In 1896, the Bhutto fortune was in trouble. Highway robbers attacked Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s great grandfather, Khuda Bakhsh Bhutto, on his way back from Jacobabad. Unconscious after falling from his horse, he died within two weeks.

Khuda Bakhsh’s son and legal heir, Mir Ghulam Murtaza Bhutto, was in Kabul at this time, having fled the reach of the British Raj after murder charges were laid against him.

The Raj declared that since Mir Murtaza was an absconder of the Empire’s courts, all family possessions had to either be confiscated or destroyed. Zulfikar’s father, Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto, at eight years old, saw his house in Garhi Khuda Bakhsh — named after the deceased head of the family — burned down.

A SCANDALOUS AFFAIR

Much like those of his grandson Zulfikar, legends of Mir Murtaza’s colourful youth permeate the recollections of the Bhutto clan. American historian Stanley Wolpert in Zulfi Bhutto of Pakistan writes that, for the Bhuttos, the reason why Mir Murtaza was in Kabul was because he had had an affair with the mistress of Shikarpur’s Collector and District Magistrate, Col Alfred Hercules Mayhew.

The Bhuttos’ fortune was nearly erased by the British Raj, until a fugitive heir returned in disguise and charmed his way to a reprieve

Mayhew was a long-time British bureaucrat in Sindh. Owen Bennett-Jones notes in The Bhutto Dynasty that though he was answerable to the commissioner of Sindh in Karachi, the distance from the port city to Shikarpur was such that Mayhew became one of the most powerful individuals in the vast area.

Sindh at the time was still under the control of the Bombay Presidency, as it had been since 1848 (and lasted until 1936). Shikarpur served as a critical trade route between India and Afghanistan. Larkana — where the Bhuttos held their land — at the time was a tehsil (taluka in Sindh) of Shikarpur, but became an independent district in 1901. Today, Shikarpur comes within Larkana Division.

For the Bhuttos, the background........

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