Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  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.”

  Akiko, a Japanese woman, joined the Kalasha community when she married a Kalasha man twenty years ago. Photo by the author

  Azem came up to Zulfikar and me. “I am sorry that you cannot join us,” he said. “Only those who are here in the valley at the start of the festival can take part. But if you had been here,” he said to me, “it would not have been a problem: Muslims cannot join in, but foreigners can.” And in fact I could see a German man, with camera around his neck, and his wife twirling themselves around and waving their arms almost as gracefully as the Kalasha. Presumably he had been there for the goat sacrifice. There was also a lady in full Kalasha costume, complete with cowrie shells—but, unlike any others among the Kalasha women, she was also wearing spectacles. And her features were certainly not Kalasha. She was Japanese. Later I had a chance to speak to her briefly. Her name was Akiko and she had been living in the valley, she said, for twenty-five years. She had come to photograph the region and had fallen in love with a local man. She felt part of a family there, she said: when she visited Japan now, it felt like an alien, individualistic place.

  Zulfikar, a Muslim, took his exclusion with good grace, and even apologized to Azem for having shaken his hand (which must have made him impure). “It’s useful for them to have this rule,” he commented to me. “It stops them from being overrun by visitors.” This was not a potential problem in the winter, but I was told that the summer festival attracted many Pakistani tourists who were as intrigued as those from Greece or countries even further afield. Many of the visitors were friendly, but some came with the wrong idea: they expected that because Kalasha women did not wear veils and were not Muslims, they would be available for sex. Lurid tales of a custom called the budhaluk—when a Kalasha man once a year was chosen from the community, consecrated himself by spending time in the high mountains, and then impregnated as many women as possible—had helped spread this idea. In fact, the Kalasha are very reserved about sex, and during Chaumos it is completely forbidden even between married couples. This does not stop prostitutes from coming from other parts of Pakistan to exploit the legend by dressing as Kalasha women, though, trading on this desire for the exotic.

  In any case, though Zulfikar and I did not actually take part in the afternoon’s dance, we had a good view. It began with a great milling about of Kalasha women—for whom synthetic fabrics have opened up an entire rainbow of colors to wear, oranges and pinks and yellows alongside the traditional red and black—and men, who dressed much more tamely in shalwar kameez and Chitrali cap. Kalasha boys had adopted Western clothes and baseball caps. In the midst of the crowd I could catch sight of some brave individuals dancing while surrounded by a circle of chanting and cheering onlookers. Gradually, men and women formed human chains and began to dance in earnest.

  Zarmas Gul prepares a traditional meat chapati for the festival of Chaumos, the winter solstice, when days begin to grow longer and nights to shorten. Photo by the author

  Men and women danced not as partners but in separate groups, and they chanted as they danced. I asked Azem Beg what the words meant. “It is about the return of the god, coming to rejoin us,” he replied. “And they say our uncles’ sons and our aunts’ daughters have come to celebrate with us.” Every twenty minutes, he said, the chant changed. Over the course of the festivities, the various chants made up a lengthy paean to Balimain, the god of the festival, who comes from afar on a winged horse to collect the petitions of the Kalasha. Children dashed about among the dancing adults, playing games of chase. They were almost never told off. Sometimes the boys would form little groups, linking arms and chanting at the girls. This proved to be a strategic error. One girl realized that the boys, having linked arms, would find it hard to disentangle themselves in time to chase after her. So she kicked the middle boy between the legs and sped away, laughing merrily.

  After a while the daytime dancing started to subside, and the Kalasha headed home to prepare for another dance that would take place at night. I went to the guesthouse where we were spending the night, which was run by Azem’s relative Zarmas Gul and her husband. (Again, Gul is not a surname but a term of endearment—it means “flower”—stuck onto the end of her given name.) I watched as Zarmas Gul sat by a wood stove making mutton bread, which resembled a Cornish pasty, but was far better because it was made with fresh meat. An old computer was playing Hindi music alternating with American pop, and while waiting for the stove to heat up, our Kalasha hostess, in her elaborate embroidered dress, moved gently in time with the rhythm of Rihanna. Her daughter sat nearby, wearing a track suit instead of the traditional embroidered dress (“She’s a tomboy, but she does agree to wear Kalasha dress for school,” Azem Beg told me later), and occasionally taking over the computer to play a game on it.

  Despite these intrusions of a more modern way of life—made possible, of course, by the power lines that I had seen running along the gorge—the Kalasha daily routine otherwise remains unassisted by modern conveniences. Even the smallest meal in the village took preparation—wood had to be cut, collected, stored, and kept dry, and even to fry an egg, the fire had to be lit. How hard it must be to wash clothes in this freezing winter, I thought. The consolation was that the stove quickly made the room very warm and felt all the more so because we knew how cold it was outside.

  Conditions must have been unimaginably tougher for the Kam in Robertson’s time—in an even higher place in the mountains, and without electricity or income from tourism. Yet Robertson said that they were “never melancholy”—perhaps because they were so unremittingly social. They never understood, for instance, that he sometimes wanted to be alone. When he retreated to his room in the hope of writing in peace, he noted in frustration, they assumed that there was something wrong with him and would make a special point of coming into his room and trying to cheer him up. (He could get rid of them only by asking them to teach him their language: teaching him bored them so much that they would invariably walk out almost at once.) The Kalasha, too, seemed content in their valley. Few of them, even among those who had converted to Islam, chose to leave for a career in the cities. From my own Western standpoint, every day seemed to be a struggle for them, but I reflected that they also never had to deal with the problems modern urbanites face: being in a crowd of strangers, being the odd one out, being lonely.

  That evening, the second round of dancing began after dark. From our guesthouse Zulfikar and I could see blazing torches appear farther down the valley, and hear the distant sound of singing. Then a group of young men and women materialized slowly out of the darkness and headed toward a nearby field. We followed them, keeping a respectful distance. At the field we saw dots of light appearing all over the hillside, which turned out to be brushwood torches carried by Kalasha descending from their mountain villages. A hubbub arose as people greeted each other, sometimes after months of separation. The dancing lasted through the night, lit by the flames of a huge fire. Even though snow fell steadily, the Kalasha seemed not to notice. Warmth and light and human vigor were driving away the dark and cold, presaging the summer to come. When I got up the next morning, Azem Beg was still awake—he had gone in the early morning, after the dancing, to congratulate a number of couples that had gotten married the day before.

  Azem’s father had been an elder among the Kalasha, but they were traditionally an egalitarian and democratic people without permanent leaders. Robertson found that when
Kam leaders had to make important decisions, they always waited for other members of the tribe to express an opinion and then agreed with whatever the majority said. In cases where there was a serious division and no clear majority, Kam politicians had recourse to a tactic only rarely employed by politicians in Western democracies: they would literally hide so that they could avoid making a divisive decision. Among the Kalasha, there are elders called gaderakan who check to make sure that the community performs its rituals correctly; they are unpaid volunteers, not really priests in the normal sense.

  —————

  That night I slept in a Kalasha home, glowing embers in the stove keeping the room warm. In the morning, after the rising sun had taken the edge off the valley’s nighttime chill, I had the chance to see a different style of dancing. Another of the Kalasha valleys—the farthest from Rumbur, called Birir, being several hours’ journey by car—had solstice celebrations of a slightly different kind. Zarmas Gul was from the valley and had told us about the festival, though my own Kalasha companions did not even seem to know about it—it seemed that news did not travel much between Birir and Rumbur, perhaps because few Kalasha either have cars or see strong reasons to leave their own valleys to make the tough journey by foot to see the other Kalasha communities. Azem and Wazir, a Kalasha who had converted to Islam, came with me.