Birir gets few tourists and is poorer than Rumbur, and many of the Kalasha in Birir were living in a large wooden building on the hillside. It was in the old style—built on several levels with staircases linking communal balconies, off which each family had a room. The steep slope of the hillside meant that each balcony was set just a little way back from the one below it. It was far more picturesque than the newer buildings in Rumbur (let alone those in the middle valley, Bomboret, which has been extensively modernized) but also much more cramped.
There was also a collection of houses on the valley floor, and we walked through this and beyond, up the valley a distance and then a short way up the hillside, to a vantage point where there stood a temple called a jestakhan—sacred to Jestak, goddess of the family. This was where the festival was taking place. A police guard outside the door had to see my passport before he allowed me into the temple—which was a single room, lined with pillars, all made of wood. Although it had been built recently, it had an air of great antiquity. Perhaps this was because of its interior pillars, which looked like an exoticized version of Ionic columns; perhaps it was the cobwebs on those pillars, which obscured the symbols carved into the wood. Most of the room was in shadow, except that through a square opening in the roof two thin rays of sun lit up the temple wall, and a window looked out onto the icy mountainside. A crowd of boys and girls were staring down at us through the opening, sitting on the roof—I guessed that they might be Muslims barred from entering.
A Kalasha singer has been rewarded for his singing at the Chaumos festival with a shiny cape. Here, outside the temple where the festival is being celebrated with dancing, he wears it proudly. Photo by the author
There were maybe eighty or even a hundred Kalasha in the room. Some sat on a bench at the back, but most were standing; the women in their multicolored dresses were lined up in the shadows. Friends greeted each other as they met, and stood chatting for a time. Others stood quietly listening to three men in shalwar kameez and Chitrali caps: one wore a sparkling cloak of synthetic fiber colored red and gold. These three were singing a simple chant in a minor key, consisting only of two notes suggesting sadness. In the corner of the jestakhan, two men beat different-sized drums to accompany the chant. Around its edges forty or fifty women formed a long line with linked arms and repeated the chant after the singers; they did not keep strictly to time, and the room was filled with discordant, melancholy notes. Standing among the men in the center of the circle, I had an experience quite different from that at Rumbur. The latter had been rough-and-tumble, while this felt solemn and mystical. The drums beat slowly, the women moved counterclockwise around the edges of the room, and the men sang on. Kalasha men came up to the singers from time to time and put crumpled rupee bills in their caps, a traditional way of rewarding good singing.
Interpreting the song, Azem told me that it had come to one of the singers in a dream, and that it related to a place in the valley where the Kalasha in the past had danced for the festival. “The god is asking, why do we not use the whole valley for Chaumos?” he translated. The scope of the festival had shrunk over the decades as the community had dwindled. Places where celebrations had once taken place were now owned by Muslims and counted as impure. How many people, I wondered, must have made this lament over the years as Islam, Christianity, or other missionary religions arrived in their homelands?
In January 2013 Kalasha women celebrated Chaumos, the winter solstice, with dancing in a temple called a jestakhan. The Kalash have many gods: Jestak is their goddess of the family. Photo by the author
The rhythm changed. The drums sped up. The women broke into groups of four and some of the men joined them, dancing around more informally and sometimes spinning about. The drumbeat became loud and fast, and I along with Wazir and his friends joined in the new dance. Groups of four, men and women separately, sped around the dance floor—counterclockwise as before—and whenever they caught up with the group ahead of them, they would bump into them. Both groups had then to face each other and laugh loudly. Alternatively, a group could spin around to face the group behind them and do the same. When I sat out one round, I saw that the insistent thump of the drums, the staccato and slightly manic-sounding laughter, and the sight of people rushing around the room made for an extraordinary madcap atmosphere. And then the drums subsided and the more stately dance resumed.
When the dancing eventually ended and we left the jestakhan, we heard more laughter and singing down the valley, near the old wooden house I had seen when we arrived. “Those are the pure boys,” Azem Beg told me: he meant virgin boys, a group who were considered especially pure in a ritual sense. In the festival they were thought to represent the community’s dead ancestors, and they went from house to house, bringing good luck and receiving presents of new clothes in return. The boys were still singing as we walked back down the valley from the jestakhan, passing as we did so a covered arcade where some of the valley’s Muslim converts were cooking themselves kebabs.
“Our hearts are open,” Azem explained to me on the journey back to his home valley of Rumbur, “so we pray in the open air.” In fact, Rumbur had a couple of stone temples, but these were small and not the focus of communal worship. The outdoor place of worship was called the sajjigor (which was also the name of the god that was worshiped there) and was located in a grove of trees beyond the northern edge of the village, which had been off-limits to me while the festival lasted. When we returned to Rumbur, however, the festival had ended and Wazir agreed to escort me there. It meant walking out of the village on its northern, higher end (the valley had hills on either side, but the valley floor, too, had a noticeable slope at this point) and heading along a path, slippery with ice, to a bridge across the river, on the other side of which the grove stood in an open field. Young men that we met along the path told us that we could look at the sajjigor provided we touched nothing. So we stood on the edge of the grove and looked through the trees at five wooden effigies, which we were careful not to approach. These, Wazir said, taking pains to defend his relatives against charges of idolatry, were not meant to represent gods. They are in fact effigies of important men in the community who have died, and are remembered a year later by their families. A stained patch on the ground near them showed where a hundred goats had been sacrificed in the previous days. A stone mound piled with twigs was where a ceremony had been held for boys who had reached the age of wearing trousers—each of them had thrown a twig on the pile as part of the ritual.
I looked again at the wooden effigies, which made me think of an episode in Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. In it, two disreputable ex-soldiers decide to set themselves up as pagan kings. “They call it Kafiristan,” one of them says to the other. “By my reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two and thirty heathen idols there, and we’ll be the thirty-third.” Thanks to their knowledge of Freemasonry symbols, which turn out in Kipling’s story to have come down to the Kafirs from their long-dead ancestor Alexander the Great, the two get away with their ruse for a while before being turned on by the Kafirs—one is killed, the other goes mad. These wooden figures reminded me of Kipling’s story and of the Kafiristan fever that had gripped Victorian British society when it was written.
—————
It was some trace of that fever that made me want to walk further north up the valley and nearer the border with Nuristan. Between the Kalasha village and the Afghan border, Wazir told me, there was a village of Nuristanis. These were descendants not of the Kalasha tribe but of the Kam whom Robertson knew; during Abdur Rahman’s invasion their ancestors had escaped forcible conversion by fleeing across the border and taking refuge in Rumbur. In a later generation their community had adopted Islam anyway, finding the rules of impurity impossible to maintain when all their cousins back in Nuristan had become Muslim. In Schomberg’s time they were called Red Kaf
irs and were blamed by the Kalasha for all kinds of mischief. I asked Wazir if he could take me to their village, and he said that he knew them and could introduce me. So we carried on walking northward from the sajjigor, recrossing the river by sliding across a precariously icy log, and clambering up to regain the main track. Above the track on the hillside at this point were some Kalasha summer houses, which were taboo for women after Chaumos. A small boy descended from one of them carrying a goat, placing his feet carefully in the packed snow that clung to the steep hillside. We clapped when he made it down safely, and he ran shyly away with the goat toward the village. We walked on, and I spoke to Wazir about religion.
Wazir was a Kalasha who had converted to Islam, which meant he could give me some insight into the challenges that faced the community as it tried to hold on to its few remaining members. Wazir told me that he had been the only Kalasha boy in his class at secondary school. “The teacher asked if there were any Kalasha pupils, and I put up my hand,” he told me. “I was the only one. I was made fun of a lot.” When they asked him questions about his beliefs, he had no answers to give them. As he told me: “If I ask Kalasha people, ‘Why do we do this thing?’ or ‘Why do we follow that tradition?’ they will only say, ‘That was how our grandparents did it.’ They don’t know what it means.” As a thoughtful boy, not having any answer to give to the other boys and teachers when they challenged him, he eventually agreed to become Muslim—a step that takes only the recitation of a single sentence (“I witness that there is only one God and that Mohammed is his prophet”) and which is effectively irreversible. If Wazir after conversion were not to continue practicing as a Muslim, he would expose his whole community to danger. Although abandoning Islam is technically not against the law in Pakistan, 76 percent of Pakistanis polled in 2010 said that it merited the death penalty. Even just a rumor that a person has left Islam can spark mob violence.
Because of this kind of experience, many Kalasha families had chosen not to send their children to school at all. The community’s Greek supporters, however, had built primary schools in all three valleys, and a secondary school in Bomboret which was open to both Kalasha and Muslims. At these schools at least some of the teachers were Kalasha, and the girls could wear their traditional outfits. The community has also begun to celebrate its own heritage: at the jestakhan in Birir, I had seen Kalasha men carrying a big old-fashioned recording device while others took videos of the dancing on their mobile phones. A museum in Bomboret has begun to compile the community’s oral heritage. Perhaps because of this renewed pride in their identity, educated Kalasha (Wazir told me) no longer converted to Islam. It remained true, however, that very few Kalasha had much to say about their beliefs, in contrast with most Muslim communities, where Islam will often have at least one outspoken advocate. Robertson, incidentally, encountered much the same problem as Wazir: “if the perplexed stranger asks the explanation of practices and usages,” he wrote, “the reply will almost invariably be . . . it is our custom.”
Historically, other factors had also encouraged Kalasha to convert—ones that appear again and again in the history of religions. The Kalasha, like other Kafirs, had serfs called bairas who were bought and sold by Kalasha and barred from marrying Kalasha of higher rank. Unsurprisingly, these unfortunates were the first to convert to Islam, as Schomberg noticed when he visited Rumbur in the 1930s (just forty years after Kafiristan had been forcibly converted). Schomberg saw a huge difference between the graves of bairas before conversion, which he compares to a pile of packing cases, and their graves after conversion, which revealed a jump in status and self-respect. (Similarly, some of Pakistan’s nearly three million Christians were once low-caste Hindus. It seemed in Iran, too, that the priestly caste of Zoroastrians had been the ones who held on to their religion the longest.)
Conversion could save a family money, too. During each festival, a Kalasha family has to give three or four goats for the sacrifice. Funerals can be cripplingly expensive: they last three days, and can involve the sacrifice of more than 80 goats and four cows. Islam involves much less personal expense. The clothing of Kalasha women is another cost that converts no longer have to take into account, since Muslim women tend to wear simple, cheaper fabrics. Conversion could also open new opportunities, especially for women, who Wazir told me formed the majority of recent converts. That surprised me, given that it meant surrendering their freedoms. But some women, I learned, had fallen in love with officials or policemen visiting from Chitral, and marrying one of these men would mean for them a more comfortable life.
In Wazir’s case, by contrast, conversion had done little good. In fact, it had complicated his life immensely, since he was the only Muslim in his village and was having difficulty finding a wife. I wondered if he ever regretted his choice. He spoke of the Kalasha virtues almost wistfully. People trusted each other, he said. Goats could be left unwatched because nobody would steal them. Theft was punished with the most draconian penalty the Kalasha imposed: expulsion of the culprit from the community. Sex before marriage was not punished, and if a woman wanted to leave her husband and marry someone else, then her husband had no right to prevent it (though he did have the right to be paid double the original bride price). In Islam wives have more difficulty initiating divorce. “And when I visit a Kalasha home,” Wazir added, “I can sit with the whole family in their room. But when I visit a Muslim friend, I must sit in a separate room,” because in strict Islamic households, a woman should only be seen by her close male relatives.
In the 1890s, Robertson had picked up on the relaxed attitude that prevailed among the Kafirs and was shocked by what he called their “gallantry.” He found that they regarded adultery, for the most part, as a matter of general hilarity. When a man and a married woman were caught making love, the tribe would come to watch and laugh; the man did not find it nearly as amusing, as he would have to pay the cuckolded husband a heavy fine (the woman did not pay a penalty). Wooden “Nuristani” chairs, recognizable by the circular patterns carved on their backs and the tall horned finials that stick up from them, decorate the salons of sophisticates and expatriates in Kabul; few of their owners know that the circles were originally intended to represent vulvas, the protruding finials were once copulating couples, and the chairs (only ever used by men) were fertility symbols. The Kalasha have a more reserved attitude than Kafirs did, but—as Wazir noted—are more liberal than Muslims in certain ways.
This village of Nuristanis stands at the top of the Kalasha valley of Rumbur. It was founded by refugees from the forcible conversion to Islam of the peoples of the region now called Nuristan. Photo by the author
As Wazir and I were walking up a mountainside on our way to the border with Nuristan, we encountered a group of his Muslim friends. “Here’s a mix of everyone around,” Wazir said as he introduced me: “a Chitrali, another Kalasha convert like myself, a Gujar, and a Nuristani.” The second-to-last man he named was from an especially dark-skinned nomad group, and the last man had brown hair and was notably fair-skinned. The Kalasha convert was stolidly carrying a big box that he had tied around his shoulders, which he planned to deliver to a shop in the Nuristani village. As we walked, the box burst and six bags of sweet bread fell out. We each gave him a hand by taking one. I had often imagined visiting a village of Nuristanis, but I had never imagined that in a snow-swept wilderness hard by the borders of Afghanistan I would be delivering them their daily supply of brioche. Nor did I expect them to be playing golf—“Nuristani golf,” that is, as Wazir called it. A group of Nuristani youths were standing on the edge of the ravine the Kalasha River—here, more like a stream—had carved in the narrow valley, hitting wooden balls across it with long pieces of wood shaped like hockey sticks while smaller children scampered to recover them. The winner was simply the person who hit the balls the farthest. Wazir was a champion player.
The village itself consisted of a single building made of wood, like the one that I had seen
in Birir. Each family had a room, and the rooms were linked to one another by balconies and exterior wooden stairways. Once inside, I found that the passages smelled of urine. An old man lay, weak and coughing, on a bed; the hearth was in the center of the room, other beds lined the walls, and a collection of shiny metal crockery was displayed on a set of shelves. (Displays of silver are mentioned by Robertson as a status symbol among the Kafirs.) The old man’s wife made tea for me and Wazir while two small boys, obviously her grandchildren, sat and stared at everything I did. One of them asked to have one of my Kalasha garlands. I gave it to him, and then the other could barely leave me alone, tugging at one of my remaining garlands in the hope that I would let him take it. I asked to take a photograph of a small girl who had been watching us from outside, but the question apparently offended the grandmother: taking pictures of the boys was allowed, but not girls. Still, the family was not quite as strict as some, because they had allowed us into their room. This was perforce shared between women and men, so some Muslims would not have allowed us to enter it. As I got up to go, a pile of bedclothes at the side of the room moved, and a woman underneath them spoke.
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