7th March, 1912.
CHAPTER I.
THE BORDERLAND.
The whole of the country lying immediately to the west of the Punjab, and between it and the kingdom of Afghanistan, is held by the two great nations of Pathan and Baluch, the former lying to the north and the latter to the south of a line drawn from the western face of the Suleiman Mountains opposite Dera Ghazi Khan, almost due west to Quetta. The land, then, of the Pathans may be said to comprise the regions of the Sufed Koh and the Suleiman and adjacent mountains with their numerous offshoots; and their territory may be considered roughly to be enclosed by the River Indus on the east, by Afghanistan on the west, Baluchistan on the south, and on the north by Kashmir and the Kunar River—a veritable tangle of brown hills.
“It is a long strip of unutterably rugged country; stony barren heights, deep abrupt valleys seamed by occasional torrents; the farms represented by a patch of corn on a hillside or a scrap of cultivation on a narrow strip of alluvial soil alongside a mountain stream. No highways, save those made by us; the village roads—mere tracks straggling over hills and among the roughest ravines—always difficult and often dangerous. The dwelling places, fortified towers or caves among the hills.” The Pathan territories occupy many thousand square miles of mountainous country through which flow the Gomal, the Kurram, the Zhob, the Kabul and other smaller rivers with their tributaries, the principal tributaries of the Kabul River being the Chitral, the Bara, the Swat and the Kalpani. The rainfall in this region is scanty and uncertain, and agriculture can only properly be carried on in those tracts watered by these rivers.
The language of the Pathan is called Pushtu or Pukhtu, according as it is the softer Kandahari dialect or the hard guttural speech of the Peshawar Valley, the line which separates the two being the northern boundary of the Khattak tract in Kohat and the south-east corner of the Peshawar District. It is only since the fourteenth century that Pushtu has attained the dignity of a written language. And what of the men who speak it? What is a Pathan?
Pathan Descent
In India all Pushtu-speaking people come under this designation—a corruption of the word “Pukhtun”—the term being frequently used to denote equally the Pathan proper, the Afghan, the Tajik, the Hazara and the Ghilzai; but, strictly speaking, the title is not really applicable to any of the four last, who, though related to the true Pathan by historical, geographical and ethnological association, are none the less distinct peoples. There is great conflict of opinion as to the original stock from which the Pathans have sprung—the traditions of the people themselves are conflicting, vague and misleading, but the Pathans believe that they are descended from Saul, the first King of the Jews. They speak of themselves as “Beni Israel,” the children of Israel, and the greybeards of the Pathan tribes are fond of tracing their story back to Ibrahim, Isak and Yakub. However far-fetched and mainly traditionary the connection may be, there is, as discussed by Bellew, a savour of Israelitish custom and an often remarkable similarity of name still surviving—Amazites, Moabites and Hittites live again in Amazai, Muhibwal and Hotiwal, to be found on Mount Morah, the hill Pehor, and the plain of Galilee (Jalala); there is the valley of Sudum; the observance of the “Passover,” offering sin and thank offerings, or driving off the scapegoat laden with the sins of the people—with many other religious and social observances which are Jewish rather than Islamic in their origin. It would seem that the Pathan race is closely allied to the Afghan on the one side, and, though perhaps not so closely, to certain tribes of Aryan Indians on the other. (The language is a mixture of partly Persian, partly Indian—Prakrit—origin.) The Pathan may be indeed described as an Indian Afghan, and the probabilities are that he represents an earlier eastern emigration of certain sections of the same tribes as have given birth to the Afghan; and from this point of view the Pathan and the Afghan are by origin one and the same. Whatever view is correct, there can be no doubt that the Pathan differs from the Afghan in the possession of certain Indian affinities not present in the other. Whether these are due to an admixture of Indian blood, or whether they are merely the result of close and prolonged political and social contact with India, is a matter of no very particular importance.
Ibbetson favours the theory that the Pathans are in the main a race of Indian extraction, that is, that the Pathan stock is decidedly Indian despite the admixture of foreign blood. According to him, the true Pathans are the modern representatives of an Aryan Indian race called by Herodotus the Pactiyae, which gave birth to many of the tribes represented to-day in and on the borders of the Peshawar Valley. According to this view the Pathans proper are those Pathan tribes which have a decidedly Pactiyan stock, in which the preponderating racial element is Indian; while the mixed Pactiyan and foreign tribes in which the stock is not Indian, but Afghan, Turk or Scythian, as the case may be, are Pathan by virtue of their Pactiyan blood, as well as by their geographical location, association, customs and language. But that the stock is in the main Afghan rather than Indian, seems borne out by the fact that from the earliest times of which historical records exist, we find the Pathan ever arrayed against and despising the Indian—evincing an antagonism which is not merely practical and political, but one of ideals and sentiment. On the other hand, although the Pathan tribes have had constant and bloody feuds with the Afghans, in their brief periods of peace they display a marked similarity of sentiment, ideals and aims, while the mental characteristics of the Pathan also approximate much more closely to the Afghan than to those of any purely Indian tribe.
Of the other races and tribes to which the term Pathan is loosely applied, the Ghilzais are a race of mixed Turkish and Persian descent, which has now become assimilated with the Afghans by sentiment and association. The Tajiks, another to which the term Pathan is applied, are of pure Persian origin, and are believed to be the remnants of certain Persian tribes who once inhabited Afghanistan before the advent of the Afghans by whom they were subdued. The Tajiks still retain their Persian speech. The Hazaras are Persian-speaking Tartars who have long settled among the Afghans, but who hold among them a subordinate and dependent position.
Character