South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,

n.s., Vol.XXIX, no.2, August 2006

Small Players in the Great Game: Marginality

and Representation on the Northern Frontiers
of Nineteenth-Century Colonial India

Shafqat Hussain

Yale University

In their rocky defiles their chiefs led the lives of absolute autocrats; the
slave-trade flourished, and the ruler of Hunza, especially, whose terri-
tory led up to the foot of the comparatively easy passes leading to the
Pamirs and the valley of the Yarkand river, found the looting of the rich
caravans on the trade route between Central Asia and India a source of
wealth. For centuries the name of the Hunza-Nagar men had struck
terror into the hearts of all travelers in the country between Afghanistan
and Kashgar.
Jenny Visser-hooft, Among the Karakoram Glaciers in 1925

Introduction
Located between the fast-expanding Russian Empire to the northwest, a tentative
Chinese Empire to the northeast and an anxious British India to the south, Hunza
in colonial times was one of a group of small independent princely states tucked
away in the valleys of the eastern Karakoram Mountains. It was ruled by a fiercely
independent ruler, the Mir. Although it was formally outside the influence of any of
the three empires, and resented their attempts to gain control, its rulers periodically
politicked with the British, Russian and Chinese authorities and tried to play one
against the other. Locally, it went through periods of hostilities and peace with the
neighbouring small states of Yasin, Nagar and Kashghar.

I would like to thank Carol Carpenter for providing me with the opportunity to write this paper, and giving me such
excellent guidance during the process. Michael Dove also gave me insightful comments and advice which helped
clarify my arguments. I am also grateful to Annie Harper for her many readings of the manuscript and her
helpful comments on content and style, and to Ian Copland for his work in editing the paper.

ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/06/020235-19 # 2006 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
DOI: 10.1080/00856400600809955
236 SOUTH ASIA

During the late nineteenth century, the era of the Great Game,1 the people of Hunza
featured in the colonial travel literature as raiders and plunderers of Kirghiz encamp-
ments and trade caravans that travelled between India and Central Asia. Writing
about the Hunza tribe, Algernon Durand states that they were in the practice of

‘striking the road’, and looting the caravans on their way between
Turkestan and India. The rulers of Hunza availed themselves of this
commanding position freely; their name was a terror to the merchant
and to the gentle Kirghiz, and their success was such that certain
roads were entirely abandoned by traders.2

Other writers described its inhabitants as uncivilised savages and ‘wild looking
men’,3 and the region in general was referred to as Yaghistan, ‘meaning land of
the ungovernable, of savages’.4

The representation of the people of Hunza as savages and caravan raiders was part of
a large nineteenth-century discourse on race, evolution and civilisation produced by
Europe’s scientists, philosophers, explorers and colonial officers. In this discourse
most non-European societies were seen as marginal to civilisation and history.5
The discourse and the representation it generated of the people of Hunza provided
the British Empire with justification for extending its administrative control, as a
civilising force, to secure the border of its empire from the advancing Russians.6

In this paper I look at the history of interaction between the British colonial admin-
istration and the rulers of Hunza, and I make two particular and interrelated
1
The Great Game refers to the Anglo-Russian rivalry during the latter part of the nineteenth century in country sur-
rounding the northern borders of the British Indian Empire. During this period northern India’s independent states
occupied the most strategic positions, and later found themselves being invaded and conquered by the British Empire
to form a buffer zone between the British and Russian Empires. For more detail see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game:
The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994).
2
Algernon Durand, The Making Of a Frontier: Five Years’ Experiences and Adventures in Gilgit, Hunza, Nagar,
Chitral and the Eastern Hindu-Kush (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1900), p.139. Emphasis added.
3
Francis Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent: A Narrative Of Travels in Manchuria, Across the Gobi Desert,
Through the Pamirs, the Himalayas and Chitral (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), p.260.
4
John Biddulph, The Tribes Of Hindoo Koosh (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing,
1880), p.4; and Durand, The Making Of a Frontier, p.177.
5
For more detail see Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies Of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and
Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001).
6
The importance of Hunza to the British can be judged from the following quote from Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India
from 1898 to 1905. ‘This remote mountain valley (Hunza) has an importance for Englishmen which its geographical
isolation would lead few to suspect. It is one of the northern gates of India, through which a would-be invader must
advance if he advances at all’. George Curzon, Leaves from a Viceroy’s Note-Book and Other Papers (London: Mac-
millan and Co., 1926), p.178.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 237

arguments: firstly, I argue that the colonial representation of the Hunza community
as caravan raiders was a misrepresentation of the political economy of Hunza which
was in reality driven by its conflict with the Kirghiz over the control of grazing areas.
This misrepresentation, I show, was not due simply to the British conjuring up an
image of Hunza in order to justify their invasion of it, but also reflected the
active role played by the frontier communities of Hunza and Kirghiz in better posi-
tioning themselves in the imperial process of control, conquest and subjugation in
order to turn it to their advantage. My hypothesis here is that the colonial represen-
tation of Hunza society as outside the forces of history and civilisation had no
empirical basis.

Secondly, the paper will focus on the way in which the rulers of Hunza resisted,
negotiated and ignored colonial discursive power—showing at once the tenuousness
of colonial power at the margins, and the diverse ways in which agency can be
exerted. I argue that this exercise of agency was not part of a grand scheme of resist-
ance, but rather was exercised in a contingent and fractured manner, thus reflecting
the nature of structures of power within which it operated. In making this argument, I
propose to look particularly at the ways in which the last ruler of independent Hunza,
Mir Safdar, adopted and deployed subversively the colonial representation of
himself and his people as a kind of cultural and discursive resource. I will also
demonstrate how, at other moments, through a strategic choice of ignoring the colo-
nial discourse of representation and launching a counter-discourse of the self, the
ruler of Hunza managed to operate—albeit for a short period—outside the colonial
discursive space and its field of power.

