeated the Nawab in a pitched battle and besieged his capital until Patiala sent help. [7] In 1808 Ranjit Singh occupied Faridkot, marched on Maler Kotla and asked a ransom of Rs. 155,000, until the British intervened and in 1809 reinstated the Nawab. [7] Chavan adds that Maler Kotla saw no single incident of violence in 1947 and that most of its Muslims chose to stay in India. [13]

Jaora, Korwai, Kurnool and Palanpur

Smaller houses follow the same pattern. Jaora's Nawab Ghafur Khan was, by the Imperial Gazetteer, an Afghan of the Tajik Khel from Swat, whose grandfather Abdul Majid Khan came to India to make his fortune. The family settled in Rohilkhand, Ghafur Khan served Amir Khan of Tonk as his agent at Holkar's court, and the Treaty of Mandasor confirmed him in Jaora in 1817. [8] Korwai was taken in 1713 by Muhammad Diler Khan, an Afghan from Tirah of the Firoz Khel, and, the gazetteer says, was as large as Bhopal during the Mughal decline. [9]

In the south Daud Khan, a Pathan general who had served the Mughals, received Kurnool as a jagir after Aurangzeb's army took it in 1687. His successors were Himayat Khan from 1733 and Munavvar Khan from 1752, and the last Nawab, Ghulam Rasul Khan, was found in 1838 to be preparing a rising and was sent to Trichinopoly; Kurnool was annexed. [10]

Palanpur in Gujarat is older. The Bombay Gazetteer of 1880 says the Muslim leaders who conquered Palanpur and Deesa were the Jhaloris, a family of Lohani Afghan stock who claimed to have been governors of Bihar. About 1370 their head, Malik Yusuf, left Bihar to seek a settlement elsewhere, reached Jalor on the way to Mecca and took it in 1373. [11] The gazetteer says the Jhaloris later belonged to the Mehdavi sect. [11]

Pathan towns of the Ganges plain

Pathan states were few; Pathan towns and estates were many. Shahjahanpur began in 1647 with Diler Khan's fort and, as the gazetteer tells the story, a city peopled by a large body of Afghans sent by Bahadur Khan, then serving beyond the Indus. The tradition is that they belonged to fifty-two tribes, each with its own quarter, and many of the quarters are still named after Pathan clans. [5] Bahadur Khan had twenty sons, from whom many of the city's Pathan families descend. [5] The same gazetteer notes a tradition that the town's growth owed something to forced conversion of Hindus. [5]

Mau Rashidabad and Kaimganj, in the Farrukhabad district, belong to the Bangash. The Farrukhabad gazetteer says over 70 per cent of the Pathans of the district lived around the earlier Bangash strongholds, Kaimganj and Farrukhabad, and that Pathans from Kaimganj enlisted in the army. [4] The 1911 gazetteer counted 34,739 Pathans there, 32.5 per cent of the district's Muslims, of whom the Bangash were the largest clan. [4]

Counting Pathans

The Shahjahanpur gazetteer counted 41,137 Pathans in 1901, 30.72 per cent of the Muslim population, a figure approached in no other district except Bareilly. [5] They were mostly cultivators and also a leading body of landholders. Ghori and Yusufzai were the strongest clans, then Dilazak, Bangash, Muhammadzai, Rohilla, Tarin and Warakzai. [5] The gazetteer adds that the name was often applied improperly to others than descendants of Afghan immigrants, above all converted Rajputs, who habitually assumed the style of Pathan. [5] Ridgway's handbook, from the 1901 census, counts 417,326 Pathan men in the United Provinces, more than half classed as miscellaneous, 64,921 Pathans in Rajputana, over 17,000 each in Bhopal and Gwalior and 61,887 in Hyderabad. [12] These are census categories, drawn up by British officials.

What the families kept

The records show a memory of descent kept in names. Shahjahanpur's quarters carry the names of Pathan clans. [5] Farrukhabad's Bangash still live around Kaimganj and Mau Rashidabad, where their ancestor was born. [4] The Maler Kotla family kept its genealogy, and Hayat Khan's Pashto text gives it from Shaikh Ahmad Zinda Pir of the Sarwani through Shaikh Sadr al-Din to the chiefs of his own day. [1]