Roots of Afridi Insurgency in British India’s North-West Frontier: 1849-1897

The North-West Frontier of British India, a semi-independent mountainous borderland, was the site of continuous Pukhtun armed struggle against colonial intrusion throughout the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth. Persistent tribal armed attacks and major rebellions were followed by ‘butcher and bolt’ or ‘burn and scuttle’ British military expeditions, including one of the biggest Victorian small wars–the Tirah Campaign of 1897/98. Two features are particularly distinctive about the Pukhtun insurgencies: 1) The fierce and consistent nature of Pukhtun opposition to the encroaching British military state; 2) The insurgents’ success in warding off annexation and inflicting decisive military defeat time and time again propelled the colonial state into an ongoing reflexive about its failure to ‘pacify’ the region and control the tribes. Focusing on Afridi insurgency in the nineteenth century, this article examines some themes that draw attention to causes, grievances, and toward the insurgent actors. While our fleeting glimpses into insurgents motives and actions come largely from colonial accounts of counter-insurgency operations, by drawing on my extensive archival and field research in the North-West Frontier, including Afridi oral testimonies, this paper focuses its lens on the Pukhtun perspective of the North-West Frontier ‘small wars’.