The paper draws, of necessity, mostly on primary accounts of British travellers and
administrators. No Hunza records of the above encounters exist—if any were ever
written. I will interrogate these texts, however, through the lens of my own personal
knowledge of modern-day Hunza.

Analytical Framework: The Discourse of Representation

The rapprochement of history and anthropology7 by scholars working on South
Asian history and culture has provided the methodological grounds to deconstruct
colonial texts and the categories one finds therein. This approach has reconstructed
colonial history as a dynamic interaction between the coloniser and the colonised—
as a history that looks not just at how Europe influenced India, but also at how the

7
For more detail see Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1987); and Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks, ‘Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism,
and the Technologies Of Power’, in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol.1, no.2 (1988), pp.224–9.
238 SOUTH ASIA

British colonisers were themselves changed forever in their interaction with Indian
society.8 And it has also revealed weaknesses in some post-colonial theories of
resistance and subaltern consciousness. Using archival and ethnographic studies,
critics have argued that power and resistance (and hence centre and margins)
should be seen not as two separate domains ruled by a mentality of opposition (as
have conventional theories of power would hold9), but as parts of a single domain
governed by a unified field of discourse and practice.10

More generally, a reading of this literature suggests that conventional theories of

power and resistance are giving way to a more nuanced understanding of the
relationship between them—one in which mutuality rather than autonomy, hybridity
rather than homogeneity, and contingency rather than teleology are the norms.11
With its emphasising of the importance of collaboration, negotiation and complicity
between marginal and powerful groups, this new writing has little patience with the
representation of marginal groups as a ‘polarised social category with the mentality
of opposition’.12

By the same token, recent studies in the subfield of social and political ecology indi-
cate that marginal communities, rather than simply resisting, also engage with
central institutions and discourses of power. This perspective illuminates both the
tenuousness of central power at the margins, and the diverse and creative ways in
which agency can be exerted.13 In her study of interactions between the powerful
8
For more a detailed discussion of Cohn’s work see Brian Keith Axel, ‘Introduction: Historical Anthropology and
Its Vicissitudes’, in Brian Keith Axel (ed.), From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham:
Duke University, 2002), pp.1–44.
9
For treatment of conventional theories of power and resistance see the works of James Scott, Domination and the
Art Of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Ranajit Guha, Elementary
Aspects Of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
10
See Timothy Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors Of Powers’, in Theory and Society, Vol.19, no.5 (Oct. 1990),
pp.545–77; David Ludden, ‘Introduction: A Brief History Of Subalternity’, in David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subal-
tern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalisation Of South Asia (London: Anthem Press,
2002), pp.1–39; and K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Situating the Subalterns: History and Anthropology in the Subaltern
Studies Project’, in David Ludden (ed.), Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the
Globalization Of South Asia (London: Anthem Press, 2002), pp.212–55. Sivaramakrishnan notes that the subalterrn
and resistance theorists ignored the fact that the subaltern ‘self was constantly in the process of production, mediated
through symbols and processes both internal and external to the subaltern’s moral and physical domain’, p.224.
11
For illustrative examples of this literature see Sumit Guha, Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200–1991
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forest: Statemaking and Environ-
mental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Nandi Sundar, Subaltern
and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History Of Bastar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
12
Ludden, ‘Introduction: A Brief History of Subalternity’, p.23.
13
See the works of Tania Li, ‘Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot’, in
Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol.42, no.1 (2000), pp.149–79; Anna Tsing, ‘Becoming a Tribal Elder
and Other Green Development Fantasies’, in Tania Li (ed.), Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality,
Power and Production (Amsterdam: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1999), pp.159–202; Peter Brosius,
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 239

state of Indonesia and the marginal tribal groups of Meratus Dayak, Anna Tsing
shows that the Meratus are both coerced by, and engage with, state power in its
various administrative and development practices;14 while Tania Li and James
Ferguson, writing on the same area, argue that marginal communities use the subal-
tern and marginal identities imposed upon them by ruling states to ‘position’ them-
selves strategically with regard to these states.15 Ferguson calls this self-fashioning a
‘cultural style’—which he argues is not about what is done, but how it is done.
Nevertheless Ferguson warns that style must not be perceived as an ‘expression’
of underlying ‘real’ identity, nor as something that the ethnic actors merely slip
into as the situation demands.16 Rather, he likens the act of expression to a ‘perform-
ance’ that is ‘motivated, and intentional but not simply chosen’.17 Two important
features of this conceptualisation of representation, therefore, are the agency it pro-
vides to the local people, and the contingency of this agency.

The History of Hunza in the Late Nineteenth Century

During the first half of the nineteenth century Hunza, from the perspective of the
British, was simply a little-known state between Kashmir (a vassal state of the
British Empire) and China. There are cursory references to Hunza in the writings
of Moorcroft and Trebeck, and of Vigne, travellers who explored the region in the
early nineteenth century, but none of these men ever actually visited the place.18
Not until 1890 did the region feature in an official colonial publication, the Gazetteer

‘Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representation Of Indigenous Knowledge’, in Human

