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Among the Wild Tribes of the Afghan Frontier A Record of Sixteen Years' Close Intercourse with the Natives of the Indian Marches
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318 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 18, 2010
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About the author
T.L. Pennell
4 booksTheodore Leighton Pennell (1867-1912), was an English Protestant missionary and doctor who lived among the tribes of Afghanistan. He founded Pennell High School and a missionary hospital in Bannu in the North-West Frontier of British India, now Pakistan. For his work he received the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for public service in India. He published a work on his life under the title Among the wild tribes of the Afghan frontier in 1908.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 22, 2020
A difficult read due to the rambling narrative style... but still, a colonial travel journal with fascinating details. According to my Pathan friends, not much has changed.
Interesting entries :
-----------------
WARLORDS :
"The causes of 90% of feuds are… zan, zar, and zamin … Persian words meaning women, money, and land."
"Disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than between strangers."
"The Afghans never forget their tribal feuds. The feuds begin again as soon as the danger is past."
HEALTHCARE :
"Sometimes four or five blind men will come in a line, holding on to each other, and led by one who is not yet quite blind. Very likely they have trudged painfully upwards of a hundred miles, stumbling over the stones in the mountain roads, and arriving with wounded feet and bruised bodies."
“Dzan is a treatment habitually used in cases of fever, whether acute or chronic, and in a variety of chronic complaints, which they do not attempt to diagnose. It consists in stripping the patient to the skin and placing him on a bed. A sheep or a goat is then killed and rapidly skinned. The patient is then wrapped up in the skin, with the raw surface next him and the wool outside."
“Dam is akin to what is known in Western surgery as a moxa. A piece of cloth is… steeped in oil, placed on the part selected by the doctor, and set alight. It burns down into the flesh… and leaves an ulcer. This remedy is used for every conceivable illness."
"At one time smallpox was terribly rife in Afghanistan, and even now no village can be visited without seeing many who are permanently disfigured…"
"In Kalabagh… the people are pale and anæmic, and nearly all suffer from goitre… They form a great contrast to the hardy mountaineers… These form one of the great recruiting grounds of the Pathan regiments of the frontier."
"The fine physique and good health of the hill Afghans and nomadic tribes is largely due to the fact that their girls do not marry till full grown, not usually till over twenty, and lead healthy, vigorous, outdoor lives. They form a great contrast to the puny Hindu weaklings, the offspring of… couples scarcely in their teens."
"… A fine young Pathan of about twenty summers, and his father --a greybeard, with handsome but stern features…carefully shielding his son's face from the sun with an old umbrella."
AFGHAN WOMEN :
"In all Muhammadan countries women hold a very inferior, almost humiliating, position, being regarded as very distinctly existing for the requirements of the stronger sex. In Afghanistan they labour under this additional hardship, that the men are nearly all cruel and jealous…"
"When on the march the women are heavily loaded. They can often be seen not only carrying the children and household utensils, but driving the pack animals too, while the lordly men are content to carry only their rifle."
"Some of the women of the Povindah tribe are splendid specimens of robust womanhood. These people travel hundreds of miles from Khorasan to India. The outdoor, vigorous, active life has made them healthy, muscular, and strong, and buxom and good-looking."
"The Afghan noblemen maintain the strictest parda, or seclusion, of their women, who pass their days monotonously behind the curtains and lattices of their palace prison-houses, with little to do except criticize their clothes and jewels."
"The poorer classes cannot afford to seclude their women, so they try to safeguard their virtue by the most barbarous punishments…"
"A certain trans-frontier chief that I know, on coming to his house unexpectedly one day, saw his wife speaking to a neighbour over the wall of his compound. Drawing his sword in a fit of jealousy, he struck off her head and threw it over the wall, and said to the man: 'There! You are so enamoured of her, you can have her.' The man concerned discreetly moved house to a neighbouring village."
"The recognized punishment in such a case of undue familiarity would have been to have cut off the nose of the woman and, if possible, of the man too."
"Every year in the mission hospital we get a number of cases, many more women than men, where the sufferer has had the nose cut off."
"This being a very old mutilation in India, the people centuries ago elaborated an operation for the removal of the deformity, whereby a portion of skin is brought down from the forehead and stitched on the raw surface where the nose had been cut off… We still use this operation, with certain modifications, for the cases that come to us."
