Bhittani

In the Afghan genealogies the Bhittani carry the name of Bitan, written Batni in Dorn's translation of the Makhzan-i Afghani and called Sheikh Beit as a saint. Dorn's text makes him a son of Pathan, that is Abd Ulrashid or Qais, with a daughter, Bibi Matu, and three sons: Ismail, Ishbun and Kajin. Elphinstone, writing from the same genealogies, listed Betnee as one of the four sons of Kyse from whom the great divisions of the nation sprang.

The Makhzan tells how Ismail left the line. His uncle Sarbanni, poor and childless, asked Sheikh Beit to pray for him, and Sheikh Beit offered one of his sons. The youngest, Kajin, ran home and clung to his mother, so Sarbanni took Ismail, and from Ismail came the Sarbanni's wealth and descendants. Ibbetson, in Rose's Glossary, says the same: Ismail was adopted by Sarban and his descendants still live with the Sarbani Afghans.

The names of the other brothers vary. Raverty says the Baitnis descend from Shpun, or Wur Shpun, and Kajin. Ibbetson says the tribe consists chiefly of Kajin's descendants with a few of Warshpun's, that the Dhanna and Tatta are said to descend from slaves of Tajin, and that a small Sayyid clan, the Koti, is attached to them. Bibi Matu's line is the Matti, the Ghilzai, Lodi and Sarwani, who overshadowed her brothers' descendants.^1–3,5

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Ibbetson records that the Bhittani first lived on the western slopes of the northern Sulaiman range. Pressed by the Ghilzai, they moved in the time of Bahlol Lodi through the Gomal Pass to the eastern side of the range, as far west as Kaniguram. The Wazirs later drove them back beyond Garangi, and the Gurbuz disputed the Gabbar mountain with them. Raverty gives the same movement eastwards before the Ghilzai, and places the Baitnis in the mountains immediately west of Tank. He lists Baitnis among the Afghan tribes who took service in Hindustan after Bahlol Lodi called for his kinsmen in 1451, and Ibbetson says many of the tribe left for India in these disputes. Bellew puts the earlier home of the Bitani in the hills between the Logar valley and Zurmat in Ghazni province.

The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer of 1883-84 describes the Bhittani country as a tract of hills some forty miles long and twelve to sixteen wide along the border from the Marwat tahsil to the Gomal valley. In the north the tribe held little land in the plains. In the south it held a strip of fertile ground from the Takwara stream to Dabbra, a few hamlets in the Nasran country, and part of the north-east Gomal valley. Wazir hills lie to the west, and the gazetteer says the two tribes were generally more or less at feud. Villages lay hidden in hollows. Houses were mud and brushwood huts, and some families lived in caves. Jandola, on the road up the Tank stream into Waziri country, was one of the principal places.^3–7

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Bellew, in 1891, gave the Bhittani as a branch of the Batani at five thousand families on the western slopes of Gabbar and the outer Wazir hills, in three divisions: Tata, also called Pala, Dana and Urashpun. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer places them on the ground. The Warashpun hold the north, the Tatta the south and the Dhanna the middle. The Dhanna own the Gabbar and most of the Khaisara lands, the second by purchase from the Warashpun. The Tatta hold Saraghar, Jandola and Kot Khirgi, and own much of the land in the Jatatar villages bordering the Bhittani circle. Most Bhittani in the Gomal valley are Tatta, and the gazetteer calls them the strongest section in British territory.

The Bannu gazetteer of 1883 divides the Dhanna into two clans, Boba and Bobak, and names an older group, the Wurgara, often called a fakir kaum, as the descendants of the clan that held the hills before the Dhanna came.^4,6,7

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Until the middle of the nineteenth century the tribe lived almost wholly in its hills. Ibbetson says it spread into the Tank plains only in the last eighty years before his survey, and the Bannu gazetteer puts the first permanent squatting in British territory sixty or seventy years before 1883. In 1866 the Deputy Commissioner of Bannu, Major Minchin, took 2,500 acres of waste from several Marwat villages and gave it to the Dhanna and Wurgara Bhittani. A channel from the Kachkot canal was dug to the settlement, Haramatala. The grant required the Bhittani to answer for their passes, as the Wazirs did, to farm the land themselves, and to pay a full assessment after ten years.

The Marwats resented the grant. The gazetteer records that they called the Bhittani 'Masaud's jackals' and Haramatala the 'thieves' station'. The same gazetteer, and the Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer, say that before the 1870s the Bhittani, though nominally British subjects, had guided and helped Waziri raiders into the plains, and that in the course of a year or two after 1873 they agreed to guard the passes. These are the officials' accounts.

In the years before British rule, men of the tribe joined Alladad Khan with a force of Wazirs in an attempt on the fort of Tank, which the Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer describes as foiled by its governor, Khoda Bakhsh Khan. Alladad Khan burned the town and retired to the hills.^5–7

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The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer says the Bhittani lands were held almost entirely by cultivating proprietors, with tenants and hired labourers almost unknown. It put the whole tribe at some 8,000 or 9,000 people in 1883, and the 1881 census counted 2,628 resident in the Tank tahsil. The Bannu gazetteer estimated the Dhanna and Wurgara within and just beyond the Bannu border at under 1,700 and about 150, and said about seven eighths of them came down to the plains in the cold weather. Ibbetson recorded that the tribe had no common chief.^5–7

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد