Brahui: one language, one puzzle

In the previous chapter, we saw how the Baloch tribes settled in this region, arriving from Kerman and Makran. But in the mountains around Kalat another language is also spoken. It is like neither Balochi, nor Persian, nor Pashto. It is Brahui. According to linguists, it is related to the Dravidian languages of southern India, that is, the family of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. This is the question that has been called “the Brahui problem” for nearly a century: how did a language of the Dravidian family reach the mountains of Balochistan, when, in Bray’s words, it is an isolated island hundreds of miles from its relatives?

Where the language is spoken

According to Josef Elfenbein’s article “Brahui” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, the core area of Brahui speakers is a narrow strip. It begins a little south of Quetta and runs through Noshki, Kalat and Khuzdar to Lasbela. This is the area historically called Sarawan and Jhalawan. Elfenbein says the language has no major dialect differences. The only notable difference is in the pronunciation of “h”, which varies between the Sarawani speakers of the north and the Jhalawani speakers of the south.

According to Bray, the 1931 census counted 162,688 Brahuis in Balochistan and fewer than 225,000 in the whole of India. According to Iranica, censuses have tended to confuse Brahui tribesmen with those who give Brahui as their mother tongue.

In the eyes of European scholars

In the mid-nineteenth century, Robert Caldwell, in his famous book “A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages” (1856), established the Dravidian languages as a family separate from Sanskrit. But his mind on Brahui was not entirely clear. He linked it to the same source as Punjabi and Sindhi, and saw in it only a Dravidian element. According to Iranica, the first formal scholarly answer to the question came in 1880 from the German scholar Ernst Trumpp. His paper appeared in the journal of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and is regarded as the first scientific study of Brahui. Iranica writes that Trumpp showed Brahui to be Dravidian in its base, answering Caldwell’s doubts, although those doubts were not fully removed even in the 1913 edition of Caldwell’s book.

The biggest later work is that of Denys Bray, an officer and scholar of British India. The first part of his book “The Brahui Language”, covering introduction and grammar, was printed in Calcutta in 1909. In 1913 the Royal Asiatic Society published his “The Life-History of a Brahui”, which records traditions and customs told by Mirza Sher Muhammad. In 1934 further parts of the work came out in Delhi. Part II was titled “The Brahui Problem” and Part III was an etymological vocabulary. According to Iranica, it was here that Bray gave the question this name.

Structure of the language

According to Iranica, Brahui has its own Dravidian words for one, two and three: asit, irat and musit. All counting from four onwards is taken from Balochi. So the most basic stock of the language is Dravidian, covered by a thick layer from centuries of living as neighbours.

In Iranica, Elfenbein cautiously estimates that about 20 per cent of Brahui words come from Balochi, while genuine Dravidian words are only about 15 per cent. Persian and Arabic words are also numerous, about 35 per cent. The influence of Sindhi and Saraiki (Jatki) is also clear in the vocabulary, although, in Elfenbein’s words, it has not reached the deep structure of the language. According to Elfenbein, Brahui’s link with Kurukh and Malto, in the northern branch of the Dravidian family, is now largely established.

Two main explanations of the puzzle

Now the real question: how did this language get here? There are two main views, and neither is settled.

The first view, which Iranica calls the most common theory, is that the Brahuis are the remnants of a Dravidian population that entered India from the north-west in the third millennium BC, and part of which stayed behind in Sarawan and Jhalawan. Some holders of this view, Bray among them, also link it to the Indus Valley civilisation. But the link is conjectural because, as Bray himself wrote, the script on the Indus Valley seals could not be read.

The second view is that Brahui speakers came to this area much later. Elfenbein argued this view in his paper “A Periplus of the Brahui Problem” (1987). According to his own article in Iranica, the more acceptable view is the one put forward in 1924 by the French scholar Jules Bloch. It holds that the Brahuis are relatively recent migrants from the western Deccan. They probably set out in small groups around the seventh century and reached the heights of Kalat by the twelfth century or somewhat earlier.

Written history helps little with this question. According to Iranica, the first certain written mention of the Brahuis is in seventeenth-century Mughal writings about the Khanate of Kalat. History before that is based on conjecture.

What physical evidence says

Physical evidence does not settle the matter either. According to Iranica, the Brahuis cannot be told apart physically from their Jat and Baloch neighbours. According to the Imperial Gazetteer (1908), Risley, on the basis of measurements, placed them with the Baloch and Afghans in a “Turko-Iranian” group.

But caution is necessary here. Physical or genetic similarity does not decide the question of language. Resemblance to neighbouring populations may be the result of living together and intermarrying for centuries, and it fits both explanations. Bray wrote in 1934 itself that language easily separates from race and passes from one people to another.

Tribal tradition and identity

Alongside these scholarly debates are the Brahui tribes’ own traditions. They were recorded in the Balochistan District Gazetteers of the British period, for example in the Jhalawan volume (1907). They are based on tribal genealogies and memories of the Kalat court, and should be read as tradition, not as linguistic proof. The Jhalawan gazetteer records that the present division into Sarawan and Jhalawan was probably established at the start of the eighteenth century in the time of Mir Abdullah Khan. According to the same gazetteer, “Jhalawan” comes from the Balochi word “jahl”, meaning below or south, and “Sarawan” means above or north. According to Iranica, the power of the Khanate of Kalat rested from the start on alliances of leading Brahui tribes and a system of patronage. The khanate will be described in Chapter 19.

Tradition of reading and writing

The written tradition of Brahui is based on the Arabic script, especially the Urdu style of writing. According to Iranica, a well-known early Brahui work is “Tohfat al-Ajaib”. It was translated from Persian into Brahui by Mulla Malik Dad Ghurshin, a Kandahari attached to the court of Mir Nasir Khan I. The original manuscript is now said to be lost. According to Iranica, the Brahui Academy was founded in Quetta in 1966, and by 1984 it had about 15 books and reprints to its name.

The Brahui puzzle is not yet solved. A language whose first three numerals point to southern India, and whose remaining counting comes from neighbouring Balochi, holds within it a whole chapter of the region’s history. Honesty requires us to say that there are two main explanations and neither is yet decisive.

Next Sunday: Mir Chakar Rind and the Rind–Lashari wars.