Balochistan’s history preserved in heroic poetry

The previous chapter, on Mir Chakar Rind and the Rind-Lashari wars, noted again and again that there is no contemporary written source for these events. How, then, did the stories reach us? The answer is one word: poetry. The Baloch tribes kept their history not in books but in poems, and for centuries these poems travelled in the memory of singers. This chapter looks at what this poetry is, who preserved it, when it was written down, and how far historians trust it.

Daftar: poems of lineage

In the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Josef Elfenbein writes that only a part of classical Balochi poetry has so far been collected and published. The oldest poems are called “Daftar poetry”, or “poems of the register”, because they list the names of persons, tribes and places like a register. Elfenbein says they may date back to the 16th century CE. According to the Iranica article on oral literature, the main subject of these “Daftar” cycles is the history of the Baloch people: its origins, genealogies and tribal fights, with love stories woven in here and there.

In his 1904 book “The Baloch Race”, Mansel Longworth Dames wrote that the oldest poems name tribal units, or “bolaks”, and count forty-four of them. No complete list of these has survived.

The Chakar cycle: a thirty-year war

According to Elfenbein, a large part of Balochi heroic poetry is divided into “cycles” whose constant theme is tribal conflict. The most important and widest is the “Chakar cycle”: the many poems concerning Mir Chakar Rind, most of which are about the thirty-year war between the Rind and Lashari tribes. On the basis of internal evidence, Elfenbein places these events probably between 1475 and 1525. Some poems are attributed to Beborg, a companion of Mir Chakar, but Elfenbein says the age and authenticity of such attributed poems cannot be verified.

In the preface to his 1907 collection, Dames writes that the names of the poets of most poems have been preserved. A trained Dom recites the name and introduction of a poem’s poet before singing it, and this preface is regarded as part of the poem itself. He says the poets of several poems are themselves characters in the events and speak in the first person, such as the five poems exchanged between Chakar and the Lashari chief Gwaharam. Dames sees no good reason not to accept these poems as the words of those chiefs. Thus the voices of both the Rind and the Lashari have reached us.

The tradition does not end with the 16th century. The contents of Dames’s 1907 collection also list poems of later periods: “Mazari and Jamali Brahui”, “The Battle of Tibbi Lund”, “Khosa and Leghari”, and “Marri and Musa Khel”.

Hani and Sheh Murid

Linked to the Chakar cycle is a separate tale, that of Hani and Sheh Murid, which appears in Dames’s collection under the title “Murid and Hani”. Dames calls it a romantic poem about Mir Chakar and his companions, probably composed after the heroic poems of the Chakar cycle. In his summary, Hani, the daughter of Mando, was betrothed to Murid, son of Mubarak, but Chakar, while drunk, made Murid give up his fiancée to him. Dames says Chakar is still regarded as the ideal Baloch chief, yet in the poems he takes Hani from Murid unjustly.

Voice of the coast: Hammal Jiyand and the Portuguese

The clash between the coastal Baloch of Makran and the Portuguese in the 16th century is also preserved in Balochi heroic poetry. According to the 1906 Makran Gazetteer, around the beginning of the 16th century the Portuguese occupied several places on the Makran coast and clashed with the Kalmatis several times. Poems about the Kalmati hero Hammal Jiyand are a memorial of that era. Among the well-known poems of Makran, the Gazetteer mentions Hothman Kalmati’s poem describing the fight between Hammal and the Portuguese. According to Elfenbein in Iranica, Hammal lost a naval battle, was taken alive by the Portuguese and finally died in captivity.

The tradition has left marks on the ground too. The Makran volume of the 1906 Gazetteer of Balochistan says that two old guns at Gwadar and one at Pasni are popularly believed to have been taken from the Portuguese. This is “popular belief”, not proof.

Those who sang and those who remembered

Elfenbein writes that until modern times Balochi literature was wholly oral and mostly in verse, preserved only in the memory of professional narrators, singers known as Dom, Lori and Langho. According to Dames, the Doms are the hereditary minstrels of the Baloch who sing poems at tribal gatherings but are not poets themselves. A poet would have a Dom learn his poem by heart. The Makran Gazetteer says that many leading men there kept books called “daftar”, in which they wrote down their favourite poems in Persian script.

Under the pen: when the poems were written down

According to Elfenbein, the oldest datable written records of Balochi are three manuscripts in the British Museum, written in the first half of the 19th century. From the 1850s this poetry began to be put on paper by collectors, mostly Englishmen living in India. A. Lewis, in 1855, is the first notable name. In 1881 Rai Bahadur Hetu Ram’s Urdu “Bilochi-Nama” was printed in Lahore, and in 1885 J. M. Douie published its English translation in Calcutta, though according to Dames the translation does not include the poems. Then in 1907 came Dames’s two-volume “Popular Poetry of the Baloches”, published jointly by the Folk-lore Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. One volume has translations with an introduction and notes, the other the Balochi texts. Elfenbein regards Dames as the most important of these collectors.

According to Elfenbein, regular written literature in Balochi began in Pakistan only after about 1950, and Quetta and Karachi have always been the centres of publication. The Iranica bibliography lists Mir Sher Muhammad Marri’s “Balochi Kohnen Shairi”, published by the Balochi Academy, Quetta, in 1970. Elfenbein calls it the first collection of classical poems after Dames. In 1990 Elfenbein’s own “An Anthology of Classical and Modern Balochi Literature” was published in two volumes in Wiesbaden. Elfenbein warns that Dames’s Balochi texts contain many errors, his English translations are very free, and all his material comes from one small area.

Historians and the Brahui tradition

Scholars agree on three points. First, the poems cannot be shown to be contemporary with the events. Elfenbein says the narrators added to and altered them over centuries, though their core should be genuine. That is why their dates come with the word “probably”. Second, each poem is composed from the standpoint of one tribe, so there are several accounts of one event, and according to Dames even different versions of the same poem differ. Third, where there is no other source, these poems are the only window on history. Elfenbein calls the Hammal Jiyand cycle basically certainly historical, but writes that its details have not yet been compared with Portuguese documents.

The best-known English source on the Brahui oral tradition is Denys Bray’s 1913 book “The Life-History of a Brahui”, based on what Mirza Sher Muhammad of the Zehri tribe told him. It describes the customs of a Brahui’s life and is not a collection of heroic poems. We have found no reliable source on Brahui verse history that could be cited here.

Heroic poetry is the history of Balochistan that was written in sound before paper. The historian reads it with caution, but without it Balochistan in the 15th and 16th centuries is almost silent.

Next Sunday: The Mughals, the Safavids and the contest over Kandahar: when Balochistan came between two great empires.