Place · pass & caravan route · Pakistan
Gomal Pass
The third of the great passes, with the Khyber and the Bolan, and the least remembered. The Gomal river runs down from the Ghazni uplands to the Indus at Dera Ismail Khan, and its valley carried the winter caravans of the Povindah nomads out of Afghanistan into the Indian plains for centuries. It is a traders' route rather than an army's: too long and too waterless for a campaign, but workable for thousands of camels moving with the season.
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 31.917, 69.317
Worth knowing
Because the Gomal was a commercial rather than a strategic pass, it was left to the tribes who controlled it and levied tolls on it, and the British never fortified it as they did the Khyber — so it stayed the merchants' road.
Connections (3)
- Route adjacencyThe Povindah caravans
The Gomal was the Povindah road. Every autumn Lohāni, Nāsir and Kharoti nomads brought camel caravans of thousands of animals down this valley from the Ghazni uplands, wintered in the Indus plains, dispersed across northern India to sell dried fruit, horses, wool and cloth and to lend money, and went back up in spring. The pass was never fortified the way the Khyber was, because it was too long and waterless for an army and perfectly workable for a caravan — so it stayed the traders' route and the tribes who held it took the tolls.
- Route adjacencyGhazni
The Gomal rises in the uplands behind Ghazni and comes out at the Indus, which makes it the direct line between the Ghaznavid heartland and the Punjab plains. Mahmūd's raids into India used the northern passes, but the commercial traffic between Ghazni and the Indus ran down this valley for centuries afterwards, and the Povindah caravans that still used it in the nineteenth century were the surviving end of that system — the same route, the same goods, long after the empire that made it profitable had gone.
- Site adjacencyDera Ismāʿīl Khān & the Derajat
Dera Ismāʿīl Khān is where the Gomal comes out. The pass carries the valley down from the Ghazni uplands and delivers it to the Indus plain at this town, which is why a Baloch chief's fifteenth-century foundation became the market at the foot of a caravan route — the Povindah kafilas wintered here and dispersed from here into India. The town has been moved twice because the Indus shifted, but the position relative to the mouth of the Gomal has not changed.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gomal Pass” and “Povindah”. Imperial Gazetteer of India, North-West Frontier Province volume; Robert Nichols, A History of Pashtun Migration.
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