by Zubair Torwali*
The author is a community activist, researcher, author, and educator based in Bahrain, Swat Pakistan. Zubair has published works in English, Urdu, and the Dardic Torwali language. He has authored and supervised a number of books in and about Torwali. His book in English, Muffled Voices, provides insight into Pakistan’s social, cultural, and political issues. The author is a prolific writer of research papers and articles written for English dailies and weeklies of He founded and leads Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT), an organization that focuses on education and development.
Dardistan, Boloror Kafiristan
The mountain area stretching east from the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan across north Pakistan to the borders of Kashmir was known as Bolor, Dardistan and Kafiristan in the past. Bolor was the name given to the areas of Gilgit and Baltistan. Gilgit was known as Little Bolor while Baltistan was regarded as Greater Bolor. Dardistan is the term used by many ancient scholars and writers to describe the entire region from Panjshir valley to Kashmir, mainly because of its main ethnic group, the Dards, Darada or Dardic; who speak a number of Indo-Aryan languages much different from the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in the plain valleys of the Indus and Ganges. Kafiristan is a derogatory term mainly used by travelers, invaders and researchers associated with Afghanistan and Central Asia and the Mughal empire of India. They described these people as Kafirs (unbelievers, pagans) because of their different faith systems and cultures, which did not resemble any of the Abrahamic religions. Traces of their ancient religions can now be found in the religious practices of the Kalash people of Southern Chitral.
This area includes the Afghan province of Nuristan, the Chitral and Kunar valleys, the Kohistan region, to the west; the upper Dir and Swat valleys, in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to the south west; and the basin of the Gilgit river and the upper reaches of the Indus basin to the east. It was largely non-Islamic till the beginning of the nineteenth century (Rennell 1792, p. 164; Elphinstone [1815] 1969, p. 618). The inhabitants of the region practiced archaic polytheistic religions. These religions were differing in many traits from each other – such as the names of divinities, the forms of religious festivals, the contents of the mythologies – but they had at their core a common symbolic system based on what Parkes termed as ‘pastoral ideology’ (Parkes 1987). This ideology attached positive values of human solidarity and harmony with the spirits of nature and opposed negative values of individual appropriation and manipulation. The dichotomy of pure- impure was, however, a key element of this ideology and was projected on the natural environment (Cacopardo A.M. 1985; cf. Jettmar 1975, pp. 216-220).
Though linguistically and ethnically the region was greatly diversified, yet it was characterized in pre-Islamic times by a certain degree of cultural homogeneity that allows to identify it as a distinct unit—a ‘culture area’ which was termed as Bolor, Dardistan and later as Kafiristan. (Cacopardo, Cacopardo 2001, pp. 25-28)
From Nuristan to Ladakh, it was evident that the pre-Islamic religions of all the peoples of the Hindu Kush/Karakorum—the speakers of Nuristani and Dardic languages—basically belonged to the same model.
Situated among the most rugged and lofty mountains of the world between India, Central Asia, Iran and China, the pre-Islamic cultures of this region emerged as a localized, non-literate religion of nature, community, ancestry, and immanent divinity, that was different from the great world religions that surrounded it at different times in history, which include the Vedic, Zoroastrian and Hindu cults, and particularly Buddhism in the first millennium A. D. and Islam in the second.
This area comprises of valleys of four mighty mountain ranges namely: the Hindu Kush, Karakorum, Pamir, and Himalaya with Hindu Kush sharing most of the land and communities. More than 25 distinct languages belonging to the five different groups were recorded in the Eastern Hindukush, Karakorum, and Pamirs.
According to Fussman 1972, Morgenstierne 1974, Edelman 1983, Strand 2001, Bashir 2003, Kreutzmann 2005 and Cacopardo A.S. 2013, the languages spoken in the region mostly belong to the Dardic (or North-West-Indo-Aryan) and Nuristani groups, with Burushaski as an isolated language, as well as some peripheral Iranian languages in the north, and, more recently, Pashto, which has been expanding from the south since the sixteenth century (Caroe 1958, p. 181).
If we include the Central Asian region in this linguistic map, we get approximately 50 indigenous languages. On this map the number of Indo-European languages is greater than Turkic and others. Among them the Dardic languages are more in number followed by Iranian, Nuristani and Turkic languages whereas two languages are Sino Tibetan. In addition, Burushaski is spoken mainly in Hunza and Yasin in Gilgit-Baltistan and a small population across the border in Indian held Kashmir.
Thus situated in between the Iranian, the Indian, and the Turkic worlds, this region was in the past barely effected by the turmoil of the plains until the advent of Islam.
Islam spread swiftly in Central Asia while its progress was delayed in this region of Dardistan. Though the plains north and south of the Hindu Kush were in Muslim hands since the end of the first millennium CE, Islam gained its first footholds in the Hindu Kush only in the sixteenth century.
A close study on the culture of the region shows that the Indian influence seems to be more original and older than the Iranian or Turkic. This region is linguistically closer to India. The Dardic languages are entirely Indo-Aryan languages with only a few differing features from the languages of the plains. The Nuristani languages, even though Iranian, are, in the end, closer to the Indian than to the Iranian branch (Buddruss 1973, pp. 38-39).
