The Yusufzai: the Pashtun tribe of Swat, Buner and the Mardan plain

The Yusufzai (یوسفزی) hold the north of the Peshawar valley and the hills beyond it. When Mountstuart Elphinstone was in Peshawar in 1809, the north of the plain was theirs, and so were the hill valleys of Buner, Swat and Panjkora; some sections lived east of the Indus. [3] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 added Dir and the Bashkar valley, and noted that the Pashtuns themselves used the name Yusufzai only for Dir, Swat and Buner, with the Chamla valley; in British usage it was also the name of the subdivision formed by the Mardan and Swabi tahsils. [7] That plain, the Samah (Yusufzai Samah), was a dry waste until canals turned it into corn-land and cane-fields. [1]

Olaf Caroe wrote that a Yusufzai asked who he is will answer "I am an Afghan", not "I am a Pakhtun", and that the Yusufzai, with the Khalil, Mohmand and Muhammadzai of Peshawar, consider themselves the truest Afghans. [1] Their speech is the hard northern Pashto, Pakhto. The Imperial Gazetteer called the Yusufzai dialect the classical one, in which the earliest Pashto books were written, and "the purest and clearest form of the language". [7] On the dialects see Pashto dialects.

Descent and branches

The tribal genealogies make the Yusufzai sons of Kharshbun, son of Sarbanr. The Peshawar District Gazetteer of 1897–98 sets out the line: Kharshbun's son Kand had two sons, Ibrahim Ghori, ancestor of the Khalil, Mohmand and Daudzai (the Ghoriah Khel), and Khakhai. Khakhai's son Mak was the ancestor of the Gigiani of the Doaba; his other son Mand had two sons, Yusuf and Umar. The Yusufzai proper descend from Yusuf; the Mandanr descend from Umar's son Mandan. [8] Together with the Gigiani, Tarklanri and Muhammadzai they are the "Khakhay" tribes of the chronicles. [1]

Elphinstone was told that the Yusuf branch took Swat, Panjkora and Buner, and the Mandanr the plain north of the Kabul river with the Chamla valley. He divided the Yusuf into three clans: the Akozai, who took Swat and Panjkora, and two more who took Buner, whose names he spelt "Moollezyes" and "Lawezyes". [6] The Akozai of Swat were reckoned at about 150,000 people in 1908. Their clans, as the Imperial Gazetteer lists them: [7]

• Left bank of the Swat river: the Ranizai and Khan Khel in Lower Swat; the Sulizai and Babuzai in Upper Swat. All except the Ranizai are called the Baizai.

• Right bank: the Shamizai, Sebujni, Nikbi Khel and Shamozai in Upper Swat; the Adinzai, Abazai and Khadakzai in Lower Swat. All except the Abazai and Khadakzai are called the Khwazozai.

The Mandanr of the plain are divided into the Usmanzai, the Utmanzai and the Razzar. The Razzar include the descendants of three of Mandan's four sons, Razzar, Mahmud and Khizzar; the fourth, Manno, was the father of Utman and Usman, whose descendants hold the eastern corner of the plain. [8] In the Mardan plain, Swabi is the chief village of the Utman tappa and Kalu Khan of the Razzar tappa, whose people are all descendants of Mandan; Mardan and Hoti lie in the Kamalzai tappa. [7]

Fredrik Barth's fieldwork in Swat in 1954 shows how fine the segments run. The Babuzai, the most important group in the valley, controlled an area of some 50,000 people, of whom only about 1,000 were adult Babuzai men. They were divided into the Bami Khel, Aka-Maruf Khel, Aba Khel and Barat Khel, and each of these into lines of brothers and first cousins. [2] Elphinstone, a century and a half earlier, collected the names of at least thirty independent Yusufzai communities and guessed there were more. [6]

From Kabul to the Peshawar valley

The Yusufzai histories, as Caroe retells them, begin near Kabul. The Khakhay tribes backed the Timurid prince Ulugh Beg, Babur's uncle, then quarrelled with him. He invited the Yusufzai maliks, about seven hundred of them, to a feast and had all but six killed. Among the dead was the leading malik, Sulaiman; among the survivors was the young Malik Ahmad, later the leader of the tribe. Caroe puts the massacre between 1480 and 1490. [1] Elphinstone's version came from a history of the Yusufzai written in a mixture of Pashto and Persian in 1184 AH (1771), which he thought consistent and largely confirmed by Babur's memoirs. [6]

