Swat: the valley, the district and the former state

At a glance

• Swat is the valley of the Swat river in the Hindu Kush foothills of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The 2017 census counted 2,308,624 people in the district, and the 2023 census 2,687,384. [2, 3]

• Its old name is Uddiyana, "the Garden", the Buddhist land that Chinese pilgrims visited between about AD 403 and 752. [1]

• The Yusufzai took the valley from the Swatis in the early sixteenth century. The Imperial Gazetteer says that by then they held Lower Swat, and Caroe puts the conquest at about 1515. [4, 6]

• Most of the valley was the Swat State from 1915, under Abdul Jabbar Shah and from 1917 under Miangul Abdul Wadud, who was followed in 1949 by his son Miangul Jahanzeb. It merged with Pakistan on 15 August 1969. [8]

• In 2007 to 2009 the valley was held by the Taliban of Maulana Fazlullah. The army operation of May 2009 displaced "hundreds of thousands" by Fleischner's count, about 2.5 million by Khadim Hussain's and almost 3 million by the Crisis Group's. [9, 10, 12]

The valley and its name

The Swat river rises in the ranges bordering Chitral and runs south and then west to the Panjkora and the Peshawar plain. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 gives the river valley as at most 130 miles long and about 12 miles wide on average, starting at about 2,000 feet where the Swat and Panjkora meet and rising to peaks of 15,000 to 22,000 feet. [4] Barth, who did his fieldwork in 1954, calls it a valley closed on all sides by mountains. Its roads do not follow the river through the defile but cross the Malakand, Shahkot, Mora and Karakar passes, and the one trade route of any size runs from Nowshera over the Lowari pass to Chitral. He therefore calls Swat a dead end for communications. [7]

Traditionally Swat has two parts. Swat Kohistan is the mountain country on the upper river as far south as Ain. Swat proper is Bar, Upper Swat, and Kuz, Lower Swat, which runs from Landakai to Kalangai. [4, 8] After the State grew over Buner and part of Indus Kohistan, people outside it called all of that Swat. [8] "Swati" means an inhabitant of the valley, and is also the name of a tribe that once lived there and now lives east of the Indus. [5]

The Gazetteer gives the river's Sanskrit name as Suvastu. [4] The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang wrote it Su-p'o-su-tu. [1] Aurel Stein explained that the old name of the country was Uddiyana, which Xuanzang's narrative turns into the Sanskrit Udyana, "the Garden", and which Fa-hsien wrote Wu-ch'ang. [1]

Hay called it "one of the beauty spots of northern India, rivalling even Kashmir". [5] The country around it is described in the Pashtun lands.

Uddiyana

Arrian's account of Alexander's campaign in 326 BC is the first mention of these countries in a historical record, and the Gazetteer says that Alexander's successor Seleucus gave them to Chandragupta. [4] Stein put Alexander's city of Bazira at the ruined hill of Bir-kot in Lower Swat and the stronghold of Ora at Udegram higher up. [1] Caroe accepts Bazira at Birkot but not the identification of Ora as "final". [6] Indo-Greek and Saka rulers followed, Sultan-i-Rome says, naming Menander and Maues. [8]

The Chinese pilgrims are the main witnesses for the next thousand years. Fa-hsien came down from the Hindu Kush about AD 403 and found "the religion of Buddha extremely flourishing", with five hundred monasteries. Sung Yun in AD 519 found a king who kept to the Buddha's law. Xuanzang, about AD 630, found most of the fourteen hundred monasteries by the river in ruins; the monks, once 18,000, were "fond of reading their texts but were incapable of penetrating their meaning". Stein blames the White Hun conquest of a century before. [1] The last visitor, Wu-k'ung, came in 752 and stayed on as a monk. [1]

The Italian Archaeological Mission has dug at Barikot (Bazira) since 1987. In 2023 its director, Luca Olivieri, reported a sacred monument of the fourth century BC that was made a Buddhist temple in Ashoka's time, enclosed by the Indo-Greeks and given a podium in the early Kushan period, about AD 70 to 90, and used until the fourth century AD by radiocarbon dating. [11] Barth records that Pathan tradition has Mahmud of Ghazni converting the valley to Islam about AD 1000, and that the Swati tribe came about two hundred years before the Yusufzai, chasing the Dilazak. [7]

