LECTURE VIII.
THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER.
THE SIKHS.
In the British Empire there is but one land frontier on which warlike preparation must ever be ready. It is the Northwest Frontier of India. True that there is another boundary, even longer, drawn across the American Continent, but there, fortunately, only customs houses are necessary and an occasional police guard. The Northwest Frontier of India, on the other hand, lies through a region whose inhabitants have been recruited throughout the ages by invading warlike races. Except for the Gurkha mountaineers of Nepal, the best soldiers of the Indian Army are derived from the northwest, from the Rajputs, the Sikhs, the Punjabi Musulmans, the Dogra mountaineers north of the Punjab, and the Pathan mountaineers west of the Punjab. The provinces along the frontier, and the Afghan land immediately beyond it, are the one region in all India from which, under some ambitious lead, the attempt might be made to establish a fresh imperial rule by the overthrow of the British Raj. It would not be the freedom of India which would ensue, but an oriental despotism and race domination from the northwest. Such is the teaching of history, and such the obvious fate of the less warlike peoples of India, should the power of Britain be broken either by warfare on the spot, or by the defeat of our navy. Beyond the northwest frontier, moreover, at a greater or less distance are the continental Powers of Europe.
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Political Map of Northwest India.| The Indian army and the Indian strategical railways are therefore organized with special reference to the belt of territory, extending from northeast to southwest, which lies beyond the Indian desert and is traversed from end to end by the Indus River. This frontier belt divides naturally into two parts. Inland we have the Punjab, where the rivers, emerging from their mountain valleys, gradually close together through the plain to form the single stream of the lower Indus; seaward we have Sind, where the Indus divides into distributaries forming a delta. Sind, as already stated, is a part of the Bombay Province, with which it is connected by sea from the Port of Karachi. Of late a railway has been constructed from Ahmadabad in the main territory of Bombay, across the southern end of the Desert, to Hyderabad at the head of the Indus delta. The Punjab is a separate Province with its own Lieutenant-Governor resident at Lahore. It was conquered from the Sikhs by a British army based on Delhi, and therefore ultimately on Calcutta.
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Map of Lower Asia.| To understand the significance of the Northwest Frontier of India we must look far beyond the immediate boundaries of the Empire. We have here a map of Lower Asia. Upon it we see a broad tract of upland which, commencing in Asia Minor, extends through Armenia and Persia to include Baluchistan and Afghanistan. There is thus one continuous belt of plateau stretching from Europe to the boundary of India. The eastern end of this belt, that is to say, Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan, is known as Iran. On all sides save the northwest and the northeast, the Iranian plateau descends abruptly to lowlands or to the sea. Southward and southwestward lie the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and the long lowland which is traversed by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Northward, to the east of the Caspian Sea, is the broad lowland of Turkestan, traversed by the Rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, draining into the Sea of Aral. Eastward is the plain of the Indus. The defence of India from invasion depends in the first place on the maintenance of British sea power in the Persian Gulf and along the south coast of Baluchistan, and in the second place on our refusal to allow the establishment of alien bases of power on the Iranian plateau, especially on those parts of it which lie towards the south and east.
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Map of the Northwest Frontier.| In the next map we have on a larger scale the detail of that part of Iran which lies nearest to India. Here we see, west of the Punjab, a great triangular mass of mountain ridges which splay out westward and southward from the northeast. These ridges and the intervening valleys constitute Afghanistan. Flowing from the Afghan valleys we have on the one hand the Kabul river, which descends eastward to the Indus, and, on the other hand, the greater river Helmund, which flows southwestward into the depressed basin of Seistan, where it divides into many channels, forming as it were an inland delta from which the waters are evaporated by the hot air, for there is no opening to the sea. The valley of the Kabul river on the one hand, and the oasis of Seistan on the other, might in the hands of an enemy become bases wherein to prepare the invasion of India. Therefore, without annexing this intricate and difficult upland, we have declared it to be the policy of Britain to exclude from Afghanistan and from Seistan all foreign power.
Further examination of the map will show that there are two lines, and only two, along which an invasion of India might be conducted. On the one hand, the mountains become very narrow just north of the head of the Kabul River. There in fact a single though lofty ridge, the Hindu Kush, is all that separates the basin of the Oxus from that of the Indus. As we see from the map, low ground is very near on the two sides of the Hindu Kush. The way into India over the passes of the Hindu Kush is known as the Khyber route, from the name of the last defile by which the track descends into the Indian Plain.