Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan of Barhang: Historian of the Chibs

Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan (راجہ محمد افتخار علی خاں) is the Karachi advocate from Barhang, a village of Bhimber district in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, who compiled the 1997 Urdu history of Baba Shadi Shaheed and the Chib Rajputs on which this series is based. A descendant of the saint by his own account, he also wrote Khandan-e-Chib Rajput and founded the Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed Academy to bring the saint’s biography to print.

Who is Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan?

Almost everything known about the compiler comes from his own preface and from the tributes printed at the end of his book, so this portrait keeps to what they state. Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali Khan signs himself an advocate of Karachi and a “resident of Barhang, Azad Kashmir”, and calls himself a humble descendant of Raja Shadab Khan, the Chib ruler of Bhimber revered as Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed (Iftikhar Ali Khan, 1997, pp. 11, 16). His friends add that he belongs to the same biradari, the Chib Rajputs, as several of them, and that the greater part of his life was spent in Karachi before he came home to Barhang (pp. 438, 440, 444).

Barhang: the historian’s village

Barhang, spelled two ways in the book, lies in Bhimber tehsil, near the town of Bhimber. One of the book’s genealogical charts places descendants of Raja Rupo Khan, a son of Raja Shadab Khan, in Barhang and neighbouring villages (p. 389). The village recurs in the book’s history. On 20 October 1947 Bhimber’s tehsildar came to Barhang to order the evacuation of the border villages; two days later volunteers from Barhang, led by Subedar Major Raja Abdullah Khan, made the first, unsuccessful assault on Bhimber and lost about fifteen men, before the town was taken on 26 October (pp. 44–47; see The Liberation of Bhimber, October 1947). In 1962 Maulvi Raja Wilayat Ali Khan of Barhang became the first official of the Auqaf Department to take charge of Baba Shadi Shaheed’s shrine, which he served for about twenty-three years (p. 190; see From mujawirs to Auqaf), and another Barhang elder, Master Raja Khan Malik Khan, is among the narrators of the saint’s miracles (pp. 379–381). The author gave the village a book of its own.

Lawyer, scholar and organiser

The tributes fill in his career. He matriculated from Government High School, Bhimber, where Munsif Dar Mirza, later an advocate of the High Court of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, was his classmate (p. 440). He then went to Karachi, took an M.A. in journalism, graduated in law from the University of Karachi and practised there as an advocate for most of his working life (pp. 443, 449). Raja Muhammad Akram Khan, a Bhimber advocate who also studied law in Karachi, calls him an accomplished Persian scholar (p. 443).

Among the Kashmiri lawyers of the Karachi Bar he was the natural draughtsman. When they decided to form a Kashmir Lawyers Forum, recalls Sardar Abdul Majeed Khan Sadozai, later principal of the Punjab Law College in Rawalpindi, the meeting unanimously asked Iftikhar Ali Khan to draft its constitution; within a few days he produced a complete text, which the next meeting adopted without dissent (p. 434). In 1975, while compiling his first Chib history, he called on Rai Zahid Hussain Jarral, an advocate of Gujrat, who lent him Thakur Kahan Singh Balauria’s Tawarikh-e-Rajputan-e-Punjab; the two remained friends (p. 442).

His writings

The book lists five earlier works by its author (p. 436), to which the 1997 biography was added:

For the clan, Khandan-e-Chib Rajput mattered most. When Khan Iqbal Sikandar Khan of Khui Ratta first read it, some eighteen years before 1997, it was the only work on Chibhal to be had, because Thakur Major Singh’s Tarikh-e-Chibhal had long been unobtainable (p. 433). The author recalls that Raja Muhammad Yaqub Khan of Mandi Rajal stood by him “step by step” while he gathered its material with almost no resources (p. 288). Talking to Professor Raja Muhammad Asghar Khan in Rawalpindi, he named two wishes for the rest of his life: an authentic biography of Baba Shadi Shaheed, and a complete, detailed history of the Chibs; both, the professor noted, needed resources the author did not have (p. 438).

