Abstract
The East India Company’s annexation of the Punjab in 1849 looms large as a pivotal moment in the creation of the Victorian British Raj. The seizure of Ranjit Singh’s former kingdom brought with it the resources that would make the region India’s great granary, a Muslim and Sikh population that would provide the backbone of the post-1857 Indian Army, and the administrative raw materials for the “Punjab School” of the Indian Civil Service, the epitome of British paternalism in South Asia. Beyond this, however, the accession of the Punjab to the Company meant that the British now inherited the Sikh state’s loose and recent paramountcy over the ill-defined territory stretching from the east bank of the River Indus to the Khyber Pass. Eventually ranging from Chitral in the north to Waziristan and Dera Ismail Khan in the south, these Afghan borderlands with their large Pathan population would prove to be one of the abiding obsessions of the British in India. Although the issues that the British encountered on the North-West Frontier, such as indigenous unrest and raiding, Afghan intrigues, and the specter of Russian expansion, were, in the words of one author, an “imperial migraine,” control of the region was also viewed as central to Britain’s imperial power and prestige. The Frontier was the “anvil,” in the words of the Viceroy Lord Curzon, on which the future of the British Empire was daily forged.1
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Notes
See Charles Miller, Khyber: British India’s North West Frontier, The Story of an Imperial Migraine (New York, 1977); and
Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Frontiers: Delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 2 November 1907, 2nd Edition (Oxford, 1908), p. 56.
See Benjamin D. Hopkins, The Making of Modern Afghanistan (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 14.
See Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, (New York, 2011). For the creation of Britain’s “colonial knowledge” regime, see
Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996).
Charles Lindholm, “Images of the Pathan: The Usefulness of Colonial Ethnography,” in Charles Lindholm, Frontier Perspectives: Essays in Comparative Anthropology (Karachi, 1996), pp. 3–16.
James W. Spain, The Way of the Pathans, 2nd Edition (Karachi, 1972), p. 25.
See Lindholm, “Images of the Pathan,” pp. 12–13; and Barth, Political Leadership, Chapter 2. For an in-depth analysis of the role of religious leadership in the tribal areas and the ways in which British administrative practices helped create it, see Sana Haroon’s recent Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York, 2006).
Sir Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, 550B.C.–A.D.1957 (London, 1958), p. 278.
Edward Oliver, Across the Border: Or Pathan and Biloch (London, 1890), p. 224.
See Miller, Khyber, Chapters 1 through 7. Also see Sir John Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan, 3 vols. (London, 1858);
James Norris, The First Afghan War, 1838–1842 (Cambridge, 1967); and
John W. Waller, Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to Disaster in the First Afghan War (Austin, Texas, 1990). For the retreat from Kabul see
Patrick Macrory, Signal Catastrophe: The Story of a Disastrous Retreat from Kabul, 1842 (London, 1966).
Arnold Keppel, Gun Running and the Indian North-West Frontier (London, 1911), p. 5.
For the early period of British tribal management in Waziristan see Hugh Beattie, Imperial Frontier: Tribe and State in Waziristan (Richmond, 2002).
Report on Relations with the Frontier Tribes by Richard Temple, Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, 1855, quoted in William Paget and Alexander Mason, Record of Expeditions Against the Tribes of the North-West Frontier (Calcutta, 1885), pp. 10–11.
Cuthbert Collin Davies, The Problem of the North-West Frontier 1890–1908: With a Survey of Policy since 1849 (Cambridge, 1932), p. 26.
General Staff Memorandum on North-West Frontier Policy, 1 November 1920, India Office Records (IOR) L PO 4/4; Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West” in Ballads and Barrack Room Ballads (New York, 1899), pp. 3–11; and
Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, Connecticut, 1983).
The best work on the Raj’s penchant for gendering its Indian subjects into “effeminate” and “masculine” groupings is found in Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and The “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). For martial race theory, see e.g., Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 2004).
See Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1994).
Philip Mason, The Guardians (London, 1954), p. 291.
