Afghan Labour, Colonial Borders: Regulating Migration in British and Princely India
Colonial India depended on Afghan migrant labour, at the same time as it regulated and expelled them in its border-making projects.
This article is part of Jamhoor’s special issue Borders & Border-making in South Asia.
The border between Afghanistan and British India in 1934. Image: Wikipedia
Introduction: Debating Migrants and Regulation
In July 1895, employees of the British Residency in the princely state of Hyderabad exchanged a flurry of correspondence with colonial officers elsewhere across India. British officials complained of a “notorious difficulty” in Hyderabad, namely, the regulation and control of “trans-frontier” Afghan migrants. They argued that “a good deal of crime” was traceable to an “influx” of “Afghan” and “Rohilla” migrants, terms that they used to refer to Pashtuns from both Afghanistan and the so-called “tribal frontier” that separated British and Afghan territory.
The Residency employees also forwarded requests from the quasi-autonomous administration of the Nizam of Hyderabad State. These asked the British to halt “Afghan” migrants in Punjab, preventing them from traveling southwards towards Hyderabad. Some British administrators expressed distaste for this potential solution. They argued that stopping migrants within India would undermine principles of “free movement” in British India, and that the Nizam’s administration was insufficiently “liberal” for proposing such restrictions.
Drawing on British and Hyderabadi debates about how to control “trans-frontier” migrants, I analyse intersecting projects of border-making in colonial India. At the heart of the border-making projects pursued by both the colonial state and princely elites was a tension between the desire to limit labour migration from the Indo-Afghan border, often through deportations, and forms of economic dependence on these same migrant workers. Migrants were forced to negotiate these often-contradictory regulatory impulses.
Moreover, as they moved between regions that had differing degrees of colonial authority and oversight, they were regulated based on their ethnicity and region of origin, through policies that belied colonial claims to “free movement”. And migrants in both British and princely India were regulated differently based on their class positionalities. Class- and ethnicity-based regulations forced many migrant labourers into systems of economic and political dependence on landed elites and capitalist classes within Hyderabad.
Categorizing and Controlling “Afghans”
As British and Hyderabadi administrators struggled to regulate movement and migration within India, they repeatedly returned to the question of how to identify “Afghans”. Their dilemma was not solved by the demarcation of a formal border between India and Afghanistan through the Durand Line in 1893. To the contrary, it persisted (and indeed continues to confound post-colonial Pakistan). In 1919, when the third Anglo-Afghan War drove new British efforts to limit Afghan movement in India, colonial administrators puzzled over “the difficulty in ascertaining whether [migrants]… belong to Afghanistan or the tribal territory of the North-West Frontier Province”.
The 1919 war restored Afghanistan’s authority over its own foreign policy—formerly a right claimed by Britain—and reinforced the Durand Line as the border. But within India, the question of labelling, categorizing, and controlling the movement of “Afghans” remained a source of debate.
In part, this was because the Indo-Afghan border split Pashto-speakers, along with Balochi-speakers and others, between India and Afghanistan, and British administrators outside the border regions sometimes struggled to distinguish place of origin. Moreover, the British considered the so-called “frontier tribes” on the Indian side of the border to be quasi-autonomous, holding a similar status to princely states. Although many colonial institutions were extended into this “frontier” in the late and early twentieth nineteenth centuries, colonial officials continued to debate whether migrants from the frontier should be classified as “foreign” within British India.
As late as 1928, when administrators in the city of Bombay sought increased power to deport “troublesome foreigners,” they debated whether this category should include “our own trans-frontier Pathans,” meaning Pashtuns from the Indian side of the border. They worried that including them in a definition of “foreigners” would allow Afghanistan’s ruler, Amanullah Khan, to reassert territorial claims across the Durand Line. At the same time, the British also maintained that migrants, irrespective whether they came from across the border or across the frontier, threatened the peace and stability of the city.
Afghanistan’s King Amanullah Khan with Queen Soraya Tarzi in Paris. Image: Arab News
Migrants and Forms of Labour
As colonial officials corresponded about “trans-frontier” migrant labourers in 1895, they portrayed the migrants as almost exclusively men, though both census and deportation records suggest that they were, in fact, often accompanied by wives and children. Colonial reports presented highly gendered and racialized narratives of the migrants’ work, tying “martial” labour and violence to a construction of Pashtun masculinity. As a result, both British and Hyderabadi administrators often argued that “trans-frontiersmen” were well-suited only to military work, a perspective that was also rooted in a long history of “Rohilla” militias in Hyderabad.
