Marwat

The Makhzan-i Afghani (1609–11) makes Marwat the son of Lohani by his second wife, Shiri, and calls his descendants the Marwat Khel. Rose's Glossary counts the Marwat as one of the four great tribes of the Lohani, with the Daulat Khel, Mian Khel and Tator. One authority quoted by Rose calls them Lodi; Rose corrects this to Lohani.

The story told in Bannu, which Thorburn took from the Hayat-i Afghani and from local tellers in the 1870s, begins in the hills of Shalghar near Ghazni. The descendants of Marwat quarrelled with the Ghilzai over a woman, were defeated, and lost their land to the Sulaiman Khel. They went down to Tank, where their kinsmen the Niazi had settled, and the Niazi gave them a quarter share of their land.^1,4,5

About the beginning of the seventeenth century the Daulat Khel Lohani drove the Marwat and the Mian Khel out of Tank. The Marwat crossed the trans-Indus Salt Range into the plain south of Bannu, then held by the Niazi. In Thorburn's version, the Miar family of the Niazi, angry at how the sons of Isa and Sarhang had shared out the land, called the Marwat in. The Niazi met them in the passes of Pezu and Bain and lost; in a second battle on the Kurram the Sarhang leader, Maddi, was killed, and the Niazi were chased to the Tang Darrah. Thorburn and the Imperial Gazetteer place this in the reign of Akbar.

The Marwat named the plain after their ancestor and divided the river land by lot under the vesh custom: every mouth, from an infant to a grown man, received an equal strip, and the elders redivided the land every eighth year, according to Thorburn; Rose gives every ten or twelve years. A few Niazi families, the Miar and the Michan Khel, stayed and were absorbed. Elphinstone, writing from reports in 1809, described a sandy country about 35 miles square that depended on rain, where half the Marwat farmed and half moved with their camel herds. Women carried water, often 10 or 12 miles from the Gambila, and were not secluded.^2,5,6,3,4

Under the Durranis the Marwat paid between Rs 12,000 and Rs 40,000 a year, usually collected by force. Every Marwat belonged to one of two factions, the Spin (white) and the Tor (black). Around 1790 the tribe had two rival chiefs, Nur Khan of the Pahar Khel, of the hereditary chief's line, and Gulrang Khan of the Hafiz Khel. Some years later Abezar Khan, of the black faction, overpowered his rival Nawaz Khan of the Begu Khel, and Nawaz's white faction called in the Nawab of Mankera. The Nawab's army under Diwan Manak Rai defeated the black faction at Lagharwah, near the Torwah torrent, in 1819, and the Nawab then took Marwat for himself. The Imperial Gazetteer dates the annexation to 1818; Thorburn gives 1818 for Isa Khel and 1819 for Marwat.

A dum poet named Jarasi made a ballad of the battle that was still sung across Marwat in the 1870s; his grandson, Muhammad Nur, sang it for Thorburn by a fire in February 1874. Ranjit Singh marched through Marwat in 1823, and for the next twelve or thirteen years Sikh and Mankera troops raided the plain in turn, until the Sikhs took sole control in 1836. In 1843 the Sikh revenue farmer Fateh Khan Tiwana agreed to take one-sixth of the produce, and the Marwat chiefs let him build a fort at old Lakki, which the Imperial Gazetteer calls Ihsanpur and dates to 1844. When he tried to levy a poll-tax a second year, the black faction besieged the fort.^6,4,5

Herbert Edwardes took over Marwat from Fateh Khan Tiwana in 1847 and set the revenue at a quarter of the gross produce. John Nicholson made the first summary settlement in 1853. Ihsanpur remained the capital until 1864, when its people moved to Lakki on the right bank of the Gambila. In the fifty years before 1880 Marwat families moved south over the Salt Range into Dera Ismail Khan, taking land from the Kundi in northern Tank and from the Bluch in the Paniala country. The 1901 census counted 52,000 Marwat in Bannu district, the largest Pathan group there, and 8,000 in Dera Ismail Khan district.^6,4