The most extreme example of the international “forward policy” was found in Lord Lytton’s policy towards Afghanistan when he was Viceroy in the 1870s. Lytton, influenced by men such as Sir Frederick Roberts and egged on by Disraeli, was a staunch believer in the Russian menace and insisted on placing a diplomatic mission in Kabul to monitor the Afghans. When this mission was massacred in 1878, General Roberts was dispatched to Afghanistan and the second Anglo-Afghan War commenced. Britain eventually won, and Afghan foreign policy came under nominal British control. See Charles Metcalfe MacGregor, The Second Afghan War, 1878–1880: Official Account (London, 1908); and
Brian Robson, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War, 1878–1881 (London, 1986).
Sandeman (1835–1892), while serving as Resident in Baluchistan during the 1870s, introduced a policy of tribal “control” based on allowances, the use of tribal chiefs to enforce control and the use of force when necessary. See Henry Thornton, Colonel Sir Robert Sandeman: His Life and Work on Our Indian Frontier, A Memoir, with Selections from His Correspondence and Official Writings (London, 1895). Also see Christian Tripodi, “‘Good for One but Not the Other’: The ‘Sandeman System’ of Pacification as Applied to Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947,” in The Journal of Military History, 73, 3 (2009), pp. 767–802; and Marsden and Hopkins, Fragments, Chapter 2.
As Matthew Edney argues in his Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1763–1843 (Chicago, 1997), mapping and boundary building was an essential tool of imperial control. Moreover, it created a “precise imperial space, a rational space within which a systematic archive of knowledge about Indian landscapes and people might be constructed,” p. 319. For the Frontier/Afghanistan, see Simanti Dutta, Imperial Mappings in Savage Spaces: Baluchistan and British India (Delhi, 2003); and Marsden and Hopkins, Fragments, Chapter 1.
See Michael Barthorp, The Frontier Ablaze: The North-West Frontier Rising, 1897–1898 (London, 1996).
On the life and legacy of Curzon, see e.g., David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (New York, 2003);
Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, the Earl of Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon: Being the Authorized Biography of George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, KG, 3 Vols. (New York, 1928); and David Dilks, Curzon in India, vol. 1: Achievement and Curzon in India, vol. 2: Frustration (London, 1969).
On the influential role of the Indian Political Service in the modern Middle East, see James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford, 2007);
Robert J. Blyth, The Empire of the Raj: India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1858–1947 (Basingstoke, 2003); and
Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York, 2003).
There is no single work on the history of the British Indian legation to Kabul. Leon B. Poullada’s Reform and Rebellion in Afghanistan, 1919–1929: King Amanullah’s Failure to Modernize a Tribal Society (Ithaca, 1973), provides a good introduction, however. See also Sir Kerr Fraser-Tytler’s (British minister in Kabul from 1936–1947), Afghanistan: A Study of Political Developments in Central and Southern Asia (Oxford, 1967). There are several memoirs by the small cadre that manned the diplomatic and consular stations in Tibet and Sikkim, including
Sir Charles Bell’s Tibet: Past & Present (Oxford, 1924); and
Basil Gould’s The Jewel in the Lotus: Recollections of an Indian Political (London, 1957). The Tibet cadre of the Political Service has also been blessed with an outstanding monograph which should serve as a model for any study of its type,
Alex McKay’s Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre, 1904–1947 (London, 1997).
Quoted in Sir Terence Creagh-Coen, The Indian Political Service: A Study in Indirect Rule (London, 1971), p. 37.
See W. Murray Hogben’s dissertation and two articles “An Imperial Dilemma: The Reluctant Indianization of the Indian Political Service,” in Modern Asian Studies, 15, 4 (1981), pp. 751–769, and “British Civil-Military Relations on the NorthWest Frontier of India,” in Adrian Preston and Peter Dennis, (eds), Swords and Covenants (London, 1976), pp. 123–146.
Christian Tripodi’s recent study of the Political Service on the Frontier, Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and the Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier, 1877–1947 (Farnham, 2011), chronicles the cadre from the Victorian period to independence. Tripodi is particularly strong on the composition and background of the cadre.