"[An] Afghan brought down his wife to the Bannu Mission Hospital. In a fit of jealousy he had cut off her nose, but when he reflected in a cooler moment that he had paid a good sum for her, and had only injured his own property and his domestic happiness, he was sorry for it, and brought her for us to restore to her as far as possible her pristine beauty. I said to the husband that … if he would pay the price I would purchase him an artificial nose from England…
"How much will it cost?" said the Afghan.
"About thirty rupees."
There was a silence…
"Well, my man, what are you thinking about?”
"I was thinking… you say it costs thirty rupees, and I could get a new wife for eighty rupees."
INTERACTION WITH HINDUS :
"[Afghanis] find it impossible to do their business or live comfortably without the help of the ubiquitous and obsequious Hindu."
"The Muhammadan has never become such an adept at bargaining, petty trade, and shop-keeping as the more thrifty and quick-witted Hindu."
"Each Hindu trader or shopkeeper has his own particular Muhammadan malik, who... is ready to protect him--by force of arms, if necessary—from rival Muhammadan sections, and to revenge any injury done to him as if it were a personal one to himself."
"The Hindu supplies the brains and the Muhammadan the valour."
"The Hindu is ever ready to outwit his overbearing but often obtuse masters."
"A story to illustrate the mercantile genius of the Hindu:
A Muhammadan and a Hindu resolved to go into partnership. The Muhammadan, the predominant partner, stipulated that he was to have the first half of everything, and the Hindu the remainder. The first day the Hindu brought back a cow from market, milked it, got the butter, cream, made the dung into fuel-cakes, and then went to call the Muhammadan because the cow was hungry. The Muhammadan said he was ready to do his share if the Hindu did his. The Hindu blandly replied that he had already done his; the stipulated first half of the cow included the animal’s mouth and stomach and fell clearly to the lot of the Muhammadan."
"In the time of the Hindu Rajahs of Kabul… the little archæology which the valley presents is all of Hindu origin."
"If we could have visited this valley… when the first Aryan immigrants were passing down from Central Asia into the Panjab, we should have seen it covered with their settlements, and seen them engaged in the simple Nature-worship depicted in the Vedas, which record this stage of Aryan civilization."
"The traveler who has… never lived in an Indian village, remains altogether a stranger to the deep inner life of the Indian. The real India is not seen in the Westernized bazaars of the large cities, but in the myriads of villages, wherein… a more attractive side of Indian life is seen.."
"India has always been religious to the core, and learning and religion have gone hand-in-hand."
"The Indian student is an attractive personality and well worth sympathetic study… The schoolboy has not yet lost the ancient Indian respect, even love, of the pupil to the master, and is therefore much more readily subjected to discipline than his English counterpart."
"The Hindu women… bathe on the slightest pretext… and often women who carefully veil their faces when passing down the street bathe in the river and streams in a state of nudity, regardless of passers-by."
"All the travelers… mention the strange, fantastic, ochre-habited ascetics. They embody the religious ideals of the East, and carry one back to the hoary past, long before Alexander marched into India, when the same enigmas of life were puzzling the mystical mind of the East, and the same Sadhus were seeking their solution in her trackless jungles and beside her mighty rivers."
"The Indian religious ideal has always been ascetic."
"The modern Christian in England has not even learnt the alphabet of austerities and self-denials practiced in the name of religion, of which the Indians are past masters."
"The Swami, who had so overcome the bonds of the flesh that he required neither clothes nor viands, sat nude and impassive, maintaining his vitality on an occasional banana or mango ! "
"The ochre-coloured garments are sufficient passport all over India, and people give alms and offer hospitality without requiring further evidence of the genuineness."
"One of the most interesting places we visited was Haridwar, the holy bathing-place on the Ganges, which is visited by tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims … and the neighbouring Sadhu colony of Rishikesh. The latter is a village inhabited only by the Sanyasis and other Sadhus, who have built themselves grass huts in a very picturesque spot, where the Ganges River emerges from the Himalaya Mountains."
"I no longer needed to inquire why… Hindus had made this neighbourhood their Holy Land; the appropriateness of it flashed on my mind the moment the glorious vista opened before me. There beyond me were the majestic Himalayas, the higher ranges clothed in the purest dazzling white, emblem of the Great Eternal Purity, looking down impassive on all the vicissitudes of puny man."
