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Infrastructural Contingencies and Contingent Sovereignties on the Indo–Afghan Frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2020

ABHILASH MEDHI
ABHILASH MEDHI*
Affiliation:
Brown University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The Khyber Pass Railway is a defunct 42-kilometre-long railway line that connects the western reaches of Peshawar to the Afghan border. Completed in 1925 mainly to carry British troops, the railway line failed to attract decent passenger or commodity traffic. Instead, it made an impact on a more primal register. Negotiations carried out between the British Government of India and populations from around the Khyber to allow its construction reproduced and rearranged lines of authority among the latter. They also embedded colonial administrators in tribal hierarchies. Efforts to acquire land and labour opened up spaces of collaboration between the colonial administration and members of frontier tribes, effectively contributing towards a reconfiguration of sovereign power in the area. This article weaves questions of customary law and colonial legal cultures into a retelling of the history of the Khyber Pass Railway. Examining transactions across three domains of sovereign power—the economic right to use land, extension of juridical regimes, and territorial control—it argues that the operation of sovereignty in the late-colonial Indo–Afghan frontier did not adhere to conventional ideas about its concentration and monopoly. The colonial government as well as members of frontier tribes deployed the inconclusive nature of their transactions strategically and, often, sovereign power lay with the stakeholder who could determine which domains fell within the bounds of the sovereignty question and which domains fell without.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 6 , November 2020 , pp. 1949 - 1986
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I presented an early version of this article at the Princeton South Asia Conference and have benefited from the probing questions of Divya Cherian and fellow participants. I am grateful to Vazira Zamindar, Rebecca Nedostup, and Norbert Peabody for their comments and helpful suggestions on subsequent drafts. I also wish to thank Wamiqullah Mumtaz for patiently helping me track down historical and contemporary synonyms of the term ‘sovereignty’ in the Pashto language. Research for this article was supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

References

1 In 1924, the Times of India commissioned British artist of Greek origin, William Spencer Bagdatopoulos (1888–1965), to tour the country on their behalf. Over the next two years, Bagdatopoulos travelled all over India and painted images that were reproduced in the Times of India annuals. They were subsequently featured in promotional material for the Indian Railways.

2 By ‘Indo–Afghan frontier’, I mean the trans-Indus districts.

3 For centuries, the Indo–Afghan frontier and particularly the Khyber served as a resting stop for traders, religious preachers, pilgrims, nomads, criminals, and invading armies. This aspect of the frontier led to its depiction, in historical literature, as a place of transit or, to borrow Marc Augé's term, a ‘non-place’. See Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (trans.) John Howe (London: Verso, 1995)Google Scholar. Recent historiography has harped on about the need to abandon this fiction. See, for example, Nichols, Robert, Settling the Frontier: Land, Law, and Society in the Peshawar Valley, 1500–1900 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Hopkins, Benjamin D. and Marsden, Magnus, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Hopkins, Benjamin D. and Marsden, Magnus (eds), Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

4 On 11 December 1925, Edward Turnour, the 6th Earl Winterton and under-secretary of state for India, reported to the House of Commons that, according to latest estimates, the capital cost of the Khyber Railway was approximately 1,897,000 sterling pounds. He anticipated that annual working expenses, including maintenance, would come to around 33,150 sterling pounds. House of Commons Debates, 11 December 1925, series 5, volume 189, p. 848W, available at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1925/dec/11/india-khyber-railway [accessed 18 December 2019]. Also see Berridge, P. S. A., Couplings to the Khyber: Story of the North Western Railway (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1969), p. 226Google Scholar.

5 For a comprehensive discussion of the colonial economy during this period, see Tomlinson, B. R., The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more focused investigation into the currency crisis that coincided with the period of construction of the Khyber Pass Railway, see Balachandran, G., ‘Britain's Liquidity Crisis and India, 1919–1920’, Economic History Review, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, pp. 575–591CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Completion estimate of the Khyber Railway sanctioned by the secretary of state. Railway Board, Works—B, 1050-T/334-347 (July 1928) [National Archives of India, henceforth NAI]; Berridge, Couplings to the Khyber, p. 226.

