THE COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE AZAD QABAYIL: INDIRECT RULE AND NEGOTIATED SOVEREIGNTY ON THE PASHTUN FRONTIER

Abstract

This article critically examines the colonial construction and post-colonial afterlife of Azad Qabayil (“Independent Tribes”) in the North-West Frontier of British India. It challenges the assumption that tribal independence was either an inherent condition of Pashtun society or a straightforward colonial fiction. Instead, it argues that the colonial state selectively appropriated existing forms of local autonomy, recast them as a discourse of tribal independence, and deployed that discourse to legitimise indirect rule while concealing the coercive structures through which imperial authority was exercised. Drawing on archival research, critical discourse analysis, and oral histories, the article exposes the tension between the rhetoric of autonomy and the realities of governance through the Frontier Crimes Regulation, Political Agents, the Malaki system, and locally recruited forces. It conceptualises the frontier as a space of negotiated sovereignty in which internal forms of self-regulation coexisted with externally imposed political and military constraints. Bringing Said, Gramsci, and Mamdani into dialogue, the study further demonstrates how colonial groupings survived 1947, shaping Pakistan’s exceptional governance of the frontier and its enduring political legacies.