Keynote Speakers

Dr. Elena Bashir is the president of 4th International Hindukush Cultural Conference, she has lived much of her adult life since 1961 in Pakistan.  Since 1973 she has been visiting Chitral regularly, first bringing students on field trips, then working on her doctoral dissertation on the Kalasha language, completed in 1988.  During her work on Kalasha she became aware of the many similarities, and also the interesting differences between these two languages, which she has continued to study.

She has also done field work on other indigenous languages of Pakistan, including Wakhi, Burushaski, Shina, Balti, and Balochi, about which she has published several articles. She has two books on languages of Pakistan:  The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia, edited by Hans Henrich Hock and Elena Bashir, and A Descriptive Grammar of Hindko, Panjabi, and Saraiki, by Elena Bashir and Thomas J. Conners.

Title of her paper is "Three Khowar-English dictionaries and some spelling issues".

The purpose of her talk is to introduce the three Khowar dictionaries that she has been involved with for the past more than twenty years and to discuss some of the spelling questions that have been addressed, and problems that remain.  These dictionaries are:  1. A Digital Khowar-English Dictionary with audio, 1^st edition, 2005 by Elena Bashir, Maula Nigah Nigah, and Rahmat Karim Baig. A digital Khowar-English dictionary with audio,  2. A Digital Khowar-English Dictionary with audio, 2^nd  edition, 2022 by Elena Bashir, Maula Nigah Nigah, and Rahmat Karim Baig. A digital Khowar-English dictionary with audio, 3. Khowar-English glossary, to appear 2022.  This work collects the words, with their meanings and cultural notes that she has been collecting since 1986.

Alberto Cacopardo is adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Florence, Italy. He has carried out ethnographic research on various populations of Chitral and neighbouring areas over a span of several decades, starting in 1973. He has published various books and articles on the subject.

His summary of speech is

The Story of History: The Enigmatic Vicissitudes of Chitral Historiography

Why were the British so confused about the history of Chitral that, when it came to compiling the 1928 Gazetteer, they gave up altogether the task of dealing with precolonial times and started its historical narrative only from Lockhart's visit in 1885? And why is it that, up to this day, there is no reliable narrative available of the history of Chitral before British times?

            This paper discusses the sources of the various published narratives of Chitral's precolonial history, reconstructing their mutual dependencies and their interactive relation with the oral traditions of the various parts of the district. Such oral traditions, recorded in writing at different times during the last hundred-and-fifty years, are in fact a most relevant element in the formation of these historical reconstructions. Based on field-work from various decades, the paper therefore discusses the mechanisms of transmission and the sociological significance of oral traditions in Chitral, highliting the deep differences between the forms and functions observable in the multilingual southern valleys and those of the prevailingly Khowar-speaking areas of Upper Chitral.

            However, British colonial officers were not quite right when they became convinced that no local written record of precolonial events had ever existed in Chitral. The recent recovery of Muhammad Siar's Shah namah throws new light on the processes of formation of Chitral historiography. Written in the early 1800's, the poem chronicles the events of the times of Mohtaram Shah Katur II and his conflict with the Khushwaqté prince Khairullah. The paper reconstructs the peculiar vicissitudes of this important work, which disappeared from the scene shortly after its birth and never came to the hands or the ears of the British. In his narrative of Chitral history, Biddulph ignores completely the cycle of events narrated in the poem, which were in fact a most crucial phase in that history, and certainly the one with the most enduring effects on the political and social configurations of the area, still lasting to the present days.

            Nevertheless, the poem had a role in the subsequent developments of Chitral historiography, which took place under the combined impulse of the British officers and the ruling dinasty. The paper reconstructs such developments, starting from the original work of Mirza Mohammad Ghufran in the late 1800's, to follow the surprising succession of investigations, mistakes, revisions, misunderstandings and manipulations in which the work of Western authors and local writers combined to produce that most puzzling admixture of fact and phantasy that has long been widely accepted as history of Chitral.

