Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West Froneier (World Anthropology Series) - Softcover

Banerjee, Mukulika

4.12

33 ratings by Goodreads

9780933452695: Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North West Froneier (World Anthropology Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0933452691 ISBN 13: 9780933452695

Publisher: School for Advanced Research/Sar pr, 2001

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

How were the notoriously violent Pukhtun converted to an ethic of nonviolence? The Pukhtun (Pathan) of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan are regarded as a warrior people. Yet in the years between the world wars there arose a Muslim movement, the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) that was inspired by Gandhian principles of nonviolent action and dedicated to Indian nationalism rather than communal separatism. This book is the first account of rank-and-file members of the Khudai Khidmatgar, describing why they joined, what they did, and how they perceived the ethics and aims of the movement.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Mukulika Banerjee is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University College, London.

Review:

Mukulika Banerjee's extraordinarily timely study ... sets out to recover a story that has receded from the historical record as well as from popular memory. It is a story that disturbs orientalist stereotypes about the region and its people, and complicates the national narratives of Pakistan and of India. It should also give pause to the policy wonks shuttling between the Beltway and Downing Street, transmuted by the need of the hour into anthropologists and historians as they bone up on Islam and its ways, and on the martial traditions and factional culture of the Afghans. ... Badsha Khan was, for a time, able to make his people believe that the idea of the modern state could be made trustworthy. He was able to forge a movement that tapped the moral repertoire of Islam, and link it into local predispositions, weaving together a distinctive symbolic and practical cloth. This historical episode seems far indeed from the political imagination of Pathans today. But its memory may still have an effect: different futures need alternative pasts. As Haji Chairman Meherban Saha, a veteran Khudai Khidmatgar in his eighties, recalled when talking to Banerjee, 'Badsha Khan's words seemed sweet to us... Talk to a Pathan sweetly and he will do anything. --The Times Literary Supplement

A valuable corrective to orientalist representations, which portray the Pathans as invariably hotheaded and unpredictable. Firmly grounded in anthropological research but with a keen eye for historical nuance, it provides a sober and illuminating insight into a complex society that has long beguiled Western observers and is once again the object of intense Western concern. --International Affairs

This forgotten chapter suggests that Islam is more mutable than either its radical adherents or its Western detractors allow and that Pashtun history offers an extraordinary precedent for peace as well as a legacy of war. --New York Times

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.