Journey
Balochistan — the plateau and the Makran coast
Forty-four per cent of Pakistan's area and under six per cent of its people, which is the fact the rest follows from. The passes are what made it matter to everyone else: the Bolan up from the Indus plains and the Khojak over to Kandahar, and a city in the middle of them that the British leased and turned into the base from which Afghanistan was watched. The Kachi plain at the foot of the Bolan holds the longest archaeological sequence in the subcontinent, running from about 7000 BCE at Mehrgarh through Nausharo into the Harappan and out again at Pirak. Away from the passes the plateau ran itself, through a Baloch confederacy at Kalat and a ballad tradition about the war that broke it. The coast is barren and has only ever been about its anchorages.
Stops (21)
- Bolan Pass · the way up
The only practicable route from the Indus plains onto the plateau, and therefore the reason anything here is on anybody's map. A British army marched up it in 1839 and another was cut to pieces coming back; the railway was hacked up the gorge in the 1880s at gradients that still make it one of the steepest main lines in the subcontinent. Everything in this journey is arranged around the Bolan and the Khojak: the deep past at its foot, the garrison at its head, and the plateau behind it left largely to itself.
- Sibi · February, every year
The market town where the hills let go, and the place Balochistan assembles. The Sibi Mela each February is among the oldest and largest livestock fairs of the region, with horse and cattle shows, tent pegging and camel racing drawing breeders from across the province and over the Afghan border. The Jirga Hall of 1903 housed the Shahi Jirga, the assembly of Baloch and Pashtun chiefs through which the British governed and in which the province's future was settled in 1947.
- Mehrgarh · from c. 7000 BCE
The beginning of farming in South Asia, on the Kachi plain at the foot of the pass. Jarrige's excavations found wheat and barley, goats and cattle, the region's first pottery and the earliest cotton thread known anywhere, along with drilled human teeth that are the oldest dentistry on record. Nine thousand years of occupation in one mound, and it sits within twenty kilometres of two other sites that carry the story forward, which is why this plain rather than the Indus valley is where the sequence is read.
- Nausharo · c. 3000–2000 BCE
Six kilometres from Mehrgarh, and the join nobody else can show. The lower levels continue the local Mehrgarh tradition; the upper levels are a Mature Harappan town, with brick sizes, weights and pottery changing over in stratified order. Mohenjo-daro's own beginnings lie under the water table and cannot be dug, so the question of where the Indus cities came from is answered — to the extent it is answered — on a small mound in Balochistan rather than in the cities themselves.
- Pirak · c. 1800–800 BCE
And the sequel. Pirak's levels open as the Harappan cities are ending and they do not read as collapse: rice and sorghum appear beside the older wheat and barley, and the domestic horse and the two-humped camel show up together for the first time in the subcontinent's record, with terracotta horse-and-rider figurines to match. Villages rather than cities, but new animals and a new agriculture — which makes this small site unavoidable in every argument about when the horse arrived.
- Quetta · leased 1876
A city in a bowl at sixteen hundred metres where the two passes meet, and a cantonment before it was anything else. The British took Quetta on perpetual lease from the Khan of Kalat and by 1877 were administering the whole province from inside the Khanate's own territory; the staff college they founded still trains Pakistan's officers. The earthquake of 31 May 1935 destroyed almost the entire city in half a minute and killed between thirty and sixty thousand people, so almost nothing here predates that morning.
- Hazara Town, Quetta · from the 1890s
Quetta holds the largest Hazara population outside Afghanistan, in two walled quarters. The Hazaras are Persian-speaking Shias from the Hazarajat, the central Afghan highlands around Bāmiyān, and the first large migration followed Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān's campaigns against them between 1891 and 1893. More came in the 1980s, under the Taliban, and after 2001. They served the Raj as the Hazara Pioneers and commanded Pakistan's army in General Musa Khan; they have lived behind checkpoints since the 1990s.
- Ziārat & the Residency · the summer seat
The hill station above Quetta, standing in a quarter of a million acres of juniper — one of the largest and oldest stands of its kind anywhere, with trees reckoned at several thousand years growing about an inch a decade. The British built a timber Residency here as the summer seat of the Agent to the Governor-General, and Jinnah spent most of the summer of 1948 in it being treated for the tuberculosis and cancer that had been concealed throughout the Pakistan campaign, before being flown to Karachi to die.
- Khojak Pass & the Chaman line · 1891
The other gate, pointing at Kandahar. After the Second Afghan War the British drove a tunnel nearly four kilometres under the pass at Shelabagh so that troops could be moved toward Kandahar at speed — still the longest railway tunnel in Pakistan — and laid rail to Chaman, then stopped at the frontier by design. The tunnel mouth was printed on the five-rupee note, which made the most reproduced image of Balochistan for decades a hole bored through a mountain to invade somewhere else.
- Kalāt · 1666–1948
The seat of the Ahmadzai Khans, and the nearest thing the Baloch had to a state: a confederacy founded in 1666, at its height under Mīr Nasīr Khān Noori between 1749 and 1794, who campaigned with Ahmad Shāh Durrānī and then beat off the expedition sent to enforce Durrānī suzerainty. It declared independence in August 1947 and acceded to Pakistan in March 1948 — the last of the large accessions and the most argued-over, with the Khanate's records, Pakistani official history and Baloch nationalist accounts all disagreeing.
