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The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier by Mukulika Banerjea. World Anthropology Series. Oxford: James Currey, 2000. Pp. x + 238 plates, appendices, bibliography, index. 16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-85255-273-4.
Pathans are commonly associated with the full gamut of violence, from the domestic variety through tribal feud to armed resistance to outsiders. Accordingly, a peculiar interest attaches itself to the Khudai Khidmatgars or Servants of God, often referred to as the Red Shirts, a Pathan organization which professed (and sometimes practised) non-violence in the North West Frontier province of British India during the 1930s and 1940s. The apparent paradox of the wolf behaving like a lamb is the puzzle which intrigues Mukulika Banerjea, an anthropologist from University College London, and which she endeavours to solve in this book, a mixture of history and anthropological inquiry, which is based on documents from the India Office Records, the National Archives in Delhi and the Nehru papers, and, more particularly, on interviews with more than 70 veteran members of the Khudai Khidmatgar organization. It was a bold and strange enterprise for a young Indian Hindu woman to venture into the Frontier province of Pakistan and interview elderly Pathans, and all credit to Dr Banerjea for her initiative and determination. Nevertheless, the nature of the study did impose some limitations on the author's freedom to pursue her inquiries without restraint.
Although there are several biographies and a species of autobiography of the founder of the Khudai Khidmatgar, Abd al-Ghaffar Khan, and some academic studies of the politics of the North West Frontier Province during the period concerned, and although these works include some information about the organization, there have been...