Subedar Khan Inayatullah Khan: The Jagirdar Who Freed the Banah Valley

Subedar Khan Inayatullah Khan (خان عنایت اللہ خاں; 1882/83–1966) was the last chief jagirdar of Khui Ratta in the Banah Valley of Kotli, Azad Kashmir. An officer of the Jammu and Kashmir State Forces who gave up promotion to save his family’s estate, he is remembered in the 1997 Chib history as the man who freed the valley’s Muslim cultivators from the moneylenders’ grip, financed the Muslim Conference, kept order in 1947 and raised the Banah Battalion in 1948.

Early life of Khan Inayatullah Khan

Inayatullah Khan was born in 1882–83, the eldest son of Khan Sakhi Wilayat Khan, chief jagirdar (jagirdar-e-a’la) of Khui Ratta and head of the Khanka house of the Chib Rajputs. Following family custom he studied Urdu, Persian, Arabic and the other subjects then taught. When he came of age his father sent him to the court of Jammu, where Maharaja Partab Singh (r. 1885–1925) enlisted him in the State Forces as a Jemadar, a rank later called Naib Subedar. According to his second son, Raja Abdul Rauf Khan, the State Forces of those days had no ranks of Lieutenant or Captain.

He rose to Subedar and served with his unit in the First World War. Two of his fellow Subedars were Rahmatullah Khan, later a Brigadier, and Mangtu Khan Salehria, father of Colonel Rahmatullah Khan Salehria. When the unit came home to Jammu after the war it was given four months’ leave, and Inayatullah, with twelve years’ service behind him, went home to Khui Ratta.

A grandmother’s warning and a career given up

On that leave, sitting with his grandmother in the kitchen, he noticed the rotis puffing up oddly on the griddle and asked why. Because the maize was old, she told him: ever since his father had taken charge of the jagir, the household had never eaten its own grain. Everything went to the needy, even the land, and the family’s flour now came on credit from the Hindu Mehta moneylenders of Saidpur. If he did not come home and take charge, she warned, the Khatris and others would soon have the jagir lands.

Back at Satwari Cantonment in Jammu, he resolved to put the matter to the Maharaja himself, who personally settled the affairs of his army and of the jagirdars. A few days later Partab Singh came to the cantonment on a round. Walking with the officers, he asked after Inayatullah’s father, and Inayatullah told him everything: his father’s boundless generosity, the moneylenders who exploited it, the debts swollen by compound interest, the lands lost.

The Maharaja replied that he had meant to promote him to Major and then, after a posting in Gilgit, to Colonel. Inayatullah thanked him but said that unless he went home at once there would be “neither bamboo nor flute”: nothing would be left of the jagir. At the royal Durbar two days later the Maharaja sanctioned his pension, released him from service and told him not to fear the moneylenders: “You are to control them. If any difficulty arises, inform me.” The Governor of Jammu was ordered to arrange his appointment as numberdar and zaildar.

Banished to Ghagrot

At home he found that a self-serving clique had turned his father against him. Sakhi Wilayat Khan forbade him any part in the jagir’s affairs and ordered him to live at Ghagrot (reading uncertain) instead of Khui Ratta. He obeyed, but watching the ancestral estate being plundered, and the very purpose for which he had given up his career being lost, he went to Mirpur and laid the matter before the Wazir-e-Wazarat, the district governor of the Dogra administration. The Wazir came to Khui Ratta, stayed eight or ten days and at last persuaded the old chief to give his son the headship of the numberdari and zaildari of the area.

Breaking the moneylenders’ grip

As head numberdar and zaildar, Inayatullah toured the valley and found, the book says, that Khatri moneylenders took the Muslim cultivators’ grain straight from the threshing floor, leaving them to borrow grain back from the same moneylenders to feed their families through the rest of the year. He went from village to village telling the cultivators not to hand over their grain at the threshing floor at any price: “Whatever happens afterwards, we shall see.” The answer, the book says, was unanimous.

The test came at harvest, when Chaudhry Kala Jat of Sehor (reading uncertain) refused to let Sardar Sundar Das Khatri, head of the moneylenders of Khui Ratta, take grain from his threshing floor, and sent him off with a scolding. Sundar Das complained to the police at Seri. Inayatullah, as zaildar, met the Thanedar, Hari Singh Dogra, in the village, steered him first to a burglary at Andah, and then described so vividly how compound interest kept the Maharaja’s loyal subjects from two meals a day that the Thanedar came to see the moneylender, not the farmer, as the offender, reprimanded Sundar Das and dismissed his complaint.

