Military Medicine & Mountain Roads: The Creation of Barian Cantonment, 1848–1947

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.

The British forces who put down the insurrection included Major Luard of the 55th Native Infantry and Captain H. C. Johnstone of the 5th Native Infantry. The British then divided their opponents, reaching an agreement with the Abbasis that the Tanoli refused. After the revolt, construction in the hills surged. The lesson the colonial state drew was that the hills needed more roads, more barracks and more soldiers, not fewer. For Barian, that conclusion set the pattern of the next ninety years.

The Military Road and the soldiers who built it

The link between Murree and the frontier garrisons was, at first, a mule track about six feet wide, dangerous in places where it crossed cliff faces. Frequent trouble in Hazara made a proper road a military necessity, and it became known as the Military Road. The idea of using British troops as volunteer labour is credited to General Sydney Cotton, who commanded the Peshawar Division. Work began in 1863. In some battalions, including the 79th Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, roughly 650 men, more than half the unit’s strength, volunteered year after year. They worked from 5 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. through the months of May and June, earning ten annas a day if skilled and six if not, and reportedly suffered no sickness in the cool air.

The road mattered to Barian because Barian sat on it. In 1868 the Green Howards marched out from one of the hill camps to join the Black Mountain expedition, and on parts of the route the track could barely carry a horse. Whatever the exact movements of each regiment, the logic is clear: Barian grew because the road made it a convenient halt between the plains garrisons and the Hazara frontier.

From summer camp to cantonment

By the 1880s the British had established small summer camps through the Galis. Artillery units occupied Bara Gali, Kalabagh and Khaira Gali, while the heavier infantry presence concentrated at places like Kuldana, Gharial and Barian. The mountain batteries, which wintered at Rawalpindi, carried their guns up on hundreds of pack mules. Barian’s role was different: it was an infantry station.

The 1907 Rawalpindi District Gazetteer states the position bluntly. 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. A modern military historian describes Barian as a small station that could hold a battalion, and the Friday Times account of the Galis puts typical hill detachments at three to five hundred men. Another account of the Galis describes Barian as nestled in a saddle, with a small but thriving bazaar serving a considerable population in the adjacent valleys.

That bazaar is the part of Barian’s story I find most telling. A battalion of British soldiers needs food, fuel, fodder, cloth, tobacco and labour, and the people who supplied them were the villagers of the surrounding hills. A postcard from the period shows the Bazar Barian Camp as seven miles from Sunny Bank in Murree; other accounts give the distance from Murree variously as six, thirteen or fourteen kilometres, depending on the route and who is measuring. The inconsistency is a reminder of how loosely this place has been documented. The soldiers’ camp is photographed. The shopkeepers’ lives are not.

The Barian Bazaar: what is recorded, and what is not

The bazaar is the best-documented civilian part of Barian, and even so it survives mostly as images. An army photographer based in Murree, known by the name Baljee, produced large prints of the place that were issued as coloured postcards. Two are catalogued: Barian Bazaar (Summer), dated about 1908, which the collection describes as a quintessential bazaar beside an army base, and Barian Bazaar (Snow), showing the street blanketed in winter. Another period postcard labels it the Bazar, Barian Camp, seven miles from Sunny Bank. The Friday Times article on the Galis reproduces a winter view of the bazaar and describes it as small but thriving, serving a large population in the neighbouring valleys.

The wider Murree pattern helps place it. In Murree town the Mall held the European-owned stores, while the storefronts below it served the larger local population. An earlier gazetteer passage quoted in the Murree history notes that the summer influx of visitors brought their servants and shopkeepers with them, swelling a standing population of 1,768 enormously between May and November. Barian’s bazaar almost certainly followed the same seasonal rhythm, busiest when a British battalion was in camp.

Types of shops

No source I found lists Barian’s shops. What follows is an informed inference from how cantonment bazaars normally worked, not a documented inventory, and it should be checked against local memory:

• Provisions and groceries for soldiers’ messes and families: flour, ghee, tea, sugar, tinned goods.
• Butchers and vegetable sellers supplying the battalion’s cookhouses.
• Tea and food stalls for off-duty men and drivers on the road.
• Tailors, cobblers and cloth sellers for uniform repairs and everyday clothing.
• Fodder, fuel and mule suppliers, since transport on the hill roads depended on animals.
• Tobacconists and general stores selling the small comforts soldiers wanted.

The Great War, and an RAF depot

We know a good deal about at least one wartime summer. During the First World War, the 5th Battalion of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment was posted to Barian Camp. A photograph album kept by Private Henry Knight of A Company, 1/5th Royal West Kent, preserves views of the camp, and it is one of the few places where an ordinary soldier of the station appears by name. Territorial battalions like this one were sent to India to free regular units for the front, and the hill camps gave them a cool posting in a hot country.

After the war, in 1920, a Royal Air Force Hill Depot was established at Lower Barian. This is worth pausing over: it shows the station evolving from an infantry camp into something broader, a hill depot where the new air arm could rest and station its men. The Barian that the army handed to the new Pakistan in 1947 was not a tent camp on a pasture but an established cantonment, with buildings that survive in some form to this day. Old photographs show a former military headquarters building at Barian that was still standing in 2009.

One soldier who knew it in its final years, Aboobaker Osman Mitha, later recalled it in his memoir as “a lovely one-battalion cantonment at six thousand feet.” That affectionate phrase captures what the colonial army saw. For the people who lived there before and after the soldiers, the view was necessarily different.

The most eventful incidents, 1848–1947

Twelve episodes shaped Barian’s century; only a few happened at Barian itself, and the last column says which.

Two of these events, the 1857 rising and the 1947 violence, are the ones local memory keeps alive. The 1857 plot cost the Dhund their leader. The 1947 disorder ended British control of the hills and, according to a recent book on Murree under the Raj, also drove out its Hindu and Sikh minority. Both deserve fuller local research, since Barian’s own part in them remains unrecorded in the sources I could reach.

Most Influential British People

Among British and Company officers: Captain James Abbott, who helped choose the hill station site; Sir Henry Lawrence, who oversaw the Punjab administration in its founding years; Major Luard and Captain H. C. Johnstone, who commanded forces during the 1857 insurrection; General Sydney Cotton, who conceived of the Military Road; and Private Henry Knight, a name from the ranks rather than the staff. Among local figures: Sardar Sherbaz Khan and his father Fateh Noor Khan of the Dhund Abbasi tribe, and Malik Nawab Bahadur Khan of the Tanoli. I do not claim that any of them lived or served at Barian. Anyone who writes that they did, without a source, is inventing history.

The gap is not an accident. Colonial gazetteers recorded regiments, mileages and water supplies, not the names of the families who sold them grain. Those families’ stories survive, if at all, in oral memory, in revenue records held in district offices, in regimental diaries held in the British Library’s India Office Records, and in the papers of the Rawalpindi and Hazara districts.

What Barian teaches us

Three lessons seem worth drawing.

First, hill stations were military medicine before they were holiday resorts. Barian, Kuldana and Changla Gali existed because the army needed its men alive. The pretty bungalows and tennis courts of Dunga Gali came afterwards.

Second, the development of the Galis was built on a transaction that the people of the hills did not control. The sale of fourteen villages in 1855, the execution of Sherbaz Khan in 1857 and the conscription of the landscape into a road network were not separate events. Together they turned an Abbasi highland into a British military asset, and Barian’s bazaar grew in the shadow of that change.

Third, and most urgently, the history of Barian is being lost. The old buildings are being renovated, replaced or abandoned. After 1947 the army kept the cantonments near Murree for headquarters and training schools and let others go; some were later developed as resorts. Each change erases a layer. If we want a Barian history that includes the muleteers and shopkeepers, the work of collecting it has to start with elderly residents and local archives now, before the last people who remember the final years of the Raj are gone.

Barian’s century under the British was neither a simple tale of benevolent development nor of pure exploitation. It was a place made by soldiers’ health, by roads built partly by volunteers’ labour, by a tribe’s loss of its land, and by a market that fed an army. We should write all of that down, including the parts for which we still lack names.