Person · Baloch chief
Mīr Chākar Khān Rind
The Rind chief at the centre of the Baloch heroic age. His thirty-year feud with Gwaharām Lāsharī — the Rind–Lāsharī wars of the early sixteenth century — broke the first Baloch confederacy and became the subject the entire Balochi ballad tradition is built around. Having lost Sibi, he moved east, allied with Humāyūn against Sher Shāh Sūri, and was granted land in the Punjab, where he settled at Satghara in what is now Okara district and is buried.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The central hero of Balochi epic lies in a tomb in the Punjab plains, five hundred kilometres from the hills the ballads are set in, because the wars the ballads celebrate are what drove him out of them.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textHāni and Sheh Mureed
The Balochi ballad cycle is about Mīr Chākar's war, and Hāni and Sheh Mureed is its central tragedy — Sheh Mureed loses his betrothed to Chākar through an inattentive answer at an assembly, leaves for Makkah, and comes back a dervish who will not take her when she is finally offered. The minstrels who carried the cycle sang the battles and the romance as one body of material, so the historical chief and the fictional lover belong to a single performance tradition, and the hero of the ballads is also its villain.
- Mythic displacement toDera Ismāʿīl Khān & the Derajat
The Baloch came out of the hills eastward, and Mīr Chākar is the reason the movement is dated. Defeated in the Rind–Lāsharī wars, he left Sibi, allied with Humāyūn against Sher Shāh Sūri, and took land in the Punjab, where he is buried at Satghara. The same displacement settled Baloch tribes along the Indus's right bank, which is what the Derajat is: Dera Ismāʿīl Khān and Dera Ghāzī Khān are Baloch foundations of the later fifteenth century, Baloch in origin and Saraiki in speech ever since.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mir Chakar Rind”. Balochi ballad cycle in Mansel Longworth Dames, Popular Poetry of the Baloches (1907); Punjab district gazetteer, Montgomery, on the Satghara tomb.
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