Of this study’s cohort, certainly the earliest arrivals in the Sheffield area, and perhaps a majority of the men overall, have one factor in common: their origins in a small area situated either side of the Indus river which comprised a portion of Attock District in northern Punjab and a neighbouring portion of the NWFP (figure 2.1). The small district of Chhachh, twenty miles long and less than ten miles wide, lies on the south bank of the Indus and is the principal area of origin for the pioneers of South Asian migration to the Sheffield area. Surrounded by rocky hills and land of low fertility, bordered along its northern edge by the Indus and watered by runoff from the enclosing hillsides, Chhachh stands in stark contrast. Indeed, as Attock District Gazetteer highlighted, ‘the fertile Chhachh maintains a population as dense as that of almost any congested district in the Punjab... the district contains one cantonment, seven towns and 612 villages.’120 Malcolm Lyall Darling, Assistant Commissioner of the Punjab, thought highly of this agricultural district. Noting in 1925 the low productivity of agriculture in the surrounding areas, Darling praised neighbouring Chhachh:
Yet, even in the heart of this primitive (Attock) district – so full of contrast is Indian life – is the small fertile plain of the Chhachh, twenty miles long and not ten miles broad, locked in by the hills and the Indus, and containing a population of Pathans, Maliars and Awans as industrious and enterprising as any in the Punjab. It recalls the richest and most intensively cultivated strip in Europe, the country along the Bay of Naples, where a family can be maintained on 2½ acres. The soil
120Gazetteer of the Attock District, 1930, xxix-A:57–58. Figure 2.1
is a rich loam deposited by hill torrents and is abundantly watered by wells. Wheat, maize, sugar-cane, vegetables, and tobacco are the chief crops, and snuff tobacco the most valuable... So good is the farming that the average yield of 100 acres of land is 188 acres of crops, and, where special crops are grown, from 1 to 1¼ acres is considered all that a man can possibly cultivate. The late settlement officer describes how he found a family consisting of an old man, a grown-up son, two women, three small children, a buffalo, and a donkey subsisting on less than half an acre.121
The prodigious fertility of the Chhachh is perhaps just as well. As late as the early 1970s, Badr Dahya noted that the majority of Chhachhi immigrants living in the Yorkshire city of Bradford possessed a meagre one and one quarter to one and one half acres of farmland in their villages of origin.122
During the first half of the century, the commonly-held prejudice among civil servants and social investigators was that such men made the journey to Britain in order to escape their poverty-stricken existence in India, Moreover, as we shall see in the following section Working lives, South Asian arrivals in Britain were assumed to be ‘impecunious Indians of the agricultural class’ in the eyes of Home Office officials.123 Similarly, the Church-funded social investigator Phyllis Young concluded that the Indian seafarers resident in Stepney ‘come from the poorest strata of their society and many of them can neither read nor write.’124 It is certainly true that many non-elite British Indians were illiterate in their own language, not to mention English, as has been widely confirmed by the numerous South Asian subjects of oral history surveys. Indeed, most attributed this to the chronic under-provision of elementary education for children of the Indian peasantry. It may also explain the paucity of first person narratives by such individuals that can be utilised as primary sources by historians. However, it was not, by any means, true that the men came from the ‘poorest strata of their society’. As Dahya cautioned:
While the landholdings of a majority of the immigrants may appear to be meagre, the immigrants cannot be identified...with the landless category in their society of origin. One has only to witness the plight and the depressed status of the landless category in Pakistan (and, indeed, in the subcontinent as a whole) in order to appreciate the socio- economic significance of ownership of even small landholdings such as the immigrants and their families possess.125
121 M. L. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (Bombay, 1947), pp. 79–80. 122 Dahya, ‘Pakistanis in Britain’, 245.
123 TNA, HO 213/1406.
124 TNA, MT 9/3952, Seamen’s Welfare (Code 124): Report on condition of life of coloured population in Stepney and comments on general conditions of seamen, white and coloured, 1944.