Ian Copland’s “The Other Guardians: Ideology and Performance in the Indian Political Service,” in Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes, and Paramount Power (Delhi, 1978); and The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997) present a rather damning critique of the Politicals who served in the Princely States. Apart from these, there are Creagh-Coen’s The Indian Political Service and
Charles Chenevix Trench’s Viceroy’s Agent (London, 1987). Both Creagh-Coen and Chevenix Trench were former Political officers. Creagh-Coen is useful in that it offers all the basic material needed to understand the organization and structure of the service, whereas Chevenix Trench offers a very well written and entertaining narrative by former Politicals.
Tripodi, Edge of Empire, p. 30, Norval Mitchell, Sir George Cunningham: A Memoir (Edinburgh, 1968), p. 15.
See, for example, Richard I. Bruce, CIE, The Forward Policy and Its Results or Thirty-Five Years’ Work Amongst the Tribes on Our North-Western Frontier of India (London, 1900); and
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles E. Bruce, Waziristan, 1936–1937: The Problems of the North-West Frontiers of India and Their Solutions (Aldershot, 1938).
G. Leslie Mallam and Diana Day, A Pair of Chaplis and a Cassock (London, 1978), p. 24, Mallam Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (CSAS).
In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Gandhi’s non-cooperation campaign and the introduction of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms led to a number of resignations from the ICS. Thereafter both recruitment and retention picked up again and stabilized for the remainder of the inter-war period. For the ICS in this period, see Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993);
Roland Hunt and John Harrison, The District Officer in India, 1930–1947 (London, 1980);
David C. Potter, India’s Political Administrators, 1919–1983 (Oxford, 1986);
Ann Ewing, “The Indian Civil Service, 1919–1924: Service Discontent and the Response in London and Delhi,” in Modern Asian Studies, 18, 1 (1984), pp. 33–53;
H. M. L. Alexander, “Discarding the ‘Steel Frame’: Changing Images Among Indian Civil Servants in the Early Twentieth Century,” in South Asia, 5, 2 (1982), pp. 1–12; and
T. H. Beaglehole, “From Rulers to Servants: The I.C.S. and the British Demission of Power in India,” in Modern Asian Studies, 11, 2 (1977), pp. 237–255.
Rudyard Kipling, Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (London, 1919), pp. 187–214.
See, e.g., Stephen P. Cohen, The Indian Army: Its Contribution to the Development of a Nation (New Delhi, 1991);
Anirudh Deshpande, British Military Policy in India, 1900–1945: Colonial Constraints and Declining Power (New Delhi, 2005); and
David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–1940 (Basingstoke, 1994).
See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920).
Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century (London, 1975), p. 197.
See Pillarisetti Sudhir, “Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Retreat of the Raj: A Look at British Attitudes to Indian Nationalism in the Inter-War Period” (Presentation made to the British Studies Seminar, The University of Texas at Austin, 18 April 2008);
Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics and the Creation of the 1935 India Act: Last Act of the Raj (Farnham, 2009); and
Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, North Carolina, 2006). For a small sampling of contemporary examples see
Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York, 1927) and
Lieutenant-General Sir George Fletcher MacMunn, The Underworld of India (London, 1933).
Field Marshal Sir Claud Jacob, Testimony to the Indian Statutory Commission, 20 June 1929, Simon Papers IOR F77/56. and also see Pradeep P. Barua, Gentlemen of the Raj: The Indian Army Officer Corps, 1817–1949 (Westport, Connecticut, 2003).
Robert Johnson, “Small Wars and Internal Security: The Army in India, 1936–1946” in Allan Jeffreys and Patrick Rose (eds), The Indian Army, 1939–1947: Experience and Development (Farnham, 2012), pp. 223–224.
Alan Warren, Waziristan, the Faqir of Ipi, and the Indian Army: The North West Frontier Revolt of 1936–1937 (Karachi, 2000), p. 27.
Tripodi, Edge of Empire, p. 32; and Valentine Chirol, The Middle Eastern Question or Some Political Problems of Indian Defence (London, 1903).
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Marsh, B. (2015). The North-West Frontier: Policies, Perceptions, and the Conservative Impulse in the British Raj. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_2
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