0000 à1469 : GEO – P0LITICAL IMPORTANCE OF ‘5 – AAB’ :
PUNJAB : * ANCIENT LAND OF THE FIVE RIVERS:
-I-
‘5 – AAB’ : P U N J A B :
The Punjab
- with its feudatory States and the
- North-West Frontier Province
- with its Agencies
- and Tribal Areas
The Punjab: covers an area:
- of 175, 248 square miles or
- one-tenth of the area of the British Indian Empire:
- and include a population of 28,0006, 777 souls, or
- one eleventh of the total population:
The Punjabis
- number among their inhabitants:
- one-fourth of the Muhammadan,
- one-twentieth of the Hindu, and
- eleven-twelfths of the Sikhs.
The Punjab: occupies
- the angle where the Himalayas,
- which shut in the peninsula to the north,
- meet the Sulaimans
- which bound it on the west,
The Punjab: lies
- between Hindustan
- and the passes
- by which alone access
- from the great Asian continent is possible,
The old Punjab Province
- was, in a very special sense,
- the Frontier of India
- and guarded the gateway
- of that British Empire of which it was:-
- The last portion to be ? won.
……………………………………………………
– II-
1.1 North-West Frontier Province
This description
-
now applies
-
with even greater
-
accuracy to the
-
North-West Frontier Province:
I. Which
-
was carved out of the Punjab in 1901,
-
its area being increased by the addition of
-
the protected territories which form the Political Agency of
-
Dir, Swat and Chitral.
II. This new Province is thus bounded on the:-
-
north by the Hindu Kush mountains, which shut it off from the Pamirs,
-
east by the territories of the Maharajas of Kashmir and the Punjab;
-
south it is bounded by the Dera Ghazi Khan District of the Punjab,
-
west by the kingdom of Afghanistan.
III. It falls into three main divisions—
-
the cis-Indus District of Hazara, the trans-Indus territories of Dir, Swat, Chitral
-
the comparatively narrow strip between the Indus and the Afghan hills which forms
the districts of Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan : and -
the rugged mountainous regions on the west between those districts and the border of Afghanistan which form the Political Agencies of Waziristan, Southern and Northern, the Kurram and the Khyber.
IV. Ethnologically,
-
indeed, it includes the eastern part of the Afghanistan or ‘ land of the Afghans,’
-
and it is essentially
-
a Pathan or
-
Afghan country.
Ethnologically the North- West Frontier Province is of great interest and importance to the student of the races of the Punjab.
But the materials for its history are scanty and uncertain as comparcd with those which, imperfect as they are, exist in the case of the Punjab.