This region actually carried the pre-Rigvedic Indian religions. Michael Witzel (2004) concludes that the Hindu Kush area shares many of the traits of the Indo-Iranian myths, rituals, society, and echoes many aspects of Rigvedic but hardly of the post Rigvedic religion. He further elaborates that though the rituals in the Hindu Kush religion are still of the Indo-Iranian type, however, the South Asian and Vedic influences are remarkable.
Karl Jettmar (1974), however, states with examples in his paper, ‘Parallels Between Iranian and Dardic Institutions and Ideas’ that the Iranian influence is “not due to a common heritage going back into Indo-Iranian antiquity but to diffusion in the course of a long and complicated symbiosis”.
For the study of the ancient religions and traditions of this region the present Kalasha system can be considered as a representative of the pre-Islamic world of the Hindu Kush.
Many elements seem to indicate that the cultures of Dardistan were unique examples of Indo-Aryan cultures that, left aside by mainstream Hinduism, followed largely an independent development. However, while, for Fussman, they belong to a post-Iranian, though pre-Vedic, phase, for Witzel, their roots may go further back, to the undivided Indo-Iranian past.
Music as a cross-cultural construct
Music as a cross-cultural construct, involves both music and culture. Alan Merriam (1964) assigns three aspects to music: sound, behaviour, and concept. As sound, music is auditory signals that are produced by performers and perceived by listeners. As behaviour, music is associated with tangible activities (e.g. performance, dance, ritual) that are often essential to music experience. As concept, music is thought as having specific functions within any social group (Clayton, 2001; Cross, 2006; Dissanayake, 2001). This makes music a multimodal phenomenon.
On the other hand, culture refers to a set of behaviours, beliefs, social structures, and technologies of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. It includes social conventions related to art, dress, manner, dance, music, religion, ritual, and morality. There are many subcultures (Hebdige, 1979) within a culture. Each subculture carries its own distinctive habitus: the habits, beliefs, skills and preferences that are implicitly acquired and that shape perceptions, behaviours, and experiences.
The emotional properties of music are central to understanding cross- cultural similarities and differences in musical behaviours. According to Alan Lomax (1962), “music somehow expresses emotion; therefore, when a distinctive and consistent musical style lives in a culture or runs through several cultures, one can posit the existence of a distinctive set of emotional needs or drives that are somehow satisfied or evoked by this music”.
Cross-cultural music awareness may be defined as the understanding of similarities and differences in cognitive processes and emotional experiences for music across cultures; and can be used to differentiate universal and culture-specific determinants of music understanding.
Commonalities in musical behaviours across cultures also arise from biophysical differences or similarities across cultures in acoustic environments. Commonalities in music behaviours across cultures frequently arise from transcultural diffusion and interaction.
Listeners who share cultural experiences with the singer or songwriter have additional benefits of cue redundancy, which is culture specific, whereas listeners from other cultures must rely on psychophysical cues which are auditory and are shared by all music in order to recognize the emotional connotation of the music.
Understanding of emotion is affected by familiarity with the conventions of the tonal system and sensitivity to psychophysical cues. Listeners who are familiar with a musical style should find it relatively easy to decode emotional meaning in that music because they can draw from both culture-specific and psychophysical cues.
When cultural-specific cues are unfamiliar or absent, listeners may still attend to auditory cues such as tempo and intensity. These cues provide listeners with a general understanding of the intended emotion even for unfamiliar musical styles. Psychophysical cues are especially powerful signals because their interpretation requires no knowledge of musical conventions. Indeed, cues such as tempo and intensity have emotional significance in other channels such as speech prosody.
Speech Prosody is the study of intonation and related phenomena, including pitch, loudness, timing, speech rate, and voicing properties. Emotional sensitivity for prosodic materials is similar to emotional sensitivity for musical materials.
Musical tradition in the Dardistan
Elfenbein and Ambady (2003) proposed a cultural proximity hypothesis to predict how well people of different cultures recognize emotional expression. According to their hypothesis, members of cultures who share cultural elements should be more successful at understanding each other’s emotional expressions than members of cultures that are less similar. Thus, according to this hypothesis, the members of the various subcultures of the regions of Dardistan, Central Asia and modern India should be better at recognizing the emotional expressions of each other. Yet the psychophysical cues associated with emotions will allow individuals to decode emotions across cultural boundaries.
We cannot find any inter-culturally valid definition of music, and the term music is found in only selected cultures but musicality, like elsewhere, is a prominent and distinctive characteristic of this region. People engage in activities that we would call music, often in relation to rituals. Peoples of all cultures sing, and singing is an activity recognized on the basis of context or by cultural consensus as different from speech. There is some form of instrumental music as well. Musical pieces, like performers, carry contextual and social memory.
Many of the languages of Dardistan, and probably of Central Asia, do not have a cover term like ‘music’. They have indeed names for individual genres of music. There are terms for more specific acts like singing, playing instruments, and more significantly for performing, such as dance and games.
