Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (40 page)

The campaign to replace Persian words with Arabic ones dates back to the time of Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who deposed Pakistan’s democratic socialist president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1978. Despite his politics, Bhutto had already put Pakistan on a road toward Islamic conservatism by passing a law against blasphemy, many of whose victims have been from religious minorities. Zia took things much further, imposing public whipping as a penalty for drinking alcohol and stoning to death as a penalty for adultery. Pakistan backed the most brutally militant of rebel groups in neighboring Afghanistan against the Soviets. Promoting Islamic causes gave a clearer, unifying purpose to Pakistan, a country stitched together in 1948 from a collection of provinces—including Chitral—that had little but religion in common. Constant tension with India, Pakistan’s majority-Hindu eastern neighbor, also helped create a feeling that being more Islamic was the same as being more patriotic. Widespread corruption created a sense that only the pious could be trusted to run things honestly. Zia’s successors never quite rolled back the changes he had made.

When eventually a plane reached Chitral, with me on board, I saw that the valley’s floor was flat and green with buildings scattered across it haphazardly; a wide river flowed down its southern edge, and steep and bare mountainsides rose on either side. At one point we passed the steep slope down which McNair had come, past corpses of dead travelers. A slight mist hung over the valley, the only trace that remained of the thick storm clouds. This valley had been an independent princely state, ruled by
mehtar
s, when McNair and Robertson came through. I headed for a hotel that belonged to a cousin of the present
mehtar
. His great-grandfather had ruled the valley in Robertson’s time, and done everything possible to stop Robertson from reaching the Kam Kafirs—even going as far as bribing the Kam to kill him—out of fear that the British might be hoping to annex Kafiristan and Chitral along with it. (In reality, Chitral remained a princely state, with control over its internal affairs, until its 1969 annexation by Pakistan.)

His descendant, Shahzada Siraj ul-Mulk, was by contrast immensely helpful. He had once worked as an airline pilot, and his wife, Ghazala, had a degree in catering. When they were not entertaining diplomats at their elegant salon in Islamabad, they were looking after hunters, hikers, and writers at the hotel they ran together. As I sat by an open fire in its dining hall Siraj handed me an eighty-year-old book, falling apart at the spine, written by Colonel Reginald Schomberg. A speaker of six languages and holder of several military medals and one from the Royal Geographical Society, Schomberg visited Chitral in the course of twenty years spent exploring central Asia. (At the end of his life he would join the Catholic priesthood.) He wrote this book,
Kafirs and Glaciers,
during his travels. Marginalia written in irritation showed where Siraj’s father had once disputed the book’s unkinder observations on the Chitralis. Schomberg had made a gloomy prediction about the Kalasha, the only non-Muslims in Chitral, in particular. “Before very long,” he had written, “they will be persuaded—so gently, so blandly, but so firmly—to become Mohammedans and will be bad Muslims instead of good pagans.”

I was soon to have a chance to come to my own conclusion on the subject, because I set off the next day to see the nearest Kalasha valley in the company of Siraj himself, a driver, and a Pakistani photographer called Zulfikar who was also staying at the hotel and was keen to see the Kalasha. Given that there are three hundred thousand Chitralis in all, and only four thousand are Kalasha, I was not surprised that the road we drove along was lined with signs showing the Muslim names for God: the Merciful, the Glorious, He Who Grants Power, He Who Takes Power Away. After half an hour we crossed the Chitral River, which I had seen running along the southern side of the main valley, and turned into a narrow gorge whose shale sides, lined with complex striations, looked like a frozen waterfall. Thirty feet or so below us a tributary of the Chitral, the Kalasha River, thundered at the gorge’s bottom. The road headed upward, higher into the mountains.

The village of Grom, in the Kalasha valley of Rumbur, has the benefit of electricity but still must contend with cold and snow for much of the year. The Kalasha’s poverty and remoteness have protected them from pressure to adopt Islam. Photo by the author

The springs of our car groaned as it bumped over the road’s rocky surface, and there were stretches where the gorge was barely wide enough for the car and the driver had to concentrate to make sure that he had chosen the precise angle that would neither scratch its doors on the cliff to our left nor send its wheels over the edge of the precipice on our right. I was amazed to learn that a minibus made this journey regularly. Electric wires stretched all along the length of the road, for miles and miles—showing that even if the Pakistani state was fragile and inefficient, it was still capable of delivering some services to its people.

After a time the gorge opened out to become a valley. We passed occasional houses by the roadside: at first these belonged to Muslim families, as I could see from the fact that the girls standing outside were veiled. After we had driven for another hour or so I saw much brighter clothes hanging out to dry on branches of roadside trees, and then a woman dressed in a black gown with complex red, white, and yellow embroidery and a headdress made from many-colored wool, white cowrie shells, and a red pompon, plus jangly earrings. We were among the Kalasha of Rumbur valley, one of the three in which they still can be found. They were in the midst of celebrating their winter solstice festival. Our car came to a stop in a small village called Grom. The valley, which here was around two hundred yards wide, had steep sides covered in snow and dotted with fir trees, while its fields were mud-brown. It was around 2:00 p.m., but the sun would soon dip beneath the hilltop. We headed for a house built in the style of a Swiss chalet with slate rock and wooden beams. A Kalasha man called Azem Beg—Beg being an honorific title rather than a surname, for the Kalasha do not generally use surnames—came out and greeted Siraj by hanging several brightly colored garlands around his neck. (Many of the Kalasha were wearing these for the festival.) He invited us into a wooden barn still under construction, where we stood shivering for a few moments as a cold wind came through its windowless window frames. Azem Beg seemed not to notice the cold. His two small children, a boy and a girl, joined us, bringing more garlands in different colors, and necklaces of threaded almonds. “Ishpata,” they said, which means “hello” in the Kalasha language.

