Swati

The Swati are not Pashtun by descent, and the Pashtun genealogies do not trace them to Qais Abdur Rashid. They live among Pashtuns in Hazara, and the 1907 Hazara gazetteer records Pashto as the everyday language in the Agror and Konsh valleys, where many of them live. The colonial writers took the name to mean what it says: a people of the Swat valley.

The 1910 Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes calls them the original inhabitants of Swat, sometimes called Dehgans, and says that according to some authorities they were of Indian origin. Its entry on the Dehgans describes them as said to be descendants of the Indian races that once lived in north-eastern Afghanistan. The Hazara gazetteer of 1907 says the name shows they are a people who once occupied the Swat valley and that their origin is probably mixed. Rose, in the Glossary, calls them a group of tribes claiming Pathan descent but probably of mixed origin.

The tribe's own account differs. As the Hazara gazetteer records it, the Swati claim to be Pathans connected with the Yusufzai, or rather with the Ranazai from whom the Yusufzai are descended, and they produce a family tree tracing their descent from Adam and from the same stock as the Pathans generally. The compilers considered the claim unsustainable. The Khankhel, the family of the hereditary Swati chief at Garhi Habibullah, maintain that they are not Swati but Quraishi, which the gazetteer takes as a sign of the tribe's mixed origin.^1–3

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The sources agree that the Swati were pushed out of Swat by the Pathan tribes and crossed the Indus into Pakhli, in what is now Hazara, but they disagree on when. The Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes says the Akozai Yusufzai drove them out of Swat and Buner at the end of the fifteenth century, and that they emigrated eastwards under Sayyid Jalal Baba, a son of Pir Baba of Buner, and settled in Tikri, Allai, Deshi, Nandihar, Pakhli, Konsh, Bhogarmang, Agror, Balakot and Garhi Habibullah. The Hazara gazetteer places a series of inroads in the seventeenth century, the latest probably early in the eighteenth and led by Jalal Baba, whose tomb is in the Bhogarmang valley. Rose, using Ibbetson's account, puts Jalal Baba at about the end of the seventeenth century with a footnote adding that Colonel Wace's date should perhaps be put a century earlier.

In the gazetteer's account the Swati's sovereign shortly before their eviction was Sultan Pakhal, of the Jahangiri Sultans, from whom the name Pakhli is derived. In Hazara they dispossessed the Karlugh Turks, who had been settled there since Timur's time, and took the north of the district and the hill country to its west. The Sayyids of the Kagan valley are descendants of Jalal Baba and remained virtually independent masters of the upper glen until an expedition in 1852 enforced their submission.^1–3

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The Hazara gazetteer, citing the census, counted 34,989 Swati, who occupy the greater part of Mansehra tahsil. It divides them into two main branches. The Ghabri, or Upper Pakhli, hold the Kagan, Balakot, Garhi Habibullah, Mansehra, Shinkiari, Bhogarmang and Konsh tracts, together with Nandihar and Thakot over the border. The Mamiali-Mitrawi, or Lower Pakhli, hold Bhairkund, Agror, and Tikri and Daishi across the border. Allai is shared by both. The hereditary chief is Muhammad Husain Khan of Garhi Habibullah Khan, of the Khankhel sub-section, who in 1907 was the largest jagirdar in the district, with Konsh and part of the Kunhar valley assigned to him in grants of nearly 22,000 rupees.

In the Durrani period the north of Hazara was managed through the head of the Swathi clan. Sadat Khan, the head of the Swati, founded on the Kunhar the village then called Garhi Sadat Khan, now Garhi Habibullah Khan after his son, and was so respected that the chiefs of Tanawal and of the Jaduns referred their disputes to him. In 1823, according to the gazetteer, Sardar Hari Singh punished the Jaduns, Swati and Tanaoli for attacks on Sikh forts, raiding Agror, Tikari and Konsh with 500 horsemen and taking 1,000 Swati women and children captive.¹

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد