The Beautiful Kalasha
By Dr Amineh Hoti
Islamabad
If you want to know and feel what ‘magical’ is in Pakistan, understand the Kalasha and ideally help them after you visit them in their valleys. I went to visit the Kalasha to get to know and write about them for my work and I lost my heart to them.
The journey there was not easy: PIA flights, which we had booked both ways to Chitral, got cancelled so in the freezing cold of late December in 2018 with my young daughters aged nine and twenty-three I visited them by traversing a terribly dangerous road. The journey lasted about seventeen hours in total, most of it on a very bumpy dirt-road, with no barriers and falls down the cliffs that would give the bravest of us humans goose bumps!
But the trouble that it takes to get there is completely worth the journey: The Kalasha are a beautiful people. They are proud of their ancestry and rich history. They say they were once rulers of a wide area which included much of Chitral and Afghanistan. As descendants of Shalak Shah, who was a general in the army of Alexander the Great, and who stayed behind in present-day Pakistan, they have a sense of Greek pride. Their sense of self as leaders and rulers is so positive that many of them have given themselves and their children the names of thinkers and heads of state: Iqbal, Quaid-i-Azam, Bhutto, Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif, even Razia, named after the Queen, Diana, and so on and so forth.
The Kalasha said they were attacked twenty-five times by other peoples and tribes and during this time they lost a lot of precious belongings, even possibly their sacred texts. They like to be referred to as the “Kalasha”, in contrast to “The Kalash” which they say the Chitralis call them. The Kalasha see themselves as peace-loving people. Their leader and elected Chairman Saifulla Jan Taj said since hundreds of years not a single Kalasha has killed another person, nor have they ever stolen anyhing, because both murder and theft do not exist in their culture and religion.
When I spoke with the local Chitralis, some of them said, “The Kalash are Christians”. Others said, “They are kafirs”. The Kalasha elders told me that they are not ‘kafir’. Kafir is used for a person who denies and is ignorant of God, but they believe in one God. Millat Gul, the daughter of a KalashaQazi, said, “We believe in doing good and we believe in Allah, EikKhuda and call him Khodai. We are not kafir!”
The Kalasha family is strongly bonded and the families we visited lived next to one another. They live in houses made from wood, stone and mud, all natural materials. All houses are beautifully designed – even in the cold of the severe winter the stoves that were placed in the center of the living rooms would warm up the rooms while the stoves were used for cooking. Men and women both help in domestic chores. At birth, baby girls are as welcome as baby boys, I was told by my twenty-two-year old friend Razia, daughter of Bhutto, who caringly put us up in his home. And girls in the valley have now attained high levels of education, including master’s degrees and some aimed to do their PhDs and most want to be professionals. As a people, the Kalasha are caring, hospitable and warm greeting each other and their guests every time they meet with “Ishpatha!” meaning hello or salam. Even relations between the opposite sexes are not cold or formal as in many tribal families elsewhere in Pakistan, but is human, natural, and warm.
Marriage often takes place as a result of love and couples who love each other beforehand either run away together during festivals or take their mother’s approval. During the Chawmus festival I attended in December, about thirteen couples got married. They were love marriages. But if a girl is not happy she may decide to leave the marriage and this is not at all considered bad, I was told, even if she has children from the marriage. So women do not suffer in silence and in pain as many Pakistani women do in difficult marriages.
There are many other rules of the Kalasha way of life based on giving people space and recognition of their human needs. Customs are based on purity and pollution: women are often confined to a bashali house during childbirth until they are pure ten days after birth. Men are forbidden in these places to give women space for rest and recovery.
But the Kalasha as lovely and attractive a communal family as they are to the world draw many foreigners and locals to them every year, have many unresolved problems and challenges. They seek and request the government to build proper and safe roads to their valleys, to put up hospitals, to build universities and colleges in their areas so they do not have to travel all the way to Chitral and Peshawar to study under “bad teachers” as one young university going Kalasha girl told me, and they wish for employment so that they may improve their living conditions further.
• The beautiful Kalasha girls, dressed in unique and colorful clothes also spoke of being harassed, even to this day, by local people, particularly men who want to take their pictures and worse who perceive them as sexual objects. Kalasha women have been forced to put on a shawl and cover their faces because of harassment from male visitors from other parts of Pakistan. But as Arab Gul, the archeologist, said to me, “We Kalasha girls may not wear the head covering like the Chitrali women, but we have a lot of self-respect and honor. We are not just our clothes, we have a rich culture and heritage. We want to be seen with the eye of ezat – honor – and dignity.”
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