7 The compartmentalization of communities into various tribes and tribe segments is problematic, as it was administrative reports, gazettes, censuses, and other colonial textual productions that lent fixity to more fluid social relations that appear to have been a convention for an earlier period. I have put the word tribe in quotation marks to emphasize connotations of primitivism that remain attached to it. All subsequent uses of this and related terms such as ‘tribal’ shall be without quotation marks to make for easier reading.

8 From at least the fourteenth century, the standard definition of the English word ‘sovereignty’ has been ‘[s]upremacy in respect of power, domination, or rank’. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did this definition change to denote ‘royal authority or dominion’ or ‘absolute and independent authority’ free from any monarchical government, in the process becoming entangled with conceptions of modern statehood. See ‘sovereignty, n.’, OED Online, July 2018, Oxford University Press, available at http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/185343 [accessed 18 December 2019]. The Pashto word for ‘sovereignty’, toolwaki, is of relatively recent origin and used mainly in academic settings. In Dari Persian—the language of choice in the court of the Afghan Amir—synonyms of the term ‘sovereignty’ fall into two groups: those implying absolute submission to kingship or divine authority (farmān-guẕāri, ḥukm-guẕāri, ḵẖudāwand-gāri, and so on) and those suggesting domination over a territory (kishwar-dāri, kishwar-ḵẖudā’I, and so on). See Steingass, Francis Joseph, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1892)Google Scholar.

9 Though contentious, the use of the term ‘Western’ is essential here. I mention it not in the geographical sense, but to refer to a culturally particular set of ideas within political thought.

10 For a discussion of how prophecy and millenarianism animated the contest for legitimacy in frontier society and with the British, see Edwards, David B., Heroes of the Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Condos, Mark, ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 58, no. 3, 2016, pp. 717–745CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haroon, Sana, ‘The Rise of Deobandi Islam in the North-West Frontier Province and Its Implications in Colonial India and Pakistan 1914–1996’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 18, no. 1, January 2008, pp. 47–70Google Scholar.

11 I use ‘sovereignty’ and ‘authority’ alternately to draw attention to their positions along a continuum; I do so in the wake of Steven DeCaroli, who calls sovereignty ‘the most extreme form’ of authority. See DeCaroli, Steven, ‘Boundary Stones: Giorgio Agamben and the Field of Sovereignty’, in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life, Calarco, Matthew and DeCaroli, Steven (eds) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 48Google Scholar.

12 Here, ‘non-adversarial’ implies those interactions that were either not adversarial or stopped short, for whatever reasons, of manifesting themselves in violence.

13 Subsequent uses of the term shall not use quotation marks.

14 Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 34Google Scholar. Writing on Afghanistan, Benjamin Hopkins has attributed a comparable dynamic—the reification of a dominant historical vision—to the influence of Mountstuart Elphinstone. According to Hopkins, later generations of administrators, travellers, and scholars followed in the footsteps of Elphinstone in describing Afghanistan as a space of arid emptiness and visceral recalcitrance, thereby advancing an ‘Elphinstonian episteme’. See Hopkins, Benjamin D., The Making of Modern Afghanistan (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 12–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elphinstone, Mountstuart, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, and Its Dependencies, in Persia, Tartary, and India, two volumes (London: Richard Bentley, 1842)Google Scholar.

