Statistics of the North-West Provinces of British India

1851 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 345
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
North West ◽  
The North

North-West Frontier: Kohistan, Hindu Kush, Pamirs

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Searle
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
British India ◽  
The West ◽  
North West ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
North West Frontier Province ◽  
Hindu Kush ◽  
Tribal Areas

The Hindu Kush Mountains run along the Afghan border with the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Following the First Anglo-Afghan war of 1839– 42 the British government in Simla decided that the North-West Frontier of British India had to have an accurate delineation. Sir Mortimer Durand mapped the border between what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1893 and this frontier is known as the Durand Line. Unfortunately it is a political frontier and one that splits the Pathan or Pushtun-speaking lands into two, with the North-West Frontier Province and Waziristan in Pakistan to the east and the Afghan provinces of Kunar, Nangahar, Khost, Paktiya, and Kandahar to the west. The border regions north of Baluchistan in Quetta and Waziristan are strong tribal areas and ones that have never come under the direct rule of the Pakistani government. Warlords run their drug and arms businesses from well-fortified mud-walled hilltop fortresses. During the period that Lord Curzon was Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 the entire border regions of British India were mapped out along the Karakoram, Kashmir, Ladakh, and south Tibetan Ranges. During Partition, in 1947, once again an artificial border was established separating mostly Muslim Pakistan from India. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, gave Sir Cyril Radcliffe the invidious task of delineating the border in haste to avoid a civil war that would surely have come, and on 17 August 1947 Pakistan inherited all the territory between the Durand Line and the new Indian frontier, the Radcliffe Line. In the north, the disputed Kashmir region still remained unresolved and the northern boundary of Pakistan ran north to the main watershed along the Hindu Kush, Hindu Raj, and Karakoram Ranges. To the west, Afghanistan was a completely artificial country created by the amalgamation of the Pathans of the east, Hazaras of the central region, the Uzbeks in the Mazar-i-Sharif area, and the Tadjiks of the Panjshir Valley along the border with Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The British lost three wars trying to invade this mountainous land between 1839 and 1919, and the Soviet Union which occupied Afghanistan for ten years from 1979 also withdrew across the Oxus River in failure in February 1989.

scholarly journals Art. II.—An Essay on the Brāhūī Grammar, after the German of the late Dr. Trumpp, of Munich University

1887 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-135
Author(s):  
Theodore Duka
Keyword(s):  
British India ◽  
Strong Emission ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Subject

In the range of philological study and research there is nothing so attractive as the discovery of certain tribes who speak a language unconnected with the languages of the peoples which surround them. In Europe we have the striking example of the Basque language on the French and Spanish frontier, and, on a larger scale, we find the descendants of the ancient conquerors of the upper part of Pannonia — the Hungarians — surrounded by German, Sláv and Latin elements, speaking the Magyar language, a language wholly isolated, whose philological position has not as yet been determined to the satisfaction of all. Such isolated peoples appear like islets on the vast ocean of Languages. Another remarkable example is the language of the Bráhúi in the north of Sindh and on the east of Balúchistan, on the north-west of British India, which is the subject of the present essay. This language is spoken in a region to which much attention has been attracted of late; it is the territory formerly known as the Khánat of Khelat. The writing of the Bráhúi is the Arabic alphabet, and the letters l and t are pronounced from the roof of the mouth with a strong emission of the breath.

No ‘Signs of Weakness’: Gendered violence and masculine authority on the North-West Frontier of British India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH KOLSKY
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
White Male ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
British India ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Gender Hierarchy ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Colonial Frontier

Abstract On 14 April 1923, in the dead of night, an English girl was kidnapped from her bedroom in a military bungalow in the Kohat Cantonment on India's North-West Frontier. The kidnapping is a notorious incident that has been told and retold in multiple languages, disciplines, and media for almost a century. From the colonial perspective, the kidnapping was seen as an ‘outrage’ that demonstrated the lawless savagery of the tribes who inhabited this strategically significant Indo-Afghan borderland. From the local perspective, the kidnappers led by Ajab Khan Afridi were valiant heroes who boldly challenged an alien and oppressive regime. This article adopts a gendered lens of historical analysis to argue that the case offers important conceptual insights about the colonial preoccupation with frontier security. In the British empire, the idea of the frontier signified a racial line dividing civilization from savagery. The colonial frontier was also a zone of hyper-masculinity where challenges to state power were met with brutal violence in a muscular performance of masculine authority. In this space where ‘no signs of weakness’ could be shown, the abduction of Molly Ellis represented an assault on the fictive image of white, male invincibility and the race–gender hierarchy that defined the colonial system.

scholarly journals “Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 717-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Condos
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discourse ◽  
British India ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Way

AbstractDuring the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. Yet, rarely do these debates engage with the historical and discursive origins of the term “fanatic.” As a result, many of these discussions tend to reproduce uncritically the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically shaped the way “fanaticism” and “fanatical” violence have been framed and understood. This paper seeks to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism.” It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of these phenomena, I explore how these discourses interacted to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” I show how this was perceived as an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed entirely outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be destroyed completely. The subjectification of the “fanatic,” in this case, ultimately served as a way of activating the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill. Finally, I deconstruct these reductive colonial representations of fanaticism in order to demonstrate how, despite British views to the contrary, these were often complex and deeply political acts of anti-colonial resistance.

scholarly journals Evolution of cartographic aggression by India: A study of Limpiadhura to Lipulek

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Jagat K Bhusal
Keyword(s):  
East India Company ◽  
Historical Maps ◽  
British India ◽  
The West ◽  
Google Maps ◽  
Southern Plains ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Kali River

Nepal is a sovereign country since its history and has never been colonized. In course of time, once a greater Nepal shrunk to present territory after its defeat in the Anglo-Nepal War (1814–15) and since the signing of the border treaty (Between the East India Company and the Raja of Nepal) which is known as the Sugauli Treaty of 1816. The defeat fixed the river Kali as the border in the west and the Mechi in the east on the hilly regions whereas there are border pillars (Jange Pillars) on the southern plains. The territorial issue between Nepal and India on the north-west border, especially up to the source of the Kali river is reviewed in this paper. Interpretations of the relevant documents and correspondences, reviewed papers, articles in periodicals and newspapers, and historical maps are critically made with reference to the recent freely available google maps and political maps published by Nepal and India. British-India after the Sugauli treaty and also India after the independence realized the importance of the Gunji-Kuti area, Lipulek pass and Kalapani and made the unilateral cartographic manipulation on the North-west border of Nepal. It is found that the borderline swinging over the century clearly indicated that the encroachment of about 400 sq. km land of Nepal contravened the spirit of the Sugauli Treaty.

The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin D. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
North West ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The North

From the invention of imperial authority along the North-West Frontier of British India, subjects were divided between the “civilized” inhabitants populating the cultivated plains and the “wild tribes” living in the hills. The problem of governing this latter group, the “independent tribes,” proved a vexed one for the British Raj. The mechanism developed by imperial administrators to manage the frontier inhabitants was the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), first promulgated in 1872 and still in effect today. The FCR was designed to exclude the Frontier's inhabitants from the colonial judiciary, and more broadly the colonial sphere, encapsulating them in their own colonially sanctioned “tradition.” Exploring the use of the FCR as an instrument of governance from its first inception into the twentieth century, this article argues that it was key to shaping the nature of frontier rule, which in turn shaped the very nature of the colonial state itself.

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