Daur

The Khulasat al-Ansab, the late eighteenth-century genealogy quoted in Dorn's notes to the Makhzan-i Afghani, names Dur among the descendants of Shitak, alongside the Surani, Mulhi, Kiwi and Adu Khel, and says all of them are called Banussi because they live in the territory of Bannu. Caroe's table of the Karlanri tribes keeps this line: the Shitak branch is the Daurs and the Bannuchis, and Caroe notes that they are the only Karlanri tribes who live in irrigated valleys and not in the hills. A route survey quoted by Raverty in 1880 calls Dawar a numerous division of the Shitak, descended from Shitak, son of Kaki, son of Karlarni.

Longworth Dames, writing in Rose's Glossary in 1914, disagreed: he held that the tribes of Dawar are separate and are not included in any of the genealogies, and he pointed out that the Makhzan-i Afghani of 1609–11 does not name them at all. Bellew (1891) recorded a belief that the Daur were moved to the Tochi from Zamindawar on the Helmand in the mid-twelfth century, under Shahab-ud-din Ghori; he gives this as a supposition, and no earlier source confirms it.

The tribe's own reckoning, set down in Rose's Glossary, traces it to an eponym, Dawar, with two main branches, the Tappizai and the Mallizai, which Bellew calls Tapi (Lower Dawar) and Mali (Upper Dawar). Several sections stand outside both branches. The Amzoni are said to descend from a Khostwal who joined the Daur. The Idak sub-section was formed by three septs of Kharoti, Katti Khel and Turi origin who agreed to settle in one village on the day of Id, which is how the village got its name.^1,2,7,5,3,6

Daur is the open stretch of the Tochi valley in North Waziristan, about 35 miles long and surrounded by the Wazir hills. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 divides it into Lar (Lower) and Bar (Upper) Daur and counts about 75 walled hamlets. Bellew describes two valleys joined by a narrow defile called the Tograi Tangi. The Daur dug channels from the Tochi and its side streams to water maize, rice, millet, sugar-cane, wheat and barley, and they worked the heavy alluvial soil with the spade, because a plough could not break it.

Raverty's survey records a ruined site the people called Shahr, the city, which they held to be the old seat of government, and the tomb of Malik Ajdar, a holy man whom they venerated and whom they took to be a companion of the Prophet. It names the Mubarak Shahi as the section from which the chiefs of the tribe had come in earlier times. The valley was known for two breeds of horse; the small, hardy one was called Gala-i Duzd, the stolen herd. By 1908 the Imperial Gazetteer reported the breed extinct.^7,8,3

Ibbetson's account in Rose's Glossary places the Bannuchi and their Daur kinsmen in the hills east of the Khost range, with Shawal as their centre, before the Wazirs drove them out; the Bannuchi then took the Bannu plain and the Daur the banks of the Tochi. Under Akbar, Bannu, Daur and Isa Khel formed a sarkar of the province of Kabul, but Caroe notes that the Ain-i Akbari records no revenue or troops from them.

In the autumn of 1701 Prince Bahadur Shah, then governor of Kabul for his father Aurangzeb, marched from Khost through Dawar to Bannu and found the road held by Wazir, Daur and other tribesmen; he passed only after Nawab Nasir Khan made an arrangement with them. On his way back the Wazirs, Daurs and men of Khost held the Hasan Tangi defile, drove back his advance troops and made him pay heavily for a clear road. In 1738 part of Nadir Shah's army entered Bannu by the Daur valley. Caroe records a Waziristan tradition that Ahmad Shah Durrani assessed the Daur at 12,000 fighting men. The valley fell nominally under Durrani rule but stayed independent in practice until 1893.^10,4,7,8,9

After the Muhammad Khel rising on the Bannu border, the British fined the villages of Daur in 1872. Upper Daur paid; the jirga of Lower Daur refused. A force of 1,500 men entered the valley, and when men in Haidar Khel fired on troops during talks, the village was stormed and burnt. The Daur paid the fine on 7 February 1872.

The Durand agreement of 1893 put the valley inside the British sphere, and the boundary was marked in 1894–95. During the demarcation the Daur petitioned for the whole valley to be taken over, for protection from Wazir and Mahsud raids, and it came under direct administration from 1895. They agreed to pay a tithe of the produce, first commuted to Rs 8,000 a year; the settlement of 1903 fixed it at Rs 36,000. Government schools opened at Miram Shah, Idak, Hassi Khel and Tappi, and Miram Shah became the headquarters of the Northern Waziristan Agency.^9,8