15 Bayley, Victor, Permanent Way Through the Khyber (London: Jarrolds Publisher, 1934)Google Scholar.

16 British fascination with the hyper-masculine male inhabitant from the Indo–Afghan frontier is well documented in the literary sphere. Rudyard Kipling, for instance, was both appreciative and wary of the virile Pashtun male, whom he thought to be an improvement on their grovelling, kowtowing counterparts from certain other parts of the subcontinent. He echoed such ideas in Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892), pp. 85–94Google Scholar, and Kim (1901). Although images of Pashtun women clad in cerulean burqas and chadors shot in cities, towns, and villages strung along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border have become ubiquitous in recent years due to the sheer volume of news generated on the ‘war on terror’, within the historical discipline and in the imperial archives, Pashtun women register only a chimera-like presence. For examples of anthropological studies of women that predate the ‘war on terror’, see Boesen, Inger W., ‘Women, Honour and Love: Some Aspects of the Pashtun Woman's Life in Eastern Afghanistan’, Afghanistan Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, 1980, pp. 50–59Google Scholar; Tapper, Nancy, Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grima, Benedicte, The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women: ‘The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me’ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

17 The ethnographic archive on Pashtun tribes from the Indo–Afghan frontier and Afghanistan is vast. Some examples are Burnes, Alexander, Travels into Bokhara: Being an Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary and Persia, three volumes (London: John Murray, 1834)Google Scholar, Cabool: Being a Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in that City in the Years 1836, 7, and 8 (London: John Murray, 1842)Google Scholar; Masson, Charles, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Panjab, four volumes (London: Richard Bentley, 1842)Google Scholar; Lal, Mohan, Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, & Turkistan to Balkh, Bokhara, and Herat and a Visit to Great Britain and Germany (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1846)Google Scholar; Bellew, Henry Walter, Journey of a Political Mission to Afghanistan in 1857 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862)Google Scholar, The Races of Afghanistan: Being a Brief Account of the Principal Nations Inhabiting that Country (London: Thacker, Spink, and Company, 1880)Google Scholar, An Inquiry into the Ethnography of Afghanistan (Woking: Oriental Institute, 1891)Google Scholar; Broadfoot, James Sutherland, Reports on Parts of the Ghilzi Country (London: John Murray, 1885)Google Scholar; Garrick, H. B. W., Report of Tour Through Behar, Central India, Peshawar, and Yusufzai, 1881–82 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1885)Google Scholar.

18 See Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. Zak Leonard has complicated our understanding of the relationship between the ‘ethnographic state’ and knowledge production on the frontier by highlighting two traditions and periods in colonial ethnography's broad trajectory in the area: a textual tradition (spanning roughly from 1850 to 1890) represented by H. G. Raverty and H. W. Bellew, and a folkloric tradition (1875–1910) led by S. S. Thorburn and M. L. Dames. See Leonard, Zak, ‘Colonial Ethnography on India's North-West Frontier, 1850–1910’, The Historical Journal, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, pp. 175–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Leonard illustrates nuances in the colonial construction of tribes that revisionist critics of colonial ethnography have typically overlooked. It is worth noting at the same time that Raverty and Bellew's accounts have had more vibrant afterlives, both in terms of inspiring other colonial ethnographic narratives and within academic discourse.

19 Report on the Administration of the Punjab and its Dependencies, for the year 1869–70, IOR/V/10/34 [British Library, henceforth BL], p. 23.

20 I borrow the phrase ‘culture of contracts’ from Bodhisattva Kar's study based in the north-eastern frontier of British India, in which he argues that deeds signed between European speculators and Naga tribesmen fixed proprietary claims to land in the Naga Hills while simultaneously propagating the idea that land constituted private property. See Kar, Bodhisattva, ‘Nomadic Capital and Speculative Tribes: A Culture of Contracts in the Northeast Frontier of British India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 53, no. 1, 2016, pp. 41–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Powindahs were groups of Afghan grazer-traders who descended from the mountains of Afghanistan every autumn to sell dried fruits and clothes across a vast territory, starting from the valley of the Indus in the west to Bengal and Assam in the east. They returned to Afghanistan in the spring with various items. See Robinson, Captain J. A., Notes on Nomad Tribes of Eastern Afghanistan (Quetta: Nisa Traders, 1978 [1934])Google Scholar.

