Chitral

The mehtars

Chitral lies in the Hindu Kush between Afghanistan and the Karakoram, on routes to Badakhshan and Kashgar. The Kator dynasty ruled it from the sixteenth century with the title mehtar, managing relations with Afghanistan, Badakhshan, Kashmir and eventually the British.

The siege of Chitral in 1895, in which a small British garrison held the fort for forty-seven days during a succession war before a relief column arrived over the Shandur pass, was among the more publicised episodes of the imperial frontier and led to permanent British involvement in the valley.

Chitral acceded to Pakistan in 1947 and the state was merged in 1969.

The Kalash

Three side valleys of Chitral — Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir — are home to the Kalash, some three to four thousand people who practise a polytheistic religion with altars, wooden effigies and a calendar of festivals, and who are the last community in the region not to have converted to Islam. Their religion has affinities with pre-Islamic Nuristani and older Indo-Iranian traditions and is of considerable interest for that reason.

The neighbouring Nuristan in Afghanistan, formerly Kafiristan, practised a related religion until its forcible conversion in the 1890s; the Kalash valleys, on the Chitral side of the line, escaped it. The community is small, under pressure, and much studied.