Gilgit

Gilgit, an outlying province in the extreme north-west of India, over which Kashmir has reasserted her sovereignty. Only a part of the basin of the river Gilgit is included within its political boundaries. There is an intervening width of mountainous country, represented chiefly by glaciers and ice-fields, and intersected by narrow sterile valleys, measuring some 100 to 150 m. in width, to the north and north-east, which separates the province of Gilgit from the Chinese frontier beyond the Muztagh and Karakoram. This part of the Kashmir borderland includes Kanjut (or Hunza) and Ladakh. To the north-west, beyond the sources of the Yasin and Ghazar in the Shandur range (the two most westerly tributaries of the Gilgit river) is the deep valley of the Yarkhun or Chitral. Since the formation of the North-West Frontier Province in 1901, the political charge of Chitral, Dir and Swat, which was formerly included within the Gilgit agency, has been transferred to the chief commissioner of the new province, with his capital at Peshawar. Gilgit proper now forms a wazarat of the Kashmir state, administered by a wazir. Gilgit is also the headquarters of a British political agent, who exercises some supervision over the wazir, and is directly responsible to the government of India for the administration of the outlying districts or petty states of Hunza, Nagar, Ashkuman, Yasin and Ghizar, the little republic of Chilas, &c. These states acknowledge the suzerainty of Kashmir, paying an annual tribute in gold or grain, but they form no part of its territory.

Within the wider limits of the former Gilgit agency are many mixed races, speaking different languages, which have all been usually classed together under the name Dard. The Dard, however, is unknown beyond the limits of the Kohistan district of the Indus valley to the south of the Hindu Koh, the rest of the inhabitants of the Indus valley belonging to Shin republics, or Chilas. The great mass of the Chitral population are Kho (speaking Khowar), and they may be accepted as representing the aboriginal population of the Chitral valley. (See Hindu Kush.) Between Chitral and the Indus the “Dards” of Dardistan are chiefly Yeshkuns and Shins, and it would appear from the proportions in which these people occupy the country that they must have primarily moved up from the valley of the Indus in successive waves of conquest, first the Yeshkuns, and then the Shins. No one can put a date to these invasions, but Biddulph is inclined to class the Yeshkuns with the Yuechi who conquered the Bactrian kingdom about 120 B.C. The Shins are obviously a Hindu race (as is testified by their veneration for the cow), who spread themselves northwards and eastwards as far as Baltistan, where they collided with the aboriginal Tatar of the Asiatic highlands. But the ethnography of “Dardistan,” or the Gilgit agency (for the two are, roughly speaking, synonymous), requires further investigation, and it would be premature to attempt to frame anything like an ethnographical history of these regions until the neighbouring provinces of Tangir and Darel have been more fully examined. The wazarat of Gilgit contains a population (1901) of 60,885, all Mahommedans, mostly of the Shiah sect, but not fanatical. The dominant race is that of the Shins, whose language is universally spoken. This is one of the so-called Pisacha languages, an archaic Aryan group intermediate between the Iranian and the Sanskritic.

In general appearance and dress all the mountain-bred peoples extending through these northern districts are very similar. Thick felt coats reaching below the knee, loose “pyjamas” with cloth “putties” and boots (often of English make) are almost universal, the distinguishing feature in their costume being the felt cap worn close to the head and rolled up round the edges. They are on the whole a light-hearted, cheerful race of people, but it has been observed that their temperament varies much with their habitat—those who live on the shadowed sides of mountains being distinctly more morose and more serious in disposition than the dwellers in valleys which catch the winter sunlight. They are, at the same time, bloodthirsty and treacherous to a degree which would appear incredible to a casual observer of their happy and genial manners, exhibiting a strange combination (as has been observed by a careful student of their ways) of “the monkey and the tiger.” Addicted to sport of every kind, they pursue no manufacturing industries whatsoever, but they are excellent agriculturists, and show great ingenuity in their local irrigation works and in their efforts to bring every available acre of cultivable soil within the irrigated area. Gold washing is more or less carried on in most of the valleys north of the river Gilgit, and gold dust (contained in small packets formed with the petals of a cup-shaped flower) is an invariable item in their official presents and offerings. Gold dust still constitutes part of the annual tribute which, strangely enough, is paid by Hunza to China, as well as to Kashmir.

