Place · pass & siege site · Pakistan
Malakand
The pass between the Peshawar valley and Swat, held by a British garrison from 1895 and besieged in July and August 1897 during the general rising along the whole frontier — the largest tribal mobilisation the British faced in the north-west. The relief and the punitive campaign that followed were reported by a twenty-two-year-old subaltern who had attached himself to the column, and Winston Churchill's The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1898, was his first book.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.500, 71.750 (approximate)
Worth knowing
Churchill wrote his way out of soldiering here: the Malakand book paid better than his commission and established the method — attach yourself to a campaign, report it, publish — that he used again in Sudan and South Africa.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencySaidu Sharīf
Malakand is the way into Swat, and whoever holds the pass holds the valley behind it. The British garrisoned it in 1895 and were besieged there in the general frontier rising of 1897, the largest tribal mobilisation they faced in the north-west. Twenty years later Miangul Abdul Wadūd founded the Swat State behind that same pass and ran it, with a reputation for schools and swift justice, until 1969 — a princely state that existed in the space the pass created between British India and the mountains.
- CampaignChitral
The two set-piece frontier sieges of the 1890s, and the same troops relieved both. Chitral's fort was held for forty-six days in 1895 and relieved by two columns, one of which crossed the Shandur in snow. Two years later the rising of 1897 pinned the garrison at Malakand. Between them they produced the system that governed the frontier for fifty years — agencies, political agents, subsidised tribal levies and punitive columns — and a great deal of the literature, including a subaltern's first book.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Siege of Malakand” and “Malakand Field Force”. Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898); Government of India frontier campaign despatches, 1897.
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