Place · tribal mountain valleys · Pakistan
The Kalash valleys
Also known as Kalash, Kalasha, Bumburet, Rumbur, Birir, Kafiristan
Three valleys in Chitral — Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir — holding the Kalash, some four thousand people with their own Indo-Aryan language, their own polytheistic religion with a pantheon and a strict purity geography, and a festival calendar of Chaumos, Joshi and Uchau.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.700, 71.650
Worth knowing
They are the last non-Muslim community of the Hindu Kush; the neighbouring valleys of Nuristan across the Afghan border, which practised a related religion, were converted by force in the 1890s, which is when the region stopped being called Kafiristan. Kalash carved wooden effigies for the dead are among the very few figurative sculpture traditions of the north-west.
Connections (3)
- AnalogueGandhāra
The Kalash valleys are a few valleys from the Gandharan Buddhist country and hold the last non-Muslim community of the Hindu Kush, with carved wooden effigies for the dead that are among the very few figurative sculpture traditions surviving in the north-west. Gandhara gave the Buddha a human face and then lost its own image-making entirely; Chitral did not.
- Site adjacencyChitral
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.
- AnalogueNuristan (Kāfiristān)
The Kalash of Chitral and the pre-Islamic Nuristanis were one religious world: related languages of the Nuristani and Dardic groups, wooden ancestor effigies, goat sacrifice, altars to a high god and a set of lesser deities, wine, and an elaborate purity code separating high ground from low. Nuristan was converted by force in 1895–96 and its carved funerary figures survive mainly in museums. The Kalash, on the other side of a two-year-old border, were not, which makes them the only living branch of the tradition.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kalash people”. Georg Morgenstierne's Kalasha linguistic work; Augusto Cacopardo, Pagan Christmas: Winter Feasts of the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush (2016).
Open The Kalash valleys in the repository →