Dahya argued that ties to land ownership, regardless of how small the plot, were a significant factor in the relative prosperity and social standing of immigrant men. Scholars such as Mukulika Banerjee have emphasised that land ownership was crucial to their sense of being Pashtun and the strong regard for ethnic identity and economic independence that this entailed.126 Pashtun culture was, and continues to be, bound together by what Akbar Ahmed identifies as essentially a code of conduct and honour known as Pukhtunwali or Pashtunwali (according to the two major Pashtun dialects).127 ‘Doing Pashto’ is, according to Fredrik Barth, a means by which Pashtuns conceive their sense of self, the Pashtun community and their place within it.128 Banerjee explains that this honour code was fundamentally linked to daftar – the land conquered or colonised by Pashtuns and collectively owned by the men of each tribe. Each Pashtun man was allocated a parcel of land and became a daftari or shareholder. Under the system of wesh, land shares were regularly redistributed among members of the tribe. Wesh helped to maintain ‘some semblance of equitable distribution’ of land and prevented ‘particular groups or individuals from benefiting from the best land in perpetuity.’ The system, which was enacted every five to thirty years, ‘underpinned and reflected the ideology of egalitarianism and honour which was central to the ideas of Pukhtunwali.’129
With the conquest of Punjab (including the region that was to become the NWFP) by the Mughals, the Sikhs and, latterly, by the British, each successive administration actively undermined the wesh system for the purposes of tribute and tax collection. Thus, influential men were elevated above their tribal peers by means of exemption from revenue payment and ‘grace and favour’ rights over additional land.130 The British colonial administration’s preference was for the development of individual private property to underpin their vision of a nascent capitalism combined with a semi-feudal social relation between something akin to a ‘squirearchy’ and their peasant tenants. Accordingly, Pashtun tribal collectivism was undermined by the promotion of favoured, loyal individuals to a powerful class of zamindars – landowners with exclusive rights over land (zamin) and over an increasingly disenfranchised peasantry. The newly elevated position of such men was lent a veneer of tradition by the bestowal of the traditional honorific title of khan. Under British rule, the title khan, meaning leader or chief, could also indicate that the holder was an agent of the British according to the classic, colonial model of indirect rule.131
This social stratum, however, has been conceptualised as being comprised of both big and small khans. Big khans owned vast estates and were co-opted by the British colonial administration. They became, as Banerjee describes, a ‘substantial
126 M. Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North-West Frontier (Oxford, 2004), p. 30.
127 A. S. Ahmed, Pukhtun Economy And Society: Traditional Structure And Economic
Development In A Tribal Society, International Library Of Anthropology (London, 1980), p. 91. 128 F. Barth, Features of Person and Society in Swat: Collected Essays on Pathans (London, 1981), p. 105.
129 Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, 30. 130 Ibid., 30–31.
landed aristocracy who had been designated by the colonial authorities as “natural leaders” of the people.’ Provided with ‘extensive privileges, such that they typically owned thousands of acres, had substantial wealth and status and exercised great influence over the villages in their domain’, these men were, she continues, ‘loyalist linchpins of British rule in the Frontier.’132
According to Darling, beneath these loyalists were placed the small khans. Also landowners, their holdings varied from a few acres to entire villages and were analogous to a English country squires.133 The stratum of small khans also included those peasant proprietors we have previously discussed, who made their living from minute holdings of less than two acres. These men, according to the feudal model promoted by the British colonial administration, were analogous to the sturdy and independent yeoman famer of the English rural scene.134 It is this latter group to whom many of the Muslim men who married in the Sheffield area are linked, being smallholders themselves or the younger sons of smallholders.135 Furthermore, their choice to use the honorific ‘Khan’ as a surname in their encounter with British officialdom’s requirement for fixed, preferably patrilineal, surnames (such as on their marriage certificate), was likely made to indicate their relative prestige as the sons of landholders and perhaps even their ethnicity as Pashtuns.