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Mad Mullahs and Englishmen: Discourse in the Colonial Encounter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

David B. Edwards
David B. Edwards
Affiliation:
Washington University, St. Louis
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Extract

Winston Churchill was winning money at the Goodwood Races when he heard the news that a tribal uprising had broken out on the north-west frontier of India. Within a matter of hours, the young cavalry officer, who was then on home leave from his regiment in Bangalore, booked return passage on the Indian Mail. He also sent off a telegram to an old family friend, General Sir Bindon Blood, who had been appointed to head the column that was being dispatched to relieve the two garrisons at Malakand and Chakdara then under Beige. General Blood had once made a casual promise to Churchill that he would include him in a future campaign, and with this promise in mind Churchill set off for the frontier.

Type
The Foundations of Historical Discourse
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 649 - 670
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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References

Some of the research on which this paper is based was conducted in Peshawar, Pakistan between November 1982 and June 1984 and supported by predoctoral grants from the Fulbright-Hays Commission and the National Science Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions received as this paper has gone through various incarnations. In particular, I must thank Lois Beck, John Bowen, Steven Caton, Holly Edwards, Raymond Grew, Susan Harding, and Aram Yengoyan.

1 For background on Churchill's activities in the summer of 1897, see Churchill, Winston S., My Early Life—A Roving Commission (London: MacMillan, 1943)Google Scholar; Morgan, Ted, Winston Churchill-Young Man in a Hurry 1874–1915 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 89–93Google Scholar; and Manchester, William, The Last Lion Winston Spencer Churchill Visions of Glory 1874–1932 (Boston: Little Brown, 1983), 249–58.Google Scholar

2 On the state of empire in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, see Morris, Jan, Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968)Google Scholar; and Farwell, Byron, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 311–17Google Scholar. On the uprisings of 1897, see also Nevill, H. L., Campaigns on the North-West Frontier (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1977)Google Scholar; James, Lionel, The Indian Frontier War: Being an Account of the Mohmand and Tirah Expeditions 1897 (London: William Heinemann, 1898)Google Scholar; McMahon, A. H. and Ramsay, A. D. G., Report on the Tribes of Dir, Swat and Bajour (Peshawar: Saeed Book Bank, 1981)Google Scholar; and Ahmed, Akbar S., Millenium and Charisma Among Swat Pathan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).Google Scholar

3 Quoted in Churchill, Randolph S., ed., Winston S. Churchill Companion 1896–1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), Vol. 1, Pt. 2, 774.Google Scholar

4 bid, 789, 783–4.

5 Cf., ibid, 881, for the Prince of Wales' letter to Churchill in which he praises his writings.

6 Churchill, Winston S., “The Story of the Malakand Field Force-—n Episode of Frontier War,” in his Frontiers and Wars (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962), 28.Google Scholar

7 Ibid. 29.

8 Letter from Harold Deane, Malakand Political Agent to the Secretary, Foreign Department, Government of India, 8 August 1897 [Punjab Civil Secretariat/Foreign Department/Frontier File (PCS/FD/FF) September 1897]. Government of India documents cited in this article were examined in the archives section of the Peshawar Library. The filing system employed in this archive does not necessarily correspond to those found in other Government of India archives.

9 Churchill, , op. cit. (1962), p. 66.Google Scholar

10 Ibid, 28–29; for the original despatches from which the book length account was drafted, see Woods, Fredrick, ed., Young Winston' s War: The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill, War Correspondent, 1897–1900 (London: Leo Cooper Ltd., 1972), 9–10.Google Scholar

11 Op. cit. (1962), 29.Google Scholar

12 Ibid. (1972), 29.

13 Ibid. (1962), 28.

14 Op. cit. (1972), 29–30.Google Scholar

15 Ibid. (1972), 30.

16 Ibid., 10.

17 “Karam,” in Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, Gibb, H. A. R. and Kramers, J. H., eds. (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1974), 216.Google Scholar

18 Gilsenan, Michael, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 75Google Scholar. See also, Gilsenan, , Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), esp. 20–35.Google Scholar

19 Ibid, 83–84.

20 Crocker, J. Christopher, “The Social Functions of Rhetorical Forms,” in The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric, Sapir, J. David and Crocker, , eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 33–66Google Scholar; James, W. Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 8–11Google Scholar; and Paine, Robert, “When Saying is Doing,” in Politically Speaking: Cross-Cultural Studies of Rhetoric, Paine, , ed. (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981), 9–24.Google Scholar

21 Crocker, , op. cit., 46.Google Scholar

22 Churchill, Randolph S., op. cit. 816–21.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 818.

24 Ibid, 818–19.

25 Biographical information on the Mad Fakir comes from a telegraph dated 8 August 1897 from the Deputy Commissioner (Peshawar) to the Secretary, Government of the Punjab; and from the “Political Diary of the Political Agent, Khyber Agency.” (Both of these documents were examined in the archival section of the Peshawar Library.)

26 A typical example of this kind of story is found in Niamatullah's History of the Afghans (London: Susil Gupta, 1965). In one of the chronicles that make up this history, a ruler named Islam Shah decides to punish a dervish accused of opening a shop to waste “his whole time in conversation with the women of the town” (p. 169). The dervish is brought before the king who denounces him and has him bastinadoed. The dervish is silent throughout the ordeal until the end when the king threatens to have him burned for any future violation of the law. To this, the faqir replies, “Burn me, if thou dolt not burn thyself.” The next morning, a boil appears on the king which shortly becomes a burning inflammation that spreads throughout his body. When the king attempts to find the dervish to beg forgiveness, the man is nowhere to be found, and the king soon dies of his affliction (pp. 169–70).Google Scholar

27 The similarity between miracle stories told of different saints was described as early as 1882 by a scholar named R. C. Temple, who noticed the close resemblance between stories pertaining to the Akhund of Swat and those having to do with otherwise unrelated saints from the Punjab and Sindh. See Temple, R. C., “Twice-Told Tales Regarding the Akhund of Swat,” in The Indian Antiquary, 9 (11 1882), 325–6.Google Scholar

28 Churchill, R. S., op. cit., 819.Google Scholar

29 Woods, op. cit., 9–10.Google Scholar

30 Churchill, R. S., op. cit., 820.Google Scholar

31 Churchill, Randolph S., op. cit., 818.Google Scholar

32 Mills, H. Woosnam, The Pathan Revolts in North-West India (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1979; originally published in Lahore by The Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1897).Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 161.

34 Ibid., 163.

35 Ibid., 161

36 Ibid., 163–4.

37 Ibid., 165.

38 Ibid., 165.

39 Ibid., 165.

40 Michel, Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). In the prison context studied by Foucault, the rationalization of power demanded that all marks of the individual's personal identity be transformed into signs of institutional dominance. In a similar way, dominance on the frontier is exercised by having that which is most intimately linked to the identity of tribal culture appropriated and made part of the political language of the foreign power.Google Scholar

41 al-Hujwiri, Ali Bin Uthman, The Kashf al-Mahjub, R. A. Nicholson, trans. (Lahore: Islamic Book Foundation, 1980), 4.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., 226.

43 Al-Bukhari, Ratak Quoted in Gibb, and Kramers, , eds., op. cit., 432 (“Nafila”).Google Scholar

44 See Schimmel, Annemarie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 133Google Scholar; and Al-Hujwiri, , op. cit., 226–7.Google Scholar