22 Of span 1,000 millimetres.

23 For a representative example of such debates, see House of Commons Debates, 14 February 1898, series 4, volume 53, pp. 499–500, available at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1898/feb/14/address-in-answer-to-her-majestys-most [accessed 18 December 2019].

24 Letter from Agent, North Western Railway to the Secretary, Railway Board, Simla, dated 11 July 1925. Railway Department, Traffic, 1368-T 1-4 (August 1925) [NAI].

25 Of span 1,676 millimetres.

26 These figures have been culled from colonial documents. While it would be unwise to accept them uncritically, they give a rough sense of the scale of violence on the frontier. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

27 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, p. 15.

28 Circular issued by India Office, dated 30 April 1920. IOR/L/PS/18/A189 (30 April 1920) [BL].

29 Letter from Viceroy, Army Department, to Secretary of State for India, dated 16 February 1920. IOR/L/PS/18/A189 (30 April 1920) [BL].

30 Comment by A. Hamilton Grant, dated 22 July 1919. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier Branch, 6-F, 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

31 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, p. 39.

32 Denys Bary's response to N. M. Joshi, March 1922. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier Branch, 6-F, 1-151 (1923) [NAI]. The Afridis are a Pashtun tribe whose territory straddles the Khyber Pass. Some ethnographic accounts written by colonial officials and anthropologists in the post-colonial period suggest that Afridis can be further organized into eight clans: Adam Khel, Aka Khel, Kamar Khel, Kuki Khel, Malik Din Khel, Qambar Khel, Sipah, and Zakka Khel. Others have conflated sub-clans with main clans, increasing the number of Afridi clans in the process. It is not the intention of this article to reproduce such nomenclatures, though it is worth noting that, by the 1930s, many Afridis were sufficiently aware of this classification. In a letter addressed to the Assistant Political Officer of Khyber Agency, dated 17 September 1930, members of an Afridi jirga distanced themselves from tribal disturbances, as well as the activities of the Congress Committee, Khilafat Committee, and Pashtun subjects from the Peshawar Valley, by signing under the eight main clan names. They also provided a count of the number of elders from each clan who had signed off on the letter. See IOR/L/PS/12/3142 (4 October 1930–30 April 1931) [BL].

33 See Homji, V. M. Meher, ‘Droughts, Aridity, and Desertification in the Indian Sub-Continent’, Annals of Arid Zone, vol. 36, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–17Google Scholar; Young, T. C. M., Richaiond, A. E., and Brendish, G. R., ‘Sandflies and Sandfly Fever in the Peshawar District’, Indian Journal of Medical Research, vol. 13, no. 4, 1926, pp. 961–1021Google Scholar.

34 Memorandum from the Railway Department, dated 16 April 1921. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier Branch, 6-F, 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

35 They were aggressive because they involved an act of war and occasional as, even on the hostile Indo–Afghan frontier, military confrontations were infrequent events.

36 Caton, Steven C., ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’, Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 12Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., p. 13.

38 For information on the Sandeman System, see Benjamin D. Hopkins, ‘Managing “Hearts and Minds”: Sandeman in Baluchistan’, in Hopkins and Marsden, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, pp. 49–74. On why the Sandeman System was not applied to the North-West Frontier, see Tripodi, Christian, Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier 1877–1947 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011)Google Scholar.

39 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, p. 191.

40 Noelle, Christine, State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan: The Reign of Amir Dost Muhammad Khan (1826–1863) (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 167Google Scholar.

41 Nichols, Robert, A History of Pashtun Migration, 1775–2006 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 92Google Scholar.

42 Hart, David Montgomery, Guardians of the Khaibar Pass: The Social Organisation and History of the Afridis of Pakistan (Lahore: Vanguard Books Ltd, 1985), p. 19Google Scholar.

43 Aitchison, C. U., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries, vol. XI (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1909), pp. 96–99Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., p. 28.

