Dera Ismail Khan and the Derajat: the Daman plain and the Powindah road

At a glance

• Dera Ismail Khan stands near the right bank of the Indus, about halfway between the Salt Range and the border of Dera Ghazi Khan. The plain called the Daman runs west from the town to the Sulaiman hills. [2, 3]

• By the usual account the city was founded in the late fifteenth century by Baloch settlers of the Hot branch, under Malik Sohrab and his son Ismail Khan. The Indus washed the old town away in the 1820s and the present city was laid out on a new site. [2, 3]

• The district was settled from two directions: Jats and Baloch came up the Indus from the south, and Pashtun tribes, many of them nomads of the Gomal road, came from the north-west. [2]

• Pashto is spoken along the foot of the hills. The speech of the Indus plain and the city is a southern Punjabi dialect, called Jatki, Hindko or Derawal in the 1880s and grouped today as Saraiki. [1, 2]

• Every winter the Powindah caravans came down the Gomal Pass, camped on the Daman and went on to India. [2, 4]

The Derajat, the Daman and the name

Dera means a camp or settlement, and Dera Ismail Khan is the camp named after Ismail Khan. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 says the three Deras, Dera Ismail Khan, Dera Fateh Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan, gave their name to the Derajat, the long plain between the Indus and the Sulaiman range. [3] H. G. Raverty adds a note on spelling: the old town's name is Isma'il, with no "sh" in it. [5]

The Daman, "the skirt of the hills", was first the strip of Pashtun country directly under the mountains. The riverside plain between it and the Indus was called Makkalwad, a name out of use by 1883, when the Daman meant the whole plain. [2, 4] Mountstuart Elphinstone, who crossed it in 1809, gave the same two meanings. [4]

Baloch founders and the Hot chiefs

The best account of the founding is a Persian manuscript translated by Lieutenant Maclagan and quoted in the district gazetteer of 1884. In 874 AH (1469) Sultan Husain of Multan took in Malik Sohrab, a Dodai Baloch from Kech in Makran, with his son Ismail Khan and others of his tribe, and gave them the land from Karor to Dinkot to hold against hill robbers. Sohrab "founded a Dera named after Ismail Khan". [2] Raverty corrects one detail: Sultan Husain was a Langah sovereign of Multan in his own right, not a governor, and Sohrab belonged to the Hot clan. [5]

The gazetteer warns that local historians gave the founding of every town to a chief or his son, and that the Hot rulers all took the title Ismail Khan while in office, as the Mirani rulers of Dera Ghazi took Ghazi Khan or Haji Khan. [2] When Sher Shah Suri held court at Khushab in 1540, Ismail Khan, Fateh Khan and Ghazi Khan came to submit, and he confirmed them in their holdings. Olaf Caroe calls them Baloch of the Hot tribe, founders of the three Deras. [2, 9] The muster is told in Sher Shah Suri.

The Hot chiefs fought constant small wars with the Gandapur and other Pashtun tribes on their western border, and never held authority over the Pashtuns of the western Daman. [2] The end of their rule is dated differently. The gazetteer of 1884 has Ahmad Shah Durrani depose the last of them, Nusrat Khan, about 1770 after a scandal and carry him prisoner to Kabul; the Imperial Gazetteer says they were reduced to vassalage about 1750. [2, 3] Governors from Kabul followed, and in 1794 Shah Zaman gave the government to Muhammad Khan, a Saddozai Pashtun, with the title Nawab. [2, 3]

Babur, who crossed the Daman in 1505, never mentions the Baloch of Dera, which the gazetteer takes as a sign that they were then men of little note. He took cloth, drugs and sugar from Afghan merchants there and describes the Gomal caravan road. [2]

Three peoples on one plain

The gazetteer describes a double colonisation. Before the fifteenth century, it says, a few Jat tribes lived by their cattle in a jungle country. Mixed Jat tribes, Siyal, Chinah, Khokhar and others, came up the valley about 1400. The Baloch followed in large bands under named leaders, and in the lowlands they were a military and ruling class while the Jats held the land. "Jat" here covers many unrelated families, Awans among them. [2]

