Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan has been lavished with more names than can be kept track of. Badshah Khan. Bacha Khan. Baba. Khan Sahib. Frontier Gandhi. In each case, the name says as much about this remarkable man as about the vision of those bestowing it. In narratives of India’s freedom movement during the 1930s and 1940s, he is also seen as the embodiment of hopes of accommodation and unity — as too the seeming naivete of those dreams. In Rajmohan Gandhi’s slim and elegant book, the biographical sketch is as much the story of a life as it is an interrogation of the subcontinent’s present and past. The book, says Gandhi, has long been on his mind. While finalising the list of profiles for Understanding the Muslim Mind 20 years ago, a rule he set himself was that he would not take up any living person. (Badshah Khan passed away in 1988.) A nudge towards the task came on that fateful day in September 2001. Coincidentally, on the 11th he had just returned to Delhi after a visit to Badshah Khan’s family in his native Charsadda Valley in the North-West Frontier Province. “In the new phase ushered in by that event,” writes Gandhi, “Badshah Khan’s life, it was obvious, had taken on additional meaning.” Yet, as another Great Game is played out, as events in Afghanistan cast their shadow on Pakistan’s side of the Durand Line, the biography is much more than a simple exercise in contrasting Ghaffar Khan and Mullah Omar — and the worldviews they offer. From Ghaffar Khan’s childhood in Utmanzai on the banks of the Swat, from his introduction to English education, to his separation of western education from imperial domination and to his nuanced rescuing of Pakhtun pride and dignity from old notions of revenge and violence — every page seems to be set against the betrayal of later years. “To a knowledgeable Indian,” says Gandhi, “guilt rather than a sense of relevance is what the name Badshah Khan first triggers, for when in 1947 power was finally sighted by the Indian National Congress, promises given to Badshah Khan were promptly forgotten. He who in hard times had stood for Indian unity was dropped. The sacrifice of a faithful friend was the price of power. Quietly, swiftly, matter-of-factly, leaders in India paid the price.” And left Ghaffar Khan to negotiate his own adjustments with a divided subcontinent. This coming “sacrifice” hangs over the Pakhtun’s first acquaintance with the Indian freedom movement, his enduring friendship with Mahatma Gandhi, his insistence that his Khudai Khidmatgars (“Red Shirts”) remain nonviolent, his devotion to the cause of unity. Rajmohan Gandhi also addresses the question of Badshah Khan’s Pakhtun nationalism. Was he a nationalist or a universalist? Did his devotion to the Pakhtuns imply alienation of other ethnic groupings, Punjabis, Tajiks, etc? In answering these questions, he asserts the salience of Ghaffar Khan’s vision today.