But these same records admitted that many migrants sought—and ultimately found—employment as “servants,” a category that included urban servants, landless laborers, and some security guards, or “agricultural cultivators”, which typically referred to tenant farmers. Some migrants did take up labour categorized as “martial” by regional officials, working not only as guards but also in private security roles for urban capitalists or in the private armies of major landowners. Even in these positions, however, the regulations on migrants in Hyderabad meant that they worked within a tightly controlled system of labour.
An 1889 law in Hyderabad State required both migrants and their employers to pay “security for their good behaviour” to the state, and demanded that employers also officially register any “Afghans” or “Rohillas” employees. The law was not explicit in whether it applied to only migrants from Afghanistan or also those from the frontier territories or even British India, and in practice there seems to have been little distinction between Pashtuns from either side of the border.
Moreover, while the law ostensibly applied to all “trans-frontier” migrants, class informed whether and how it was used. Many Afghan merchants, traders, and some moneylenders who possessed capital were permitted in the state without employer registration. Conversely, potential labourers who arrived without a predetermined employer were in danger of deportation or imprisonment.
The contradiction inherent within these regulations—that the state hoped to benefit from the work of “trans-frontier” migrants while also deporting or blocking entrance to them—was readily apparent, with some administrators even commenting on it. As British officers debated how to halt the movement of migrants into Hyderabad, one complained that the Nizam himself, along with “the principal noblemen and jagirdars,” or hereditary landlords, all employed “trans-frontiersmen” for military, service, and agricultural work. “Such employment… must be the main inducement that brings these men to Hyderabad State,” he wrote. Even as Pashtun workers were framed as “turbulent classes,” undesirable in the state, they played an important role in its economy.
Regulating and Registering “Afghans” in British India and Hyderabad
Border mark at Indo-Afghan border during World War II. Image: Wikipedia
Laws that sought to limit and regulate the movement of migrants from Afghanistan and the border regions were not unique to Hyderabad. For instance, during the third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, “Kabulis” in Calcutta were forced to register with the police and prohibited from traveling outside the city. While most Calcutta-based Afghan “traders” were permitted to remain at their local residences, migrants who were perceived as potentially “dangerous”—most often poorer migrant labourers without local social or economic capital—were arrested and interned for the duration of the war.
Hyderabad State’s treatment of “trans-frontier” migrants borrowed most explicitly from its neighbour, the Bombay Presidency. From 1864, the police in Bombay used the Foreigners Act, an all-India law, to deport migrants who were accused of being unemployed or suspected of “troublemaking”. The act required foreigners to register themselves upon their settlement in major cities, though this was often unenforced. Nonetheless, police in Bombay seized on the provision to detain and deport Pashtun migrants, and sometimes also migrants from India’s princely states.
By the early twentieth century, the Bombay police accused local capitalists and landlords with ties to the border region of “going up to… Afghanistan and tribal territories and bringing down Pathans with promises of employment”. While the police issued warnings to the local capitalists and landlords who engaged in this practice, their regulatory efforts focused more explicitly on their Pashtun labourers themselves. They announced that any unemployed migrants would be arrested and deported and sent the “mounted police” to perform “night patrol” in areas where migrant labourers resided.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Pashtun migrants in Bombay city were also used by mill, factory, and dock owners to break labour strikes. These migrants could not refuse work without risking arrest, abuse, or deportation by the dedicated “Pathan branch” of the city police, and so were seen by local officials and capitalists as a means to undermine the growing power of organized labour in the city.
But the Hyderabadi system differed from these policies in several ways. Most importantly, it not only required migrants to register with the state, but also tied them to their employers. Migrants who sought to leave or switch jobs, or who were dismissed by their employers, risked imprisonment and deportation. Employers were required to give “notice of termination” to the state. Designed to allow the state to keep track of migrants, this requirement may have allowed employers to abuse or underpay migrants, using threats of termination and deportation.
These regulations demonstrate that in Hyderabad State, migrants from Afghanistan and the Indo-Afghan frontier were not only controlled through policies limiting entrance into the state, but also through an internal legal regime that made migrant labourers dependent on employers. In the case of many agricultural labourers, as well as some migrants employed in private feudal armies, it bound them to the Hyderabad State’s powerful landlords.
Princely Borders
Hyderabad’s distinctive efforts to maintain forms of control over “Afghan and Rohilla” labourers in the late nineteenth century were predicated in part on its status as a quasi-autonomous princely state. Although over 500 princely states were recognized by the British within the Indian subcontinent, many were small landholdings with limited authority. Hyderabad, in contrast, was the most populous princely state in India, with a population of 11,141,142—more than double that of Afghanistan itself—at the turn of the twentieth century.
The state was never truly autonomous, always subject to oversight and intervention through the British resident’s office. But the Nizam’s administration retained some authority over internal affairs, and indeed, even tributary sub-polities dominated by major landowners within Hyderabad State exerted significant political and economic influence within their regions.