Pashtun tribes came from the other side. The Powindah tribes had long traded between Hindustan and Khorasan by the Gomal Pass, and a feud sometimes stranded one on the plains. [2] The gazetteer places Lodi clans in the area from the early thirteenth century and says many left for Hindustan under the Lodi and Sur dynasties, which left the Prangi, Suri and Pabbi too weak to stand against the Lohanis. [2] The Lohanis, a Lodi branch driven from the Ghazni hills by the Sulaiman Khel, arrived in Akbar's time: the Marwat, Daulat Khel, Mian Khel and Tator. [2, 7] Caroe counts the Lohani, Marwat and Niazi as settled Ghilzai. [9] See the Ghilzai and the Lodi dynasty, where these genealogies are weighed.

By 1883 the Pashtuns held a belt along the hills, one block to a tribe, and on the Kulachi plain they were hardly a quarter of the people; Jats, Baloch and others farmed. [2] In 1901 the Imperial Gazetteer counted 73,000 Pathans, under 30 per cent of the district, 58,000 Jats, 21,000 Baloch and 29,434 Hindus, and called the small Pashtun share unusual for a frontier district. [3] Bhakkar and Leiah were detached in 1901, so these figures do not compare directly with the counts of 1881 and 1891. [3]

The Pashtun tribes of the Daman

The Ushtarani are Sayyids of the Sherani stock, descended, Rose says, from Ustaryani, who married into the Sherani. They were shepherds and Powindahs until a quarrel with the Musa Khel about a century before Rose wrote ended their western migration and drove them to farming. They live mostly in villages just inside the hill passes. [2, 7]

The Babar are a small tribe allied to the Sherani, centred on Chaudwan. The gazetteer calls them civilised, many able to read and write, making shoes for Afghanistan and sending men with the Mian Khel and Nasar caravans to Bukhara and Kandahar; they had no recognised chief. [2] Rose quotes Edwardes, who called them the most superior race in the trans-Indus districts, and the proverb "A Babar fool is a Gandapur sage". [6] The sources differ on their arrival: early in the fourteenth century in Rose, about 1600 in the gazetteer. [2, 6] Elphinstone writes "Bauboor" and says their men travelled as merchants without families. [4]

The Mian Khel, Lohani Powindahs, came to the Daman in the sixteenth century, settled first at Tank with the Daulat Khel, then took Daraban and Musazai. They were long semi-independent and at feud with the Gandapur and Babar. [2] Rose adds that they never quite gave up the caravan life and were "the richest of all the Pawindahs". [7]

The Gandapur are Sayyids of Ushtarani stock in Rose's account. They were a poor Powindah and pastoral tribe from the hills east of Kandahar until about 1600, when the Daulat Khel chief Khan Zaman settled them at Rori against the Marwats; they spread to hold the country from Takwara to the Mian Khel border, with Kulachi as chief town. [2, 6] The Nawab Muhammad Khan defeated them at Maddi in 1813 and burned Kulachi. [2] The 1884 gazetteer quotes Elphinstone calling them lawless and quarrelsome, though their sticks of wild olive made killings rare, and also great merchants, with fifty or sixty men going each year to Khorasan and four times as many to India. [2] Rose calls them "lawless, brutal and uncivilised". [6] These are officials' views; Rose also says the tribe farmed more than any other Pashtun community of the district. [6]

The Kundi, a Powindah tribe of Niazi descent, hold the Sohali stream in the north of Tank; the gazetteer says they were not "a colonising race", so Marwat settlers took their eastern lands. [2, 6] The Bhittani came down into the Tank plain in the fifty years before 1883, and the Marwat into the Largi valley and the Tank borders, about 5,000 in the district. [2]

The Baloch and Jats

The gazetteer calls the Baloch the lowland rulers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though by 1883 Jats and Sayyids held the superior rights in most land. They had lost their tribal organisation, except the Kasrani of the south, and only a few Kasrani villages still spoke Balochi. [2] Elphinstone found the town "chiefly Beloches", and the governor who met him was Fateh Khan, a Baloch serving the Saddozai Nawab. [4] The Nawab's government settled Baloch groups near Dera Fateh Khan, and Sarwar Khan of Tank settled Jats in what became the Jatatar country. [2]

