Kurram River

The Kurram is a frontier river. It rises in the Safed Koh range in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, about 20 km south-east of Gardez, and runs some 320 km through Kurram District, North Waziristan and Bannu to join the Indus near Isa Khel. It irrigates about 32,000 hectares, and the Kurram-Garhi project, completed in 1962, added flood control, irrigation and power.

Where it sits in the Sikh story

• 1818 and 1834: Maharaja Ranjit Singh enters Peshawar on 19 November 1818, and Hari Singh Nalwa annexes it to the Sikh dominions in 1834.
• 1820 and 1821: Dera Ghazi Khan and Dera Ismail Khan are conquered, pushing the frontier west of the Indus.
• 30 April 1837: the Afghans are driven from Jamrud, at the mouth of the Khyber, but Hari Singh Nalwa is mortally wounded.
• The Kurram valley was a separate matter. In the early nineteenth century it was governed from Kabul, with a Kabul governor in place from about 1848. A British expedition under Neville Chamberlain entered it in 1856, and its administration passed to the British in 1890 at the request of the Turi tribe.
• 1848: at Bannu, on the lower Kurram, Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes renames the town Dhulipnagar and builds a fort named Dhulipgarh in honour of the Maharaja of Lahore.

What it means today. The Kurram marks how far west the story of Sikh rule on the frontier runs. Peshawar and Jamrud were Sikh posts, the Kurram valley was governed from Kabul, and the river’s lower reaches carried, at Bannu, a fort named for the Maharaja of Lahore. Kurram became a district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2018.