"Here in Haridwar was a weird collection of bovine monstrosities--cows with three horns, one eye, or a hideous tumor; calves with two heads or two bodies. These were paraded forth by their fortunate possessors, who reaped a good harvest of coins from the devout visitors, who worshipped them as illustrations of the vagaries of divinity."
.
Interesting entries :
-----------------
WARLORDS :
"The causes of 90% of feuds are… zan, zar, and zamin … Persian words meaning women, money, and land."
"Disputes are more likely to arise between cousins than between strangers."
"The Afghans never forget their tribal feuds. The feuds begin again as soon as the danger is past."
HEALTHCARE :
"Sometimes four or five blind men will come in a line, holding on to each other, and led by one who is not yet quite blind. Very likely they have trudged painfully upwards of a hundred miles, stumbling over the stones in the mountain roads, and arriving with wounded feet and bruised bodies."
“Dzan is a treatment habitually used in cases of fever, whether acute or chronic, and in a variety of chronic complaints, which they do not attempt to diagnose. It consists in stripping the patient to the skin and placing him on a bed. A sheep or a goat is then killed and rapidly skinned. The patient is then wrapped up in the skin, with the raw surface next him and the wool outside."
“Dam is akin to what is known in Western surgery as a moxa. A piece of cloth is… steeped in oil, placed on the part selected by the doctor, and set alight. It burns down into the flesh… and leaves an ulcer. This remedy is used for every conceivable illness."
"At one time smallpox was terribly rife in Afghanistan, and even now no village can be visited without seeing many who are permanently disfigured…"
"In Kalabagh… the people are pale and anæmic, and nearly all suffer from goitre… They form a great contrast to the hardy mountaineers… These form one of the great recruiting grounds of the Pathan regiments of the frontier."
"The fine physique and good health of the hill Afghans and nomadic tribes is largely due to the fact that their girls do not marry till full grown, not usually till over twenty, and lead healthy, vigorous, outdoor lives. They form a great contrast to the puny Hindu weaklings, the offspring of… couples scarcely in their teens."
"… A fine young Pathan of about twenty summers, and his father --a greybeard, with handsome but stern features…carefully shielding his son's face from the sun with an old umbrella."
AFGHAN WOMEN :
"In all Muhammadan countries women hold a very inferior, almost humiliating, position, being regarded as very distinctly existing for the requirements of the stronger sex. In Afghanistan they labour under this additional hardship, that the men are nearly all cruel and jealous…"
"When on the march the women are heavily loaded. They can often be seen not only carrying the children and household utensils, but driving the pack animals too, while the lordly men are content to carry only their rifle."
"Some of the women of the Povindah tribe are splendid specimens of robust womanhood. These people travel hundreds of miles from Khorasan to India. The outdoor, vigorous, active life has made them healthy, muscular, and strong, and buxom and good-looking."
"The Afghan noblemen maintain the strictest parda, or seclusion, of their women, who pass their days monotonously behind the curtains and lattices of their palace prison-houses, with little to do except criticize their clothes and jewels."
"The poorer classes cannot afford to seclude their women, so they try to safeguard their virtue by the most barbarous punishments…"
"A certain trans-frontier chief that I know, on coming to his house unexpectedly one day, saw his wife speaking to a neighbour over the wall of his compound. Drawing his sword in a fit of jealousy, he struck off her head and threw it over the wall, and said to the man: 'There! You are so enamoured of her, you can have her.' The man concerned discreetly moved house to a neighbouring village."
"The recognized punishment in such a case of undue familiarity would have been to have cut off the nose of the woman and, if possible, of the man too."
"Every year in the mission hospital we get a number of cases, many more women than men, where the sufferer has had the nose cut off."
"This being a very old mutilation in India, the people centuries ago elaborated an operation for the removal of the deformity, whereby a portion of skin is brought down from the forehead and stitched on the raw surface where the nose had been cut off… We still use this operation, with certain modifications, for the cases that come to us."
"[An] Afghan brought down his wife to the Bannu Mission Hospital. In a fit of jealousy he had cut off her nose, but when he reflected in a cooler moment that he had paid a good sum for her, and had only injured his own property and his domestic happiness, he was sorry for it, and brought her for us to restore to her as far as possible her pristine beauty. I said to the husband that … if he would pay the price I would purchase him an artificial nose from England…
"How much will it cost?" said the Afghan.