History.—The Dards are located by Ptolemy with surprising accuracy (Daradae) on the west of the Upper Indus, beyond the head-waters of the Swat river (Soastus), and north of the Gandarae, i.e. the Gandharis, who occupied Peshawar and the country north of it. The Dardas and Chinas also appear in many of the old Pauranic lists of peoples, the latter probably representing the Shin branch of the Dards. This region was traversed by two of the Chinese pilgrims of the early centuries of our era, who have left records of their journeys, viz. Fahien, coming from the north, c. 400, and Hsüan Tsang, ascending from Swat, c. 631. The latter says: “Perilous were the roads, and dark the gorges. Sometimes the pilgrim had to pass by loose cords, sometimes by light stretched iron chains. Here there were ledges hanging in mid-air; there flying bridges across abysses; elsewhere paths cut with the chisel, or footings to climb by.” Yet even in these inaccessible regions were found great convents, and miraculous images of Buddha. How old the name of Gilgit is we do not know, but it occurs in the writings of the great Mahommedan savant al-Biruni, in his notices of Indian geography. Speaking of Kashmir, he says: “Leaving the ravine by which you enter Kashmir and entering the plateau, then you have for a march of two more days on your left the mountains of Bolor and Shamilan, Turkish tribes who are called Bhattavaryan. Their king has the title Bhatta-Shah. Their towns are Gilgit, Aswira and Shiltash, and their language is the Turkish. Kashmir suffers much from their inroads” (Trs. Sachau, i. 207). There are difficult matters for discussion here. It is impossible to say what ground the writer had for calling the people Turks. But it is curious that the Shins say they are all of the same race as the Moguls of India, whatever they may mean by that. Gilgit, as far back as tradition goes, was ruled by rajas of a family called Trakane. When this family became extinct the valley was desolated by successive invasions of neighbouring rajas, and in the 20 or 30 years ending with 1842 there had been five dynastic revolutions. The most prominent character in the history was a certain Gaur Rahman or Gauhar Aman, chief of Yasin, a cruel savage and man-seller, of whom many evil deeds are told. Being remonstrated with for selling a mullah, he said, “Why not? The Koran, the word of God, is sold; why not sell the expounder thereof?” The Sikhs entered Gilgit about 1842, and kept a garrison there. When Kashmir was made over to Maharaja Gulab Singh of Jammu in 1846, by Lord Hardinge, the Gilgit claims were transferred with it. And when a commission was sent to lay down boundaries of the tracts made over, Mr Vans Agnew (afterwards murdered at Multan) and Lieut. Ralph Young of the Engineers visited Gilgit, the first Englishmen who did so. The Dogras (Gulab Singh’s race) had much ado to hold their ground, and in 1852 a catastrophe occurred, parallel on a smaller scale to that of the English troops at Kabul. Nearly 2000 men of theirs were exterminated by Gaur Rahman and a combination of the Dards; only one person, a soldier’s wife, escaped, and the Dogras were driven away for eight years. Gulab Singh would not again cross the Indus, but after his death (in 1857) Maharaja Ranbir Singh longed to recover lost prestige. In 1860 he sent a force into Gilgit. Gaur Rahman just then died, and there was little resistance. The Dogras after that took Yasin twice, but did not hold it. They also, in 1866, invaded Darel, one of the most secluded Dard states, to the south of the Gilgit basin, but withdrew again. In 1889, in order to guard against the advance of Russia, the British government, acting as the suzerain power of Kashmir, established the Gilgit agency; in 1901, on the formation of the North-West Frontier province, the rearrangement was made as stated above.