Place · mountain principality · Pakistan

Chitral

Function

Landscape & environmental change

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

35.846, 71.786

Worth knowing

The Kalash valleys lie within Chitral, which makes the district the one place where a pre-Islamic religion of the Hindu Kush survived — because the Durand Line put these valleys on the British side while their relatives across it were converted in 1895.

Connections (4)

• CampaignMalakand

  The two set-piece frontier sieges of the 1890s, and the same troops relieved both. Chitral's fort was held for forty-six days in 1895 and relieved by two columns, one of which crossed the Shandur in snow. Two years later the rising of 1897 pinned the garrison at Malakand. Between them they produced the system that governed the frontier for fifty years — agencies, political agents, subsidised tribal levies and punitive columns — and a great deal of the literature, including a subaltern's first book.

• Site adjacencyThe Kalash valleys

  The Kalash valleys — Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir — lie in Chitral district, and that administrative fact is why they exist. Chitral was a princely state under British and then Pakistani suzerainty, on the eastern side of the Durand Line; the related Kāfirs on the western side were conquered and converted by Amīr Abdur Rahmān Khān in 1895 and 1896. The Mehtars of Chitral taxed the Kalash but did not convert them, so a religion of the Hindu Kush survived on one side of a border drawn two years earlier.

• Route adjacencyShandur Pass

  The Shandur is Chitral's road east, and the polo on it is the rivalry that road produced. At three thousand seven hundred metres the pass carries the highest polo ground in the world, and each July Chitral and Gilgit play there in the free-style form — six a side, no umpire, the ball struck from the throw-in at a gallop. The 1895 relief column came over this pass in snow to reach the besieged fort; the same crossing now carries a tournament between the two districts it joins.

• Route adjacencyThe Wakhan Corridor

  Chitral's northern passes — the Dorah and the Broghol — lead over into Badakhshan and the Wakhan, which is what made a small mountain principality strategically interesting to two empires at once. The 1895 boundary settlement that created the Wakhan corridor also fixed Chitral's status as a British-protected state, precisely so that the approaches from the Pamirs into India would be in known hands. The 1895 siege of the fort happened in the middle of that settlement being negotiated.

On these journeys

• The frontier — the Durand Line and the Pashtun century

Sources

Wikipedia, “Chitral” and “Chitral Expedition”. G. J. Younghusband, The Relief of Chitral (1895); Imperial Gazetteer of India, North-West Frontier Province volume.

• Wikipedia — Chitral