Ecology, Vol.25, no.1 (1997), pp.47–69; Beth Conklin and Laura Graham, ‘The Shifting Middle Ground:
Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics’, in American Anthropologist, Vol.97, no.4 (1995), pp.695–710; and
Charles Zerner, ‘Through a Green Lens: The Construction Of Customary Environmental Law and Community in
Indonesia’s Maluku Island’, in Law & Society Review, Vol.28, no.5 (1994), pp.1079–122.
14
Anna Tsing, In the Realm Of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-Of-The-Way Place (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993).
15
According to Li, the deployment of identities must be seen as a case of ‘positioning’ and the articulation of that
‘positioning’ in a particular context. Li, ‘Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia’, pp.151– 2, 171. See also
James Ferguson, ‘Rural Connection, Urban Styles: Theorizing Cultural Dualism’, in James Ferguson (ed.), Expec-
tations Of Modernity: Myths and Meaning Of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of
California, 1999). Ferguson describes this positioning as emanating from particular subjectivities and as a form
of self-fashioning: ‘these subjectivities emerge not simply as a mechanical effect of structures (the old “sex
roles” of functionalist sociology) but as a form of self-fashioning in which there is room for subversion, ambiguity
and play’, p.96.
16
Ferguson, ‘Rural Connection, Urban Styles’, p.97.
17
Ibid.
18
William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, Travels in the Himalayan Provinces Of Hindustan and the Panjab; in
Ladakh and Kashmir; in Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz, and Bokhara 1819–1825 (London: John Murray, 1841),
pp.265– 6; Godfrey Vigne, Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo, the Countries Adjoining the Mountain-Course Of
the Indus, and the Himalaya, North Of the Panjab (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), p.379.
240 SOUTH ASIA

of Kashmir and Ladakh, in which it was recorded as an independent state on the

border of Kashmir.

The first attempt by the British to make contact with Hunza occurred in 1847, when
British Lieutenants Vans-Agnew and Young were sent there.19 But they were
refused entry, which triggered a long spell of fitful hostilities between the Govern-
ment of India and the Mir’s kingdom. Between 1848 and 1869, Kashmiri forces
on behalf of the British made three attempts to subjugate Hunza, but on each
occasion they were badly routed.20 Nevertheless in 1869, Mir Ghazan Khan recog-
nised the suzerainty of Kashmir and started paying its ruler an annual tribute. Ten
years later, alarmed by the recent fall of the Central Asian Khanates of Khiva
and Merv to the advancing Russians, the British established a ‘political agency’ at
Gilgit, a frontier post 100 kilometres south of Hunza within the vassal state of
Kashmir, and Major Biddulph became its first political agent. Abandoned after
three years, it was reconstituted—this time permanently—in 1889.21 Meanwhile,
adhering to the tradition mapped out by his predecessors, Ghazan Khan politely
but firmly refused to allow another posse of British officers to pass through Hunza
territory.

Yet in 1888 the British heard a rumour that a Russian party had entered Hunza. This
resulted in imperial plans to bolster the Gilgit agency in order to keep a check on
Hunza affairs, and they ordered frontier specialist Major Francis Younghusband to
make another effort to penetrate Hunza’s borders.22 Ostensibly, Younghusband’s
visit was not in response to the Russian threat, but to stop recent depradations
inflicted by Hunza raiders on the caravans of the Kirghiz nomads.

In the autumn of 1888 [wrote Younghusband]. . .these robbers had

made an unusually daring attack upon a large caravan, and had
carried off a number of Kirghiz to Shahidula, on the Yarkand road.
The Kirghiz had applied to [the] Chinese for protection against such
raids, but had been refused it, and they thereupon, in the spring of
1889, made a similar petition to the British authorities. It was to
inquire into and report upon the circumstances of this raid, and to
19
Their report was never made public and was believed to have been lost when Vans-Agnew was murdered in
Multan after his return. For details see Biddulph, The Tribes Of Hindoo Koosh, p.8; and Frederic Drew, The
Jummo and Kashmir Territories: A Geographical Account (London: John Murray, 1875), p.440.
20
For details of Gilgit and the Kashmir war see Drew, The Jummo and Kashmir Territories, pp.435–43.
21
For details of changing British policies in Hunza and Gilgit see John Keay, Explorers Of the Western Himalayas
1820–1895 (London: John Murray, 1996), pp.356–86.
22
Ibid., p.83. Lord Curzon also believed that the Mir of Hunza was in communication with the Russians. See Curzon,
Leaves from a Viceroy’s Note-Book, p.185.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 241

examine all the country between the trade route and Hunza, with a view
to stopping such raids for the future, that I was now to be sent by the
Government of India.23

But he was instructed to keep his eyes open for any signs of political intrigue; and
when he met a Russian army detachment inside Hunza, it confirmed for him the immi-
nence of a Russian invasion of British India. When this intelligence reached London,
orders immediately went out for the agency in Gilgit to be reinstated. Colonel Durand,
a highly ambitious man and one of the ‘hawks’ of the Foreign Department, was sent
there as political agent. In the autumn of 1889 Durand signed a treaty with the new
mir, Safdar Ali who, in exchange for a subsidy, agreed to acknowledge Britain’s
suzerainty over Kashmir (to whom it was already paying an annual tribute) and to
open its borders to British diplomatic missions.24 By this time the Russians had effec-
tively extended their border to the north of Hunza and the threat of an invasion of
British India was looming ever larger in the minds of the British government. In
1891 Durand sent Younghusband to survey the Pamir passes to the north of Hunza
to look for the presence of Russians. Sure enough, Younghusband was duly expelled
from the Pamir territory by Colonel Yanoff of the Russian army although according to
British maps this part of the Pamirs was still technically under Chinese jurisdiction.25
Younghusband reported this action as the first step toward a Russian invasion of
India. His apprehensions mounted when Mir Safdar Ali

began to speak of the White Monarch, as he called the Tsar of Russia,

as his friend, and in his correspondence and conversation to allude to
himself as the equal of that Sovereign, of the Emperor of China, and
of the Empress of India—a quartet of potentates who, in his opinion,
divided the globe.26