Hyderabad’s princely status meant that officials in both British India and Hyderabad sought to regulate and control movement into and out of the state. The colonial idealization of a principle of “free movement” in India was always a fallacy. It never applied to groups categorized as “criminal castes and tribes,” many of whom were required to register with the authorities and secure passes for movement. These efforts to regulate movement were complicated by the existence of internal borders between British-administered India and princely states.
British officials sometimes portrayed large princely states as places that outlaws escaped to in order to avoid detection and arrest. However, the British colonial Thuggee and Dacoity Department (later the Central Criminal Crimes Intelligence) had claimed “special jurisdiction” to make arrests in princely states from the 1830s. Hyderabadi administrators also sought to enforce the state’s borders. With frequent influence from colonial overseers, the state’s leaders developed a policing infrastructure meant to keep out and deport “troublesome” migrants, not only “Rohillas” and “Afghans,” but also groups classed as “criminal” by the colonial authorities.
At the same time, Hyderabadi officials recognized the porousness of the state’s borders with British India. Most Pashtun migrants entered Hyderabad by traveling through the Bombay Presidency, with many ultimately taking up work in cities such as Aurangabad and the surrounding agricultural regions, which bordered Bombay.
The Nizam’s ministers requested that officials in Bombay assist in preventing this migration, but also argued that a more effective policy would be stopping migrants in Punjab, long before they reached Bombay. This request mirrored Hyderabad’s efforts to limit the number of Arab migrants into the state, which required the British to stop Arabs upon their arrival in the port of Bombay and forbid them from proceeding to Hyderabad. Hyderabadi and British administrators discussed the enforcement of princely borders as tied not only to territorial boundaries themselves, but as dependent on projects of colonial policing throughout the subcontinent.
The Durand Line and Shifting Regimes of Control
Migrants from Afghanistan and the Indo-Afghan frontier were targeted by Hyderabadi border-making policies long before the 1889 registration law and the flurry of correspondence exchanged in the late 1890s. As early as 1853, the Nizam’s administration had sought to have the British Indian government issue a proclamation alerting “Rohillas” that they were prohibited from entering the Nizam’s dominions and could suffer deportation or imprisonment if apprehended.
By 1884, the Nizam’s court had created a Majlis-i Ravahil (Council on Rohillas), responsible for “supervising and controlling,” sometimes by means of deportation, Pashtun migrants. This Majlis was formed as part of the reformist project of the Hyderabadi prime minister, Sir Salar Jung, who sought to limit the number of “Rohillas” in the state’s military forces. While the Majlis deported some “Rohillas” to Afghanistan or the frontier, others, accused of “plunder” and “thievery”, were tried and sent to the colonial penal colony on the Andaman Islands. Both deportation and internment at the Andamans required close coordination with the British police systems.
Despite earlier regulatory and border-making projects designed to limit the number of migrant labourers in Hyderabad, the 1890s marked a shift in the state’s policies. This was due, in part, to Hyderabadi awareness of the enforcement of the colonially defined border with Afghanistan, marked by the Durand Line. Earlier regulation of migrants in Hyderabad had largely fallen within the purview of the local administration, even if they sought British cooperation in announcing them and coordinating deportations.
After the Second Anglo-Afghan war, the Durand Line was established in 1893 as the border between British India and Afghanistan. The border remains contested in Afghanistan to this day.
But in the 1890s, the Nizam’s court sought new forms of British cooperation, recognizing that the imposition of the Durand Line marked a potential turning point in British efforts to exert authority over Afghan migrants within India. The border was praised in some British circles for codifying which frontier tribes were within India, and which beyond it, and thereby theoretically limiting the Afghan Amir’s sphere of influence. It posed a stricter official distinction between “foreign” Pashtun subjects of Afghanistan, and those who resided within India.
As such, while Hyderabadi policies towards “Afghans” often applied equally to Pashtuns from both sides of the border, Nizami officials increasingly framed appeals to the Resident around the idea that those from Afghanistan specifically were “foreign” within India. In the 1895 correspondence, Nawab Vikar ul-Umra, Hyderabad’s prime minister, questioned his British interlocutors on the issuance of “passports” for “Kabulis and Rohillas from Afghanistan”, and whether migrants without passports might be stopped in Punjab to prevent their travel to Hyderabad.
Regulatory Regimes of Ethnicity and Class
In the letters between British and Hyderabadi officials, overlapping categories including “Afghan,” “Rohilla,” “Pathan,” and “Kabuli” were applied to migrants perceived to be prone to violence and potentially destabilizing for the region. However, when these ethnonyms were applied to people with economic, political, and social capital, they did not necessarily hold the same negative racialized connotations.
