Balochistan
Balochistan, also spelled as Baluchistan or Baluchestan, is a historical region in West and South Asia, located in the Iranian plateau's far southeast and bordering the Indian Plate and the Arabian Sea coastline. This arid region of desert and mountains is primarily populated by ethnic Baloch people.
Balochistan is very significant because of its strategic location, mineral wealth, long coastline along the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman and potential for discoveries of oil and gas.
The Balochistan region is split among three countries: Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Administratively it comprises the Pakistani province of Balochistan; the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchestan, along with southern Kerman province, southern South Khorasan province and eastern Hormozgan province; and the southern areas of Afghanistan, which include Nimruz, Helmand and Kandahar provinces. It borders what was historically the Pashtunistan region to the north, Sindh and Punjab to the east, and southeastern Iran to the west. Its southern coastline, including the Makran Coast, is washed by the Arabian Sea, in particular by its western part, the Gulf of Oman.
Etymology
The name "Balochistan" is generally believed to derive from the name of the Baloch people. Since the Baloch people are not mentioned in pre-Islamic sources, it is likely that the Baloch were known by some other name in their place of origin and that they acquired the name "Baloch" only after arriving in Balochistan some time in the 10th century.John Hansman relates the term "Baloch" to Meluḫḫa, the name by which the Indus Valley civilisation is believed to have been known to the Sumerians and Akkadians in Mesopotamia. Meluḫḫa disappears from the Mesopotamian records at the beginning of the second millennium BCE. However, Hansman states that a trace of it in a modified form, as Baluḫḫu, was retained in the names of products imported by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Al-Muqaddasī, who visited the capital of Makran, Bannajbur, wrote 985 CE that it was populated by people called Balūṣī, leading Hansman to postulate "Baluch" as a modification of Meluḫḫa and Baluḫḫu.
Asko Parpola relates the name Meluḫḫa to Indo-Aryan words mleccha and milakkha/milakkhu etc., which do not have an Indo-European etymology even though they were used to refer to non-Aryan people. Taking them to be proto-Dravidian in origin, he interprets the term as meaning either a proper name milu-akam or melu-akam, meaning "high country", a possible reference to Balochistani high lands. Historian Romila Thapar also interprets Meluḫḫa as a proto-Dravidian term, possibly mēlukku, and suggests the meaning "western extremity". A literal translation into Sanskrit, aparānta, was later used to describe the region by the Indo-Aryans.
During the time of Alexander the Great, the Greeks called the land Gedrosia and its people Gedrosoi, terms of unknown origin. Using etymological reasoning, H. W. Bailey reconstructs a possible Iranian name, uadravati, meaning "the land of underground channels", which could have been transformed to badlaut in the 9th century and further to balōč in later times. This reasoning remains speculative.
History
Prehistoric
Balochistan is among the earliest human settlements in the world, and the oldest evidence of human occupation in it is dated to the Paleolithic era. Evidence includes hunting camps, lithic scatter, and chipped and flaked stone tools. The earliest settled villages in the region date to the ceramic Neolithic and include the site of Mehrgarh in the Kachi Plain, which may make Balochistan the oldest civilisation in the world.These villages expanded in size during the subsequent Chalcolithic when interaction was amplified. This involved the movement of finished goods and raw materials, including chank shell, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and ceramics. By 2500 BCE, the region now known as Pakistani Balochistan had become part of the Indus Valley civilisation cultural orbit, providing key resources to the expansive settlements of the Indus river basin to the east.
Classical period
From the 1st century to the 3rd century CE, the region was ruled by the Pāratarājas, a Hindu dynasty of Indo-Scythian kings. The dynasty of the Pāratas is thought to be identical with the Pāradas of the Mahabharata, the Puranas and other Vedic and Iranian sources. The Parata kings are primarily known through their coins, which typically exhibit the bust of the ruler on the obverse, and a swastika within a circular legend on the reverse, written in Brahmi or Kharoshthi. These coins are mainly found in Loralai in today's western Pakistan.During the wars between Alexander the Great and Emperor Darius III, the Baloch were allied with the last Achaemenid emperor. According to Shustheri, Darius III, after much hesitation, assembled an army at Arbela to counter the army of invading Greeks. His cousin Besius was the commander, leading the horsemen from Balkh. Berzanthis was the commander of the Baloch forces, Okeshthra was the commander of the forces from Khuzistan, Maseus was the commander of the Syrian and Egyptian contingent, Ozbed was the commander of the Medes, and Phirthaphirna was leading the Sakas and forces from Tabaristan, Gurgan, and Khurasan. Obviously, as part of a losing side, the Baloch certainly got their share of punishment from the victorious Macedonian forces.