The most important commonality among musical systems is the co-relation of music and ritual. The musical and ritual elements are interdependent aspects of the performative activity.
Music is related to spiritual or supernatural aspects of the natural world. The history of musical activities shows its existence in all known human societies. It is a key component of ritual activities, cosmologies, and the management of social relationships — all essential elements of maintaining human groups.
In Dardistan, although there is some variation in the permissible roles of individuals and genders in musical activities, the activities are often inclusive, with little distinction between performers and the audience. All who are present participate in the activity in some capacity; and there are no specialists for music or songs here. Everybody can play and sing.
As a majority of these languages still exist in oral form to a greater extent, we do not find terms like ‘poetry’ and ‘poet’. These terms are recent intrusions in these languages. This is because, in the region, instead of ‘poems’ we have ‘songs.’ Having no literacy traditions, the ‘poetry’ in these languages is not meant to be written or ‘said’ but is meant to be sung and hence we have ‘songs’ here instead of poems. Most of the themes in this kind of poetry are related to nature, fairies, demons, highlands, physical love and sorrows. However, in some languages we find epic songs which seem to be influenced by the long poems of the Persian language. And many of the musical genres are based on the story and style of the poem; and are sometimes named after the ritual for which the song is made or character in whose honour it was sung.
Challenges posed by colonization and modernization
The development of modern technologies allows us to hear music almost anywhere, twenty-four hours a day. It is practically impossible for us to avoid it. Music has become a matter of routine consumption.
Peripheral communities, like the mountain communities of this region, do not have access to such modern technologies and communication tools. Their own folk musical traditions, are, therefore, under great pressure and may be extinct with the passage of time.
The conquest of Dardistan by the colonialists associated with the Mughals, Pathans, and later, the British has mostly eroded its ancient history, traditions, identities, cultures and languages. Music associated with their indigenous worldview was lost when their rituals and traditions were lost. What we have today in the form of folk music in the region is only the vestiges that somehow came to us through faint memory and subdued activities. The people who once shared a considerable cultural collective diverged into multiple sub and isolated cultural entities because of physical, religious and political barriers. Invaders had driven these communities away into valleys separated by high mountains and ravines. This made contact between these communities of mostly the same ancestry impossible and the collective diverged into different communities. The traditional routes of contact between a few of them were destroyed with the introduction of new roads and new units of administration. They were confined to various physical and social ghettoes; and, after a few generations, the shared cultural and historical memory of these people faded away; and the people became alien to each other. With the emergence of Pakistan and Afghanistan as ‘nation states’ these people found themselves in close contact with other dominant cultures under new administrative boundaries. This arrangement and the rise of technologies and modern means of communication have further accelerated the enculturation in these communities which, for these powerless and centerless people, meant acculturation as they could not and cannot compete with their dominant neighbours.
In addition to these exogenous forces, these communities also face multiple internal threats. With the rise in religious radicalism, music and other traditions were threatened from within. Musicians, singers, and artists were marginalized further and as a result the community was forced to imbibe the musical traditions of other dominant communities that could not be challenged by the radical elements who exist within these communities.
The conquest of Central Asia by Russia in the 19th century and the absorption of this territory into the Soviet Union during the 1920s brought inevitable changes to local music there. Cultural performances, ethno-linguistic and local identities were marginalized. Cross border symbiosis within the region was discouraged, and each musical tradition was assigned to one political boundary of the five Soviet republics: Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenia and Uzbekistan. Banning all other artistic genres and forms, only social realism was encouraged in the arts there, which limited the contours of cultural expression. Thus, musicians adapted local music to express socialist themes like the glories of collective farms. The new lyricism of music expressed the cultural enlightenment of the former Soviet Union. Old instruments and small groups gave way to systematic choirs, orchestras and pianos that were tuned to play the more complex harmonies of the new system. Musical scales that were the legacies of Persians and Arabs were labeled as feudal and religious. In the post-Soviet Union era, Soviet-inspired hybridity was promoted by the state-sponsored apparatus.
Recommendations
Based on this crude study I venture to make a couple of recommendations related to musical traditions of Dardistan.
Music was, and to some extent still is, an integral part of our communities. For our communities, music is a communal, cooperative activity, with no one considered a specialist musician. Music and related rituals are still performed by the people in a communal way; and thus, gets a status of common legacy and ownership. With the modern demand of commercialization and specialization in the field of music in the region, the fear arises that tradition will be confined to a few specialists and most people will be passive listeners as is happening elsewhere. We need to modernize the musical traditions in the region without compromising on the folk characteristics that enables all members of any community to experience music as a communal and social phenomenon.
While doing some research for this study I came across a review of a voluminous research book on music in Central Asia, titled:‘Music of Central Asia’ by a team of researchers led by Levin Theodore under the auspices of the Aga Khan Music Initiative. This book is, of course, a great reference book on the music of Central Asia. On the other hand, I did not find any good book or paper on the musical tradition of the communities of Dardistan. I, therefore, strongly recommend such an encompassing and much needed research on the musical traditions of the region be initiated.
