Tradition · nomad trading system · Pakistan
The Povindah caravans
Every autumn, Pashtun nomad traders — Lohāni, Nāsir, Kharoti — came down the Gomal out of the Ghazni uplands with camel caravans of several thousand animals, wintered in the Indus plains, spread out across northern India as far as Bengal and the Deccan selling dried fruit, horses, wool and cloth and lending money, and went back up in spring. The kafilas were armed and moved as organised bodies with their own law. It was a trading system run on the seasons, older than any border it crossed.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
- Location
- 31.900, 69.500
Worth knowing
Some Povindah families stopped going back and settled as moneylenders across north India, which is why Pashtun communities turn up in Bihar and Bengal with no connection to any conquest — they are the residue of a caravan that wintered and stayed.
The seasonal system effectively ended after 1947, when the new border closed the Gomal to annual migration; what survives is settled communities at both ends.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencyGomal Pass
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 adjacencyPurushapura / Peshawar
Where the Povindah caravans came out of the Gomal at Dera Ismāʿīl Khān and the Khyber at Peshawar, they met the plains and dispersed onto them. Peshawar was the first city Afghan traders reached descending, and the last one they refitted at climbing back; from it they reached Delhi, the Ganga towns, Bengal and occasionally the Deccan, selling and lending through the winter before the spring return. Pashtun trading families settled in Bihar and Bengal with no connection to any conquest at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Povindah”. Imperial Gazetteer of India, North-West Frontier Province volume; Robert Nichols, A History of Pashtun Migration 1775–2006 (2008).
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