Place · fair town & assembly hall · Pakistan
Sibi
Also known as Sibi — the mela and the jirga
A town at the foot of the Bolan where the plain meets the passes, and for that reason the place Balochistan assembles. The Sibi Mela each February is among the oldest and largest livestock fairs of the region — horse and cattle shows, tent pegging, camel racing and Balochi performance — drawing breeders from across the province and from Afghanistan. The Jirga Hall of 1903 housed the Shahi Jirga, the assembly of Baloch and Pashtun chiefs through which the British governed and in which Balochistan's status was settled in 1947.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.550, 67.883
Worth knowing
Sibi routinely records temperatures above fifty degrees and has touched 52.8, which makes the town that holds the province's great February fair one of the hottest inhabited places on earth for the rest of the year.
Connections (3)
- Patronage networkKalāt
Sibi is where the Khanate was governed from, in the sense that mattered. The Shahi Jirga, the assembly of Baloch and Pashtun chiefs through which the British ran Balochistan, met in the Jirga Hall at Sibi, and it was that body — not a legislature and not the Khan — that was consulted on the province's future in 1947. Kalat kept the throne and the dynastic claim; Sibi held the meeting. The two together are how indirect rule actually worked on this plateau.
- Site adjacencyPirak
The Kachi plain around Sibi holds a remarkable density of the region's deep past within a few dozen kilometres: Mehrgarh from about 7000 BCE, Nausharo taking the sequence into the Harappan, and Pirak carrying it on from 1800 BCE with horses, camels and rice. Sibi itself is the historic market town of that plain and the foot of the Bolan. The same flat ground that gives the archaeologists their sequence gives the province its February livestock fair, and for the same reason: it is where the hills let go.
- AnaloguePushkar
The two great livestock fairs at either end of the arid west, and both are older than the states they are in. Pushkar's fair gathers around the lake in Kārtik, with camel trading folded into a pilgrimage; Sibi's Mela is held in February at the foot of the Bolan, with horse and cattle shows, tent pegging, camel racing and Balochi performance, drawing breeders from across Balochistan and over the Afghan border. Both are markets that became festivals, and in both the animals are still the point.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sibi” and “Sibi Mela”. Pakistan Meteorological Department records; Imperial Gazetteer of India, Baluchistan volume, on the Shahi Jirga.
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