The survivors went east by the Khyber to the Dilazak, then masters of the Peshawar valley, who gave them the Doaba between the Kabul and Swat rivers. Malik Ahmad, himself a Mandanr of the Razzar section, complained that the Doaba was too small for his people, and the Dilazak offered the valleys of Danish Kol and Ambahar towards Bajaur, and Hashtnagar if the Yusufzai could take it from its Dehqan landholders. [1] The Gigiani, who had sided with Ulugh Beg, followed later, and Malik Ahmad gave them the Doaba; Hashtnagar went to the Muhammadzai. [1] The Imperial Gazetteer tells the same sequence: the Khakhai entered the valley in three clans, Yusufzai, Gigiani and Muhammadzai, settled on Dilazak waste land with permission, and then turned on their hosts. After Humayun's departure in the 1550s the Khakhai and the Ghoriah Khel together drove the Dilazak across the Indus. [7]

Caroe found it hard to believe that the Yusufzai settled the dry Samah only after the irrigated Doaba and Hashtnagar, and he was struck that Babur's memoirs already show Yusufzai in Swat and the Samah by 1519. [1] He dated the decisive Yusufzai victory over the Dilazak, the battle of Katlang, to about 1525. [1]

The conquest of Swat is told by Akhund Darweza, the religious teacher whom the Imperial Gazetteer calls "the historian of the Yusufzai". [7] H. W. Bellew summarised his account: the Yusufzai sent their women and drummers with standards and tents to the foot of the easy Malakand pass, as if to force it, while the fighting men crossed by the undefended Shahkot pass. The Swatis fled to the mountains and held out for twelve years until famine forced them to submit. [9] The Imperial Gazetteer gives the Malakand as the Yusufzai way into Swat, early in the sixteenth century. [7] The people of Swat who stayed became the Yusufzai's dependants; Elphinstone found these fakirs, Swatis, Dehqans and others, more numerous than the Yusufzai themselves. [6]

Babur and Bibi Mubarika

Babur's memoirs give the first dated picture of the Yusufzai in their new country. In January 1519, when Babur stormed Bajaur, Malik Shah Mansur Yusufzai was in his camp as the tribe's envoy, watched the fall of the fort, and was sent home with a robe and written threats to his tribe. Later that month Shah Mansur brought Babur some confections so strong that Babur, after eating a third of one, could not attend his evening council. Then Babur writes: "In order to conciliate the Yūsuf-zāī horde, I had asked for a daughter of one of my well-wishers, Malik Sulaimān Shāh's son Malik Shāh Manṣūr". Soon afterwards news came that the bride, Bibi Mubarika, was on her way with the Yusufzai tribute. [10] In May the same year Shah Mansur came again with six or seven Yusufzai chiefs, and all were given robes of honour. [10]

The Imperial Gazetteer credits the marriage, with force of arms, for Babur's hold over Bajaur, the Panjkora valley and Lower Swat; Upper Swat, still under its Swati ruler Sultan Wais, submitted of its own accord. [7] Caroe adds that the Yusufzai were notoriously unwilling to give daughters outside the tribe, and retells a story told in Yusufzai hujras of how Babur first saw the girl at a spring on the Morah pass. He presents it as legend. [1]

Shaikh Malli's survey and the wesh

After Katlang, Malik Ahmad's chief mulla, Shaikh Malli, surveyed the conquered country and shared it out: the Doaba, Hashtnagar, the Samah from Hashtnagar to the Indus, and the parts of Swat, Buner and Bajaur already taken. Land given to Afghan tribesmen was called daftar; land given to sayyids and holy men was called serai. Caroe noted how the serai plots were laid between the daftar of different sections, putting a holy man on every boundary as arbitrator. [1] Caroe suggested about 1530 for the survey. Malik Ahmad's grave is near Allahdand in Swat, Shaikh Malli's at Ghorbandi; Ahmad's successor, Khan Kajju, also a Mandanr, is buried on the Badrai stream between Swabi and Maneri. [1]

At first both Yusuf and Mandanr held shares in the plain and the hills. Later the Mandanr took the plain lands of the Yusuf, and the Yusuf took the hill lands of the Mandanr, which is why the Mardan plain is called Yusufzai though Mandanr hold almost all of it. [8] [1]

The best-known part of the settlement was periodic exchange, called wesh (division). Barth recorded the tradition that Shaikh Malli divided the valley among the sub-tribes and, since no two plots are equal, ordered them to be re-allotted regularly. [2] A man owned a number of shares in his descent group's whole estate, its daftar, divided into a fixed number of equal shares (Barth gives 80, 112 and 120), not particular fields. Fields were allotted for four, five or ten years, depending on the region, and then the whole estate was re-allotted by lot. In the Nikbi Khel country about a thousand shareholders were split between two halves of the land, a side valley and the river bank, and every ten years each half moved ten to fifteen miles to the other. [2] Elphinstone described the same system, in which each khel held its land in perpetuity but its divisions exchanged their shares after a fixed number of years. [6] The new ruler of Swat ended it by enforcing permanent settlement about thirty years before Barth arrived. [2] Barth also notes that the non-Yusufzai majority of Swat took no part in the moves, and that families of holy descent held a separate rank. [2]

