Abstract
In the spring of 1930, after years of ignoring the growing nationalist movement in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the local British administration was suddenly confronted with a full-scale rebellion throughout the province. Beginning with a nationalist demonstration and subsequent shooting of Indian civilians by British troops in Peshawar on 23 April, unrest quickly spread throughout the province. Within days the British had evacuated Peshawar city and much of the NWFP was essentially beyond their control. At the beginning of June, the British position was further weakened by an onslaught of Afridi lashkars who descended upon the Vale of Peshawar to fight the Government’s forces. Taken by surprise, the British, both in Peshawar and in Delhi, struggled to understand the nature of this opposition and how to beat what was now a major challenge to their rule on the Frontier and in India as a whole.1
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Notes
Unlike his predecessor as Deputy Commissioner for Peshawar, Aubrey Metcalfe, there was nothing lackadaisical about Caroe’s approach to his job. He regularly put in 16-hour days. As his former subordinate in Peshawar, K. P. S. Menon, wrote: “He was a man with a mission; he would not let sleeping dogs lie. Indeed, he thought that the dogs of the North-West Frontier never slept; they only pretended to sleep; and if the rulers were easy-going and lethargic, the dogs would pounce on them. Eternal vigilance was Caroe’s watchword” (Kumara P. S. Menon, Many Worlds: An Autobiography (Bombay, 1965), p. 93).
G. Leslie Mallam and Diana Day, A Pair of Chaplis and a Cassock (London, 1978), p. 47, Mallam Papers, Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge University (CSAS); see
G. Leslie Mallam and Ambrose D. F. Dundas, Census of India, 1931: Vol. X V, North-West Frontier Province –Part I: Report and Part 2: Tables (Peshawar, 1933).
See Abdul Ghaffar Khan, My Life and Struggle: Autobiography of Badshah Khan as Narrated to K. B. Narang (Delhi, 1969), pp. 103–104.
Minute by Evelyn Howell, 9 June 1930, HOME (POL.) F. 11/III/1930. The “Hindustani Fanatics” were a small colony of Wahhabis resident in Swat. The British waged a series of small campaigns against them in the mid-nineteenth century. Evidence suggests that Bolshevik money actually was being funneled through the colony in the 1920s (See Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (New York, 2011), Chapter 3).
A career Frontier officer, Jardine became a convert to the tenets of “Moral Rearmament,” while on leave in Britain in the late 1930s. Moral Rearmament was based around what were called “the Four Absolutes” (absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love) and encouraged its members to be actively involved in political and social issues. Jardine returned to India and a stint as Deputy Commissioner, Peshawar, intending to “live differently.” On his occasional leaves, he lived in an ashram and he later became friends with Gandhi –all the while retaining his official posts in the Political Service. He served in the Princely States throughout the Second World War, returning to the Frontier for the final years of British rule. See Lionel Jardine, They Called Me An “Impeccable Imperialist”: Experiences of British India, 1914–1947 (Bombay, 1979).
For example: “Long Live Revolution: The Only Communist Weekly Paper of the Frontier Province,” 25 March 1930, HOME (POL.) F. 11/III/1930. In his recent study of the 1935 Government of India Act, Andrew Muldoon points out that, by the 1930s, rather than using traditional “native informants,” British intelligence in India had become dangerously overreliant on information gleaned from pamphlets and the vernacular press (See Andrew Muldoon, Empire, Politics and the Creation of the 1935 India Act: Last Act of the Raj (Farnham, 2009), p. 34).
Secretary of State to Viceroy, 12 September 1930, Halifax Papers C152/6. In 1931, the journalist and Liberal Member of Parliament, Robert Bernays, compared Abdul Ghaffar Khan to the Labour Party veteran, George Lansbury: “Abdul Ghaffar Khan is a kindly, gentle and rather loveable man. As well think that old George Lansbury is a dangerous revolutionary as imagine that Abdul Ghaffar Khan is the relentless enemy of the Raj” (Robert Bernays, The Naked Fakir (London, 1931), p. 328).
H. R. S., “Unrest in the Peshawar District, 1930–1932,” in the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 19, 4 (1932), p. 641. For a history of the Royal Central Asian Society, see Hugh Leach and Susan Maria Farrington, Strolling About on the Roof of the World: The First Hundred Years of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs (Formerly Royal Central Asian Society) (London, 2003). It was in fact Trotsky who made this remark at the 3rd Conference of Communist International in 1920. Trotsky hoped to make this rhetoric a reality, but he was alone among responsible Soviet leaders in the 1920s (see
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (London, 2003), p. 379).
Sir William Barton, “The Problems of Law and Order under a Responsible Government in the North-West Frontier Province,” in the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 19, 1 (1932), p. 6.
Report by F. Isemonger (Inspector General Police, NWFP), 2 May 1930, NAI HOME (POL.) F. 255/5/1930 (Part 2). Isemonger also had a vast knowledge of actual, as opposed to supposed, international conspiracies to bring down the Raj, and had co-authored the Punjab government’s report on the Ghadr movement (Frederick C. Isemonger and James Slattery, An Account of the Ghadr Conspiracy, 1913–1915 (Lahore, 1919)).
Although this rumor appeared to be common currency throughout the Frontier, it bore no resemblance to the actual Sarda Act, which contained no provisions for personal inspections –medical or otherwise. For an investigation into the actual provisions of the Act see Sumita Mukherjee, “Using the Legislative Assembly for Social Reform: the Sarda Act of 1929,” in South Asia Research, 26, 3 (2006), pp. 219–233.
See Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the NorthWest Frontier (Delhi, 2001) for interviews with former Khudai Khidmatgar (‘Red Shirt’) volunteers.
See Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah, Ethnicity, Islam, and Nationalism: Muslim Politics in the North-West Frontier Movement, 1937–1947 (Karachi, 1999), p. 33.
See Unpublished Memoirs of Mrs. H. A. Barnes, Collected Indian Political Service Memoirs IOR F 226/1; and Charles Chevenix Trench, Viceroy’s Agent (London, 1987), p. 53.
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© 2015 Brandon Marsh
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Marsh, B. (2015). “These Infernal Khudai Khidmatgaran”: Defining and Repressing Frontier Nationalism, 1930–1931. In: Ramparts of Empire. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374011_6
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