Mardan and the Yusufzai plain: Hoti, the Guides, Takht-i-Bahi and Shahbaz Garhi

At a glance

• Mardan district lies in the Peshawar valley of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and covers 1,632 square kilometres. Its population was 2,373,399 at the 2017 census and 2,744,898 at the 2023 census. [7, 8]

• The plain is the Yusufzai plain of the British, called Mulk-i-Mandanr, "the Mandanr country", in the Pashto histories. The people who hold most of it are the Mandanr, a branch of the Yusufzai. [1, 3]

• Mardan was a tahsil of Peshawar District until 1937. The cantonment, called Hoti Mardan, became the permanent home of the Corps of Guides; the fort was built in 1854. [1, 2, 4, 10]

• Two of the oldest sites in Pakistan's north-west are in the district: the Buddhist monastery of Takht-i-Bahi, a World Heritage site since 1980, and the rock edicts of Ashoka at Shahbaz Garhi. [6, 9]

• In 2017, 2,331,929 of the district's 2,373,399 people gave Pashto as their mother tongue. [7]

The plain and its villages

Mardan town stands on the right bank of the Kalpani stream, 33 miles north-east of Peshawar and 15 miles north of Nowshera. [1] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 says that the station took its name from two villages, Mardan and Hoti, which lie on the banks of the Kalpani just below the cantonment. Hoti is two miles from it, and the cantonment was often called Hoti Mardan. [1, 2]

North of the plain, the hills run along the Pajja ridge, and the Kalpani rises in the Mora pass and flows past Mardan and Hoti before it reaches the Kabul river opposite Nowshera. The Gazetteer describes the soil of the plain as a fine alluvial deposit, much of it under "luxuriant verdure", and says the British gave the name Yusufzai to a subdivision made of the two tahsils of Mardan and Swabi. [1] H. W. Bellew, the Guides' surgeon, who wrote the first full report on the Yusufzai country in 1864, bounded the plain by the Pajja hill and its Takht-i-Bahi spur on the north, the Indus and Kabul rivers on the south, the Mahaban mountain on the east and the Hissarah Kandah ravine on the west. [3]

The Pashto histories call it Mulk-i-Mandanr after the clan that took it. Bellew counted six sub-districts: Kamalzai, Amazai, Razzar, Khodokhail, Utmanzai and Gaduns. Hoti and Mardan belong to the Kamalzai, whose two halves are the Mishranzai, with Toru as their chief town, and the Kishranzai, with Hoti. [3] The Gazetteer of 1908 gives the same tappa (tribal district) for Hoti and Mardan and adds that the Baezai tappa further north was the battleground of the descendants of Yusuf and Mandan, who called in the Utman Khel and the Khattak as hired fighters. Those mercenaries ended by taking most of the Baezai valley. [1] On the arrival of the tribe in the valley and the story of the Dilazak, see the Yusufzai and the tribe page of the Mandanr.

Bellew set down how the Kishranzai divided their land. Of 400 shares in the Kamalzai country, he was told, 200 went to the Mishranzai and 200 to the Kishranzai, and the Kishranzai's half was split again, 100 lots for Hoti and 100 for Mardan. Of Mardan's lots, twelve were set aside as mirai, free gifts for the support of holy men, and the rest went to the Pukhtun families. The land was measured with a rope by the jirga under the khan and then re-allotted by lot. [3] That exchange is the wesh described in the Yusufzai article. Bellew wrote that British rule ended it, because the plain tribes lost their hill lands and gained the plain lands of those who had been in the hills. [3]

Under Mughals and Durranis

When Babur moved down from Swat and camped at Katlang, his next march was to Shahbaz Garhi, where, in Bellew's summary of the memoirs, his troops destroyed the shrine of Shahbaz Qalandar and ravaged the country as far as Ashnaghar. [3] Bellew adds that Akhund Darweza said the shrine had been built only about thirty years before, and that it had been put on ground that held an older pagan temple, which is the reason Babur's men gave. [3] The village is named from the Qalandar, according to the Akhund. [3]

Aurangzeb sent an army against the Yusufzai in the twelfth year of his reign. Bellew found a white marble tablet with a Persian inscription at Kapurdagarhi, in the ruins of old walls. It says that in 1080 AH Shamsher Khan Tarin, for the government, conquered the country of Mandar and built a fort, a mosque and a well there. Bellew saw the remains of all three, and wrote that they were nearly the only red-brick buildings in the district. The tablet went to the Peshawar museum. [3]

Under the Durranis the chiefs of Hoti stood between the tribe and the throne. When Ahmad Shah Durrani reached Peshawar in 1749, the chief of the Mandanr, Fattah Khan, son of Nazoh Khan of Hoti, came with the khans of Toru and Babozai to give him their allegiance. Ahmad Shah asked for a contingent of 500 horse for his Indian campaign, and it served against the Marathas. [3] In Timur Shah's reign the Yusufzai paid their revenue through Fattah Khan's sons, Nowshair and Shahwali Khan, and when Zaman Shah marched against the Sikhs, Nowshair took many Yusufzai adventurers with him. [2, 3]

