Isa Khel (Niazi)

In the Makhzan-i Afghani, Lodi had three sons, Niazi, Siani and Dotani. Niazi had three sons, Bahi, Jam and Khaku, and Jam had seven, among them Daulatkhail and Isakhail. The Khulasat al-Ansab, quoted in Dorn's notes, names the descendants of Niazi as the Musakhail, Isakhail, Sambal and Saharangh, and says they live about the town of Makhad on the Indus and as far as Dera Ismail Khan.

Later writers draw the tree differently. Rose prints a pedigree from an unpublished Tazkara-i-Afghani, compiled under the supervision of Ahmad Khan of Isa Khel about a century before he wrote, in which Niazi's sons are Khaku, Jamal and Bahi. He adds that Raverty gives Jam or Jal, son of Niazi, seven sons by three wives, Isa, Ali and Daulat among them, and that another account makes Khaku the ancestor of the Sarhang of Mianwali, the Mahyar, the Michan Khel, the Mushani and the Kundi.

The clan's own ancestor appears in the colonial record as Isa Khan. The Bannu gazetteer of 1883 says he left two sons, Zakku and Apu, and two grandsons, Badu (Badan) and Mammu, and that their descendants are known by those names. Thorburn, writing in 1876, records the popular story, taken from the Hayat-i-Afghani, that Isa Khan, a captain in Bahlul Lodi's army and eighth in descent from Niazi, rebelled and was killed in Kashmir. His own inquiries, he says, did not bear it out: an Isa Khan was killed, but he was not the forefather of the Isa Khel. Rose's footnote makes the same objection from dates, since an Isa Khan who was a contemporary of Sher Shah Sur and Salim Shah Sur could not have been Niazi's grandson.^1–5

پر دې ولاړ: دودیزې شجرې · استعماري اسناد

The Bannu gazetteer of 1883 gives the movement in outline. The Niazi were Lodis who held the hills about Shalghar until a feud with the Ghilzai drove them south to Tank, where they lived for generations as traders and carriers, as the Lohani Pawindahs did later. Towards the close of the fifteenth century they spread north into the plain now called Marwat. About fifty years later the Marwat, a younger Lohani branch, followed them and drove them across the Kurram at Tang Darra. Its footnote adds that Babur, in 1505, named the Isakhel and the Niazai separately among the Afghans cultivating the Bannu country, which the compilers took to show that the Isa Khel were then, as later, the most distinguished section of the tribe.

The most important sections of the expelled Niazi were the Isa Khel, the Mushani and part of the Sarhang. The Isa Khel took the south of the country across the Kurram and became farmers there; the Mushani settled to the north round Kamar Mushani; and the Sarhang, after drifting for generations, crossed the Indus into Mianwali about 1748, when an officer of Ahmad Shah destroyed the Gakkhar stronghold of Muazzam Nagar. The gazetteer puts the Niazi settlement of Isa Khel about 270 years before its writing. Thorburn places the Marwat victory in the last years of Akbar's reign, and Rose, who gives the same sequence, puts the Daulat Khel's quarrel with the Marwat and Mian Khel at about the beginning of the seventeenth century.

On the Indus they found Awan and Jat cultivators. Rose says they expelled the Awan and reduced the Jat to servitude. Thorburn records that a Mulla, Shekh Farid, divided the land into sixteen shares, four each to the Mammakhel, Badinzai, Zakkukhel and Abukhel, the sons of Isa Khan's line, and that before the Isa Khel came, a Niazi branch called Sumbal had already settled there from Marwat and was driven out into the bed of the Indus, where it still lives.^3–5

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The Bannu gazetteer says the clan was for many generations governed by a council of elders, not chiefs, until feuds set the stronger sections, the Badanzai and Mammukhel, against the weaker Zakkukhel and Apukhel. Khan Zaman, a Zakkukhel, raised himself to the chiefship with help from Ahmad Shah Durrani and in 1761 led a troop of his clansmen to Panipat. His son Umar Khan administered the south of Isa Khel for the Nawab of Mankera and dug the canal that still carries his name, which the gazetteer says watered his own village and some land between. The gazetteer allows him a quarter of the revenue he collected.

The Nawab of Mankera annexed Isa Khel in 1818. The Sikhs marched through it in 1823 and incorporated it into their kingdom in 1836. Umar Khan's son Ahmad Khan took refuge in Bannu and Dawar and died in exile in 1838. His brother Muhammad Khan made terms with the Sikhs and held an eighth of the revenues of Isa Khel and a third of the alum works at Kotki until the Sikh official's demands drove the family out again. Major Edwardes restored them. Muhammad Khan sided with the British in the second Sikh war, his son Shah Nawaz was killed near Multan in 1848, and the Khans were rewarded for service in the district and near Delhi in the 1857 rising. The gazetteer gives Muhammad Khan's death as 1855 on one page and May 1856 on another.⁴

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The Bannu gazetteer found Pashto spoken in Isa Khel only along the foot of the Khattak hills and by the Bhangikhel Khattak. It says the Niazi had largely forgotten it and spoke it as a foreign tongue, though it was still the home language of many Niazi families in Isa Khel and Mianwali, kept longest by the women. Rose says the Niazi speak Hindko, especially east of the Indus. Thorburn reports that Wazirs and Marwats called the Isa Khel Niazi Hindkais for it.

Rose calls the Isa Khel the predominant and most warlike section of the Niazi, strict Sunnis who made good soldiers and kept much of the Pathan pride of race, and says a section of the Niazi still traded as Pawindahs, summering above Kandahar and wintering in Dera Ismail Khan. The gazetteer calls the Niazi indifferent cultivators and says that of all their sections the Isa Khel and the Tajakhel kept most of the qualities of a fighting race used to ruling weaker people.^3–5

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد