Arrival of the Baloch tribes: from Kerman to Makran

In the previous chapter, we saw Balochistan on the edge of the great empires of the Ghaznavid and Ghorid eras. In the same period, another story was quietly unfolding, one that gave this land its present name: the arrival of the Baloch tribes. Historians, linguists and Baloch tribal tradition give different answers to where and when the Baloch came from. We will present each answer with the name of the person who gives it, and will not call any one of them final.

The oldest references: "Kuch and Baluch"

In the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Brian Spooner writes that the earliest surviving mention of the Baloch is in a Pahlavi text, "Shahrestanha-i Iranshahr". It dates from the eighth century AD but is probably based on earlier material. It counts the "Baluch" among seven autonomous mountain communities, the "Kofiyar". According to Spooner, at the time of the Arab conquest the Baloch appear to have been living in south-eastern Kerman.

The name also appears in the Persian epic "Shahnama". In his 1904 book "The Baloch Race", M. Longworth Dames quotes the verses in which "Kuch and Baluch" and the soldiers of Gilan are in the army of Kai Kavus, and a Baloch contingent in the army of Kai Khusrau is led by Ashkash. But Dames concludes only that the name Baloch was present in the old tales Ferdowsi drew on. The linguist Josef Elfenbein writes that the mention of "Kuch and Baluch" among the enemies of Nushirvan in the Shahnama cannot be historical, because Tabari does not name the Baloch among those enemies and Ferdowsi’s historical sources are the same as Tabari’s.

Arab and Persian geographers of the tenth century AD place the Baloch in the mountains of Kerman, almost always paired with another people, the "Qufs" or "Kufich" ("Kuch" in Persian). According to C. E. Bosworth, "Qufs" is the Arabic form of "Kufichi", meaning "mountain dweller", and these people lived in the mountains between Kuh-i Barez and the Gulf of Oman. The "Hudud al-Alam" (372 AH982 AD) describes "Kuh-i Kufij" as a range of seven mountains running from Jiroft to the sea, each with its own chief. Muqaddasi calls the language of these people unintelligible and similar to the language of Sindh, but Bosworth regards this statement as doubtful. Bosworth stresses that, although they are mentioned together, the Qufs and the Baloch were two separate peoples, different in descent and probably in language as well.

The campaigns of Adud al-Dawla

According to Bosworth, the Buyid amir Adud al-Dawla took Kerman in 357 AH968 AD. According to the Iranica article on Adud al-Dawla, the Kuch and Baluch were allies of the Al-i Ilyas, the local ruling family of Kerman, and had kept every central government from gaining full control of Kerman. Bosworth writes that in 360-361 AH970-972 AD Adud al-Dawla attacked the Kufich and Baluch twice. Many were killed, the Baloch were driven out of the mountains and farmers were settled in their place. The source for these events is Ibn al-Athir’s "al-Kamil". In Spooner’s words, the Baloch were defeated but remained troublesome to the governments of the Ghaznavid and Seljuk periods as well.

The evidence of language

Where history is silent, language speaks. According to Elfenbein, Balochi is by origin a "north-western" Iranian language, closely related to Parthian, Kurdish, Tati and Talysh, though borrowed words have blurred its linguistic position. On this basis he places the original home of Balochi somewhere east or south-east of the central part of the Caspian Sea. He writes that the Baloch’s own tradition, that they came from the west in the seventh or eighth century AD, holds "an echo of history". Spooner too accepts that the lineage of modern Balochi is clear and that it has the features of the "north-western" Iranian type.

From Kerman to Makran: the age of migration

On how the Baloch reached Kerman, Spooner writes plainly that it is "not known". The outline of the movement east from Kerman is somewhat clearer. According to Spooner, the Baloch began to move east, even beyond Makran, around the time the Seljuks arrived in Kerman in the fifth century AHeleventh century AD. The movement continued in fits and starts, and the major migrations took place in the sixth century AHtwelfth century AD and the ninth century AHfifteenth century AD. Elfenbein’s view is slightly different. He thinks the migrations came in several separate waves spread over many centuries, some of them well before the Seljuks reached Kerman (about 1060 AD).

Tribal tradition: from Aleppo to Kech

The Baloch tribes’ own tradition, preserved mostly in epic poetry, tells the story differently. Elfenbein writes that the oldest Balochi poems tell of the first Baloch migrations from Aleppo (their traditional homeland). According to the tradition, the tribes travelled through Sistan and Iranian Balochistan to Kech, which became their main meeting place and from where they dispersed. The main tribes in these poems are the Rind and the Lashari. According to Dames, the tradition gives Mir Jalal Khan four sons, Rind, Lashar, Hot and Korai, and a daughter, Jato, and these five names are held to be the founders of the five great tribes. Dames says the tradition links this tribal division to the last rites of Mir Jalal Khan, when the brothers performed the rites separately and five "asrokh" (memorial canopies) were built in Kech. According to Elfenbein, this "register of poetry", with its lists of names, probably dates back to the sixteenth century.

According to tradition, the Baloch are Arabs, who came from Aleppo and moved east. Scholars differ on this. Spooner writes that the claim "cannot be accepted as it stands". In Elfenbein’s words, the mention of Aleppo as the starting point in these poems is "quite mythical", and historically only the part concerning places after arrival in Iranian Balochistan is useful. Spooner offers one explanation: some Arab groups may indeed have joined the mixed tribal population east of Kerman. Dames examined the theories of Arab, Rajput and Turkoman descent and judged the theory of Iranian descent to be correct. He considered Colonel Mockler’s theory, that the Rind are in fact from the Arab "Alafi" tribe, to rest on insufficient evidence.

Towards Sindh and Punjab

The journey did not stop in Makran. According to Spooner, the first record of Baloch migration towards Sindh dates to the seventh or eighth century AHthirteenth or fourteenth century AD. He writes that in the ninth century AHfifteenth century AD another wave carried the Baloch as far as southern Punjab. This is the age of Mir Chakar Rind and Mir Gohram Lashari, whose story is also recorded in the Kachhi Gazetteer and will be told in detail in chapter fifteen.

The story is tangled because most of it happened when no historian was writing it down. We have a few sentences from geographers, an epic poetry, the evidence of a language and the memory of the tribes. Reading them side by side was the aim of this chapter.

Next Sunday: Brahui: one language, one riddle, which raises a question of its own in the middle of Balochistan.