Sayyid Ahmad and the burning of Hoti, 1829

In the late 1820s the Sayyid Ahmad whom the Gazetteer calls "Sayad Ahmad" held much of the Yusufzai country. The Peshawar Gazetteer says he killed Khadi Khan of Hund and took his fort, and that Ahmad Khan of Hoti, the principal chief in Yusufzai, "met with the same treatment". After that the Sayyid took tithes from the Yusufzai. [2] Bellew records that his strict rules and his demand that Yusufzai families give daughters to his foreign followers turned the tribe against him, and that Hoti and Mardan, persisting in their obstinacy, were attacked, plundered and burnt in 1829. [3] In 1829, according to the Gazetteer, he met a Durrani force at Hoti and beat it, and the Barakzai sardars fled to Peshawar. [2]

Both accounts are British, and both lean on Yusufzai complaints about the Sayyid's rule. The Gazetteer describes his army as made up chiefly of Hindustanis and "fanatics", and neither it nor Bellew gives the case of his own followers for the rules they enforced. [2, 3] The Yusufzai article tells the rest of his story.

The Guides and the 55th at Mardan

The Guides began in 1846 with Sir Henry Lawrence, who wanted a mobile body of horse and foot, comfortably dressed and trained also in gathering intelligence. [4] They were encamped at Kalu Khan in the plain when Lumsden first led them in a night march, in the seventh month of their life. [4] The fort at Mardan, built by Hodson in 1854, was a pentagon, with the sepoys' lines inside and the officers' quarters at its angles, and a hornwork outside for the cavalry. [1, 2] Younghusband saw it from above as a five-pointed star, and said the camp "shed its white wings and became a dust-hued fort". [4] The Guides later named its bastions after Lumsden, Hodson, Daly and Sam Browne. [4]

Mardan was also where the Mutiny reached the Peshawar valley. The 55th Native Infantry, moved there from Nowshera so as to be kept apart, rose on 21 May 1857, according to the Gazetteer, and when a column from Peshawar approached the fort they fled by the Katlang road, hoping to reach Swat and Buner. [1, 4] John Nicholson went after them with cavalry and mounted police; the police killed 120 and took 150 prisoners, and the rest crossed the border, where some tribesmen killed them. Others were captured and hanged or blown from guns at Peshawar. [1, 4] The regiment's colonel, Henry Spottiswoode, shot himself in his disgrace, in Younghusband's telling. [4] Both accounts of the 55th are British, one from a regimental history and one from a government gazetteer, and neither gives the sepoys' own reasons. The part the Akhund of Swat played in their flight is told in his article.

The Guides themselves had marched out eight days earlier. They left Mardan at six in the evening of 13 May and joined the siege of Delhi early on 9 June, after 580 miles. [4]

Two later episodes are marked in Mardan. Government raised a memorial arch and tank there to the Guides' officers and men who died defending the Kabul Residency on 3 September 1879, and Younghusband gives its inscription: "The annals of no army and no regiment can show a brighter record of devoted bravery than has been achieved by this small band of Guides." [4] The memorial is a British one, and Younghusband tells the day from the Guides' side; for the wars themselves see the three Anglo-Afghan wars. A brass gun taken at Mundah in 1895 stands beside it, with a Persian inscription that begins "It's mouth is open wide to eat". [4] In July 1897, when the Malakand position was attacked, the Guides left Mardan within three hours and covered 36 miles, 29 of them on the flat to Dargai and 7 up the pass, in sixteen hours, by Younghusband's account. [4] For the Malakand and the valley beyond it, see Swat.

The regiment drew men from the plain. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, as a schoolboy, applied for a direct commission in the Guides at Mardan and was accepted, before he decided against the Army; see Bacha Khan.

The canal and the cane

Water changed the plain. The Swat River Canal, which takes off at Abazai, was opened in 1885. The Gazetteer says it irrigates 155,000 acres of the dry, sparsely peopled Yusufzai plain and had 21 drainage works in its first 22 miles. [1] Younghusband writes that it turned the desert plain of Yusufzai into one great wheat-field, and recalls how, in 1878, mullahs stirred tribesmen against the work, so that the Guides were sent out. [4] The Gazetteer's census shows what followed: the Mardan tahsil had 113,877 people in 1891 and 137,215 in 1901, and the cantonment 3,572. [1] Hoti Mardan was one of the bazaars of Peshawar District, outside Peshawar city, named in the Gazetteer's trade list. [1]

A district profile by the provincial small-business agency (SMEDA, undated) names Virginia tobacco, sugarcane and wheat as the main crops, with marble, limestone and granite deposits. [10] It also says that Mardan became a separate district in 1937, by the division of Peshawar District. [10]

Who lives here and how many

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics counted 2,373,399 people in Mardan district in 2017, against 1,460,100 at the 1998 census, with 440,222 of them in towns and 1,933,177 in the countryside. [7] The district then had three tehsils: Mardan with 1,403,002, Takht Bhai with 627,172 and Katlang with 343,225. [7] Mardan municipality had 352,200 people in 2017 and Mardan cantonment 6,824. [7] The 2023 census counted 2,744,898 in the district, at 1,681.92 people to the square kilometre, and 363,788 in Mardan municipality and 4,514 in the cantonment. [8] All of these are census counts.