The moneylenders stopped going out to the villages and sat in their shops. To keep the villagers supplied, Inayatullah had Chaudhry Sakhi Muhammad open a shop in his own house. The moneylenders soon came to the Khan’s door, pressing for repayment of his father’s debt of 36,000 rupees, and after three or four days of talks both sides agreed a settlement on six points:

1. Chaudhry Sakhi Muhammad’s shop would be closed.
2. The Muslims would end their boycott of the moneylenders.
3. No moneylender would take grain from the threshing floor; each cultivator would keep what he needed and himself hand over the rest.
4. No cultivator’s bullocks would ever be taken to recover a debt.
5. No interest would be recovered from the minor heirs of a dead debtor.
6. No Muslim woman would go to the town for shopping or any other purpose.

Peace was restored on the surface, though tension remained beneath it, and the exploitation of the cultivators was much reduced. Inayatullah later paid off his father’s whole debt.

A Muslim spring fair

One instrument of exploitation remained, in the book’s view: the great Baisakhi fair at Mujwal near Ban Ganga, where hundreds of stalls belonging to Hindu and Sikh traders and moneylenders took much of a year’s earnings from Muslim visitors in a single day. Inayatullah gathered the leading men of every Muslim biradari in the valley at his house, and they resolved to hold their own Baisakhi celebration at the shrine of Hazrat Mai Tooti. The first was held on 1 Baisakh 1942. It grew into the Banah Valley‘s Jashn-e-Baharan, the spring festival held every year since the war of 1947–49 on the airstrip at Fatehpur Dehari.

Khan Inayatullah Khan and the Muslim Conference

After the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was founded in 1932, Inayatullah Khan established its branch at Khui Ratta and worked day and night to organise it across the valley. As a jagirdar, zaildar and servant of the state he could not oppose the Dogra government openly, so he met the party’s expenses behind the scenes. Justice Rahim Dad Khan, later Chief Justice of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, called him the Muslim Conference’s “Seth Birla”, after the industrialist G. D. Birla, famous as a financier of the Indian National Congress.

Before 1947 Khui Ratta was the second-largest political stronghold in what is now Kotli District. Inayatullah gave land beside the Garhi graveyard for a Jamia Masjid, and every Friday the Muslim Conference held its public meeting on the mosque’s plinth, in rivalry with the National Conference, which drew its support in Khui Ratta from the Hindu and Sikh shopkeepers who formed the majority of the bazaar.

The Friday clash

The rivalry divided the family itself. Inayatullah’s younger brothers, Raja Haidar Ali Khan and Raja Fazal Dad Khan, had sided with the National Conference because of family differences. Through the efforts of Ghazi Ilahi Bakhsh of Mirpur and Chaudhry Rahim Dad Khan, then probably a lawyer at Kotli, Fazal Dad Khan joined the Muslim Conference, and Haidar Ali Khan agreed to follow on the next Friday. On that Friday, the book says, local National Conference leaders, whom it names as Ghazi Abdul Rahman, Qazi Khushi Muhammad of Fatehpur Dehari, Malik Sain and Trilok Chand “Comrade”, waylaid Haidar Ali Khan on his way to prayers and took him to their own meeting.

On the lawyers’ advice Inayatullah sent his young son, Khan Muhammad Sarwar Khan, to ask why his uncle was being held. The young man was roughly handled, and the Muslim Conference crowd fell upon the other meeting: twenty to twenty-five people were hurt, five or six of them seriously, and the policemen from Seri were beaten too. As the DIG, the Police Commissioner and police from Jammu converged on Khui Ratta, the two lawyers framed the defence that night: the National Conference had been chanting “Kashmir Chhor Do” (“Quit Kashmir”) and abusing the Maharaja, and Sarwar Khan had been attacked for objecting. The book openly presents this as a legal strategy; the slogan, adopted by the National Conference in 1946, places the clash in the last years of Dogra rule. The DIG, himself a Dogra, had the National Conference men arrested and summarily tried.

1947: loss, refuge and responsibility

By the end of September 1947, about six weeks after Partition, the Banah Valley was gripped by fear. The book reports that the valley’s Hindus and Sikhs were stacking sandbags on their roofs and were said to be training in secret, while the Muslims were unarmed; Maharaja Hari Singh had not yet decided on accession, and Muslims were being killed in Jammu. Dogra troops held Kotli, Mirpur and Rajouri. Inayatullah, the book says, had to walk a razor’s edge between protecting his unarmed people and keeping faith with a state government that was still in place.

