The Sumbal Family Tree

The family is of Mianwali, and has been for as long as anyone can say. It did not come from anywhere else. The Sumbals are a clan of the Niazi, and the Niazi country is this one — the plain between the Indus and the salt range, the Thal behind it, the towns along the river. What the record holds is the recent end of a long occupancy, not an arrival.

In the pedigree the Afghan genealogists set down, Sumbal is a grandson of Niazi: Niazi's son Jam had seven sons by three wives, and Sumbal was one of them — brother-line to the Isa Khel and the Daulat Khel, whose names still sit on the map of the district and in this family's own record. The Niazi came into the country from the west, by the Kurram and the Marwat plain, towards the close of the fifteenth century, and took the land either side of the river. Of the Niazi clans on this bank, the Sumbals were reckoned the strongest, and the leadership fell to them.

A word about a confusion worth clearing up. Pathan history in this period is full of movement towards India — the Lodi Sultans, Sher Shah Suri, Niazi chiefs holding Lahore and the Punjab. Those were kinsmen who went east and made their names there. This family is the other half of that story: the part that stayed. The one migration the record does show belongs to a Syed line that married in — Pir Syed Azam Shah, who came from India to Mianwali to teach — and it is his journey, not the Sumbals'.

The oldest thing the family can put a date to is a grave. Muhammad Khalil Khan Sumbal, born 1809, lies at Kundian on the Indus under a stone that names his father as well as himself. Above him the record keeps eight further names and no dates at all — the generations the family counts but cannot yet number.

From the middle of the nineteenth century the shape of the record changes, and it changes the way the whole district's did: the land stays, and the sons go to college. There is a law degree from Aligarh and a practice at the bar in Mianwali, an ADC to the Prince of Wales who stayed at Buckingham Palace, and after them service in the administration and the army, a son who died at Sialkot in 1965, and a gradual settling of much of the family in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The graves stay in Mianwali.

A family this old appears in other people's books before it appears in its own. Three kinds of writing carry the Sumbal name, and they are worth keeping apart, because they are worth different amounts.

The nine hundred

Caroe tells one story about the Sumbal at length, and it is the darkest thing in the clan's record. It belongs to the reign of Sher Shah Sur, in the middle of the sixteenth century. What follows is his account, summarised.

Sher Shah's man over the Niazi country was a governor named Mubarik Khan. He saw the daughter of Allahdad, a Sumbal freeholder, and sent to ask for her. Allahdad refused — not out of enmity, but on the ground of rank: the two houses were not equals, and a marriage between them would be no marriage. When Mubarik began to lean on the clan to force the answer he wanted, a jirga of three notables went to him and said the same thing in the language of the country: falcon with falcon, pigeon with pigeon; free-born with free-born. They offered him another match instead.

He would not hear it. He plundered a Sumbal village and carried off a slave-girl, and told the jirga to their faces that he would keep her and take Allahdad's daughter by force as well. Then he had the three notables driven out of his presence with rods.

The tribesmen killed him with their bare hands, and every one of his attendants with him.

What came next is the part that cost the clan. Sher Shah wrote to Haibat Khan Niazi — his governor of the Punjab, and a Niazi himself — that the Surs were few, and that if every Afghan felt free to kill a Sur there would soon be none left; the Sumbals were to be punished, so that killing governors did not become a habit. Haibat Khan gave nine hundred Sumbals and their families a promise of safe conduct. When they came in on it, he had the men killed and sent the women to the Emperor.

Sher Shah, who had ordered the punishment, would not have it this way. Caroe records that he disapproved in the strongest terms — that such treachery between tribesmen had never been committed before — and was thinking of removing Haibat Khan from office when he died in 1545.

It is worth being clear about what this story is and is not. The clan did not fall on a governor out of lawlessness: it refused a marriage it judged unequal, was robbed and insulted for refusing, and answered. And what broke it afterwards was not battle but a safe conduct that was not kept — by one of their own tribe, at the Emperor's order, and against the Emperor's own sense of what was permissible. The Sumbal name is prominent in the chronicles before the 1540s and thin after them, and this is why. The clan that continued here is the part of it that was not at Lahore that day.