In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reject the classical image of political organisation as a centralised, hierarchical tree in favour of the rhizome—a decentralised network that grows through multiplicity, connection, rupture, and continual regeneration rather than from a singular origin or sovereign centre. This concept offers a powerful lens through which to reinterpret the anti-colonial uprisings of Punjab during the Revolt of 1857, particularly the resistance led by Rai Ahmad Khan Kharral in Gugera and the contemporaneous rebellions of the Dhund Abbasis in Murree and Rawalpindi. Far from being isolated outbreaks of tribal disorder, as colonial historiography long portrayed them, these movements functioned as interconnected insurgent networks sustained by kinship ties, ecological landscapes, oral traditions, and shared opposition to colonial rule. As recent scholarship has argued, including the work of Turab-ul-Hassan Sargana, these uprisings constituted significant centres of popular resistance whose decentralised, relational forms of leadership and alliance closely resemble the rhizomatic model, revealing a mode of political organisation rooted not in institutional hierarchy but in autonomous yet interconnected communities.
Kharral’s movement exemplified precisely the form of organisation Deleuze and Guattari describe. Leadership existed, but authority was relational rather than sovereign. The rebellion spread through alliances among the Kharrals, Wattoos, Kathias, Fatianas, Joiyas, Tarhanas, and numerous pastoral communities. These groups did not dissolve into a centralised army; instead, they maintained autonomous identities while participating in a shared insurgent network.
The rebellion, therefore, resembled a rhizome rather than a state. Each clan functioned as a node capable of initiating resistance independently while remaining connected to others through kinship, marriage, reciprocal obligations, and territorial familiarity. The British repeatedly attempted to destroy this network by executing individual leaders, burning villages, and cultivating collaborators. Yet, like the rhizome described by Deleuze and Guattari, every rupture generated new points of resistance.
The participation of the Kathias and Wattoos is particularly significant because it illustrates that resistance was never simply tribal loyalty to Ahmad Khan Kharral as an individual. Instead, it emerged from a dense web of reciprocal kinship.
Zaheer Ahmad Wattoo’s historical writings reconstruct the participation of Wattoo clans not as auxiliary actors but as co-producers of anti-colonial struggle. Their involvement reflected longstanding systems of mutual obligation embedded within the Bar regions of Punjab, where political authority was negotiated through clan relations rather than bureaucratic institutions.
The Kathias similarly occupied crucial positions within these insurgent networks. Colonial officials frequently misunderstood these alliances because they expected political organisation to mirror European military hierarchies. Instead, they encountered fluid mobilisations whose command shifted according to locality, circumstance, and kinship obligations. This corresponds closely to Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of connection and heterogeneity. Any point of the rhizome can connect with any other. Political organisation, therefore, emerges through relations rather than fixed structures.
The Sandal Bar itself functioned as an active participant in resistance. The forests, river channels, grazing lands, and difficult terrain allowed insurgents to evade conventional military confrontation while maintaining communication across dispersed settlements.
Deleuze and Guattari insist that assemblages always include human and non-human components. The rhizome is ecological as much as political. The forests of Gugera, like the hills of Murree, became integral elements of insurgent organisation.
British military reports repeatedly noted the difficulty of suppressing mobile resistance because fighters disappeared into landscapes that colonial forces could neither fully map nor control. Ahmad Khan Kharral’s movement functioned as an ecological assemblage in which landscape, kinship, horses, messengers, drums, and oral communication collectively sustained political agency. A similar rhizomatic pattern characterised the Dhund Abbasi uprisings in Murree and Rawalpindi, where resistance emerged through localised clan authority rather than centralised leadership. As some sources identify, Murree, alongside Gugera, was a major centre of civilian resistance in Punjab during 1857, demonstrating that opposition extended beyond sepoy regiments into rural society. Mobilising through kinship networks across villages and mountain routes, the Dhund Abbasis exploited a social geography that British authorities could neither fully occupy nor dismantle, ensuring that the destruction of one settlement generated new centres of resistance elsewhere.
From a Deleuzian perspective, Murree and Gugera were not separate rebellions but interconnected plateaus within a wider rhizome of anti-colonial resistance. An equally important dimension concerns collaboration. Colonial rule depended not only upon military superiority but also upon alliances with sections of local landed elites, princely rulers, and administrative intermediaries. In the Murree–Rawalpindi region, sections of the Abbasi elite entered into accommodation with British authority, while others resisted. Similarly, within the Bar regions certain local chiefs aligned themselves with colonial administrators, facilitating surveillance and military operations against insurgents.
Rather than interpreting this as simple betrayal, Deleuze and Guattari would recognise competing assemblages. Colonial sovereignty sought to replace horizontal kinship networks with vertical administrative structures. Resistance, therefore, represented not merely opposition to foreign rule but a defence of alternative modes of political organisation.
Perhaps the strongest evidence for the rhizomatic nature of these rebellions lies in Punjabi oral tradition. As Saeed Bhutta demonstrates, Punjabi folklore preserves histories systematically excluded from official archives, with ballads celebrating Ahmad Khan Kharral, Murad Fatiana, the Wattoos, and other resistance figures continuing to circulate through dispersed acts of cultural remembrance rather than centralised institutions. Likewise, Punjabi folk songs, elegies, and narratives sustain the memory of the 1857 Revolt by emphasising collective participation over individual heroism, embodying Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome as a form of historical memory that persists and regenerates beneath attempts at erasure. Rejecting singular authorship, each performance becomes another node in an expanding network of resistance and remembrance. This decentralised understanding of 1857 is reinforced by Rajmohan Gandhi, whose histories of Punjab and the Revolt challenge simplistic binaries of loyalty and rebellion by highlighting the varied political choices made by communities and elites under colonial rule, and by Ishwar Dayal, who similarly emphasises that local grievances, agrarian tensions, and existing social structures shaped the diverse regional expressions of resistance as much as any centralised nationalist programme.
Read alongside Sargana, the works of these historians reveal that Punjab during the Revolt of 1857 was neither uniformly loyal nor uniformly rebellious; instead, it comprised multiple, overlapping political trajectories that often unfolded beyond the scope of conventional military histories. The uprisings of Rai Ahmad Khan Kharral, the participation of the Kathias and Wattoos, and the resistance of the Dhund Abbasis in Murree and Rawalpindi invite a rethinking of Punjab’s place in the revolt. Viewed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, these movements emerge not as failed rebellions lacking centralised leadership but as decentralised political assemblages sustained by kinship networks, ecological conditions, oral traditions, and localised solidarities. Their strength lay precisely in the absence of a single root: each village formed a node, each clan a connection, and each folk song a line of flight through which resistance endured beyond military defeat. Although colonial conquest dismantled many of the institutional structures of these communities, it could not erase the rhizomatic memory preserved in Punjab’s oral traditions. Recovering these histories, therefore, not only challenges the limitations of the colonial archive but also enriches political theory by showing that the Deleuzian rhizome is a valuable framework for understanding indigenous forms of anti-colonial resistance in South Asia.
Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2026