The 1997 life of Baba Shadi Shaheed

The idea, the preface says, came to him about a quarter of a century earlier: to gather the scattered pages of Raja Shadab Khan’s life and set them before the public. As a descendant he felt it to be both a duty and a debt. The road proved rocky, and only his “passionate zeal” carried him through; he credits the book’s completion to the saint’s own grace and signs the preface as a “beggar at the sacred door” of Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed, at Barhang in January 1997 (pp. 11, 16). The finished work presents its subject in the words of its subtitle: Azeem Hukmaran, Azeem-tar Wali-Allah, “a great ruler, a greater friend of God” (pp. 450–451).

Gathering the material took what he calls a “contact campaign” across Bhimber and Gujrat districts. A kinsman from Barhang, Raja Muhammad Hanif Khan, a vice-president of Habib Bank at Mirpur, raised the basic funds. Raja Ansar Mahmood of Barhang, a bank officer who in 1986 had taken first place in the B.Com. examinations of the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, put his own transport at the author’s disposal for about three months and helped photograph the shrine and the antiquities of the two districts. Chaudhri Iqbal Naseem of Chak Fazil in Kharian tehsil, a friend of some fifty years, worked on the arrangement and editing; and Qari Raja Arshad Bashir of Barhang, Naeem Irshad, Chaudhri Arshad Latif and Munsif Dar Mirza are thanked for their help and devotion (pp. 12–16).

The scanned copy runs to some 450 pages. Its first surviving pages carry a portrait of Raja Shafa’at Husain Khan, advocate, of the Pothi jagir family, and a table of contents of 58 entries. It moves from the Rajputs and the origins of the Chibs to Bhimber, the saint’s life, the rajas and the Chib houses named in The Chiefs of the Punjab; surveys the shrine, Khui Ratta, the mandis, the Ghanial villages of Kharian and the saint’s miracles; and ends with family trees, 33 reference works, tributes and a chronogram (pp. 8–10). It calls itself a taleef, a compilation, and works like one: it quotes earlier historians at length, names their pages and argues with them where the evidence points elsewhere. That method is described in The Historians of Chibhal, and the works it draws on in Sources on Chib Rajput history.

The year of publication is fixed by chronograms. Syed Arif Mahjoor Rizvi of Gujrat wrote a congratulatory poem whose phrases Ni’mat-e-Faqr-o-Ghina (“the blessing of spiritual poverty and contentment”) and Qaal-o-Maqal-e-Raja Muhammad Iftikhar Ali each add up, by the abjad values of their letters, to 1997, while its last line yields 1418 AH (p. 445). The title page carries two Persian couplets of Rumi on the power of the saints (pp. 450–451).

The Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed Academy

About two years before he signed the preface, around 1995, Iftikhar Ali Khan founded the Hazrat Baba Shadi Shaheed Academy at Barhang to see the biography through, with himself as founder-chairman (pp. 12, 449). As vice-chairman he chose Professor Raja Muhammad Aslam Khan of Gujrat district, who holds M.A. degrees in political science and history from the University of the Punjab and headed the political science department of Government Degree College, Satellite Town, Rawalpindi; a later caption describes him as a retired associate professor of Government Post-Graduate College, Asghar Mall, Rawalpindi (pp. 12, 446). The author writes that the work could not have been finished without Professor Aslam’s support and his family’s hospitality (p. 13), and Khan Iqbal Sikandar Khan’s tribute ends with a prayer for the success of the Academy’s “aims and objects” (p. 433).

How his work was received

The book closes with eleven tributes from Chib notables, lawyers and writers (pp. 433–448). Together they sketch a lawyer who found time for history and a devotee who saw his book as a service to the saint.

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• The Historians of ChibhalFrom the 1868 Gujrat Settlement to Tarikh-e-Chibhal
• Sources on Chib Rajput HistoryThe 33 works in the 1997 bibliography, annotated
• Baba Shadi ShaheedRaja Shadab Khan: ruler, healer and martyr
• The Shrine of Baba Shadi ShaheedA guide to the darbar at Aadhi Dhak
• The Liberation of Bhimber, 1947Barhang’s volunteers and the battle for the town
• Chib RajputsHistory, origins and clans of the Chibs of Bhimber