Description

Pathan is a British term for Pashtun (also seen as Pushtun and Pukhtun), the people who inhabited the region along the border between British India and Afghanistan. Today they constitute the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan. During much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, British India sought to control the Pathan areas in order to secure India’s northwestern border with Afghanistan. A Dictionary of the Pathan Tribes on the North-West Frontier of India was compiled by James Wolfe Murray (1853–1919), a ...