- Mīr Chākar Khān Rind · 1468–1565
The Rind chief at the centre of the Baloch heroic age. His thirty-year feud with Gwaharām Lāsharī broke the first Baloch confederacy and became the subject the whole ballad tradition is built around. Having lost Sibi he went east, allied with Humāyūn against Sher Shāh Sūri, and took land in the Punjab, where he is buried at Satghara in Okara district. The migration that followed him settled the Baloch tribes along the Indus's right bank, which is what the Derajat is.
- Hāni and Sheh Mureed · sung, not written
Balochi literature was oral for most of its life, carried by professional minstrels in cycles about the Rind–Lāsharī wars, and its central romance is Hāni and Sheh Mureed. Mureed, betrothed to Hāni, loses her to Mīr Chākar through an inattentive answer to a ritual question at an assembly, leaves for Makkah, and returns a dervish who will not take her back when she is finally offered. The great Balochi tragedy turns on a spoken formula rather than a battle.
- Baloch needlework (doch) · counted, not drawn
The embroidery on the front panel of the Balochi pashk, worked in silk floss in dense geometric fields with mirrors set into them, and counted off the weave rather than traced — so the pattern is carried in memory and inherited within families, and a woman who knows one can reproduce it exactly on new cloth. Makrani, Kalāti and Rakhshāni work differ enough in palette and stitch to place a garment by district. A single pashk front can take months.
- Sohr Damb, Nal · c. 3800–2000 BCE
The mound at Nal in the Khuzdar hills, and the finest painted pottery of fourth-millennium Balochistan. Nal ware is polychrome — buff ground, black outline, and the enclosed fields filled with red, blue and yellow — a technical ambition nothing else in the subcontinent attempted for another two thousand years. With Amri across in Sindh it gives the Amri–Nal culture its name, and the German re-excavation between 2001 and 2004 fixed the sequence.
- Chagai / Rās Koh · 28 May 1998
Pakistan tested five nuclear devices in tunnels bored into a granite mountain of the Rās Koh in the Chagai desert, and a sixth at Kharan two days later, seventeen days after India's tests at Pokhran. The tunnels had been kept ready since the 1980s, so the gap measured a political decision rather than any engineering. The site is on ground the Khanate of Kalat ruled, and Baloch nationalist argument treats the date as something done to the province rather than by the country.
- Miri Qalat / Sassi Punnun's fort · 4th millennium BCE onward
Makran's anchor site, in the Kech valley near Turbat, with a French sequence running from the Chalcolithic to the Islamic period in a region that offers almost nothing else. Locally it is not a prehistoric site at all but Punnun's fort, from the Balochi romance of Sassi and Punnun that Shāh Abdul Latīf also sings — so the oldest settlement in the valley is known to the people around it by the name of its saddest story.
- Sutkagan Dor · the western limit
The westernmost Harappan site known, close to the Iranian border, read by Aurel Stein as a staging post on the coastal route toward Mesopotamia. With Miri Qalat inland it marks the land and sea arms of the same movement of goods west — the reason Indus seals, carnelian and lapis turn up in the Gulf at all. The Makran coast is barren and waterless, so the Bronze Age used it exactly as everyone since has: for the anchorages and nothing else.
- Gwadar · Omani until 1958
A town on a sandy neck behind the hammerhead of Koh-e-Batil, and for most of its modern history not Pakistani. In 1783 the Khan of Kalat gave Gwadar to a defeated Omani prince and the Sultans of Muscat held it for a hundred and seventy-five years; Pakistan bought it in 1958 for three million pounds. The traffic ran both ways — Baloch have served in Omani armies for generations and Balochi is still widely spoken in Oman, so the families on both coasts are each other's relatives.
- Astola Island (Haft Talār) · Haft Talār
Pakistan's largest offshore island, forty kilometres out: seven kilometres of uninhabited rock with no fresh water, which is why it stayed a landmark rather than becoming a port. It carries the ruin of a shrine to Kali that Hindu fishermen visited by boat, and it is a nesting beach for green and hawksbill turtles, which made it the country's first Marine Protected Area in 2017. Arrian says Nearchus's sailors believed a nereid lived on an island here who turned men into fish.
- Hingol National Park · the park and the yātrā
Pakistan's largest national park, six thousand square kilometres of the Makran coastal range where the Hingol cuts to the sea — Sindh ibex, chinkara, and the largest population of Baloch wild sheep. It also contains a pilgrimage: the route to Hinglāj Mātā runs through it, past the active mud volcano of Chandragup, where pilgrims climb the cone to make offerings into the crater before going on to the cave.
- Hinglāj Mātā · every April
The cave at the end of the road, in a gorge of the Makran coastal range, and the largest Hindu pilgrimage in Pakistan. Hinglāj is counted among the Shakta pithas and the yātrā from Karachi has run for centuries, across desert and through the park, with Muslim Baloch of the area long involved in hosting it — the shrine is also known as Nani Mandir, and the local Muslim name for the goddess is Nani. It survives because it is remote, which is the story of most of what is left in this province.