Then Captain Rahmatullah Salehria of the 5th Jammu and Kashmir Battalion, the son of Inayatullah’s old comrade Mangtu Khan Salehria, rose in revolt one night, turned on the battalion’s two Hindu companies and came with a company of his own to Kot Khanan, promising to defend Khui Ratta, whose Hindu and Sikh residents had already left. That same night a Dogra army convoy was seen approaching. Believing it had come for him, Salehria withdrew to a hill some distance away. Next morning the convoy entered Khui Ratta unopposed. The Muslim inhabitants fled; their houses were looted, and Inayatullah’s house was plundered and set on fire. Grain, cash and jewellery were all lost, and in a moment, the book says, he fell “from the heavens to the ground”.

After the Maharaja’s accession to India, Indian troops entered the state. At Kotli the Dogra garrison was besieged, together with Colonel Baldev Singh Pathania, whom the book describes as the state’s Defence Minister. When news came of a major Indian advance on Kotli, Inayatullah told his people to leave their homes for safety and himself went to the Nar area, where Raja Fateh Khan, a Doyal Rajput and numberdar of Baran, sheltered him for about two months, a kindness, the book says, for which his family would be grateful “as long as the world lasts”. He then moved to his house at Kotera Khanka.

Indian forces reached Kotli and relieved Colonel Pathania, and on the same night Azad Kashmir fighters (the book’s Mujahideen) under Colonel “Khan of Mang” and Captain Raja Muhammad Afzal Khan of Kalri took Mirpur; both events fell in late November 1947. The Indian and Dogra troops soon withdrew from Kotli. The commander-in-chief of the Kotli front, Raja Sakhi Daler Khan, a veteran of the British Indian Army whom the book also calls the conqueror of Rajouri, then came to Khui Ratta. Rivals had poisoned his mind against Inayatullah, but after hearing him out he cleared him of every charge and appointed him Superintendent of Police to keep order in the area. Had Inayatullah harmed even a single Hindu or Sikh in haste, Sakhi Daler Khan told him, the Dogra army and the armed Hindu and Sikh population would have put countless unarmed Muslims to the sword; by his prudence he had saved the whole valley from ruin.

Charged as a traitor

When Sakhi Daler Khan left for the Rajouri front, command of the Banah Valley front passed to Brigade Commander Sher Ahmad Khan of Pallandri, with his headquarters at Barot Gala. Inayatullah’s rivals tried again, and the Brigade Commander summoned him and put five charges to him: that he was a jagirdar; that he was a numberdar; that he was a zaildar; that he supported the Dogra Raj and India; and that he was therefore an opponent of Pakistan and a traitor.

His defence, as the book records it, was a lesson in history. His jagir was no Dogra grant: his forefathers had held it since the days of Jahangir and Shah Jahan, before Gulab Singh, founder of the Dogra state, was even born. Thousands of men across the state were hereditary numberdars and zaildars; were they all traitors? The rest was “a very big joke with the history of Kashmir”. A century and a half earlier his “great ancestor” Raja Sultan Khan, last ruler of Bhimber (a forefather of the clan rather than a direct ancestor, since the Khanka line had branched off generations earlier), had fought Ranjit Singh’s Sikh armies. Pointing to the ridge on the horizon, evidently Pir Badesar, Inayatullah said that Sultan Khan had routed a far larger Sikh army there before calling in vain on the Muslim tribes of Poonch, Rajouri, Mirpur and Kotli for help. Had they come, he argued, Bhimber, the Gateway of Kashmir, would never have fallen, there would have been no Sikh or Dogra rule in Kashmir, and Pakistan, in the state at least, might have come into being a century and a half earlier.

The Brigade Commander, the book says, apologised and asked for his help. Inayatullah set his brothers Haidar Ali Khan and Fazal Dad Khan to supplying grain for the fighters’ rations and, despite his age, took on the recruiting of volunteers in the area himself.

The Banah Battalion, 1948–49

In January 1948 Inayatullah raised a unit called the Banah Battalion, with its headquarters at Seri. Among its officers was Qazi Jan, then a Lieutenant, who later rose to Colonel. The unit was afterwards renamed the 25 Haidri Battalion and posted to Mandher, where it was commanded by Captain Mumtaz Khan, known as “Bailar” Mumtaz Khan (reading uncertain), a former Subedar of the 4th Kashmir unit whom the book calls the conqueror of Muzaffarabad; it cites Colonel Raja Muhammad Azam Khan of Panjeri as an eye-witness. With the support of the local sardars, Inayatullah took part in operations on the Mandher front, and in recognition he was granted the rank of Lieutenant by gazette notification. When the ceasefire came into force on all fronts in 1949, he retired and returned to the affairs of his jagir. For the wider story, see The Chib Rajputs in 1947.