In 1891 forces from Hunza, in collaboration with irregulars from the Kingdom of
Nagar, took control of the strategic fort at Chalt, 30 kilometres south of Hunza,
which until then had been occupied by Kashmir forces. Around the same time
Safdar Ali intercepted, and refused to pass on, some correspondence to the Indian
Government from Younghusband in the Pamirs. The British saw these acts as viola-
tions of the 1889 agreement between Hunza and British India. Curzon recalled later:
23
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.215.
24
For details of this treaty see Curzon, Leaves from a Viceroy’s Note-Book, pp.187–9.
25
Keay describes the incidence as a case of a secretive Sino-Russian friendship of which the British officers were
unaware. See Keay, Explorers Of the Western Himalayas 1820—1895, p.485.
26
Younghusband, The Heart of a Continent, p.185. Younghusband further writes: ‘He [Safdar Ali] was under the
impression that the Empress of India, the Tsar of Russia, and the Emperor of China were chiefs of Neighbouring
tribes . . . ’, p.285.
242 SOUTH ASIA

it was in these circumstances that, Colonel Durand’s scanty force at

Gilgit having been reinforced by officers, men, and guns from India,
it was decided to send an ultimatum to the recalcitrant rulers, informing
them that a new fort was to be built at Chalt and that a military road
would be constructed to Hunza on one side of the river. . .so as to
give freedom of access to the frontier, which the Indian Government
had determined to hold.27

When the ultimatum was rejected in December 1891 British forces invaded Hunza,
and in a matter of three weeks had taken over the state. Hunza was transformed into
a forward observation post for monitoring the movements of the Russian army.
Before the British arrived Safdar Ali fled to Kashghar, at this point still part of
the Chinese Empire, where he was received as an official guest. The Government
of India duly recognised his nine-year-old brother as the new ruler of Hunza. In
1896 Russia and Great Britain sat down together under the auspices of the
Pamir Boundary Commission and jointly demarcated the official boundaries
between their two empires, leaving a narrow strip of Afghan territory, the
Wakhan corridor, to serve as a buffer zone. Thus ended this phase of the Great
Game. For the next half century Hunza did duty as the most northerly outpost of
the British Indian Raj.

Mythical Trade Caravans

As we have seen, according to British sources raiders from Hunza had been plunder-
ing the trade caravans of the Kirghiz nomads. It is important to separate out the two
‘victims’ of these raids for historical purposes. When Younghusband met with
Safdar Ali in 1889 he reminded him that the raids were committed by his subjects
upon the subjects of the British Government, and if he wished to retain the friendship
of the British Government, as he professed to do, he should restrain his subjects from
carrying on such practices.28

Here Younghusband is clearly alluding to Indian merchants and traders passing

through the area, who were rightfully considered British subjects. However, contrary
to what is alleged in several first-hand accounts of Kirghiz nomads recorded in the
colonial texts,29 there is not a single authenticated account of any traders having
been attacked. (This is despite the easy access of traders to the British officers in
Leh and other parts of northern India where these traders often travelled.) Although
27
Curzon, Leaves From a Viceroy’s Notebook, p.187.
28
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.285.
29
There is evidence that Hunza ‘robbers’ were looting other local people who traveled in this region such as the
Baltis, but this was perhaps a case of inter-state rivalry between Hunza and Baltistan. See Drew, Jummoo and
Kashmir, p.371; and Vigne, Travels in Kashmir, p.379.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 243

Central Asian and Indian traders had long been urging the British to pressure the
Kashmir government to lower its import taxes, they had never complained to the
Raj about Hunza raiders.30

The claim made by Younghusband that ‘the raids were committed by his [the Mir’s]
subjects upon the subjects of the British Government [the Indian traders]’ therefore
remains unsubstantiated. Younghusband may, however, have been referring to the
Kirghiz as British subjects. There is some evidence that the British did consider
the Kirghiz to be under their authority. However, the Kirghiz did not see themselves
as such, and indeed Younghusband himself admitted they first appealed to the
Chinese for protection from raiders.31 Reports from British travellers also undermine
the claim. Robert Shaw, who travelled through the region in 1868, wrote:

In reality the Maharaja [of Kashmir] has no more right to Shahidoolla

than I have. He has never had any rights on a river which flows
northward through Toorkistan, nor over the pastures of the Kirghiz,
who pay taxes to Yarkand. It is the more astonishing that our most
recent maps have given effect to his now abandoned claim, and have
included within his frontiers a tract where he does not possess a
square yard of ground, and whose only inhabitants are subject of
another state.32

Such was the nature of British forward policy towards this region that they arbitrarily
incorporated a whole region into the map of the area they wished to control without
reference to the actual facts of occupation.

The British claim that raiders from Hunza were attacking the trade caravans can also
be questioned on the basis of evidence that the trade route was used well before the
nineteenth century and continued to be used into the middle of the twentieth century.
There probably was some raiding on the route, but if this was so severe and frequent
that it required the British Empire to send a special officer to look into the matter,
then the raids would probably, at least temporarily, have stopped the use of this
road. We do not, however, see any evidence that trade ever ceased during this
period because of a threat from Hunza raiders. Also, from an economic point of
view, the trans-Himalayan trade was of little significant value to the Empire,
because the volume and the value of goods traded were low33 due to the precarious
30
Robert Shaw, Visits to High Tartary, Yarkand and Kashghar (London, John Murray, 1871), p.13.
31
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.215.
32
Shaw, Visits to High Tartary, p.107.
33
For details on the volume and type of goods traded on this road see Janet Rizvi, Trans-Himalayan Caravans:
Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
244 SOUTH ASIA

terrain through which the trade routes had to pass. Therefore the justification of
bringing Hunza under British control because of its subjects’ attacks on trade
caravans does not hold much weight even when viewed in the light of the possible
economic significance of that trade to the Empire.

