35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘I LIKE TOO MUCH THE PHFIT-PHFIT’
expanding empires. Neither had any interest in promoting peace
and progress on the frontier. To the newcomers, security stood as
the sole objective for the rulers of India. Like the Punjab recently,
Afghanistan was then viewed as a buffer state, and the passes were
suddenly occupied, fortified; and new roads were constructed for
the garrisons marching to and from these new forts.
This was more than Pathan dignity could tolerate. At one time or
another during the 1890s, every tribe on the frontier was up in
arms, spurning ancient traditions of hospitality and sanctuary,
ambushing and killing British civilians and soldiers alike. The
British, of course, cracked down with equal force, burning villages
and crops, destroying wells and orchards, starving women and
children with blockades, and transporting tribesmen to the remote
Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal. What followed is well
documented. After 1901, Lord Curzon, newly appointed as viceroy,
declared a new province of India, the North-West Frontier, and until
1947 the region erupted in an endless series of uprisings and reprisals.
The British managed to hold on to the passes and the roads, but
were unable to establish any real control over the hills surrounding
them. No one ever has.
The last great battle the Pathans fought was in progress when I
last visited Peshawar in 1980. By then it had become a refugee camp
and guerrilla base for those tribesmen fighting the occupying Soviet
forces in Afghanistan. As countless armies before them had learned,
so, too, did the Soviets discover the hard way that it was impossible
to fight people who were virtually invisible, who retreated after
swift, unexpected and violent attacks up into a barren and treacherous
landscape that only they knew.
Peshawar has always reigned as the unchallenged queen of Pathan
cities. Lowell Thomas, the great American journalist, referred to it
as their ‘Paris’ in 1930. Within it dwells an extraordinary melange
of races, some three hundred thousand people representing most of
Asia, and other continents as well. It has changed less over the
centuries than most other cities. The Gor Khatri, a hill at the centre
of the old city, stood when Fa Hien and Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese
pilgrims, respectively passed through in the fifth and seventh
centuries. Timur and Babur would recognise much of it today;
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