Character and the customs of the jagir

The book portrays a proud and self-respecting man. From 1947 to 1949, it says, he had “not a broken cowrie in his pocket”, yet he never asked anyone for help or spoke of his hardship. He hated lying, deceit and hypocrisy, and treated his tenants as his own children. The author argues that while jagirdari has been a byword for oppression in many lands, the Khans of Khui Ratta showed the opposite, and he lists the customs of the jagir:

• No rent was taken from the minor orphans of a dead tenant until they came of age, a rule kept, the book says, since the time of the founder, Khan Muhammad Umar Khan.
• Disputes were settled justly by the Khan himself, and the police were not allowed to interfere in the jagir.
• No one went bareheaded within the jagir’s bounds, and no one dared to violate another’s rights.
• A pasture was kept open for the villagers’ cattle, and chir pine trees from the cultivated land were given free when needed.
• Grain was lent in kind and returned in kind, wheat for wheat and maize for maize; taking back wheat for maize was regarded as a sin.
• No profit was taken on such dealings, and usury was forbidden in his house.

Two stories illustrate his care for people of other faiths. He brought up Wariyam Singh, a Sikh boy of Khui Ratta who had lost his father, so kindly that, in the book’s words, the mother forgot her widowhood and the boy his orphanhood. And when Sheikh Ghulam Din of Gorha, a Ram Dasi, wished to become a Muslim but feared losing his ancestral property, Inayatullah promised to make good the loss and transferred fifteen or twenty kanals of roadside jagir land at Gorha to his name.

Last years and death

In 1960 Inayatullah divided his property among his heirs and handed the management of everything to his eldest son, Khan Muhammad Sarwar Khan. When the Assembly passed the agricultural reform law, the jagirdari system itself came to an end in his lifetime, so that he was the last chief jagirdar of Khui Ratta, as Khan Muhammad Umar Khan had been the first. He died in 1966, aged about eighty-three, at ten o’clock on a Thursday night in the last ten days of Ramazan; his funeral prayers were said on Jumu’at-ul-Wida, the last Friday of the holy month. The author mourns him as “the uncrowned king of the Banah Valley” and closes with a couplet he attributes to Allama Iqbal:

Those who die do die, but they do not perish; in truth they are never parted from us.

— verse quoted in Iftikhar Ali Khan (1997), p. 242

His sons were Khan Muhammad Sarwar Khan, who succeeded him and died in 1991, and Raja Abdul Rauf Khan, a police inspector and the family’s historian. His grandson Khan Iqbal Sikandar Khan headed the family when the book was written.

Timeline

• 1882–83 Born, eldest son of Khan Sakhi Wilayat Khan of Khui Ratta.
• Partab Singh’s reign Enlists at Jammu as a Jemadar and rises to Subedar.
• 1914–19 Serves with his unit in the First World War (dates as given in the book).
• After the war Declines promotion, retires on pension and becomes head numberdar and zaildar.
• 1922 His father dies; he becomes chief jagirdar and later pays off his father’s debts.
• After 1932 Founds and funds the Muslim Conference at Khui Ratta.
• 1 Baisakh 1942 First Muslim Baisakhi fair at the shrine of Mai Tooti.
• Autumn 1947 Dogra troops burn his house; refuge at Baran; appointed Superintendent of Police.
• January 1948 Raises the Banah Battalion, later the 25 Haidri Battalion.
• 1949 Ceasefire; retires with the rank of Lieutenant.
• 1960 Divides his property among his heirs.
• 1966 Dies in Ramazan, aged about 83.

Frequently asked questions

Continue reading

• The Khans of Khui RattaFour centuries of the Khanka Chibs
• The Banah ValleyTemples, springs, shrines and the Baisakhi fair
• Major Raja Muzaffar KhanHis kinsman who raised the Darhal Battalion
• Chib Rajputs in Kashmir PoliticsFrom the Muslim Conference to AJK government
• The Chib Rajputs in 1947Battles, refugees and martyrs
• Raja Sultan Khan and the Sikh WarsThe battles Inayatullah invoked in his defence