Kirghiz and Hunza in the Russo-Sino-Anglo Imperial Context

The raiding of Kirghiz camps by people from Hunza must be seen in the light of the
historical relationship between the Kirghiz and the Hunza state. The Kirghiz are a
central Asian group of nomadic people who had occupied the Central Asian
valleys of Ferghana, Andijan, Kashghar and Taghudumbush and Kirghizia. During
the latter half of the nineteenth century a part of their region fell to the advancing
Russians, which resulted in a large part of their population being displaced to the
Chinese-controlled region of Turkestan. This population gave allegiance to Kash-
ghar, at the time part of the Chinese Empire which saw the advancing Russians as
a threat to its territorial sovereignty.34 Nevertheless the Kirghiz’s relationship with
China was a bloody one. The Chinese saw the Kirghiz as ‘predators and hard to
control’ people.35 The relationship became particularly strained after 1862 when
the Kirghiz, under the leadership of Yakub Baig, temporarily wrestled control of
Kashghar from the Chinese authorities and established there an independent
Muslim state called Kashgharia.

During the short reign of Yaqub Baig, the Kirghiz acquired considerable military
power. This was used to conquer the smaller neighbouring states of Badakhshan
and Yarkand, which gave Yakub control over large tracts of land inhabited by
Wakhi pastoralists who had previously paid allegiance to the Mir of Hunza.36 The
Chinese saw the growing strength of the Kirghiz within what it considered its
borders not only as a blow to its already crumbling imperial stature, but also as a
source of future threat. It therefore needed to control the Kirghiz, and found an
ally in this enterprise in Hunza, which also saw the encroaching Kirghiz as a
threat. A year after the death of Yaqub Baig in 1877, the Chinese re-took control
of Kashghar from the Kirghiz. From Hunza’s point of view this was a welcome
development as it could now expel the Kirghiz from its territories without having
34
George Koldys, ‘A Political–Historical Overview Of the Kirghiz’, in The Turks, Vol.6 (Ankara: Semih Offset,
2002), p.223.
35
Jonathan Lipmann, Familiar Strangers: A History Of the Muslims Of Northwest China (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997), p.xxx.
36
‘Mirza’, an Indian spy who traveled disguised as a merchant, stated that Yaqub Baig had dispossessed the Mir of
Badakhshan and his people of their land, and replaced them with Kirghiz. For a detailed account see George
Montgomerie, ‘Reports Of the Mirza’s Exploration from Cabul to Kashghar’, in the Journal Of the Royal Geo-
graphical Society, Vol.41 (1871), pp.132–93. Also see George Hayward, ‘Journey from Leh to Yarkand to Kashghar
and Exploration Of the Sources Of the Yarkand River’, in the Journal Of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol.40
(1870), pp.33–166.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 245

to face the prospect of retaliation from the independent state of Kashgharia. Also in
the past, when Hunza had helped China squash Kirghiz rebellions, it had earned
financial rewards and land grants from the Chinese.

At the time of the insurrection of the seven Khojas [Kirgiz] in Yarkand

in 1847, Shah Ghazanfur Khan of Hunza rendered assistance to the
Chinese in overcoming the rebellion. In recognition of this service a
jagheer was granted to him close to Yarkand, and a brass tablet
inscribed with a record of the friendship of Hunza towards Peking,
and its reward was placed on the gates of the city. A fixed subsidy
was paid by the Chinese to the Thum of Hunza, who in return gave a
nominal allegiance.37

Hunza hoped for more. It is most likely, however, that the Kirghiz saw these land
grants as illegal; certainly they never acknowledged Hunza’s claim of ownership.
Thus Hunza would have to use physical force to impose a grazing tax on the
Kirghiz.38

As the Kirghiz were nomads, reliant entirely on having access to grazing areas, the
control and use of pastures was of utmost importance to them. Under pressure on this
front from Hunza, they sought the assistance of the British, who were happy to help
because—as we have seen— the conquest of Hunza had become of ‘strategic inter-
est’ to them.39 In this way we notice parallels between the relationship of Hunza with
the Chinese, and that between the Kirghiz and the British. In both cases, imperial
powers engaged the subordinate groups for their own respective interests, while
the subordinate groups found benefits for themselves in counter-engaging with
these imperial powers.

The Political Economy of Pasture Control

During the first half of the nineteenth century the state of Hunza was involved in its
own efforts to consolidate its political and territorial authority. During this period the
Mir of Hunza, Silim Khan,

decided to bring under his control the areas that lay at the headwaters
of the Hunza River occupied at the time by Kirghiz nomads from
37
Biddulph, The Tribes Of Hindoo Koosh, p.28.
38
See Henry Yule, ‘Paper Connected with the Upper Oxus Region’, in the Journal Of the Royal Geographical
Society, Vol.42 (1872), pp.465–97. Yule writes: ‘Before twenty years ago, the Kirghiz subjects of Yarkand,
Kashghar and Farghana used to migrate in summer into Pamir, to graze their camels and yaks. These migrations
have now ceased, owing to the attacks of the people of Shignan and Kanjud’, p.471.
39
As previously noted, it was the Kirghiz who first launched a complaint against the people of Hunza to the British
officer in Leh.
246 SOUTH ASIA

China’s Taghdumbash Pamirs. Silim Khan launched a successful

military campaign against the Kirghiz, establishing sovereignty over
Shimshal Valley and the Taghdumbash Pamirs. The Kirghiz were
obliged to become Silim’s vassals and to pay regular tribute to him.40

The existence of the relationship alluded to in this quotation from Sidky is confirmed
by remarks made by Mir Safdar Ali when he was asked by Younghusband to put an
end to his subjects’ raids. Younghusband recorded that

Safdar Ali replied, in a most unabashed manner, that he considered

he had a perfect right to make raids; that the profit he obtained from
them formed his principle revenue, and if the Government of India
wished them stopped, they must make up a subsidy for the loss of
revenue.41

The mention of the word ‘revenue’ here is illuminating. It is clear that, for Safdar
Ali, the Kirghiz were grazing their livestock on his territory. According to the
custom of the region, they should have been paying some tribute to him. The
‘raids’ complained of by the British were, in this interpretation, merely an assertion
by the Mir of his sovereign right to collect grazing taxes.

