Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
It is surprising that the Chinese waited till the 20th century to invade.
what could have been the reasons? landlocked areas surrounded by mountains?
Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
We invaded and subdued them spiritually through Buddhism. They had to regroup and turn communist before trying to invade back :D
Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
the respect the word KHAN has is actually due to Mongols. Because The word KHAN was borrowed by Pashtuns from Mongols because of the fear Mongols had imposed over Central Asia.
The title Khan Bahadur was also bestowed by Mughals due to its Mongol origins. Otherwise this title had nothing to do with Pashtuns.
The titles Khan (the lowest commonly awarded) and Khan Bahadur (Mongolic root baghatur, related to the Mongolian baatar (“brave, hero”); were also bestowed in feudal India by the Mughals (whose protocol was largely Persian-inspired) upon Muslims, and later by the British Raj, as an honor akin to the ranks of nobility, often for loyalty to the crown.
Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
That is correct. Mughals were Turkish. And so were most warlords of last millenium. For example, khiji, ghori, tughlaq. This is why Urdu is a Turkish word, and not a Pashtu word.
I was wrong about khiljis. They were half Turkish and half Pashtuns.
Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
Mughal is persian word for mongol. Mughals, uzbeks, kazaks and other central asians are either turkified mongols or mongoloid turks...it may seem unbelievable but mongols changed the entire demography of central asia by wide scale massacres....Today there is no such thing as pure turk. Those of turkey have european/greek blood in them. I have read some where that turkmen are least mixed and they do not have mongolian features.
Can you give a reference that Altaic Turks from Central Asia ever looked like Anatolian Turks of present day Turkey?
As far as I understand, Turks always looked like what they are today in Central Asia. Because they have same origin as Mongols. So they have Asiatic origin. The Anatolian Turks of turkey also have some percentage of Asiatic genes of central Asian Turks too. But they look European because while genetic contribution of central Asian Turks was small in turkey, but they made the local people 'Turks' by changing their language and culture.
In other words, European-looking Anatolian Turks are an exception rather than a rule. And while Mongols raped thousands of women anywhere they went, the local population of central Asian Turks always looked like what they are today. Mongols did not alter their features from European to Asiatic.
Re: All Western invaders aren’t Pakhtun
this is where the White huns were routed, not many of us know…
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
*The blood of the Rajput and the Hun, kinsmen all from a distant past, mingled to drench the dunes around Kehror. Neither side sought quarter nor was prepared to give. Then the Huns faltered
As the luggar falcon flies, Kehror Pucca lies 35 km northeast of Bahawalpur. Once famous for its courtesans, the town is now not celebrated even for its fine block-print textiles. Ask the average townsperson and you will be told that Kehror is just another one of those many Punjabi villages with nothing to show for itself. But then we do not know our own history — especially when it goes back to the time we were still Hindus.
The second half of the 5th century saw the great incursion into the subcontinent by unwashed savages from Central Asia. Unremittingly ruthless, these fair-skinned, fair-haired men were led by their chief Tor Aman. To writers in India they were known as Huna or Turushka; we know them as the White Huns or Ephthalites. Crossing the Oxus River into Afghanistan the Huns devastated the land, their wake littered with virtually thousands of rotting human cadavers. It was rare for the Huns to pass through a habitation and leave any living soul.
Working their bloody way through the land of the Pushtuns, the Huns came over the Suleman Mountains, crossed the Sindhu River and entered Punjab. Around the beginning of the 6th century, Tor Aman died only to be succeeded by his even more bloodthirsty son Mehr Gul. Uncultured, unlettered as they were, the Huns did not preserve their acts in writing. But in this land of great learning, there were chroniclers who survived Hunnic barbarity who left behind a record of the visitation. One among the earliest chroniclers whose work survives to this day was Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim.
In 630, having travelled through Afghanistan, when Xuanzang arrived in Taxila Mehr Gul had been dead for a full one hundred years. But tales of his barbarity were then alive either on the tongues of the people or in books that are no longer extant. Those tales of cruelty did the Chinese pilgrim record in his own account. And he has a good deal to tell us of Mehr Gul. In fact, Xuanzang even reports of Mehr Gul’s successful campaign against distant Sri Lanka!
