Tanaoli

The Tanaoli are not Pashtun by descent. They live beside the Pashtuns in Hazara and are often counted with them, but the Pashtun genealogies do not trace them to Qais Abdur Rashid. Ibbetson, writing in 1883, put them under the heading of races allied to the Pathan.

The tribe's own account is Mughal. In Rose's Glossary, quoting Ibbetson, they claim descent from Amir Khan, a Barlas Mughal, whose two sons Hind Khan and Pal Khan crossed the Indus some four centuries before and settled in Tanawal of Hazara, and say they are named after a place of the same name in Afghanistan. Ibbetson did not accept it. He wrote that there could be little doubt they were of Aryan and probably Indian stock.

The Hazara gazetteer of 1907 says the tribe came from across the Indus, pushed out of the Mahaban country by the Yusufzai, but that their origin is uncertain. One genealogical tree connects them with the Janjua, while they themselves claim to be Mughals. It notes that the names of their many small sections share an ending, 'al', and that the Sarara, who say they are connected with the Dhund, also have a tradition of a link with the Tanaoli.^1,2

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

Under the Mughals a large part of the present district was the Pakhli Sarkar, which included what is now the Tanawal and Swati country. The gazetteer sets the arrival of the Tanaoli among the events of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the decline of the Mughal empire and the aggression of Pathan tribes remade Hazara. The Tanaoli were pushed out of their trans-Indus country round Mahaban by the Yusufzai and settled in the tracts that now bear their name. Rose, drawing on Ibbetson, says the same and dates the crossing about the end of the seventeenth century, adding that Colonel Wace's date should perhaps be put a century earlier. Ibbetson describes Tanawal as the extensive hill country between the river and the Urash plains, in the west centre of the district, much of it belonging to the semi-independent Nawab of Amb.

The gazetteer observes that the changes of this period came about in the absence of written records and with a system in which might was right, so that the order of events cannot be given exactly.^1,2

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The gazetteer divides the Tanaoli into two great sections, the Hindwal, who hold Feudal or Upper Tanawal, and the Pallal, who hold Lower Tanawal, including Badhnak and some villages of the Garhian tract in Mansehra tahsil. It counts them at 58,700, of whom 19,100 lived in the feudal territory. Feudal Tanawal, 204 square miles, had 31,622 people in 1901, of whom the Tanaoli were 60 per cent. It was divided between the Khan of Amb, with about five-sixths of the area, and the Khan of Phulra. The Khan of Amb is head of the Hindwal. The leading Pallal clan is the Subakhani, in three branches, in Phuhar, Bir and Shingri.

Rose puts the Pallal in the northern part of Tanawal, in the territory of the Chief of Amb, which the gazetteer gives to the Hindwal. He gives figures from the 1881 census: of about 40,000 Hazara Tanaoli, 8,737 returned as Pallal, 1,964 as Dafral, a Pallal sept, and 1,076 as Hindwal, which he thought was because clans were not recorded in Amb territory, where the Hindwal and most Tanaoli lived.^1,2

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد

The gazetteer traces the Amb family to Haibat Khan, who in the late eighteenth century established his superiority over four other leading Hindwal and began to claim equality with Gul Sher Khan, head of the Pallal, whom the traveller Forster visited in 1783. Haibat Khan died about 1803. His son Hashim Ali was killed by the Pallal chief Ahmad Ali Khan, and his brother Nawab Khan became chief, until in 1818 Sardar Azam Khan, the Durrani governor of Kashmir, had him thrown into the Kabul river in a raw hide, in the gazetteer's account, in revenge for an insult to his mother.

Nawab Khan's son Painda Khan was the most famous of the Tanawal chiefs, in conflict with the Sikhs for most of his life. In 1823 Hari Singh Nalwa defeated the Pallal chief Sarbuland Khan and burnt his seat Shingri, and Painda Khan later seized Sikh forts and fought from the Bhingra range. When Hari Singh Nalwa reached Mangal on his way to Hazara, about 1822, he found Jaduns and Tanaoli, not fewer than 25,000 men by the gazetteer's estimate, gathered to oppose him. He stormed their position and some 2,000 of them were killed. Painda Khan lost his country in the winter of 1841-1842 and died in 1843. His son Jahandad Khan seized the territory again in 1846 and was confirmed by Captain Abbott in 1847 in Feudal Tanawal.¹

پر دې ولاړ: استعماري اسناد