How the Yusufzai took the valley

Barth dates the Yusufzai conquest between AD 1500 and 1600, when they were driven out of the Kabul valley, entered the Peshawar plain and wrested Swat from the Swati. Some Swati stayed as subjects; others fled east across the Indus into Hazara. [7] Stein wrote that Swat was occupied by the Yusufzai only in the fifteenth century. [1] Caroe, using the chronicles and the Yusufzai story of the Babur marriage, put the occupation of Swat at about 1515, earlier than the Yusufzai victory over the Dilazak at Katlang. [6] The Gazetteer says Babur took Lower Swat by marriage and by force, while Upper Swat, still held by the "aboriginal Swatis" under Sultan Udais or Wais, submitted voluntarily. Under Humayun the Yusufzai overran Upper Swat as far as Ain, "beyond which they have scarcely advanced to this day". [4]

The story is told in the Yusufzai hujras, and Caroe gives it from the chronicle of Akhund Darweza. The Yusufzai had tried for two months to force the Mora pass. They then sent scouts to the Malakand, who reported that Sultan Awes, the ruler at Manglaur, kept a careless garrison there. The main force marched all night and rushed the pass at dawn, leaving a party at the Mora camp to light fires. The Yusufzai women stayed behind and sang ballads boasting of their men, and the Swatis, hearing them, watched the wrong pass. [6] Sultan Awes fled to Tanra. [6] More about the clans is in the article on the Yusufzai.

The conquest was followed by a division of land. Barth records the tradition that the Yusufzai asked the holy man Shaikh Malli to allot the valley, and that he divided it among the sub-tribes and ordered the shares to be exchanged in turn, so that no branch held the best land for ever. This is the wesh. Barth says it meant wholesale moves of landowners over about thirty miles every ten years while the non-Yusufzai majority stayed on the land as the subjects of whoever held it. [7]

The Mughals never held it, Caroe argues. He describes the Karakar pass as the scene of the first stages of the defeat of Akbar's frontier armies by the Yusufzai of Swat and Buner in 1586, and notes that Abul Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari lists Swat as a district of the Kabul province with the columns for people, troops and revenue left empty. [6] The Gazetteer says Zain Khan effected a "thorough conquest" in 1595, and that by 1658 the tribes kept their independence again. [4] Caroe, quoting Raverty, holds that the Mughals never obtained a permanent footing in these hills. [6]

The poet Khushal Khan Khattak went there looking for Yusufzai help against the Mughals and wrote of the country in Caroe's translation:

Bleak is Kabul, Swat is mild and gentle,

Its air and verdure are like unto Kashmir,

Though it spreads not out so finely;

Khushal blamed its people for what they had done with it. "The Yusufzais," he wrote, "have made of it a desert." [6]

Khans, saints and the British

Hay describes Swat before the State: no hereditary chief, "numerous petty Khans who were always fighting each other", and two parties of which the loser left its villages and waited for a turn. [5] The great saint of the age was the Akhund, Abdul Ghafur, who settled at Saidu in 1835 by the Gazetteer's date and about 1845 by Hay's, and died in 1877. [4, 5] In 1863 the forces of Swat, Bajaur, Kunar and Dir stood under his banner against the British at Ambela. [4] His life is told in the article on him.

The British came in 1895, when a relief force for Chitral took the Malakand pass and reached Chakdarra. Caroe writes that there was then no State of Swat, that the Akhund had died in 1877 and the spiritual succession was disputed among his four grandsons, and that Swat beyond Tanra stayed in "its chronic condition of tribal welter". [6] The Gazetteer records that the Political Agency of Dir and Swat was set up the next year, with posts at Chakdarra, Malakand and Dargai. [4] In 1897 the Mulla Mastan, the "Mad Mullah" of Swat, led tribesmen against Chakdarra and Malakand, who were beaten back, and the Yusufzai of Swat were punished. [4] A railway reached Dargai at the foot of the Malakand in 1901. [4]

The Swat State, 1915 to 1969

In 1915 the tribes took a king, Abdul Jabbar Shah, to unite against Dir, and in 1917 the Mianguls replaced him. Hay and Sultan-i-Rome tell this differently, and the full account is in the article on Miangul Abdul Wadud. [5, 8] The British recognised Wadud as Wali in May 1926, and Hay put his State at about 80 miles by 60, with roughly 300,000 people, ruled "autocratically", with the capital at Saidu and the biggest bazaar at Mingaora. [5]

On 3 November 1947 Wadud signed the Instrument of Accession to Pakistan, which Jinnah accepted on 24 November. It gave Pakistan control of external affairs, defence and communications and left the ruler sovereign in the State's own affairs. [8] He abdicated on 12 December 1949, and his son Jahanzeb ruled until the merger. [8] Fleischner, citing Sultan-i-Rome's book of 2008, credits Jahanzeb with three colleges, 36 high schools and more than 270 primary schools between 1949 and 1969, and sixteen hospitals with 611 beds by 1968. [9]

Sultan-i-Rome writes that the State was "benevolent" but "completely autocratic", and that the educated class its schools produced wanted a share of State jobs and joined the privileged landowners in asking for civil and political rights and a change from autocracy to democracy. The merger was announced on 28 July 1969 and completed on 15 August. [8] Fleischner reports a growing resistance movement among the educated and landed elite, and says Jahanzeb in the end helped the merger because it was unavoidable. [9] His son Miangul Aurangzeb argues that the Taliban would never have taken Swat had the Wali's system not been dissolved. [9]

Who lives in Swat

Swat proper is Yusufzai country. The Gazetteer of 1908 puts the Akozai of Swat at about 150,000 and names the clans: on the left bank the Ranizai and Khan Khel in Lower Swat and the Sulizai and Babuzai in Upper Swat; on the right bank the Shamizai, Sebujni, Nikbi Khel and Shamozai in Upper Swat and the Adinzai, Abazai and Khadakzai in Lower Swat. [4] The Akozai have their own page, and so do the Malizai, who hold the Panjkora valley in Dir, and the Utman Khel, whose country begins below the junction of the Swat and Panjkora. [4, 5] Barth says that in 1954 only about one fifth of the people of Swat were counted Pakhtuns, landowners with a place in the genealogy, and that the rest were tenants, craftsmen, saints and clients, each tied to a Pakhtun lineage. [7] That is a statement about landowning status, not language.

Sultan-i-Rome lists the other communities. The Gawri of the northern Swat Kohistan and the Torwali of the south speak Dardic languages. Gujars live in most parts. There are Sayyids, Mians, Sahibzadas and Mullas, artisans, Swati Pukhtuns, some Khattaks and a few Hindu and Sikh families. [8]

How many

The early figures are estimates. The Gazetteer of 1908 gives about 150,000 Akozai and an estimated 20,000 in the Kohistan. [4] Hay estimated the State at about 300,000 in 1934. [5] Barth gave about 400,000 for the valley in 1954 and the State's official estimate of 550,000, and said there had never been a census. [7] These cover different areas and cannot be compared directly.

The census counts: in 1998 the district had 1,257,602 people. In 2017 it had 2,308,624, of whom 695,821 lived in towns, in 5,337 square kilometres. [2] In 2023 it had 2,687,384, a density of 503.54 per square kilometre and an urban share of 29.56 per cent. [3] Growth was 3.24 per cent a year from 1998 to 2017 and 2.57 per cent from 2017 to 2023. [2, 3] Fleischner's "around 1.7 million" is her estimate, made when she said no reliable census data existed. [9]

Language

Caroe puts Swat in the area of the "hard", north-eastern Pakhtu, the speech of the Peshawar tribes, Dir, Buner and Bajaur, as against the "soft" Pashtu of the south-west. [6] The Gazetteer calls it "the pure Yusufzai Pashtu" outside the Kohistan. [4] See Pashto dialects. The 2017 census counted Pashto as the mother tongue of 2,112,811 of the district's 2,308,624 people, 91.5 per cent, and listed 169,656 under "others" without a breakdown. [2]

Life and work

Barth's picture of 1954 is of dense farming: about 800 people to each square mile of productive land, two crops a year in the valley bottom, wheat, barley and mustard in spring and transplanted rice and maize in the second season, with water drawn from the river through channels. Orange orchards were new and tea had come only thirty or forty years before. [7] Hay adds wool, ghee, blankets, the one local industry, and timber from the Kohistan forests. The State's revenue was a tenth of the harvest, mostly in kind, with tolls, about twelve lakhs of rupees a year. [5]