Herodotus in 450 BCE described the Paraitakenoi as a tribe ruled by Deiokes, a Persian king, in northwestern Persia. Arrian describes how Alexander the Great encountered the Pareitakai in Bactria and Sogdiana, and had them conquered by Craterus. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes the territory of the Paradon beyond the Ommanitic region, on the coast of modern Balochistan.
Medieval period
During the reign of Arab dynasties, medieval Iran suffered the onslaught of Ghaznavids, Mongols, Timurids, and the incursions of Guzz Turks. The relationship between the Baloch and nearly all these powers were hostile, and the Baloch suffered enormously during this long period. The Baloch encounters with these powers and the subsequent Baloch miseries forced the Baloch tribes to move from the areas of conflicts and to settle in the far-flung and inaccessible regions. The bloody conflicts with Buyids and Seljuqs were instrumental in waves of migration by the Baloch tribes from Kerman to further east.The Hindu Sewa Dynasty ruled parts of Balochistan, chiefly Kalat. The Sibi Division, which was carved out of Quetta Division and Kalat Division in 1974, derives its name from Rani Sewi, the queen of the Sewa dynasty.
The region was fully Islamized by the 9th century and became part of the territory of the Saffarids of Zaranj, followed by the Ghaznavids, then the Ghorids. The relation between the Ghaznavids and the Baloch had never been peaceful. Turan and Makuran came under the Ghaznavids founder Sebuktegin's suzerainty as early as 976–977 CE. The Baloch tribes fought against Sebuktegin when he attacked Khuzdar in 994. The Baloch were in the army of Saffarids Amir Khalaf and fought against Mahmud when the Ghaznavids forces invaded Sistan in 1013. Many other occasions were mentioned by the historians of the Ghaznavids era in which the Baloch came into confrontation with the Ghaznavids forces.
There are only passing references of Baloch encounters with the Mongols hordes. In one of the classical Balochi ballads, there is mention of a Baloch chieftain, Shah Baloch and the Baloch community of Herat's Kahdestan, who, according to Saif Heravi, was the governor or ruler of Kahdestan and heroically resisted the advance of the Mongols to Herat and Sistan with his Baloch army.
During the long period of en masse migrations, the Baloch were travelling through settled territories, and it could not have been possible to survive simply as wandering nomads. Perpetual migrations, hostile attitudes of other tribes and rulers, and adverse climactic conditions ruined much of their cattle breeding. Settled agriculture became a necessity for the survival of herds and an increased population. They began to combine settled agriculture with animal husbandry. The Baloch tribes now consisted of sedentary and nomadic population, a composition that remained an established feature of the Baloch tribes until recently.
Early Modern era
The Khanate of Kalat was the first unified polity to emerge in the history of Balochistan. It took birth from the confederacy of nomadic Brahui tribes native to the central Balochistan in 1666 which under Mir Ahmad Khan I declared independence from the Mughal suzeraignty and slowly absorbed the Baloch principalities in the region. It was ruled over by the Brahui Ahmadzai dynasty till 1948. Ahmad Shah Durrani made it vassal of the Afghan Durrani Empire in 1749. In 1758 the Khan of Kalat, Nasir Khan I Ahmadzai, revolted against Ahmed Shah Durrani, defeated him, and made his Khanate independent from the Durrani Empire.Tribalism and nomadism
Baloch tribalism in medieval times was synonymous with pastoral nomadism. Nomadic people, as observed by Heape, regard themselves as the superior of sedentary or agriculturist. It is, perhaps, because the occupation of nomads made them strong, active, and inured to hardship and the dangers which beset a mobile life.The areas of Balochistan where the Baloch tribes moved in had a sedentary population, and the Baloch tribes were compelled to deal with their sedentary neighbours. Being in a weaker position, the Baloch tribes were in need of constant vigils for their survival in new lands. To deal with this problem, they began to make alliances and organised themselves into a more structured way. The structural solution to this problem was to create tribal confederacies or unions. Thus, in conditions of insecurity and disorder or when threatened by a predatory regional authority or a hostile central government, several tribal communities would form a cluster around a chief who had demonstrated his ability to offer protection and security.