Pir Roshan, Akhund Darweza and the Mughals

In the second half of the sixteenth century the Yusufzai country was split by Bayazid Ansari, called by his followers Pir Roshan, and his great opponent Akhund Darweza. [7] In Akbar's time four of Bayazid's sons were defeated by Akozai Yusufzai from the Indus side, under Malik Hamza, at the village of Bara two miles north of Topi; two fled across the river to Torbela, where the Utmanzai killed them. [1]

The Mughal emperor Akbar saw the Yusufzai as the backbone of tribal resistance. He sent his general Zain Khan against the Yusufzai and Mandanr in Swat and Bajaur, and then reinforcements under his favourite, the courtier and poet Raja Birbal, and the physician Hakim Abul Fateh, neither of whom had commanded an army. [1] The army crossed into Swat and, over Zain Khan's objections, turned for home through the Karakar pass into Buner. In the passes the Yusufzai held the crests and poured arrows and stones on a column that had lost its order. Birbal and about 8,000 men were killed in 1586, and Zain Khan reached Attock with the remnant. [1]

Caroe called this the last serious attempt to subdue the northern hills before 1895. [1] The Imperial Gazetteer takes a different view: it says Zain Khan Kokaltash, after five years of fighting and fort-building, conquered the country thoroughly by 1595, and records that he built a fort on the Malakand in 1587. [7] Both agree that Akbar's power did not last. The Khattaks, loyal to the Mughals, used the war to plant villages at Lundkhwar, Jamalgarhi and Katlang, between the Yusuf and Mandanr lands. [1] The Imperial Gazetteer adds that both sides in the Baizai feud had hired Khattak and Utman Khel fighters, who ended up holding most of the valley. [7]

Khushal Khan's reproach

When Khushal Khan Khattak rose against Aurangzeb in the 1670s, he went to the Yusufzai country to bring that powerful tribe into the war. The poem he wrote at the time reproaches them. Elphinstone had it read to him and translated it: [3]

Had I known the state of the Eusofzyes, I should have preferred flying to Dumghaur.

Further on he names the tribes who did fight, and turns on the Yusufzai again:

I alone feel for the honour of our name; While the Eusofzyes are cultivating their fields at their ease.

The two tribes had been rivals since the Khattaks crossed to the north bank of the Kabul river to stop Yusufzai cattle raids and later settled in the Baizai valley. [9] [1]

Durranis, Sikhs and the Akhund of Swat

Zaman Shah's mother was a Yusufzai. In the struggle for Kabul around 1800, the Durrani who backed his half-brother Mahmud held that Yusufzai connection against him. [5] When Azim Khan marched from Kabul against the Sikhs in 1823, the Yusufzai sent a large contingent with him and were beaten at Nowshera; Ranjit Singh took Peshawar but did not push into the hills. [7] The Yusufzai had dominated Peshawar and its plain until the Sikh conquest of 1818–34. [2] In 1829 Sayyid Ahmad of Bareilly, as the Gazetteer calls him, set up a colony of Hindustani followers in the Amazai country; his strict rules turned the tribes against him and he was killed at Balakot in 1831. [7]

The Akhund of Swat, Abdul Ghafur, was born to Gujar parents, according to the Imperial Gazetteer, and began life as a herd-boy; Bellew calls him a Gandharai, or Safi. [7] [9] He lived for many years at Saidu, where he held, in the Gazetteer's words, "an irresistible influence over the Yusufzai and their neighbours". [7] Barth notes that he went to war only once, in the Ambela (Umbeyla) campaign of 1863, and afterwards acted as adviser to nearly every successful chief of his generation. He died in 1877, and his tomb at Saidu Sharif was one of the great shrines of the region. [2] His grandsons inherited part of his spiritual standing and the income of the shrine. [7] When Barth worked in Swat it was a state whose Ruler had been recognised by the Government of India in 1926, with its capital at Saidu Sharif. [2]

Numbers

The Afghans of Elphinstone's day reckoned the Yusufzai at 900,000. He thought that their country could not support more than 700,000, counting their dependants. [6] The Imperial Gazetteer's figure of about 150,000 for the Akozai of Swat alone dates from 1908. [7] The anthropology of the Swat Yusufzai rests largely on Barth's work of 1954 and Charles Lindholm's of the 1970s. [4]