Places to know

Saidu Sharif is where the Akhund's tomb stands under a gilt dome. Stein saw it in March 1926, among pilgrims' rest houses, with refuge towers on the hilltops around. [1] The Gazetteer calls the shrine one of the most important in northern India. [4]

Stein records Buddhist stupas at Amluk-dara and Tokar-dara, a seated Buddha cut in a rock near Amluk-dara whose face "Pathan invaders" had defaced, and Bodhisattvas cut into rocks near Guligram. [1] Barikot is the best-known excavation. [11] Mount Ilam (9,222 feet) was sacred in Buddhist times, Hay says, and Hindu pilgrims still visited a shrine on its summit. The Karakar pass (4,384 feet) leads to Buner, where the shrine of Pir Baba is, in Hay's words, the most famous place of pilgrimage on the North-West Frontier. [5]

The Taliban years and the operation of 2009

What happened in Swat between 2007 and 2009 is disputed: writers differ on the causes, on how far the militants belonged to wider groups, and on what the army did.

On the roots, Fleischner and the Crisis Group both point to a failing justice system. Fleischner writes that after the merger the district was governed as a Provincially Administered Tribal Area, and that the PATA Regulation of 1975 replaced the qazi courts with a four-member jirga that met rarely, so that land cases took eight to twelve years. [9] The Crisis Group says Swat's District Coordination Officer, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, "fully patronised" Fazlullah, that jihadi groups moved training camps to Swat after the 2005 earthquake, and that militants recruited tenants deprived of their rights by landlords. [10] Fleischner quotes the anthropologist Robert Nichols that inequality was "an underlying factor". [9]

Sufi Muhammad founded the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), in 1989 in one place in Fleischner's paper and in 1992 in another, and after 2001 sent about 5,000 young boys to Afghanistan. He was jailed, and his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah, "Radio Mullah", led the movement in Swat with illegal FM broadcasts. [9] Fleischner says the TNSM allied itself with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in 2007, that other sources dispute how close they were, that many locals first welcomed them as an alternative to a slow and corrupt system, and that the people "have clearly rejected the Taliban's ideology". [9] The Crisis Group dates deals with Fazlullah to May 2007, May 2008 and 16 February 2009, and counts 200 schools destroyed in Swat district alone and a ban on 120,000 girl students in December 2008. [10] In April 2009 a video of a seventeen-year-old girl flogged in the Matta valley caused outrage; a militant spokesman said she was punished for leaving her house with a man who was not her husband. The Nizam-e-Adl Regulation took effect on 16 April and in late April the militants entered Buner. [10]

The army operation began in May 2009. The Crisis Group says some 30,000 army and 11,000 Frontier Corps troops went in, that the militant leadership and many fighters fled without fighting, and that "scorched earth" tactics displaced almost three million people, with torture and extra-judicial killings common. It adds that, by the Human Rights Commission's testimonies, the Taliban forced children to fight or used them as human shields, and that the military said it had too little time to prepare camps without alerting the militants. [10] Khadim Hussain, a Peshawar analyst writing in Dawn in 2014, gives about 2.5 million displaced, says residents "were given timely warning" and that camps and cash payments followed, and calls the operation a model, though with "a number of lacunae". [12] Fleischner says "hundreds of thousands" were displaced and that 2,500 suspects were detained illegally. [9] The Crisis Group gives over 1,000 detained by the DCO's count and up to 2,600 by independent sources. [10]

In July 2009 the military declared the area cleared. The displaced came back, but the Crisis Group does not think that proved success, since people returned because they had left everything. The leaders escaped, and Fazlullah was reported in Nuristan. [9, 10] On 9 October 2012 his faction shot Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year-old Swat activist for girls' education, and two school friends in Mingora; all survived. [10] Afzal Khan Lala, who opposed the 2009 peace deal, and Asfandiar Amir Zeb, a descendant of the Wali who was killed by a roadside bomb while campaigning, the day after Benazir Bhutto's assassination, appear in Fleischner's account as Swat voices against the Taliban. [9]