An older man brought a bowl of burning embers to warm us and offered us tea and wine. “I add wine to my tea,” he said; “it improves the flavor.” In the seventeenth century before their mountain kingdom was reached by Westerners, the Kafirs’ wine somehow reached the Portuguese Jesuit Bento de Goes and won his approval. I found it surprisingly good, too, and invited Azem Beg to try some. He reached out his hand for it and then drew it back. “I forgot,” he said, “that we are in the middle of the festival, and this house is unclean. I may not eat or drink in an unclean house.”

This rule turned out to be central to Kalasha life. The Kafirs, as Robertson described them, were a collection of tribes whose customs varied (the Kam were much more warlike than the Kalasha, for instance) but who shared essentially the same religion. All Kafirs, for instance, had a whole series of opposing principles that governed their lives. The right hand, the male sex, the high mountains, purity, odd numbers, and life all were affiliated with each other; to these were opposed the left hand, the female sex, the low valleys, impurity, even numbers, and death. So the men sat on the right-hand side of their houses and the women on the left. Likewise, it was men who herded the goats and women who planted crops, men who went into the mountains and women whose place was the valleys, and women who were prone to all kinds of impurity.

Many of these rules are still kept by the Kalasha. In particular, the higher places of the mountains are reserved to men only during the months that follow Chaumos. A house that is clean for the festival is one that has been purified with juniper branches and which has no impure house higher than it on the mountainside. A short while after our sojourn in the barn, I was scolded for touching a village house as I passed it, since even this made it impure, and meant more juniper branches would need to be burned to restore its pristine state.

Yet the Kalasha are tolerant, when issues of purity are not involved. As we stood in the barn, Siraj Ulmulk’s long-bearded Muslim driver meekly bowed his head to receive a festival garland from a small Kalasha boy. The Kalasha did not bat an eyelid when the driver, a few minutes later, got up onto a trestle table—a cleaner surface than the floor—and prostrated himself in Islamic prayer. They are accustomed to living side by side with Muslims, because some Kalasha in the village have converted to Islam. The female converts are obvious because of their demure pastel-colored dresses and headscarves. Male costume is the same for Kalasha men as for local Muslims. It was a rather eerie thing, as I walked through the Kalasha village, to see a man looking just like the fiercely Muslim Pashtuns, wearing the shift and trousers known as the
shalwar kameez,
topped with a blanket to fend off the chill, and a flat Chitrali cap on his head, regarding me with a fixed stare—and only the brightly colored garland around his neck and a feather in his cap would tell me that he was not a Muslim but a festival-going Kalasha on his way to honor one of his gods.

Siraj returned to the hotel, while Zulfikar and I—who were going to stay the night—walked toward the center of the village, where the villagers were going to dance later to mark the solstice. On the way we passed the
bashali
, a house in the middle of the village where women must stay during their menstrual periods. Schomberg, back in the 1930s, had made it sound like a terrible place, where even a midwife could only enter after stripping naked, and which no man could even approach. Seventy years seemed to have changed this custom somewhat for the better. The
bashali
is now a wooden building constructed recently with funds raised by Dr. Lerounis, and the three women staying there were standing by the entrance and cheerfully talking to passers-by.

Kalasha women must go to the
bashali
while menstruating, to live apart. The rule is not harshly enforced however, and these three women have come out to socialize with passers-by. Photo by the author

We crossed a wooden bridge over the Kalasha River, gripping the handrail tightly to avoid skidding on the bridge’s icy surface. On the other side huge wooden casks stood by the river’s edge. There was no need to lock these, I noticed: they were left open, and each family stored their own supply of wine and nuts inside. I saw an example of the way two religions coexisted here, spotting a herdsman leading goats for the Chaumos sacrifice past the Voice of the Koran madrasa. The preparations for the festival were accompanied by an Islamic call to prayer, broadcast by loudspeakers from the mosque and echoing off the snowy hillsides.

When my fellow guest Zulfikar and I went to the dance, we were shown to a place a little apart from the dancers. In front of us a row of curious Muslim girls stood quietly, demurely rearranging their head scarves from time to time, watching their more boisterous cousins. In terms of the Kalasha religion, Muslims are considered impure at festival time because they do not undergo the purification ritual with which the festival begins (for which men must sacrifice a goat and women be censed with burning juniper). If they stay in a house or touch a dish of food, they make it impure, and they may not join in the religious celebrations, but must watch from a distance. Schomberg recorded a similar example of segregation while attending the Kalasha spring festival in 1935. “A very melancholy-looking party of [Muslim converts] were huddled apart on a roof,” he recorded, “watching with longing eyes the merriment of their former co-religionists.”