Military Medicine & Mountain Roads: The Creat...

Summary

• Murree itself, it says, was only a sanitarium, while Barian, on the border of the Rawalpindi and Hazara districts, usually held a British infantry regiment sent from Peshawar or Nowshera.
• Year Incident Link to Barian1848–49 Second Anglo-Sikh War begins with the killing of Patrick Vans Agnew at Multan; the Sikh kingdom is annexed in 1849 Creates the Company’s frontier garrisons that needed a hill refuge1850 Sanitarium committee, including Captain James Abbott, picks the Murree ridge; first party of about 100 invalid soldiers camps there Barian’s tehsil sat in the Hazara/Punjab borderland the committee surveyed1853 First barracks built at Murree Start of permanent military building in the hills1855 Dhund tribe sells 14 villages for Rs.
• Johnstone’s forces suppress the insurrection Regional crisis; no source I found places fighting at Barian1863–68 Military Road built by volunteer British troops under General Sydney Cotton’s scheme; Green Howards march out in 1868 for the Black Mountain expedition Barian lay on the road corridor1870–76 Murree serves as summer seat of the Punjab government, which returns to Simla in 1876 Raised the profile of the whole hill area; sources differ on exact dates1885–91 Gravity water pipeline from Dunga Gali to Murree laid largely by British troops; Moto Tunnel finished 1891 Shows the scale of soldier labour in the Galis1888 Northern Command School of Musketry settles at Changla Gali for the summer Changla Gali lies about 8 km beyond Barian1914–18 5th Royal West Kent Regiment camps at Barian Direct: a documented unit and a named private, Henry Knight1920 RAF Hill Depot opens at Lower Barian Direct: the air arm’s first recorded presence1947 Partition riots: Murree Brewery, a landmark of 1860, is burned; Hindu and Sikh residents are evacuated by bus with the help of some local Muslims; cantonments pass to the Pakistan Army The end of the Raj at Barian; no Barian-specific incident foundTwo of these events, the 1857 rising and the 1947 violence, are the ones local memory keeps alive.

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Disclaimer: These documents were collected by Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi during his multiple visits to the United Kingdom, sourced from The National Archives, Ministry of Defence, Cambridge University Library, genealogy sites, London Gazette, and Forces War Records—covering service records, unit war diaries, historical muster and paylists, and medal and honour rolls. I am deeply thankful to him for allowing me access to these records to write the history of Barian and the making of a hill cantonment.

Drive north from Murree along the old road toward Abbottabad and, after a short climb through pine and fir, the ridge dips into a saddle where a bazaar clings to the road. This is Barian. Visitors today take it for a roadside stop in the Galis, a place to buy tea on the way to somewhere more famous. Yet for roughly a century, from the first years of British rule in the Punjab to the eve of Partition, this saddle was a working military station, a summer home for British infantry, a market for the surrounding valleys, and, in the First World War and after, a place where soldiers and airmen were rested, trained and counted. Its history deserves better than the footnote it usually gets.

I want to tell that history plainly, and I want to be honest about where it is thin. Barian’s story survives mostly in fragments: a line in a district gazetteer, a postcard, a soldier’s photograph album, a memoir. The names that appear most often in the record belong to British officers and to the tribal leaders who confronted them. Barian’s own shopkeepers, muleteers and landholders mostly do not appear by name, and that silence is itself part of the story.

Before the cantonment: a borderland on the edge of an empire

The hills around Murree were not empty when the British arrived. The land belonged to the Dhund tribe, known also as the Abbasis, and the ridge that became Murree was then called Mussiarri. The tehsil that included Barian sat on the boundary between Hazara and the Rawalpindi side of the Punjab, and it was administered as part of the Hazara division before being transferred to the Punjab, a shifting of lines that left Barian a borderland place for decades.

The year 1848 matters because of what followed it. The Second Anglo-Sikh War, which began that year with the killing of the political officer Patrick Vans Agnew at Multan, ended in 1849 with the annexation of the Sikh kingdom. Suddenly the East India Company held a vast frontier from the Jhelum to Peshawar, and with it a serious problem: the health of its soldiers. The bulk of the Bengal Army’s British troops were stationed in the plains of the Greater Punjab and the Peshawar valley, where malaria, cholera and typhoid killed them in numbers the army could not ignore. Hill stations elsewhere in India had shown that sickness and death among troops and their families could fall by about half in the cooler air.

A committee formed in 1850 to choose a sanitarium site in the northern hills. Among its members was Captain James Abbott, the officer after whom Abbottabad is named. Abbott had already pressed the case that the Hazara and Murree hills should not be handed over to Gulab Singh’s new Kashmir state. The committee settled on the Murree ridge because it was reachable from Rawalpindi and high enough, around 2,000 metres, to stay cool in summer. A first party of about a hundred invalid soldiers spent the summer of 1850 in a temporary camp, and the first barracks went up in 1853. Some sources credit Sir Henry Lawrence, then presiding over the Punjab administration, with giving the project its official shape around 1851.

The cost to the people of the hills is rarely discussed. In 1855 the Dhund sold an area of fourteen villages to the government for Rs. 2,054, paid partly through remitted land revenue. One modern account suggests the tribe believed the newcomers would not endure the isolation or the winters. They were wrong. The administration offered plots at Rs. 50 an acre to encourage British families to build, and Murree began to fill.

1857: the uprising that shaped the hills

Barian cannot be understood without the rebellion of 1857, even though the sources I could consult do not describe fighting at Barian itself. In the summer of that year the Dhund Abbasi chief Sardar Sherbaz Khan, son of Fateh Noor Khan, planned an attack on the thinly guarded British settlement at Murree with a force reported at about three hundred men. The hill tribes of the area, among them the Dhund Abbasis, the Satti and others, and the Tanoli leader Malik Nawab Bahadur Khan of Hazara, were drawn into the plot. The plan leaked. Sherbaz Khan was captured, tried and executed; accounts describe his being blown from a cannon.