            Nowadays, all this belongs to the past. The times are ripe for a new age of Chitral historiography, in which we might hope that the work of local scholars and foreign researchers will converge to shed better light on the fascinating past of this intriguing corner of the world.

Augusto S. Cacopardois is Adjunct Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Florence, Italy. He has conducted anthropological field research in Chitral since the 1970ies under the aegis of ISMEO (Italian Institute for Middle and Far-Eastern Studies) and ISIAO (Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient). He worked at first in Bumburet and Rumbur; subsequently among the converted Kalasha communities of the Drosh area, and among the other linguistic minorities of Southern Chitral (Dameli, Gawar, Jashi, Palula). His last fieldwork in Pakistan was conducted in 2006-07 in the Birir valley to document the two-month long cycle of winter feasts. He participated in the 2^nd an 3^rd International Hindu Kush Cultural Conferences in 1990 and 1995. He has published widely in English and Italian.

His topic is "A Mythological Text from the Kalasha of Birir"

Though the Kalasha of today are monotheists, and have been so for generations, their traditional system includes, in addition to a Supreme God now identified with the God of Islam, a number of local divinities frequently addressed for good health and abundant crops. In contrast to the rich rituality of Kalasha religion, the mythology concerning these figures is rather poor. The text presented here – the recording of a spontaneous narration – is therefore a welcome addition to the thin mythological corpus recorded so far. The transcription of the text in the Kalasha language will be offered for publication with interlineal parsing and a literal English translation, together with a discursive one.

The myth concerns Warin, whose sanctuary is located in the southern valley of Birir. It explains why he is seen as a wrathful figure and why his holy place is approached with fear. The narration also highlights an interesting connection between this divinity and wine, confirmed by a parallel connection observed in Nuristan, where wine was produced in a sacred ‘garden’ of grape vines dedicated to the god Indra. The paper shows that the etymology of the name Warin and some aspects of his cult, allow indeed identifying him with Indra. It presents also further data indicating that this ancient divine figure – the tutelary deity of the Indo-Aryans – is prominent in the two northern valleys of Rumbur and Bumburet as well.

The myth thus confirms that the roots of the Kalasha religious system hark back to pre-Vedic times, that is, to a past common – the paper recalls – to most of the peoples of the Hindu Kush/Karakorum and, in a broader sense, to a good part of the populations of the North and West of the Indian subcontinent.

Prof. Emeritus Dr. Hermann Kreutzmann held the Chair of Human Geography at Freie Universitaet Berlin. He studied physics, geography and anthropology at the universities of Hannover and Freiburg. The Ph.D. degree was awarded by Freie Universitaet Berlin and his postdoctoral degree by Bonn University. In 1996 he joined Erlangen-Nuernberg University as Chair for Cultural Geography, from 2005 until his retirement in 2020 he was the Director of the Centre for Development Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin. His main research interest is regionally located in Central and South Asia with Pakistan as the prime focus; the topics range from development studies, high mountain research, mobility and migration to political geography and minority issues. Fieldwork and empirical research have been implemented since more than 40 years resulting in more than 20 books and 200 plus published research papers.

He will be speaking on "Hindukush Matters – Chitral between Karakoram, Pamirs, and Wakhan".

