UCLA

The emergence of the largest “army” of nonviolence on the heavily policed North-West Frontier of British India is a unique yet silenced history. The Khudai Khidmatgars, or the Servants of God, were organized to reform Pashtun society through modern means: education, the emancipation of women and the reinterpretation of traditions, especially of normative violence. They became an anti-colonial resistance movement after the Peshawar Riots of 1930 and, despite being brutalized by colonial authorities, the ranks of this “army” swelled to a hundred thousand volunteers in a relatively short span of time. Almost every household in the Province had a member enlisted in the grassroots Khudai Khidmatgar army, and yet this remarkable phenomenon remains unrecognized in global narratives of nonviolent resistance. The idea of Pashtun nonviolence was so contrary to long-standing tropes classifying them as an intrinsically violent and martial race—with the additional tropology of Islam as an intrinsically violent religion—that it silenced this unique expression through the dominant representational framework which categorized them as such. Generally called the “Pathans,” I use “the figure of the Pathan” as a signifier for the epistemological framework that produce both the tropology and the silences. Moreover, by reading colonial literary and ethnographic representations against the grain, I trace how this figure was produced in tandem with the tripartite, north-western frontier of imperial India, which, although one of the first “scientific” borders of India, has not received the scholarly attention it merits.

In contrast, how nonviolence was embodied on such a massively, popular scale becomes much clearer in reading the rarely analyzed Pashto resistance literature of the Khudai Khidmatgars, one that included a significant number of women contributors writing in their journal the Pukhtūn. By closely reading this heretofore unexamined literature, the women’s discourse in particular discloses the quotidian ways in which nonviolence was embodied through altered constellations of normativity affecting subject formation. I also contest the hitherto scant scholarly literature explaining Khudai Khidmatgar nonviolence as an exception of the Pashtun habitus, one that is credited to the exemplary character of Abdul Ghaffar Khan alone. More widely known as the Frontier Gandhi, or Bāchā Khan in the vernacular, he is attributed to have singlehandedly transformed the Pashtuns to the ideology of nonviolence, yet who, in turn, is classified as merely a follower of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Instead, by reading their vernacular literature I argue that the Khudai Khidmatgars were positing a new kind of political altogether by interpreting nonviolence through local registers: the indigenous codes of Pashtunwali, including local forms of radical democracy, the discourse of a liberatory Islam—especially calling upon its poetic metaphors of ecstatic enlightenment—and an anarchic nonstate imaginary. I compare Khudai Khidmatgar self-representations of nonviolence, in which love, friendship and justice were central concepts, with Jacques Derrida’s formulation of “a politics of friendship.” In opposing the normative political, one that Carl Schmitt articulates through the “friend-enemy” binary, this new political in particular posed an anarchic threat to colonial state structures. As such, they were always more suspect and policed much more harshly than other nationalist movements of the time, while their location upon the strategic yet ever-restive North-West Frontier of Imperial India justified the brutal disciplinary measures constantly meted out against them.

Given that the postcolonial nation-state of Pakistan was also grounded upon the normative political of the colonial state, the Khudai Khidmatgars were, inevitably, charged with sedition in 1948 and the movement and its literature destroyed, while its history defamed and distorted through state narratives. Right before the partition of India, therefore, the call for Pashtunistan represented, as I postulate, not only Ghaffar Khan’s utopian aspirations but was premised upon the new politics of friendship that had been painstakingly cultivated. A political toward which Gandhi’s own utopian vision of “enlightened anarchy” also aspired but which the Khudai Khidmatgars had made concerted efforts to actualize in their own terms. Therefore, as the vernacular literature aptly illustrates, the philosophy of nonviolence represented a much broader and a much more ambitious endeavor than narrow definitions of the term denote; more than merely a non-engagement with physical violence the Khudai Khidmatgar articulation was a radically new narrative for organizing communities differently, one that resonates with silent significations and urgently calls upon us to examine more closely today.