Brahui people
The Brahui, Brahvi, or Brohi are an ethnolinguistic group of pastoralists principally found in the Balochistan region of Pakistan, and to a smaller extent in Afghanistan and Iran. They speak Brahui, which belongs to the Dravidian language family.
Etymology
The origin of the word "Brahui" is uncertain. Mikhail Andronov hypothesised a derivation from Dravidian. However, Josef Elfenbein found it unconvincing and hypothesised a derivation from Saraiki brāhō, referring to the prophet Abraham; the term perhaps served to distinguish the neo-Muslim nomadic pastoralists — who had migrated into Sindh from the Western Deccan ago and adopted Islam.Origins
The origins of the Brahuis remain unclear. Brahui lore, which speaks of a migration from Syria to Kalat followed by the overthrow of one Sewa dynasty, is a piecemeal borrowing from Baloch traditions; historical ballads, etc., are nonexistent in the language. Thus, says Elfenbein, reconstructions of Brahui pre-history can only depend on linguistics and genetics.The fact that other Dravidian languages only exist further south in India has led to two hypotheses — either the Brahuis are a relict population of Dravidians remaining from a time when Dravidians were more widespread or they migrated to Baluchistan from South India sometime in the last two millennia. Noting extensive phonological similarities with Malto and Kurukh, Dravidian languages spoken as geographical isolates across central and eastern India, most linguists speculate the three groups to have shared a common stage before migrating along different directions. Sound changes shared with Kurukh and Malto also suggest that Brahui was originally spoken near them. The absence of any Old Iranian loanwords in Brahui suggests that the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from central India less than 1,000 years ago. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary, Balochi, is a western Iranian language like Kurdish, and arrived in the area from the west only around 1000 CE. Additionally, both Kurukhs and Maltos speak of an eastward migration from Karnataka in their lore, and Brahuis' self-identification as migrants from Syria can be interpreted as a distorted version of the same event. Asko Parpola states in his book Deciphering the Indus Script that the Brahui people are remnants of the Harappan culture, the language of which he concludes as "likely to have belonged to the Dravidian family".
Genetics
The Brahui do not display a higher genetic affinity to the Dravidian-speaking groups of India, instead their ancestry is more comparable to that of the neighbouring Indo-European-speaking populations. Further more, the "ancient Dravidian genetic substrate" shared by all Pakistani populations does not signify a preferential link between Brahui and the other Dravidian-speaking populations, thereby supporting the relict hypothesis. A 2025 paper found no evidence of recent genetic ancestry between Brahui speakers and their closest linguistic relatives. Instead, the population affinity towards neighbouring populations of speakers of Balochi, as well as Pashtuns and Sindhis.History
The Brahuis have traditionally been nomads; the state-formation — in the form of a confederacy, the Khanate of Kalat — appears to have been a response to the increasing penetration of Mughal governance, especially under Shah Jahan, into their traditional grazing lands and migratory routes. The Khanate was established by Ahmad Khan I, a Brahui chieftain, in the 1660s and derived its power from a complex system of inter-tribal alliances with the Balochs and Dehwaris; notwithstanding nominal suzerainties to Persia and Afghanistan at times, the kingdom gained in size and reached its zenith under Nasir Khan I in the late eighteenth century. However, British incursion into the subcontinent coupled with territorial losses to Persia compelled Kalat to accept a protectorate status; in the aftermath of the Partition, the Khanate was absorbed into Pakistan notwithstanding popular protests.Language and literature
According to Elfenbein, only about 15% of the Brahui tribesmen are primary speakers of the Brahui language; only two nuclear tribes speak Brahui as a primary language. Half of the rest may be secondary speakers of Brahui with Balochi as the primary language, while the other half are estimated to speak no Brahui "at all". The language belongs to the Dravidian language family and is, hence, a geographical isolate. It has extensively borrowed from Balochi and other languages of the area; linguist David W. McAlpin characterised it as an "etymological nightmare". There are three dialects with no significant variation: Sarawani, Jhalawani, and Chaghi.No significant corpus of Brahui literature exists; the earliest extant work is Tuḥfat al-aja īb, a translation from Persian by Malikdad Gharsin Qalati,, a court poet of Nasir Khan I. The Perso-Arabic script currently in use was developed out of the efforts of Mulla Nabo-Jan and Maulana Fazl Mohammed Khan Darkhani for spreading Islamic revivalist ideas. Literacy rates among Brahuis remained very low as late as the 1990s.