Exchange relations across mountains have been seeking new outlets and following challenging routes. Several transformations from early bridle tracks for camel and horse caravans to modern means of communication have modified exchange relations across more or less permeable boundaries and passes. Colonial and post-colonial interventions have put a significant emphasis on ‘opening-up’ areas through the means of infrastructure improvements and road building followed by infrastructure development and resource utilisation. Inclusion and exclusion of communities and territories contributed to conflict and confrontation, isolation and protection along with administrative and imperial appropriation. Mountain communities have experienced the implementation of blueprints for infrastructure development; external actors and stakeholders conceived and designed them in faraway ministries and down-country planning departments.  Nevertheless, strategic considerations mainly governed decision-making and financing of roadbuilding, but the infrastructure assets have significantly served mountain communities as a fringe benefit. The Pamir Highway, the Lowari Tunnel, the Indus Valley Road that transformed into the Pak-China Friendship Highway and uncountable link roads have become visible signs of integration policies, enabling supply structures, easier market access and enhanced mobility. They preceded the latest infrastructure projects in the framework of the New Silk Roads that have attracted investors and visitors from urban centres in down country. Aspirations connected with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor envisage the latest ‘long-term plan’ to become the most important boost for the next step of infrastructure building and economic development. The network of infrastructure assets might bring the mountain communities in the Hindukush, Pamirs, Karakoram and Himalayas much closer to each other and connect them with distant markets in Afghanistan, Central Asia, China and Pakistan.

Chitral’s position has changed over time. The Chitral Triangle performed as a strategic hub and exchange centre for trans-mountain communication, commerce and trade, exchange of people and goods prior to 1935. The following periods are characterised by border closure and control measures, political confrontation and interventions leading to the end of colonialism and the beginning of the Cold War. Various governments of independent Pakistan integrated Chitral and neighbouring principalities into the mainstream, thus becoming part of a new administrative setup and political relationship. Infrastructural assets amplified and augmented governmental and non-governmental efforts for rural uplift in mountain communities beyond security considerations and strategic planning. Recent efforts of international cooperation and the streamlining of cross-border trade will affect all kinds of exchange relations with hitherto unknown consequences.

The transformation of communication, travel and transport will be discussed and highlighted along the path from the times of load-carrying to the advent of container trucks on the Karakoram Highway. Besides visible administrative and infrastructure transformations the role of knowledge-gathering and reporting about the mountain communities from the Pamirian Knot is traced from the pre-colonial to the post-colonial period. Migration and mobility have affected livelihoods within mountain communities that are embedded in multi-local income-generation strategies and a network of far-reaching connections. The presentation will address the changing position of mountain regions and households between Karakoram, Pamirs, and Wakhan over time and in its spatial relationships.

Dr. Henrik Liljegren is a researcher in linguistics at Stockholm University (Sweden), where he received his PhD in 2008. He is one of the co-founders of Forum for Language Initiatives (FLI), a resource centre for the many language communities in Pakistan’s mountainous North, where he served for several years while also conducting fieldwork in the country, primarily in the Palula community of Chitral. His main research interests are areal-linguistic typology, language contact, Indo-Iranian languages, case alignment, phonology and lexicography. Apart from research per se, Henrik Liljegren has been engaged in language maintenance efforts and orthography development, mentoring language activists in local communities to collect and organize data, and in building networks between local communities and organizations. He is presently leading a Swedish Research Council project, documenting Gawarbati, a language of southernmost Chitral and Afghanistan’s Kunar Province.

His topic of talk is "Numerals in the Hindukush: An endangered domain within endangered languages".

A lexical domain deserving to be documented and analyzed in its own right is that of numerals or counting systems,
not the least because the linguistic forms and manifestations within an individual language appear to be pushed
aside by those of more dominant languages, in our region e.g. Urdu, Dari and English. Unusual numeral systems are actually even more vulnerable than the languages in which we observe them (Comrie 2013). In a recent areal-ypological study covering 59 language varieties in the greater Hindukush region (Liljegren et al. 2021), we concluded that purely decimal systems (i.e. the world-wide dominant ones) are in minority. Instead, two thirds of the numeral systems include a vigesimal (i.e. twenty-based) multiplicational base, present in all but one of the region’s six linguistic phyla (Liljegren 2020: 219), confirming earlier suggestions (Bashir 2003: 823; Èdel’man 1983: 50–51; Tikkanen 1988: 309).
Furthermore, it was found that the sequential order of elements in complex numerals, i.e. how one or more multiplicational bases combine with lower numerals in those, displays a significant geographical distribution, and is thus a strong indicator of sub-areality in the region (Liljegren 2020: 208–209), often cooccurring with other linguistic properties, such as kinship terminology (Liljegren 2022: 234–235) or phoneme inventories, typical of certain geo-cultural zones in the Hindukush.

