Pathan Unarmed

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.' - Sunnil Khilnani in The

• The North-West Frontier Province in the early 20th century; the origins of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement; ethnography of the movement; the British riposte; leadership of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement; the ideology of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement; Pathans and nationalist politics; the work of memory; epilogue - the nature of frontiers.