Pashto, Jatki and Saraiki

The census of 1881 covered the whole district, including the east bank, and gave per 10,000 people: Punjabi 6,407, Jatki 2,060, Pashtu 1,539, Balochi 57, Hindustani 30. The gazetteer doubts that Punjabi and Jatki differ, since the enumerators described one speech under two names. [2] The officer Mr Dames, whom it quotes, calls the language of Bhakkar, Leiah and most of Dera Ismail Khan a Punjabi dialect close to Sindhi in vocabulary; its speakers called it Hindi or Derawal, and Pashtuns called it Hindko. [2]

Pashto was spoken along the border strip from the Khasor and Bilot Baloch of Paniala to the Babar, except around Tank town, where the Daulat Khel had given it up. Dames says the district's Pashto is the soft or southern dialect, "approximating to that used at Kandahar", and thought Hindustani would replace it "as assuredly as the Celtic of the Scotch and Welsh Highlands". [2]

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics describes Saraiki as "another Punjabi dialect" present in the southern districts of Dera Ismail Khan and Tank. Its 2023 report gives language shares for the whole province: Pashto 81.00 per cent and Saraiki 3.17 per cent, with Hindko 9.39. [1] It counted the district at 1,625,088 people in 2017 on the boundaries of that census and 1,693,594 for the same year on the 2023 boundaries. The Dera Ismail Khan division had 2,795,853 in 2017 and 3,188,779 in 2023. [1]

The Powindah caravans

Raverty explains the word: powandah is from the Pashto verb powul, to graze, and names Afghan tribes that move with flocks and herds and carry goods between their country and India. [5] The gazetteer of 1884 divides them into kirri people who bring families and camp in fixed places, kafila men who come without families, and chharra men who come as labourers. [2]

The cold weather of 1877 to 1878 brought 76,403 through the passes and 1880 to 1881 brought 49,392. [2] The leading tribes were the Nasar, Sulaiman Khel, Kharoti, Mian Khel and Dotani. The Nasar, who summered in the Ghilzai country, owned about 33,000 camels and 130,000 sheep and goats. [2] The caravans came down the Gomal in October and left in April or May, bringing silk, charas and gold thread from Bukhara, fruit from Kabul and Kandahar and madder and wool from Ghazni, and taking back cotton goods, indigo, tea and sugar. [2, 3] Several of the tribes appear on the site as the Kharoti, Sulaiman Khel, Nasir and Dotani.

How much the caravans did in the town is a point on which the colonial sources differ. The gazetteer says the Powindahs seldom unpacked their wares in the district markets, yet its town entry calls Dera Ismail Khan a great emporium of the trade, with a Powindah sarai outside the walls treated as a bonded warehouse free of octroi. The Imperial Gazetteer calls its local trade second-rate but says the caravans cross the town twice a year in growing numbers. [2, 3] Captain C. M. Enriquez, who toured the border in 1909, found the bazaars lively when they passed, with black-haired Powindahs lounging in the streets and hakims selling them medicine and surma. [8]

The new city

The old town stood about four miles east of the present one, in a wood of date palms. Elphinstone reached "Dera Ismael Khaun" on 11 January 1809 and found it within a hundred yards of the Indus, with a ruinous mud wall, Baloch and Jat country people and a Hindu temple; he waited nearly a month there for an escort to Peshawar. [4, 9] The Indus swept the old town away in 1823 by the gazetteer, 1825 by Enriquez, and Nawab Sher Muhammad Khan laid out a new town on bare clay. [2, 8]

In 1836 the Sikh prince Nau Nihal Singh annexed the Nawab's land, and the town went to the Diwans Lakhi Mal and Daulat Rai. [2, 3] Edwardes reached the frontier in 1847, and in 1848 levies from Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu marched with him to Multan. The town became a district headquarters, with a municipality from 1867. [2, 3] By 1883 it had a mud wall cut down to four feet, ten gates and two main bazaars crossing at a crowded centre, Muslims living north of the main street and Hindus south, and 22,164 people in 1881; the gazetteer called it "one of the most aristocratic" towns in the Punjab, with four resident Nawabs. [2] The 1901 census counted 31,737, of whom 18,662 were Muslims, 11,486 Hindus and 1,420 Sikhs, with the cantonment included. [3]