• Bashir, Elena. 2003. Dardic. In George Cardona & Danesh Jain (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages, 818–894. London: Routledge.
• Comrie, Bernard. 2013. Numeral Bases. In Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.
• Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. https://wals.info/chapter/131. (18 August, 2022).
• Èdel’man, Džoi Iosifovna. 1983. The Dardic and Nuristani languages (Languages of Asia and Africa). Moscow: Nauka.
• Liljegren, Henrik. 2020. The Hindu Kush–Karakorum and linguistic areality. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 7(2). 239–285. https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2021-2027.
• Liljegren, Henrik. 2022. Kinship terminologies reveal ancient contact zone in the Hindu Kush. Linguistic Typology. De Gruyter Mouton 26(2). 211–245. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2021-2080.
• Liljegren, Henrik, Robert Forkel, Nina Knobloch & Noa Lange. 2021. Hindu Kush Areal Typology. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.4534221.  
• Tikkanen, Bertil. 1988. On Burushaski and other ancient substrata in northwestern South Asia. Studia Orientalia 64. 303–325

Professor Israr-ud-Din
Former Professor and Chairman, Department of Geography, University of Peshawar.
He remained head of this department for 14 years. He was president of Pakistan Geographical Association for 13 years. He was the convener of previous two editions of this conference organized in 1990 and 1995 in Chitral.
He has done an extensive research work on tribes of Hindukush, particularly those living in Chitral.
He will be presenting a summary of his work  titled "Origin and Distribution of Central Asian Tribes and Clans in Chitral"
Chitral (Upper and Lower) Districts are inhabited by more than a dozen tribes and over two hundred clans and families. Most of these families and clans migrated to the area from the surrounding regions of Central Asia, Gilgit-Baltistan, Dir and Swat Districts of Pakistan and other places during the last more than a thousand years or so. The predominant tribe is called Khow which comprises both original and migrated people from the surrounding areas. The rest of the tribes including Kalash, Bashgali, Wakhi, Gawar Bati, Dameli, Phalula, Gujar, Madaklashti, Pathan, Yadgha, Kirghizi etc. also migrated to the area in different periods of history. This paper attempts to trace out the origin of the tribes and clans who migrated from Central Asian countries and are now settled in various parts of Chitral. The information is based, besides on some written records, on interviews conducted in sixty to seventy villages from elders and knowledgeable people.
According the demographers people migrate for a number of reasons. These reasons may fall under four areas: Environmental, Economic, Cultural and Socio-political, within that, the reasons may also be ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors. Push factor may include conflict, drought famine, or extreme religious activity. ‘Pull’ factors, on the other hand, are those factors in the destination country that attract the individual or group to leave their home. In this paper it is attempted to find out the reasons which forced the various clans and families to migrate to this near location.
In all, out of the more than two hundred clans/families, about seventy migrated from different areas in Central Asia, as shown in the following table.
Table 1. Region-wise of Distributions of Immigrant families/ clans into Chitral
S.No. Region Number of Clans/ Families
1 Badakhshan 33
2 Bashgal (Nuristan) 4
3 Wakhan 3
4 Rest of Afghanistan 12
5 Sheghnan (Tajikistan) 6
6 Rest of Tajikistan 2
7 Yarkand 3
8 Qazakistan 1
9 Sariqul 3
10 Samarqand 2
Total 68
These clans/families comprise 35% of the total migrant clans into Chitral from Central Asian countries. Total list of such Clans, with their itineraries will be given in the appendix. Some detail of certain selected clans will also be highlighted.
It is hoped that this study will help to appreciate the nature of movement of people from areas to areas in these regions in the course of history.