Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
well-established groups that occupied the same areas where they
are found today. The one question remains: What is their racial
composition? We are no closer to that answer now than we have
ever been. During the time of the Greek historians, the frontier
tribes claimed indisputable descent from the Aryans who had
migrated down from Central Asia more than a thousand years
before. Over the centuries, of course, they intermarried with
subsequent invaders. In the
Babur-Nama
, the often macabrely
amusing memoirs he penned, Babur describes the attacks the hill
tribes made on his warriors as 'defying death.' Some of these tribals,
he writes, came to him after their defeat in battle, holding blades of
grass between their teeth and announcing that they were now his
'cows.' To this day the Pathans know the same gesture of ultimate
humiliation. Babur describes proudly how he built enormous
pillars from the skulls of his slaughtered enemies at Hangu and
Kohat, and in Bajaur; and how he took Bibi Mubaraka, daughter of
Yusufzai chief, as a wife; how he hunted rhinoceros; how he killed
a tiger near the banks of the Indus above Attock.
Next, the Pathans embarked on two hundred years of bloody
guerrilla warfare against the Moghuls. Accounts of revolts along
the frontier, and of unsuccessful punitive expeditions, are as
common in the chronicles of the Delhi emperors as they are in the
British India Office archives in London. Some historians maintain
that the Moghul empire in India began to shrivel when it was severed
from its taproots in Central Asia. The Pathans themselves favour
this view, since it acknowledges their part in humbling the mighty
Moghuls.
As they had profited from the chaos caused by Timur's breakdown
of Hindu rule, so the Pathans made hay in the twilight of the Moghul
empire, many of them joining the forces of the Persian Nadir Shah,
who sacked Delhi in 1739. At this time, the shah looted its renowned
Peacock Throne; to this day it remains in Tehran. And in 1761 the
Pathan Ahmad Shah Abdali led an army against the Mahrattas, who
had co-opted Moghul power in northern India. His success could be
said to have paved the way for British conquest - at least the Pathans
can argue it.
There were still three more major battles for the Pathans to fight