45 Circular issued by the Secretary of State for India, dated 30 April 1920. IOR/L/PS/18/A189 (1920) [BL].

46 Letter from the Political Agent, Khyber to the Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, dated 31 March 1921. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

47 Note on picquet posts in Khyber. IOR/L/PS/10/951, Pt 3 File 8929 (1920) [BL].

48 House of Commons Debates, Lords Sitting of 3 May 1923, series 5, volume 53, 1109, available at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1923/may/03/the-north-west-frontier [accessed 18 December 2019].

49 Scouts received clothing and supplies from the British government. Ibid.

50 The expression ‘twilight zone’ is borrowed from Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat. See Hansen, Thomas Blom and Stepputat, Finn, ‘Sovereignty Revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35, 2006, pp. 295–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 For Carl Schmitt's theory of how sovereign power rests with whoever has the right to decide on the state of exception, see Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, (trans.) Schwab, George (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

52 Hart, Guardians of the Khaibar Pass, p. 23. In certain unirrigated tracts of Swat and Bannu districts, land was communally owned under the wesh system, and individual plots were allocated to members of particular tribes for lengths of time varying from six to 30 years. The quantum of land owned by the tribe remained the same, and periodic reallotment was thought to offset the disadvantages of being assigned an unproductive plot. Wesh was devised by Sheikh Mali in Swat in the sixteenth century to compensate for inequities in quality of land, distance of plot from settlement, access to water, and so on. From Swat, the system spread to Kohistan and the Peshawar Valley and emerged as a predominant form of land settlement. See Wadud, Abdul and Khan, Muhammad Asif, The Story of Swat as Told by the Founder Miangul Abdul Wadud Badshah Sahib to Muhammad Asif Khan (Peshawar: Ferozsons, 1963)Google Scholar.

53 A kanal of land was equal to one-eighth of an acre or approximately 506 square metres. Twenty kanals constituted one marla. See Foreign and Political Department, Frontier 232-F (1926) [NAI].

54 Letter from Political Agent, Khyber to Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, Peshawar dated 24 February 1926. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier 232-F (1926) [NAI].

55 Extract from Khyber Political Diary for week ending 10 March 1906. Foreign Department, Frontier—B, Proceedings, Nos. 90/93 (April 1906) [NAI].

56 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, p. 57.

57 Ibid., p. 58.

58 Letter from Major E. P. Anderson, Superintendent of Works, Khyber Railway, Peshawar to H. D. Green, Deputy Chief Engineer, North-Western Railway, Lahore, dated 24 February 1923. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

59 Moylan patented a hand-worked rock drill in 1903. He also undertook heavy earthwork on the Great Indian Peninsular Railway and cut many tunnels for railway projects in Bengal, north-east India, and Burma, among other places. See The Mining Journal, Railway and Commercial Gazette, vol. 74, 1903, p. 634Google Scholar; ‘William Morgan Moylan’ in ‘Memoirs’, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, vol. 107, no. 1, 1 June 1924, pp. 1302–1303Google Scholar.

60 Railway Board, Projects—B, 1050/209-16/P (June 1923) [NAI].

61 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, pp. 60–61.

62 In unsettled parts of the Indo–Afghan frontier, namely in parts of the frontier for which there had been no formal tax revenue surveys or settlements, the only laws in operation were of the criminal kind. See Nichols, Robert, The Frontier Crimes Regulation: A History in Documents (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

63 For a discussion on how characteristics that embody ritual are distinct from the defining characteristics of ritualization, see Bell, Catherine, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1997])Google Scholar.

64 The popularity of the segmentary lineage theory goes back to the publication of three works by Edward E. Evans-Pritchard on the social structure of tribal populations in Africa, viz. African Political Systems, The Nuer, and The Political System of the Anuak of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The approach dominated anthropological studies to emerge from the British academy from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. For a representative example, see Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940)Google Scholar.