"About thirty rupees."
There was a silence…
"Well, my man, what are you thinking about?”
"I was thinking… you say it costs thirty rupees, and I could get a new wife for eighty rupees."
INTERACTION WITH HINDUS :
"[Afghanis] find it impossible to do their business or live comfortably without the help of the ubiquitous and obsequious Hindu."
"The Muhammadan has never become such an adept at bargaining, petty trade, and shop-keeping as the more thrifty and quick-witted Hindu."
"Each Hindu trader or shopkeeper has his own particular Muhammadan malik, who... is ready to protect him--by force of arms, if necessary—from rival Muhammadan sections, and to revenge any injury done to him as if it were a personal one to himself."
"The Hindu supplies the brains and the Muhammadan the valour."
"The Hindu is ever ready to outwit his overbearing but often obtuse masters."
"A story to illustrate the mercantile genius of the Hindu:
A Muhammadan and a Hindu resolved to go into partnership. The Muhammadan, the predominant partner, stipulated that he was to have the first half of everything, and the Hindu the remainder. The first day the Hindu brought back a cow from market, milked it, got the butter, cream, made the dung into fuel-cakes, and then went to call the Muhammadan because the cow was hungry. The Muhammadan said he was ready to do his share if the Hindu did his. The Hindu blandly replied that he had already done his; the stipulated first half of the cow included the animal’s mouth and stomach and fell clearly to the lot of the Muhammadan."
"In the time of the Hindu Rajahs of Kabul… the little archæology which the valley presents is all of Hindu origin."
"If we could have visited this valley… when the first Aryan immigrants were passing down from Central Asia into the Panjab, we should have seen it covered with their settlements, and seen them engaged in the simple Nature-worship depicted in the Vedas, which record this stage of Aryan civilization."
"The traveler who has… never lived in an Indian village, remains altogether a stranger to the deep inner life of the Indian. The real India is not seen in the Westernized bazaars of the large cities, but in the myriads of villages, wherein… a more attractive side of Indian life is seen.."
"India has always been religious to the core, and learning and religion have gone hand-in-hand."
"The Indian student is an attractive personality and well worth sympathetic study… The schoolboy has not yet lost the ancient Indian respect, even love, of the pupil to the master, and is therefore much more readily subjected to discipline than his English counterpart."
"The Hindu women… bathe on the slightest pretext… and often women who carefully veil their faces when passing down the street bathe in the river and streams in a state of nudity, regardless of passers-by."
"All the travelers… mention the strange, fantastic, ochre-habited ascetics. They embody the religious ideals of the East, and carry one back to the hoary past, long before Alexander marched into India, when the same enigmas of life were puzzling the mystical mind of the East, and the same Sadhus were seeking their solution in her trackless jungles and beside her mighty rivers."
"The Indian religious ideal has always been ascetic."
"The modern Christian in England has not even learnt the alphabet of austerities and self-denials practiced in the name of religion, of which the Indians are past masters."
"The Swami, who had so overcome the bonds of the flesh that he required neither clothes nor viands, sat nude and impassive, maintaining his vitality on an occasional banana or mango ! "
"The ochre-coloured garments are sufficient passport all over India, and people give alms and offer hospitality without requiring further evidence of the genuineness."
"One of the most interesting places we visited was Haridwar, the holy bathing-place on the Ganges, which is visited by tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims … and the neighbouring Sadhu colony of Rishikesh. The latter is a village inhabited only by the Sanyasis and other Sadhus, who have built themselves grass huts in a very picturesque spot, where the Ganges River emerges from the Himalaya Mountains."
"I no longer needed to inquire why… Hindus had made this neighbourhood their Holy Land; the appropriateness of it flashed on my mind the moment the glorious vista opened before me. There beyond me were the majestic Himalayas, the higher ranges clothed in the purest dazzling white, emblem of the Great Eternal Purity, looking down impassive on all the vicissitudes of puny man."
"Here in Haridwar was a weird collection of bovine monstrosities--cows with three horns, one eye, or a hideous tumor; calves with two heads or two bodies. These were paraded forth by their fortunate possessors, who reaped a good harvest of coins from the devout visitors, who worshipped them as illustrations of the vagaries of divinity."
.
February 6, 2010
Very interesting narration of a westerner missionary among Puktuns.
October 20, 2014
Very interesting.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews