Home History Uyghur Uprising: Why Sindhi traders were massacred in 1933?

Uyghur Uprising: Why Sindhi traders were massacred in 1933?

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Uyghur Uprising: Why Sindhi traders were massacred in 1933?
A Chinese Muslim Rifleman - Image Courtesy: Wikipedia

The Christians were murdered because they were originally Muslims and had converted by the Swedish missionaries, but the reasons given by historians for the killings of Shikarpuri traders are conflicting.   

Sindh Courier

In 1933, a number of Christians, and the Hindu Sindhi traders from Shikarpur, Sindh province of Pakistan, were massacred by the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province of China. As per historical accounts, the Christians were murdered because they were originally Muslims and had converted by the Swedish missionaries, but the reasons given by historians for the killings of Shikarpuri traders are conflicting.

These are the same Uyghur Muslims for whom the China has been a center of contention for the world. The Western media across the World has come down heavily on the Chinese government, for reported detention of Uyghur Muslims in its re-education camps. It is said that these Muslims are forced to undergo psychological indoctrination programs organized by the Chinese Government. Let’s share the historical accounts of gory incidents that took place in Xinjiang.

Who are Uyghur?

The Uyghur are predominantly Turkic-speaking ethnic groups primarily from China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang. It is said that more than 10 million Uyghur Muslims live in this region. Uyghur speak their own language, which is quite similar to the Uzbek language. Most of the Uyghur practice Sunni Islam.

This Xinjiang region is under China’s administrative control since 1949. It is an extremely important province which has high strategic and business importance since ages. It shares borders with other Muslim countries like Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. It is situated along the ancient Silk Road trading route and known for its abundance of oil and other natural resources including rare earth metals.

The cause of current disturbance is the demographic shift due to the increasing number of Uyghur and Han ethnic people and a constant fight to retain control over this area.

History of Uyghur people

The current Xinjiang region was known for its Buddhism roots, the same was documented by the famous Chinese pilgrim traveler Xuanzong in 7th Century AD. We can still see the ruins of many Buddhist monasteries in the Turfan area of Xinjiang. Buddhism was adopted by the famous Kocho kingdom of Uyghur, later on, Christianity also started spreading its influence via missionaries.

However, the balance started changing since the arrival of Islam into the Tarim Basin area. In 821 AD, an Arab ambassador visited the Uyghur kingdom and Islam spread like a wildfire since 11th century AD, and in just a few decades, Islam became the most dominant religion of the entire region and its neighboring states. It is said that Uyghur people started conversion at a rapid pace.

Xinjiang has been home to many ethnic groups throughout history, but Uyghur were comparatively new in this region. Various Chinese dynasties (Han ethnicity) at times have ruled over Xinjian, but the brutal uprising started in the early part of the last century.

In the early 1930s, Uyghur leadership started an uprising to snatch their land from Chinese Han dynasty rulers. Uyghur were led by Muhammad Amin Bughra and Abdullah Bughra, who infused hatred against Hans, Hindus, and Christians and initiated bloody battle which cost thousands of innocent lives.

Turkic_Conscripts_36th_division_1933_Kumul
Image Courtesy: Wikipedia

Massacre of Hindus and Christians

The Uyghur people and their battles have a long history, but here we will share a part of it related to massacre of Hindus traders and Christians.

The Bughras applied Shariah law in the Xinjiang region and started attacking the Hindus and Christians and were forcing them to convert into Islam. Uyghur leader Amir Abdullah Bughra attacked many Swedish missionaries and killed many Christians. Bughra’s army beheaded and killed thousands of Muslims also who had converted to Christianity. Several thousand other Uyghur Muslims who were converted to Christianity were executed at Uyghur Habil in 1933.

Uyghurs killed hundreds of Hindus in Shamba Bazaar, Khotan and Posgam on 25th March 1933. They snatched the belongings of Hindus, slaughtered them with their families, and asked the remaining Hindus to desert the Xinjiang region.

Muslim Turkic Uyghur plundered the possessions in Karghalik of Rai Sahib Dip Chand (famous businessman) and his fellow Hindus on 24th March 1933. Several hundreds of Hindus were massacred in Keryia city, where a huge number of migrant Hindus from Sindh’s Shikarpur district were living for decades. Many Hindus’ throats were slit and thrown in wells to die slowly, just like Kerala’s Mopla Style.

The selective slaughter of the Indian Hindus was infamously called the “Karghalik Outrage“. The Emirs of Khotan (Uyghur) orchestrated this ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Christians and declared Shariah law in Khotan on March 16, 1933.

Hindus were living in Xinjiang for ages, and they were economically well settled. On the other hand, Uyghur were nomadic and they used to loiter and being fanatics. They used to mistreat their women in inhumane fashion, they used to marry and divorce at will and used to treat their Women like an animal. Uyghur men used to sell their children.

To escape this pathetic treatment, Uyghur women used to desert them and marry non-Muslims, which is Hindus, Christian, or Han Chinese. For this act, they targeted only Hindus and Christians, as Han were out of their bounds, hence they never tried to do any sort of misadventure against them.

Uyghur were extremely violent, and they were always up in arms against Hindus and Christians. There is much documentary evidence which proves that they used to slaughter cows purposefully to offend Hindus and to show them their rightful place.

The details of massacre are given in a book ‘Warlords and Muslims in Chinese Central Asia: A Political History of Republican Sinkiang 1911-1949’ by Andrew D. W. Forbes (1986).

Some other accounts of history also state that the Bughras applied Shariah law while ejecting Khotan-based Swedish missionaries. They demanded the withdrawal of the Swedish missionaries while enacting Shariah on March 16. 1933. Uyghur leader Amir Abdullah Bughra violently assaulted the Yarkand-based Swedish missionaries and executed them; however, they ended up only being banished thanks to the British interceding in their favor. There were beheadings and executions of Muslims who had converted to Christianity at the hands of the Amir’s followers.

Several hundred Uighur Muslims had been converted to Christianity by the Swedes. Imprisonment and execution were inflicted on Uighur Christian converts and, after refusing to give up his Christian religion, they executed the convert Uighur Habil in 1933.

The East Turkestan Republic also banished the Swedish missionaries and tortured and jailed Christian converts, mainly Kirghiz and Uighurs. The Islamic East Turkestan Republic forcibly ejected the Swedish missionaries and was openly hostile to Christianity.

They subjected former Muslim Christian converts like Joseph Johannes Khan to jail, torture and abuse after he refused to give up Christianity in favor of Islam. After the British interceded to free Khan, he was instead forced to leave his land and in November 1933 he came to Peshawar.

Meanwhile, the killings of two Hindus at the hands of Uighurs took place in Shamba Bazaar. Plundering of the valuables of slaughtered Indian Hindus happened in Posgam on March 25 and on the previous day in Karghalik at the hands of Uighur. Killings of Hindus took place in Khotan at the hands of the Bughra Amirs. Antagonism against both the Hindus ran high among the Muslim Turkic Uyghur rebels in Xinjiang’s southern area. They plundered the possessions in Karghalik of Rai Sahib Dip Chand, who was the aksakal of Britain, and his fellow Hindus on March 24, 1933, and in Keryia they slaughtered Hindus, who belonged to Sindh’s Shikarpur region. The slaughter of the Sindhi Hindus was called the “Karghalik Outrage”. The Muslims had killed nine of them.

However, French historian Claude Markovits in his book titled The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947, narrates a different story.

An Indian community that earned notoriety and the ire of the Uyghurs and Chinese was the Shikarpuris. The diaries of the Kashgar agency, which would become the British consulate in the city had detailed information about the Shikarpuris in Xinjiang, according to Markovits. “It gives a fairly detailed, although extremely hostile account of the activities of Shikarpuri moneylenders in southern Sinkiang or Kashgaria (there is no evidence of a Shikarpuri presence in the rest of this huge territory), from the 1890s to the 1940s, which saw the last Shikarpuris leave the region,” the French historian wrote.

By 1907, there were 500 Shikarpuri moneylenders in the region. They had a so-called “shah-gumastha” system where the shah advanced capital to junior partners, the gumasthas, who had no capital of their own but were engaged to travel and collect debts. “Some of these gumasthas were described as ‘bad characters,’ men against whom there were cases in Shikarpur for housebreaking,” according to Markovits. “Their exactions against the local population in the course of collecting debts, in particular their seizing of women and children as sureties, led to a string of protests from the Uyghur peasantry, which were relayed by the Chinese authorities to the British consular authorities.”

The British consular officers used to regularly receive complaints about the moneylenders, who were accused of charging exorbitant interest (12% per month), not returning bonds despite loans being fully paid up and forcibly keeping people in confinement until loans were paid back.

Allen Robert Shuttleworth, who was a British consular officer in Kashgar, wrote that the Chinese and the British were ready to help the Shikarpuris collect their debts but there was no satisfying the moneylenders who he called “vultures” and “an unlovable lot”.

By 1909, half of the Shikarpuris were sent back to India. Others managed to stay on in Xinjiang until 1933, when Uyghur uprising against the Chinese led to violence against the moneylenders. The violence claimed several Indian (Sindhi) lives and led to a flight of most Shikarpuris, although some stayed back until the early 1940s.

According to another narrative, a communal riot between local Muslims and Hindus in Yarkand when a Muslim woman was found in the room of a Hindu cook. The situation threatened to spiral out of control, but the Chinese authorities took swift action, including fining the cook, administering mild beatings on those who used insulting languages against Muslims and a gift of carpets. Muslim rioters were also punished with similarly mild beatings and banned from slaughtering cows or selling beef in front of Hindu serais.

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Source: Turnicle, Scroll, Wikipedia and some other websites