Hindu Dera and 1947

The Express Tribune reported in 2018 that before independence Dera was the only district of the North-West Frontier Province with a considerable Hindu community, and that, on the account of the local historian Syed Hafizullah Gillani, nearly half of the walled city was Hindu and much of its trade in Hindu hands. Gillani dates violence against Dera's Hindus to 1931, 1932 and 1947, when a Muslim League demonstration turned to burning shops and schools. He says seven Hindus were killed in front of police, after which most left, some by air after Nehru and Patel intervened, others in convoys to the railway at Darya Khan, and that about two dozen low-caste Hindus remained by early 1948. He names greed, resentment of Hindu moneylenders and the wish to be rid of debts among Muslim neighbours' motives. [10] The numbers are his, and the report rests on him alone.

Since 1947

Dera lies beside the tribal districts, and their wars have reached it in three ways.

When the army began Operation Rah-i-Nijat against the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan in 2009, Mehsud families went to Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. Dawn reported in August 2012 that 40,000 registered Mehsud families were waiting with host families in the two districts and that only one of six subdivisions had been declared cleared. [12] The Express Tribune reported in December 2012 that Mehsuds from Wana had no relief camps in Tank or Dera, paid up to Rs20,000 for a journey that normally cost Rs500 to Rs1,000, and met rents of up to Rs15,000. [13]

The Gomal Zam dam, on the Gomal at Khajuri Kach in South Waziristan, was inaugurated on 12 September 2013 by the federal minister for water and power, Khwaja Muhammad Asif. Dawn reported that he expected a "green revolution" for South Waziristan, Tank and Dera Ismail Khan, with 17.4 megawatts of power and flood protection. [11]

Sectarian and militant violence marked the city from 2009. Dawn called the district a flashpoint for violence between militants from the Shia minority and the Sunni majority when it reported the shooting of three Shia labourers on 25 May 2009; police linked it to a pattern of target killings. [14] On 25 November 2012 a bomb near an Ashura procession in the Commissionary Bazaar killed five and injured about 70 by Dawn's count. A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, claimed it as a suicide attack; the provincial information minister said the bomb had been planted in a closed workshop. [15] On the night of 29 to 30 July 2013 armed men attacked the central jail, and Dawn reported that nearly 175 prisoners escaped, including 35 described as high-profile militants, and that at least nine people were killed. A Taliban spokesman claimed the attack, and the provincial chief minister called it an intelligence failure. [16]

The Saraiki province question reached Dera in 2012 and 2013. Saraiki parties demanded that Tank and Dera Ismail Khan join any new Saraiki province. A Saraiki Parties Alliance protest on 1 February 2013 blocked the circular road for two hours, and its leader said Saraiki people would not live under Pakhtun rule from Peshawar; the Tribune reported that shops run by Pashtuns stayed open. [17] Another Saraiki leader, reported on 22 February 2013, said Pukhtun rulers in Peshawar were exploiting Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. An undated Tribune report has the chairman of the Dera Seraiki Party asking that the boundary follow the 1981 census. [18, 19] The Pashtun parties' positions are not quoted in these reports.

Kafir Kot and Tank

The district's oldest monuments are the two forts of Kafir Kot on the Khasor spurs above the Indus, of rough stone with small carved temples inside. The gazetteer says tradition ties them to the last Hindu rajas, Til and Bil, and that Bilot takes its name from Bil Raja's fort. [2]

Tank, to the north-west, was a small Pashtun state under the Katti Khel chiefs of the Daulat Khel. Sarwar Khan used to flood the land when the Nawab of Dera approached, and Nau Nihal Singh annexed it in 1836. [2] In 1870 Sir Henry Durand, Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, died at Tank after his elephant was driven against an arch; he was buried at Dera Ismail Khan. [3]