Kundi

Rose describes the Kundi as a small Pawindah clan who claim descent from the ancestor of the Niazi, and in his entry on the tribe as a Pathan tribe of the same descent as the Niazi. In another entry he gives an account in which the Kundi descend from Khaku, one of Niazi's three sons, and are confined to Tank. Thorburn, who wrote of Bannu and its borders in 1876, names the Kundi and the Marwat as kin, both Lohanis. The Dera Ismail Khan gazetteer of 1883-84 does not give their genealogy. It says only that they came into Tank either with the Daulat Khel or soon after, and calls them a Pawindah tribe who settled in the tahsil about the same time as the Daulat Khel.

The same gazetteer says the older Lodi tribes of the district, the Prangi, Sur and Pabbi, were expelled, exterminated or absorbed, and that a few Dreskhels were still found in the Kundi country.^1–4

Based on: Colonial records

The gazetteer places the original Kundi country along the Suheli stream, from the Gandapur country to Mulazai, between the villages of the Jat tract and the Bhittani range. Their old villages are Pai and Ama Khel. Drikki was founded afterwards by a leading Kundi named Drug or Drikki. The gazetteer says the Kundi are not a colonising people: they like to gather in their old villages, while Marwat immigrants have gradually occupied all their eastern lands and hold four or five villages there. Rose says the Marwat have encroached largely on those eastern lands within the last 80 years of his source.

In 1883 the gazetteer counted the Kundi, with women and children, at rather less than three thousand, two-thirds of them in the three villages. It names the Kundi, with the Mallakhel, Zumrani and Ghurani, among small Pawindah tribes whose camps were scattered about the Paharpur country. The gazetteer also quotes Mr Dames on the district's languages: the Kundi and Tator tribes of Tank spoke Pashto, while the Daulat Khel, living in the midst of a Jat population, had given it up.^1,3

Based on: Colonial records

Late in his rule, Sarwar Khan, the Daulat Khel chief of Tank, who died in 1836, conquered the Kundi, who held the country north of the Suheli, and placed garrisons there. The gazetteer then names Mian Khan, Kundi, as one of the chief men of Tank under Sarwar Khan. When the Sikh government assigned Tank in jagir to three Multani Pathans, it set aside smaller grants for others, Mian Khan Kundi among them.

Mian Khan took the losing side in the quarrel between Diwan Daulat Rai and Malik Fateh Khan Tiwana and was killed at Dera Ismail Khan in the attack made on Ashiq Muhammad Khan's party. The Multani chiefs then turned on his family. Its principal members left the country and their allowances were confiscated.

Thorburn records a Marwat proverb that a dead Kundi is better than a live one, and explains it: a Marwat had killed a Kundi, and the dead man's relations demanded an unusually large blood price, which was paid. Rose reports the same proverb and says the Kundi are or were a lawless tribe and great robbers, but adds that Macgregor found them quiet and inoffensive and that the older description was probably out of date.^1,3,4

Based on: Colonial records