65 Sayyid Baha’ al-Din Majruh, Dzandzani Khamar (Kabul: Da Adabiyato aw Bashari ‘Ulum Pohandzai, 1357 SH [1979]). I am deeply grateful to Dr James Caron for sharing his English translation (‘Ego-Monster’) of the work with me. For a more general discussion downplaying the notion of non-hierarchical tribal societies, see Banerjee, Prathama, ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 53, no. 1, 2016, pp. 131–153CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Haroon argues that this view was utterly incompatible with nationalist movements such as the Khud‘ai Khidmatgar that gained in prominence in the North-West Frontier Province during the same period. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, leader of the Khud‘ai Khidmatgar movement, recognized the challenge of accommodating the mullah-dominated politics of the Khyber and other tribal agencies within a framework of nationalism. See Haroon, Sana, ‘Competing Views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and Society in the Indo-Afghan Borderlands’, in Green, Nile (ed.), Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), p. 146Google Scholar.

67 The anthropological literature on the social organization of Pashtuns and the centrality of land ownership and agnatic attachment among them is vast. A number of these texts have responded to the use of a structural–functionalist approach to study the Indo–Afghan frontier. While remaining faithful to the principle of tiered political mobilizations, Fredrik Barth, in his study on Pashtun communities from Swat, proposed that individual choices were just as important in determining political organization. More than a decade later, Talal Asad suggested that, in the absence of a centralized authority, sovereign power in the frontier rested with landowning Pashtuns. See Barth, Fredrik, Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans (London: Athlone Press, 1965 [1959])Google Scholar; Asad, Talal, ‘Market Model, Class Structure and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organisation’, Man, vol. 7, no. 1, March 1972, pp. 74–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barth, Fredrik, Features of Persons and Society in Swat. Collected Essays on Pathans (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar. For a discussion of how cultural principles served as the bases of people's authority and animated the contest for legitimacy in frontier society, see Edwards, Heroes of the Age.

68 Haroon, Sana, Frontier of Faith, Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

69 The idea of contingent sovereignty was furnished by the US military establishment in the first decade of the twenty-first century to justify intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is based on the recognition that sovereign rights and immunities are not absolute and depend on the observance of certain obligations. See Stuart Elden, ‘Contingent Sovereignty, Territorial Integrity and the Sanctity of Borders’, SAIS Review, vol. 26, no, 1, Winter–Spring 2006, pp. 11–24. I use this term in the context of the Indo–Afghan frontier of the 1920s and 30s to mean an urgent, quick-fix kind of sovereignty and to emphasize its perpetual making and unmaking.

70 Letter representing Afridi elders to Chief Commissioner, Northwest Frontier Province, Peshawar, 5 May 1927. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 531-F (1927) [NAI].

71 Jagirdari or the system of providing land grants in exchange for revenue collection was introduced in the thirteenth century. It was used widely by the Mughals.

72 Das, Veena and Poole, Deborah (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), p. 20Google Scholar.

73 Letter from Major E. P. Anderson to H. D. Green. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

74 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, pp. 72–73.

75 See Sood, Gagan D. S., ‘“Correspondence Is Equal to Half a Meeting”: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Eurasia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 50, no. 2/3, 2007, pp. 172–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Machado, Pedro, Oceans of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Foreign Department 3453-F, dated 7 October 1898, IOR/L/PS/12/3150 [BL].

77 Letter from Foreign Secretary to Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, 2 January 1931, IOR/L/PS/12/3150 [BL].

78 Gulli, Bruno, ‘The Sovereign Exception: Notes on Schmitt's Word that Sovereign Is He Who Decides on the Exception’, Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, vol. 1, 2009, p. 28Google Scholar.

79 ‘“The Afghan War”, December 10, 1878’, in Kebbel, T. E. (ed.), Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1882), pp. 240–251Google Scholar.

