Place · Makran port · Pakistan
Gwadar
A town on a sandy neck behind the hammerhead of Koh-e-Batil, and for most of its modern history not Pakistani at all. In 1783 the Khan of Kalat gave Gwadar to a defeated Omani prince, and the Sultans of Muscat and Oman held it for a hundred and seventy-five years; Pakistan bought it in September 1958 for three million pounds. The traffic in people ran the other way too — Baloch have served in Omani armies for generations and Balochi is still widely spoken in Oman.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.126, 62.322
Worth knowing
Gwadar was administered from Muscat for longer than Pakistan has existed, so people born there before 1958 were Omani subjects, and the Omani-Baloch families on both coasts are still one another's relatives. Its money was Indian too: from 1959 the Reserve Bank of India printed a separate rupee for circulation outside India — the same note in a different colour, told apart by its serial prefix — and it was legal tender in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the Trucial States, because the Gulf’s trade ran to Bombay and Karachi. The special issue existed to stop gold smuggling draining India’s own note circulation, and it unwound state by state: Kuwait in 1961, Bahrain in 1965, Qatar and Dubai in 1966 after India devalued without warning, Oman last in 1970.
Connections (3)
- Successor capital ofSutkagan Dor
The Makran coast has always been about the same thing: a deep-water anchorage on the run between the Indus and the Gulf. Sutkagan Dor, the westernmost Harappan site, was read by Aurel Stein as a staging post on that route four thousand years ago. Gwadar is the modern answer to the same geography — a natural harbour behind the Koh-e-Batil headland, Omani for a hundred and seventy-five years, bought by Pakistan in 1958, and now built out as a deep-sea port. The coast is barren; only the anchorages have ever mattered.
- Route adjacencyAstola Island (Haft Talār)
Astola lies about forty kilometres off the coast between Pasni and Gwadar, on the sea road that has run this shore since the Bronze Age. Nearchus took Alexander's fleet along it in 325 BCE and Arrian records the sailors' fear of an island here; the Periplus and the Arab geographers name the same anchorages. The island is uninhabited because there is no fresh water on it, which is precisely why it stayed a landmark and a fishing camp rather than becoming a port like the mainland harbours either side of it.
- Craft tradition ofBaloch needlework (doch)
Makrani doch is the coastal branch of Baloch embroidery, and Gwadar is where it travels from. Baloch families have moved between the Makran and Oman for generations — Gwadar was administered from Muscat until 1958 — so the coastal embroidery styles, with their own palette and stitch density, have a second home in the Gulf, where Baloch communities buy and commission them. The work is one of the more durable things that crossed with the people, along with the language.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gwadar”. Foreign Office records of the 1958 transfer; J. E. Peterson, Oman's Insurgencies, on Baloch service in Omani forces.
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