For instance, Hyderabad was home to long-established landowners and state elites with Pashtun and Afghan background, who were portrayed in state writings as respectable members of regional Muslim society. The Gulzar-i Asafiyah (Garden of the Asafi Dynasty), a Persian history and collection of records of Hyderabad under the Nizams, included several sections of biographies of Hyderabad’s “qaum-i Afghanan” or “community of Afghans”. Largely descended from jamadars, or military commanders, in the Nizam’s forces, several were appointed taluqdars—the state’s equivalent of a magistrate or collector—and joined state councils.
This differentiation based on wealth and social capital did not only apply to individuals of Pashtun or Afghan descent whose families were well-established in Hyderabad. We have already seen that some traders were excluded from the requirement to register and declare an employer under the 1889 law targeting migrants from Afghanistan and the frontier. Although both Hyderabadi and British officials complained that “Afghan” moneylenders took advantage of the poor, moneylenders likewise were rarely targeted by the registration law.
Legal and regulatory efforts in both British India and Hyderabad framed Pashtun labourers—whether cultivators, security workers, or domestic servants—as “dangerous” because of their ethnicity and region of origin. But these categories intersected with their class positionalities, with labourers specifically bound to their employers and viewed as potential “thieves” or sources of regional instability.
A picture from 1910 showing Afghans shooting from the Khyber Pass. Image: Harry Shepherd/Hulton-Deutsch Collection via NY Times
Post-Colonial Afterlives
The colonial Indo-Afghan border-making project along the Durand Line was reinforced by independence, partition, and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, although the border has remained famously porous. In the pre-independence period, on the Indian side of the border, Pashtun political groups, such as the Khudai Khidmatgars led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had advocated forms of Pashtun autonomy and independence.
But the new Pakistani state side-lined these narratives, seeking instead to display its political authority up to the colonially defined border with Afghanistan, even as Afghan leaders maintain that the border is “disputed”. While frequent border-crossing remains a feature of the Durand Line, it retains its status as a marker of regional sovereignty, albeit a controversial one.
Conversely, the border-making projects of Hyderabad State were erased in the wake of independence and partition. Hyderabad’s Nizam declined to accede to either India or Pakistan in 1947, and in September 1948, newly independent India launched a so-called “police action” against the Nizam’s forces and allied militias, forcibly annexing the state.
Upon Hyderabad’s annexation, approximately 2,700 “Pathans” in the state were incarcerated in a “transit camp” for planned deportation. This number included people from both sides of Durand Line, as well as some families that had resided in Hyderabad for multiple generations. Along with other “non-Indian” Muslims, especially Arabs, “Afghans” were suspected of supporting the Razakars, a militia that had sought Muslim rule for post-colonial Hyderabad. Afghans and Arabs in Hyderabad became the subjects of post-colonial debates about the intersections of ethnicity, nationality, and region of origin, as Indian officials debated whether it was possible to deport them.
Razakars were a private militia to support the rule of Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan. 1948, Operation Polo. Image: LIFE
Conclusions: Traversing Borders
Although these two projects of border-making – along the Indo-Afghan border and the borders of the princely states – had very different post-colonial outcomes, for a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they intersected. The Indo-Afghan border and politically ambiguous frontier contributed to regulatory efforts to categorize and control Pashtun migrants as foreign subjects within India. When migrant labourers moved across the borders between British and princely India, into states such as Hyderabad, they encountered shifting regulatory programs, including some which tied them to their employers.
For colonial-era officials in south and central India, the Indo-Afghan border mattered less as physical marker of sovereignty than a distant, imagined space that engendered foreign-ness within India. They often disregarded whether individual migrants were from the Indian or the Afghan side of the border, instead noting the existence of the border and frontier to regulate Pashtun labourers as foreigners. Likewise, princely Hyderabad’s borders were always porous, but the legal presence of the borders allowed the state to seek British support in limiting the movement of migrants. Attempts to regulate migrant labourers through these border-making projects were rooted in inherent contradictions between colonial and elite efforts to limit mobility and the important economic roles that “trans-frontier” migrants played within both British and princely India.
Ultimately, migrants from Afghanistan and the frontier who travelled to Hyderabad not only traversed these multiple border-making projects. As they did so, they faced intersecting efforts to control their labour, with the enforcement of borders and accompanying regulatory laws ultimately tying many migrant workers to landowners and employers.
Amanda Lanzillo is a historian researching labour, technology, and social change within colonial-era Indian Muslim communities. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Princeton University Society of Fellows, and is working on a book tentatively titled Manufacturing Islamic Modernity: Muslim Artisans and Industrial Change in Colonial India.