The thesis that the people of Hunza and the Kirghiz were engaged in a struggle for
control over pasture resources, rather than perpetrating raids, is supported by a
further anecdote from Younghusband. In 1889 when he was sent on the aforemen-
tioned mission to look into the problem of Hunza raids on the Kirghiz, he took
along with him Kirghiz men as local guides. Younghusband noted:

Another difficulty was in regard to Turdi Kol, the Kirghiz chief, who
was standing with us round the fire. The Kanjutis, not knowing who
he was, said to me that their chief, Safdar Ali, particularly wanted to
get hold of Turdi Kol, as he had shot one of the Kanjutis in the raid
of the previous year and they asked me where he was.42

The fact that the Kirghiz had shot the Hunza man shows that they were not as
‘gentle’ as Colonel Durand thought they were. Neither were they passive recipients
of Hunza state aggression. All through the period being discussed here the Kirghiz
strongly contested the Hunza claims over their grazing areas. Perhaps it was
40
H. Sidky, Irrigation and State Formation in Hunza: The Anthropology Of a Hydraulic Kingdom (Lanham: United
Press of America Inc., 1996), p.66.
41
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.285.
42
Ibid., p.261.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 247

because of this counter-violence that in some earlier colonial writings the Kirghiz
were represented as hereditary practitioners of caravan raiding. For example,
Shaw writes: ‘all we knew was that certain nomads, calling themselves Kirghiz,
had formerly rendered the more westerly road to Yarkand unsafe by their
depredations’.43

The struggle for control over the Kirghiz grazing lands was also particularly intense
because of the excellent pasturage available there. With little cultivable land avail-
able and very sparse pasture areas in central Hunza valleys, the headwaters of the
Raskam valleys were particularly attractive to the pastoralists and rulers of Hunza.
The Earl of Dunmore, who travelled through the region in 1892 after Hunza had
fallen to the British, left this impression:

They [the Kirghiz] live in their felt tents and wander about from place
to place with their yaks, camels, sheep, and goats, cultivating here and
there a little barley. As a rule they are tolerably well off, as they pay no
rent to the Government for their grazing.44

In similar vein, Edith Lorimer nominated as the most important feature of the
Yarkand River valley its luxuriant pastures. Of Shimshal, in northeastern Hunza,
she wrote: ‘Food and pasturage are plentiful, and life in some respects more
luxurious than in lower Hunza’.45

The conflict between the people of Hunza and Kirghiz must be understood in the
light of the importance that small states, such as Hunza, attached to grazing areas
for their legitimacy and continued survival. The rulers of these small states
derived their power through control over material wealth such as livestock and
their ability to provide protection to their inhabitants from outsiders.46 The rulers
of Hunza saw the unlicensed use of their pastures by Kirghiz nomads as not only
a threat to their economic position, but also to their political authority. It is therefore
possible that the rulers of Hunza—in order to consolidate their control over the
Kirghiz and to maintain their authority with their subjects—asked for the payment
43
Shaw, Visits to High Tartary, p.104.
44
The Earl of Dunmore, The Pamirs; Being a Narrative Of a Year’s Expedition on Horseback and on Foot through
Kashmir, Western Tibet, Chinese Tartary, and Russian Central Asia (London: John Murray, 1894), p.239.
45
Edith Lorimer, Language Hunting in the Karakoram (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1939), p.121. During
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shimshal was a place exclusively set aside for the grazing of royal flocks,
p.123.
46
Richard Emerson, ‘Charismatic Kingship: A Study Of State-Formation and Authority in Baltistan’, in Akbar
S. Ahmed (ed.), Pakistan: The Social Sciences’ Perspective (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.100– 45.
248 SOUTH ASIA

of tribute and perhaps did authorise raids on Kirghiz caravans when this tribute was
not forthcoming.

The British, however, saw the physical enforcement of Hunza’s policy of collecting
grazing taxes from the Kirghiz as caravan ‘raiding’ and ‘plundering’. In
keeping with the intellectual climate of the time, they assumed the practice was
a traditional one rooted in the atavistic hostility of one savage tribe to another.
In thus depicting the practice as part of the character of the Hunza people, the
British obfuscated the political-economy dimension of ‘raiding’. What began as
a struggle over political and economic resources became (ironically) a struggle
over cultural representation.

Misreading Land Use

British colonial officers who travelled to the Hunza region in the late nineteenth century
lamented the amount of abandoned land they encountered. Generally, they attributed
this to Hunza raids. Biddulph, describing the country around Gilgit, remarked that

no natural feature marks the boundary (between Kashmir and

Yaghistan), but the difference in the appearance of the country is at
once evident—fewer villages, less cultivation, more cultivable
ground lying idle.47

When Younghusband visited Hunza in 1892—after it had been subjugated—he

commented:

There were, too, the remains of houses, and the spot had been inhabited
and cultivated at one time, and, now that the raids from Hunza have
been put an end to by the Indian Government, there is no reason why
it should not be so again.48

However Visser-hooft, who went to the region almost thirty years later when raiding
was supposed to have long stopped, found the same situation—lots of abandoned
fields. She wrote: ‘There were signs that shepherds with their flocks had visited
the valley at some time, probably coming over from Chinese Turkestan in late
autumn’.49 She added: ‘We also found patches which showed that the ground had
been cultivated, but there were no signs of people themselves’.50
47
Biddulph, The Tribes Of Hindoo Koosh, p.4.
48
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.258.
49
Jenny Visser-hooft, Among the Karakoram Glaciers in 1925 (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1926), p.70.
50
Ibid.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 249

The signs of abandoned cultivation or human settlement in these pastures are actually
signs of the traditional transhumance cycle51 of livestock grazing among the Kirghiz
and Hunza shepherds. Under this system, shepherds take their livestock to high
alpine pastures in early summer and stay there for the entire summer, living in small
stone huts. These dwellings are vacated—‘abandoned’ if you will—in autumn.
Migration to the high pastures takes place in stages, starting in early spring, and the
first pasture settlements are at relatively lower altitudes. As the summer sets in, the
herders move their stock gradually upwards, timing their movement with the avail-
ability of pasture. As they move upwards, the pasture dwellings at the lower altitudes
are progressively abandoned. This kind of vertical migration is practised to this day and
I have visited such pasture huts throughout the region. Even today, in late autumn the
vacated pasture settlements present a deserted and abandoned look.

