Lest you go away thinking that it was just the Pashtuns who instituted various cruel punishments, during these various skirmishes that Masters was involved, he gives an account of a lot of cruelty on both sides. It is still customary among some tribes in Assam (northeastern region in India)… to punish an unfaithful woman by tying her to a post with her legs apart over a quick-growing kind of bamboo, and leaving her there until the bamboo grows up into her womb and stomach and she dies.īizarrely, particularly given their stance on women and adultery, there are also a few reports of these “death by golden shower” executions being preceded by the women first gang raping the condemned man before drowning him in their urine. If that all weren’t cringe-worthy enough: They rewarded infringements of lesser laws by tearing a man’s tongue out by the roots. This kind of cruelty was not confined to war, but was as much a part of the Pathans’ normal lives as were their sturdy independence… If a man suspected his wife of the most minor infidelity, he would cut her nose off… The Pathans punished an adulterer by forcing a thick and knobbly thorn twig down his penis. Sometimes they would peg the prisoner out and, with a stick, force his jaws so wide open that he could not swallow, and then the women would urinate in his open mouth (taking turns) till he drowned. Sometimes they would torture prisoners with the death of a thousand cuts, pushing grass and thorns into each wound as it was made.
Both these operations were frequently done by the women. …if they captured any soldiers other than Muslims, and especially if the soldiers were Sikhs or British, they would usually castrate and behead them. The women of this group, particularly in the Afridi tribe of the Pashtuns (who today primarily reside in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan), would occasionally execute people this way, as mentioned by the British John Masters who was stationed in British India when he was 18 in 1933. This method of execution was used by the Pathans (also known as “ethnic Afghans” and “Pashtuns”). On that note, I was recently reading the first volume of John Masters’ autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger, and came across one of the more bizarre execution methods, death by drowning a person in urine. And, of course, wars tend to bring out the worst in people so it’s not surprising that war-time executions can occasionally be among the most bizarre and cruel. Humans have invented a variety of amazingly cruel and unusual ways to kill or maim one another (often for shockingly arbitrary reasons).