80 William Patrick Andrew also served as chairman of the Scinde, Punjab, and Delhi Railway Company, as previously mentioned, and was well versed in the logistics of the frontier.

81 Andrew, William Patrick, Our Scientific Frontier (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1880)Google Scholar.

82 Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty, Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 24Google Scholar.

83 Letter from Major H. C. Finnis, Political Agent, Khyber Agency to C. Latimer, Secretary to the Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, Peshawar, 2 June 1923. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F 1-151 (1923) [NAI].

84 Letter from G. Roos Keppel, Political Officer, Khyber, to F. D. Cunningham, Commissioner and Superintendent, Peshawar Division, Peshawar, 18 January 1900. Foreign Department, Frontier—B, Proceedings, Nos. 45–49 (August 1900) [NAI].

85 ‘The Punjab Frontier Crimes Regulation, 1897’ in Nichols, The Frontier Crimes Regulation, p. 43.

86 For an example of the use of such bonds, see Alacs, Erika and Georges, Arthur, ‘Wildlife Across Our Borders: A Review of the Illegal Trade in Australia’, Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 40, no. 2, 2008, pp. 147–160CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Pashtunwali refers to an unwritten ethical code followed by the Pashtun tribes.

88 See Rzehak, Lutz, Doing Pashto: Pashtunwali as the Ideal of Honourable Behaviour and Tribal Life among the Pashtuns (Kabul: Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2001), p. 13Google Scholar.

89 A traditional assembly of elders.

90 Ata'i, Moḥammad-Ebrahim, A Dictionary of the Terminology of Pashtun's Tribal Customary Law and Usages, (trans.) Shinwary, A. Mohammad (Kabul: International Centre for Pashto Studies, Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan, 1979), p. 2Google Scholar; for a discussion of how the tribal jirga came to be mobilized in the longue durée by Afghan rulers and foreign powers, see Hanifi, M. Jamil, ‘Editing the Past: Colonial Production of Hegemony Through the “Loya Jerga” in Afghanistan’, Iranian Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 295–322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Memorandum from Political Agent, Khyber to Secretary to Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province, 12 November 1931, IOR/L/PS/12/3150 [BL].

92 Letter from H. N. Bolton, Chief Commissioner, North-West Frontier Province to Sir Denys Bray, Foreign Secretary, Foreign and Political Department, Simla, Peshawar, dated 1 October 1925. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F (1922) [NAI].

93 Kolsky, Elizabeth, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 4, October 2015, p. 1219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Ibid., p. 1225.

95 Kolsky, Elizabeth, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

96 House of Commons Debates, 14 February 1898, series 4, volume 53, pp. 499–500, available at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1898/feb/15/address-in-answer-to-her-majestys-most [accessed 18 December 2019].

97 Tulu-i Afghan, Kabul, 30 January 1926. IOR/L/PS/10/951, Pt 3 File 8929 (1920) [BL].

98 Local government ignored this assessment claiming that the author, Saida Khan Shinwari, was a disappointed contractor and that his observations were influenced by commercial reasons. See Sarhad, Peshawar, reproduced in Khilafat, Bombay, 23 October 1925. Foreign and Political Department, Frontier, 6-F (1922) [NAI].

99 Mbembe, Achille, ‘Necropolitics’, (trans.) Meintjes, Libby, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Robinson, Notes on Nomad Tribes of Eastern Afghanistan, p. 27.

101 Bayley, Permanent Way Through the Khyber, p. 56.

102 Larkin, Brian, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 42, October 2013, pp. 327–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Not least Ajab Khan and his gang's kidnapping of 17-year-old Mollie Ellis from a garrison at Kohat in April 1923. The incident was widely reported in newspapers in London and New York, and sparked off a confrontation between the British and Afridis from the area. See Heston, Wilma L. and Nasir, Mumtaz, The Bazaar of the Storytellers (Islamabad: Lok Virsa Publishing House, 1989), p. 284Google Scholar.