Royal Agency and Power Play

Now let us explore some of the rhetoric and strategic deployment of images of Hunza
by Mir Safdar Ali during the days leading up to the invasion of Hunza in 1891. A
year earlier, in 1890, the British had attempted to sign a treaty with the Mir of
Hunza. The British offered him Rs20,000 per year as subsidy in return for his
promise of stopping caravan raiding and ‘entertaining no Russian’.52 Durand, the
British agent who communicated this offer, was initially treated harshly by the
Mir, and threatened with execution. The Mir, however, relented when Durand
offered to raise the subsidy by Rs5,000.

During these talks the Mir repeatedly alluded to reports of a Russian party being dis-
patched from St. Petersburg, carrying a message and gifts for him from the Tsar.53 At
the time Durand thought this just empty boasting. But in the lead-up to the invasion
of 1891, Safdar Ali started sending insolent messages to Durand telling him that

he cared nothing for the womanly English, as he hung upon the skirts of
the manly Russians, and had given orders to his followers to bring him
the Gilgit Agent’s head on a platter.54
51
Transhumance is an economic system that involves both agriculture and livestock herding. The main characteristic
pattern of this system is one in which the inhabitants live in permanent villages in the valleys around which are lands
suitable for both agriculture and horticulture. During winter both the human population and the livestock are to be
found in the villages, the livestock being stall-fed on hay cut, dried, and stored the previous autumn. In spring the
livestock are moved up to successively higher grazing areas as the season advances. For more details see Douglas
Johnson, The Nature Of Nomadism: A Comparative Study Of Pastoral Migrations in Southwestern Asia and
Northern Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp.17–22.
52
Keay, Explorers Of the Western Himalayas, p.476.
53
See Hopkirk, The Great Game, p.462.
54
Curzon, Leaves from a Viceroy’s Notebook, p.187.
250 SOUTH ASIA

In another letter he wrote: ‘I will withstand you even though I have to use bullets of
gold. We will cut off your head, Colonel Durand, and then report you to the Indian
Government’.55 In the event of an attack on Hunza, he continued, he would defend
Hunza to the death as it ‘was more precious to us than the strings of our wives
pyjamas’.56

I suggest that through the use of characteristically violent and idiosyncratic threats,
as in the above examples, Mir Safdar was reproducing and deploying the British rep-
resentation of him as a savage, barbarian, and lawless ruler. Europeans had long
romanticised the ‘noble’ savage, but this image bespoke fear as well as an admiration
for the primitive. The reference to the cutting off of the British agent’s head and
sending it home on a platter was absolutely the stuff of Victorian nightmares.57
Yet while the Mir’s deployment of these representations catered to British prejudices,
to the people of Hunza they had a different meaning; they conjured up associations of
defiance and valour. Paradoxically these representations worked discursively to
nourish resistance. What is interesting here is that each side used the same cultural cat-
egories both to justify an invasion of Hunza and to rally resistance to it.

Meanwhile the Mir played on the deep-seated British paranoia towards the Russians.
Evidently he knew—or guessed from the reactions of the agent—that this was a
particularly acute imperial blind spot. Here once again Safdar Ali sought to turn
the cultural phobias of the dominant British to his advantage. To put it another
way, we can say that the Mir through this inversionary strategy managed to
acquire agency within a diplomatic relationship of asymmetrical power.

The co-option of imperial cultural categories by the Mir and the effectiveness of this
strategy must, however, be viewed in the light of both imagined and real events. That
is, the British representation of the people of Hunza as savages and caravan raiders,
though based on a misreading of Hunza’s struggle with the Kirghiz over the control
of grazing areas, was based on real life events in which the raiders from Hunza did
plunder Kirghiz encampments and occasionally kill Kirghiz nomads. Likewise, the
Mir of Hunza’s threat to cut off the British agent’s head was no empty boast given
55
Ibid., pp.187–8.
56
Hopkirk, The Great Game, p.473.
57
Safdar Ali’s threat to cut off Durand’s head was horrifying to the British for the particularly savage style of killing
that was threatened. The British were responsible for the killing of many thousands of people throughout the Empire,
in Africa and Asia, but their style was somehow a more civilised one. For example, Mbembe describes how the
British in Africa invoked the metaphor of hunting in order to justify their killing of the natives, and in so doing
rendered the natives subhuman, and their killing of them somehow civilised. See Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’,
in Public Culture, Vol.15, no.1 (2003), pp.11–40. This distinction in styles of killing and its reinforcement of who is
and who is not civilised continues today, with beheadings of individuals by ‘terrorists’ considered infinitely more
savage than the killing of many thousands by the bombs of the ‘civilised’.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 251

that, since the 1840s, several European explorers and travellers had met their deaths
at the hands of locals in the region.58

There was, though, a further way in which the Mir interacted with the power of the
British, which was by simply ignoring it. During his visit to Hunza in 1889, when
Younghusband put the question of raids to the Mir and asked him to put an end to
such practices, Safdar Ali refused point blank. At this point Younghusband asked
him if he had ever been to India. This was of course a very important question,
and actually a veiled warning to the Mir about the power of the British Empire.59
Younghusband recalled that the Mir, in answer to this question, stated that ‘“great
kings” like himself and Alexander never left their own country!’60 At this point
Younghusband became frustrated; he did not know how to handle a person who see-
mingly could not or would not recognise the obvious subtext of the discussion—
namely the dominance of the British—which for Younghusband was a naturalised
and unquestioned assumption. ‘The difficulty was, therefore, to know how to deal
with such a man as this’.61 Nor did things improve when the Mir refused to
consider Younghusband’s demand that he put an end to raiding. Younghusband
wrote afterwards:

