Robert Sandeman and the “Sandeman system”

In the previous chapter we saw how the treaties of 1841, 1854 and 1876 changed the relationship between the Khan of Kalat and the British government. Behind the 1876 treaty stood a man whose name is still linked to the tribal administration of Balochistan: Robert Groves Sandeman. In this chapter we follow his path from Dera Ghazi Khan to Lasbela. We also look at two kinds of opinion on the “system” named after him: the praise of his colonial biographers and the criticism of later scholars.

Dera Ghazi Khan: the frontier officer

Sandeman’s biographer T. H. Thornton writes that in early 1866 the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab made him acting District Officer of Dera Ghazi Khan. The district lay at the southern end of the Punjab frontier, next to Sindh. In early 1867 about 1,500 men of the Marri, Bugti and Khetran tribes raided Harrand. About 200 raiders were captured in the pursuit. Sandeman held them on condition that the tribal chiefs came in person to talk. The chiefs met him at Rajanpur. They promised to stop plunder and to keep the routes to the hills open. In return the government employed a few tribal horsemen, whose job was to keep contact between the chiefs and the officials. According to Thornton, this was the beginning of the larger “tribal service” system. In the same period Sandeman formed councils of chiefs and notables to settle disputes. The annual jirgas later held at Sibi in winter and Quetta in summer were an extension of this.

A. L. P. Tucker wrote in his 1921 biography that Sandeman had seen this method among the Pashtun tribes and introduced it among the Baloch. According to the Imperial Gazetteer (1908), the Mithankot conference of February 1871 recommended wider use of the practice of employing tribal horsemen. The conference was held between representatives of the Punjab and Sindh governments.

The Mastung darbar, 1876

In Kalat, the Khan, Mir Khudadad Khan, had been fighting the Brahui chiefs for years. According to Thornton, Sandeman left Dera Ghazi Khan on his first mission on 18 November 1875. He was accompanied by 1,000 to 1,200 Baloch horsemen led by the tumandars of the district. The mission was not fully successful. The second mission set out on 4 April 1876. The Khan reached Mastung on 31 May. Before that, in a memorandum dated 6 June, which is included as an appendix in C. U. Aitchison’s collection of treaties, the Khan wrote that he would return their ancestral lands to the chiefs of Sarawan and Jhalawan.

At Mastung a six-member arbitration committee was formed: three nominated by the Khan and three by the chiefs. Sandeman himself was the final arbitrator. The committee sat from 9 to 11 July, and the reconciliation was formally announced at a darbar on 13 July 1876. The chiefs agreed to obey the Khan, and the Khan restored their “ancient rights”. The American anthropologist Nina Swidler writes that most of the disputes concerned land and revenue, and most were decided in favour of the chiefs. In the same period, the protection of the Bolan Pass was given to the Kurd, Mengal, Marri and Kakar tribes, and part of the agreed revenue was kept for them. The Imperial Gazetteer called the Mastung agreement “the Magna Charta of the Brahui confederacy”.

Afterwards, on 8 December 1876, Lord Lytton and the Khan made a new treaty at Jacobabad. According to Aitchison’s text, it repeated the treaty of 1854. British agents were allowed to stay at the Khan’s court and in the state with guard detachments, and British arbitration was agreed in disputes between the Khan and the chiefs. Permission was given to station British troops and to build railway and telegraph lines. The Khan was promised Rs100,000 a year, and a separate Rs20,500 a year for trade routes. Aitchison calls this treaty “the foundation of the Baluchistan Agency”.

Agent to the Governor General

On 1 January 1877 Sandeman received the honour of C.S.I. at the Delhi Darbar, and on 21 February 1877 he was appointed Agent to the Governor General for Balochistan. He had three assistants and a medical officer. According to Aitchison, his headquarters were at Quetta, and British troops were stationed at Quetta and Mittri.

Levies and jirga

The Imperial Gazetteer describes the history of the levy system thus: it began in 1867 with a few Marri and Bugti horsemen of Dera Ghazi Khan. After coming to Balochistan, Sandeman gave allowances to the chiefs so that they would keep a fixed number of armed horsemen and footmen, maintain peace in their tribes, and produce offenders when a crime was committed. According to the Gazetteer, the system rested on two assumptions: that every tribe has influential heads who can enforce obedience when supported, and that no tribesman will work for the government without payment. In 1904 the directly administered areas had 2,022 levies and 1,173 police, and cases were also sent to jirgas in accordance with custom.

In Thornton’s book, H. S. Barnes wrote that allowances were not cut when a crime occurred. The allowances were used as pressure to get the actual offenders from the chiefs, and a tribal jirga tried them according to custom.

Praise and criticism

The system was accused of paying “blackmail” from the start, and it was defended from the start too. Thornton quotes a letter of 5 August 1875 in which Sandeman, agreeing with his correspondent, writes: “As you say, blackmail is the payment which a powerful neighbour forcibly takes from a weaker one; I help the weaker neighbour and take his services.” According to the same letter, he paid Rs14,000 a year to 57 Marri horsemen. Tucker gave his book the subtitle “Peaceful Conqueror of Baluchistan” and called the criticism of the levies as “organised blackmail” baseless. The Imperial Gazetteer calls Sandeman the founder of the present province. It says he was the first officer to break the “Close Border” policy, and that his policy was “conciliatory intervention”, accompanied by profitable employment and light taxation.

Later scholars have seen the same system differently. In her 2014 book “Remotely Colonial”, Swidler calls the ten-year dispute between Sandeman and Sir William Merewether, Commissioner in Sindh, a clash of two schools of frontier policy. Merewether was trained in John Jacob’s Sindh school, and Sandeman in the Punjab school. According to Swidler, Sandeman’s success also depended on the chiefs regarding him as their ally. She writes that “there was a fine line between a stipend for service and the purchase of loyalty”, and that this line was crossed when agency officers began withholding payments as punishment for non-cooperation.

In a 2019 paper, Muhammad Fiaz Anwar of the Islamia University of Bahawalpur wrote, with reference to the Marri and Bugti tribes, that the tumandars received judicial powers along with command of the levies. According to him, this established a form of indirect rule, and official patronage changed the relatively egalitarian structure of these tribes into an authoritarian one.

The end in Lasbela

In January 1892 Sandeman went to Lasbela. According to Thornton, he fell ill on 23 January and the doctor diagnosed influenza. He died in the camp at Lasbela on 29 January 1892. At the Jam’s request he was buried there on 1 February, and the Jam had a dome built over the grave. He was Agent from February 1877 to January 1892, about fifteen years (Swidler writes “about fourteen years”).

Next Sunday: Quetta: the birth of a cantonment town.