The 2017 table of mother tongues gives Pashto to 2,331,929 people, about 98 per cent. Urdu came next with 10,358, then Punjabi with 5,963 and Hindko with 4,500. [7] The speech is the Yusufzai Pashto of the plain, a hard, northern dialect; see Pashto dialects.

The land is held, in the old accounts, by the Mandanr (Kamalzai, Amazai, the Razzar sections and the Utmanzai) rather than the Yusuf. The Gazetteer of 1898 names among the leading men of the Mardan tahsil Muhabbat Khan of Toru, Khwaja Muhammad Khan of Hoti and Ibrahim Khan of Mardan. [2] The Gigiani, the Muhammadzai and the Dilazak of the neighbouring plains have their own pages: Gigiani, Dilazak and Utman Khel. On Hashtnagar and Charsadda, see Charsadda; on Peshawar, which governed the district for a century, see Peshawar.

Takht-i-Bahi and Sahr-i-Bahlol

The monastery of Takht-i-Bahi, "Throne of Origins", is the best-preserved Buddhist monastery in Pakistan. UNESCO, which inscribed it in 1980, says it was founded in the early first century AD, was in use until the seventh, and covers about 33 hectares on hilltops between 36.6 and 152.4 metres high. It is built of local stone in Gandharan "diaper" style, in lime and mud mortar, and has a main stupa court, a court of votive stupas, a monastic quadrangle with meditation cells, a conference hall and covered, stepped passageways. [9] About five kilometres away, on a mound up to nine metres high, lie the walls of Sahr-i-Bahlol, a small fortified Kushan-period town of 9.7 hectares. UNESCO says the sculptures were removed to the Peshawar Museum, the Gondophares inscription is in the Lahore Museum, and the town's land belongs to local khans. It names encroaching houses, vegetation, drainage and traffic as threats. [9]

The first modern description is Bellew's of 1864. He found the ruins on the crest and northern slope of the hill, covering about a mile and standing some 300 feet above the plain, with detached quadrangles of monks' cells beside circular platforms that he took for the bases of stupas, and a city of two-storey houses on the ridges below. [3] Bellew read the whole hill as an ancient city with idol temples. The plan Cunningham published in 1874, reduced from a survey by Sergeant Wilcher, shows what UNESCO now describes: a monastery with a stupa court, chapels and a meeting court. [3, 5] The Gazetteer of 1898 puts the crest at about 650 feet above a plain 1,209 feet above the sea, against Bellew's 300 feet, and says the site had been excavated and a report printed in 1874. [2]

The rock edicts at Shahbaz Garhi

Shahbaz Garhi is a village on the Makam river. E. Hultzsch, the German epigraphist who re-edited the inscriptions of Ashoka in 1925, puts it nine miles from Mardan; the Peshawar Gazetteer of 1898 says six or seven miles east of it. [2, 6] The inscription is half a mile from the village, on a large mass of trap rock about 80 feet up the slope, with rock edicts I to XI on the east face and XIII and XIV on the west. Edict XII is on a separate boulder, which has a wall round it. [6]

General Court of Ranjit Singh's service first reported it in 1836, and Captain Burnes sent an agent for a paper impression in 1838. Charles Masson then climbed up himself, and Hultzsch praises his zeal at a time when going there was a real risk. [6] The writing is Kharoshthi, which runs from right to left, not Brahmi, and this is one of two sets of the fourteen edicts in that alphabet. The other is at Mansehra, in Hazara. [6]

The edicts show how far Ashoka's rule reached. In the fifth, he says that he appointed officers of morality when he had been anointed thirteen years, to work among all sects, and among the Yonas, Kambojas and Gandharas and other western borderers. Hultzsch's translation of the Shahbaz Garhi text gives the names in that order. [6] The thirteenth names the Greek king Antiyoka (Antiochus of Syria) and, beyond him, four more kings, the last written Alikamdara at Shahbaz Garhi. Norris proposed hesitantly that this was Alexander of Epirus, and Beloch later argued for Alexander of Corinth. [6] Hultzsch dates the Kalinga war that the thirteenth edict describes to 256 BC. [6] The Peshawar Gazetteer, in 1898, gave about 250 BC for the edicts. [2]

Life and work today

The SMEDA profile names a light-engineering cluster at Takht Bhai and furniture and handicraft clusters in Mardan town. [10] At the 2017 census 440,222 of the district's people, about 18.5 per cent, lived in towns. [7]

Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan became known across the country on 13 April 2017, when Mashal Khan, a 23-year-old mass communication student, was beaten and shot to death by a mob inside the campus after being accused of blasphemy. A joint investigation team concluded in June 2017 that the allegation was unfounded and was used to turn a mob against a student who had spoken against the university's administration. [11] In February 2018 an anti-terrorism court at Haripur sentenced the main shooter, Imran Ali, to death, gave five others life terms and 25 others three years, and acquitted 26. Mashal Khan's father said justice had not been delivered, the provincial chief minister said the government would appeal against the acquittals, and a lawyer for the defendants said they would challenge the verdict. [11]