There was no diplomatic mincing of matters with Safdar Ali, and this
outspokenness did not come from any innate strength of character, but
simply because he was entirely ignorant of his real position in the
universe.62

It is through the polar positioning of the Self and the Other in their discourses that the
British authenticated the substance of their power over outlying areas of the Empire
such as Hunza. The Mir, by ignoring such positioning, made that power less effec-
tive, for its force lay partly in the subject acknowledging and submitting to the struc-
tural features of the discourse. The Mir’s response to Younghusband’s question
regarding whether or not he had ever been to India suggests that the Mir was
58
Col. Charles Stoddard and Capt. Arthur Conolly were killed by the ruler of Bokhara, Alexander Burns was killed
by a mob in Kabul, Adolph Schlagintweit was killed by the Chief of Kangra, and George Hayward was killed by the
Chief of Yasin.
59
The Indian government regularly sent the rulers and leaders of petty tribal states to military towns in India to show
them the might of imperial military power, and thus impress upon them the Empire’s political objectives. For
example see Dunmore, The Pamirs. After the fall of Hunza in 1891, Dunmore met the rulers of Hunza and other
tribal states in Rawalpindi, a military garrison town in British India. He writes: ‘the Government had sent them
[the tribal leaders from Hunza and Nagar] down into India to give them some sort of idea of England’s power in
that country, with a view to their returning to their native states and informing the hill tribes how absolutely
futile it would be on their parts to ever attempt to measure strength with such a power as that of Great Britain’, p.3.
60
Younghusband, The Heart Of a Continent, p.286.
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid., p.285. Emphasis added.
252 SOUTH ASIA

perhaps aware of the subtexts implicit in this equation. By stating that ‘“great kings”
like himself and Alexander never left their own country’, Safdar Ali was implying
that he did not think there was anything worth seeing outside his own domain. As
well, his reference to Alexander played on popular contemporary European theories
about the link between the Macedonian conqueror and certain northern Indian tribes,
which even today have conspicuously ‘Aryan’ features and pale skin colour.63
Finally, by ignoring the colonial context and by disregarding Younghusband’s
warning about the reservoir of British power in India, the Mir subverted the asym-
metrical power relationship between himself and the British. In fact, he could
even be said, from his perspective, to have inverted it because it was the British
who were marginal to his domain of power. Indeed from the Mir’s perspective,
the whole notion of marginality as constructed by the British was absurd, given
that Hunza was located in the centre of three empires, two of them arguably as
powerful as the British one in India.

There is no reason to believe that Safdar Ali did not genuinely believe in his own
importance. Therefore, I argue that his outright disregard for British power was not
necessarily an act of sheer bravery, but rather was due to the particular history and
the circumstances in which he found himself. Kashmiri forces, acting at the behest
of Calcutta, had tried and failed on three occasions to subdue Hunza. When the
British finally managed to establish an agency at Gilgit in 1879, they got cold feet
and abandoned it after three years. These failures and vacillations on the part of
the British would have given Safdar Ali confidence and inflated his sense of self-
importance. The parallel diplomatic courtship of Russian and Chinese officials
would have also had an impact on the Hunza rulers’ attitude towards British demands.

Conclusion
Biddulph, the first British officer to come into contact with the Hunza community in
1876, wrote:

Aided by nature in preserving their independence, and partially isolated

from one another, the people of the country have formed themselves
into a number of separate communities which have existed for gener-
ations within the same narrow limits. Living the same life and follow-
ing the same customs as their forefathers did hundreds of years ago,
they have remained unaffected by the changes that have taken place
around them.64
63
The popularised version of this theory can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would be King.
64
Biddulph, The Tribes Of Hindoo Koosh, p.2.
 SMALL PLAYERS IN THE GREAT GAME 253

This paper shows that Biddulph could not have been more wrong. The people of
Hunza were integrally connected, at multiple levels, with the imperial policies and
politics of their region. Moreover they actively engaged in those politics, negotiating
and strategically collaborating with the polities around them. Eric Wolf writes:
‘Rather than thinking of social alignments as self-determining, we need—from the
start of our inquiries—to visualize them in their multiple external connections’.65
Arjun Appadurai, making the same criticism, states: ‘Natives, people confined to
and by places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger
world, have probably never existed’.66 I have shown that beneath the seemingly sim-
plistic and self-serving representation of the Hunza people as caravan raiders lay a
complex web of intersecting historical processes. By focusing on local histories of
power and conflict, and how they were spun into and deflected by regional and
imperial histories, I have tried to reconstruct a history of the nineteenth-century
Hunza state’s interaction with the British colonial state informed both by local
and colonial history.

I have also sought to demonstrate that the colonial representation of the people of
Hunza was mutually constituted in interactions between them and the British obser-
vers of the region. This mutually constituted representation was not, however, single,
stable or fixed. It never solidified into a cultural category. Rather, its meaning shifted
from one user to another, and over time.67 The play in meaning that this interaction
allowed, of course, was not infinite. The Mir of Hunza could only push the savagery
trope so far. Nevertheless this paper shows that he used it every bit as creatively as its
British originators.

65
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p.387.
66
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Putting Hierarchy in Its Place’, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol.3, no.1 (1988), pp.36–49.
67
The representation of the Hunza as caravan raiders continues to be used to this day. During my fieldwork, in
discussions about this colonial representation with people from Hunza, they insisted that they had indeed been
caravan raiders in the past, and that their eschewment of this way of life demonstrated their movement towards civi-
lisation. This redeployment of representations has to be understood in the context of Hunza’s location on the margins
of the Pakistani nation-state.