Five hundred years after Xuanzang, the Kashmiri Pundit Kalhana also tells us of the savagery perpetrated by the Huns. The Rajatrangini (Chronicle of Kings) that he wrote about 1160 tells us that these savage killers eliminated ‘three crores’, drowned others for sport in the great rivers of the land and knew no pity either for women or children or the elderly. We also learn that a dark cloud of crows and vultures advanced with the Hunnic army to feed on the corpses they left behind.
But by and by, while he ruled over the land from Sangala (very likely Sialkot) he received word of the gathering of a great confederacy of Rajput warriors on the fringes of the distant desert in the south. Because of his numerous victories over the supine Pushtuns and the people of Punjab, Mehr Gul was convinced of his own invincibility and would have perhaps smiled at reports of this uprising. Those who had faced his arms had not lived to rue the day, and so too would these supposed warriors. With these thoughts in mind, he led his army southward dreaming of yet another victory.
Records are scant, but we know that the Rajput princes Yasodharman of Mandasor and Baladitya of Magadh led this confederacy. It was the beginning of the year 528 and about the time when spring had already broken in the south and people were celebrating the spring festival to honour the fertility of the Earth. By one account, it was February when the Rajputs gathered near Kehror. The remarkable Abu Rehan Al Beruni leaves us no doubt about the location of Kehror which, by his reckoning, lay ‘between Multan and the castle of Loni [Rajasthan].’
Little is known of the actual battle, but as one stands on the vantage of Kehror, the imaginative mind can see the battle unfolding: the Rajputs, dark of skin with upturned moustaches and colourful turbans in chain mail on their ponies were a great host. The fair-skinned Huns with their pointed helmets from which their hair hung in ringlets astride their bigger horses, their buff coats sewn with metal plates as armour. The Rajputs carried broadswords and long bows the length of the archer while the Huns had shorter swords and bows to use from horseback.
The Huns were seeking yet more slaves and women to sleep with. The Rajputs had come to the field to fight to the finish for they had left behind in their towns and cities their loved ones awaiting word of the final outcome of the struggle. Were the Rajputs to fall, those at home were to commit themselves to flames in the act of committing johar. That was the way of the Rajput; it had been done before and was to happen again.
The battle was hard fought, the tactics of Central Asia unfamiliar to the Rajputs. The wave after wave of riding archers who loosed their missiles just before they wheeled away, perfected by the Parthians over five handed years earlier, was devastating. Taking the advancing line of horse to be a charge, it may have taken a few such waves for the Rajputs recognise the move and to let loose with their bows of considerably longer range to wreak havoc in the distant lines of the Huns and their charging archers.
Only then would have Mehr Gul ordered the closing in for hand-to-hand combat. The Huns fought hard, but the Rajputs harder still. The blood of the Rajput and the Hun, kinsmen all from a distant past, mingled to drench the dunes around Kehror. Neither side sought quarter nor was prepared to give. Then the Huns faltered. They fell back. The Rajputs closed in and the rout began.
For the Rajputs, mortal combat had always been as sport in the arena. It was never their way to pursue and slaughter a vanquished and withdrawing enemy. As the Huns retreated, the commanders of the confederacy held back their warriors to see if the enemy rallied around a second time. But the Huns only receded in headlong rout. The trumpeters were ordered to sound the cessation of battle and in triumph Yasodharman and Baladitya turned homeward.
When I told this story to a man in Kehror many years ago, he was indignant that I could be pleased about the victory of Hindus over Muslims. No amount of parading the fact that the event preceded Islam by almost a hundred years convinced him. Mehr Gul (Sunflower or Sun Rose), he insisted was ‘Islamic’ and a Pushtun name to boot. The man was incapable of recognising that names do not have religions and that most ‘Islamic’ names had been in use centuries before the advent of Islam or any other religion.
But this incapacity to see history as it really is, is the national bane brought upon us by sixty years of being fed a history subservient to a national ideology.
Salman Rashid is a travel writer and knows Pakistan like the back of his hand. He can be reached at [email protected]*