I arrived in the Pamir region by road along the Panj River, the headstream of the Amu Darya, otherwise known as the Oxus, the greatest of Central Asia’s rivers. For earlier travellers, the Oxus was a river almost of legend. Peter Hopkirk describes in his excellent book, The Great Game, about the British-Russian rivalry in Central Asia in the 19th century, the journey of a party led by William Moorcroft, a veterinary surgeon with the British East India Company, to Bukhara, in 1824-1825. When they reached the banks of the Oxus, after a journey of many months, they were the first Englishmen ever to set foot there. For me it was a journey of a few hours by jeep along a rough road from Dushanbe.
It is a splendid journey, along the fast-moving river, hemmed in by the narrow gorge, the rocks rising sheer above us, and then opening out into fertile valleys, looking across at the mud-brick houses on the Afghan side, the lush fields, children playing in the river shallows. I reached Khorog, the principal town of the Pamir region of Gorno-Badakhshan, in the evening. It was very dark, with only a few dim lights. I felt quite lost. Thankfully, I had the phone number of a brother of someone back in London.
Gorno-Badakhsan accounts for nearly half of Tajikistan’s territory, but only 3 per cent of its population. It is a remote, mountainous region, which had few visitors until quite recently. Since Soviet times, its closeness to Afghanistan meant it was a closed area, and foreigners still need a special pass in order to go there. Its remoteness had for thousands of years protected it and its people from outside influence. Its people speak a medley of languages, they have a unique culture and religious traditions. But in the late 19th century, the region caught the covetous eyes of the great powers vying for control in the region, Russia and Britain. These two empires had been eying each other nervously across the expanses of Central Asia for decades. The fear of Russian encroachment towards India had impelled the British into disastrous invasions of Afghanistan.
By the end of the 19th century, it was the mountain passes leading into India through the northwest frontier that most worried the British authorities in Delhi. British and Russian expeditions spent months at a time mapping the region. In 1889, a young British officer, Francis Younghusband, met and dined with the Russian Captain Gromchevsky and a party of Cossacks. Gromchevsky was a generous host, and as the vodka flowed, he expounded on his confidence that before long Russia would invade India. But the two parted as friends. On a later expedition, in 1891, Younghusband met a large party of Cossacks led by a Colonel Yanov. Again, they got on famously, and Younghusband was impressed by the lavishness of the Russian hospitality. However, the Englishman was disturbed to be told that the Russians claimed the whole Pamir region as their own, including territory that the British considered to be Afghan or Chinese, as well as territory they considered to be within their own sphere. Again they parted as friends, even when three days later the Russian returned and told Younghusband he had been ordered to leave Russian territory. Yanov expressed his embarrassment at having to carry out such a disagreeable order, and Younghusband assured him he bore him no personal grudge. As with many episodes in the Great Game, British and Russian adversaries did not let their rivalry get in the way of fellowship and mutual respect.
The incident with Colonel Yanov prompted the British to adopt a more assertive stance, issuing a strong protest to St. Petersburg and moving up forces to bring local rulers to heal. The British were particularly concerned about a narrow tongue of territory between Afghanistan and China, the so-called Pamir Gap, in the Wakhan valley, which was not claimed by any state. If the Russians took this, it would bring them to the very gateway of British India. The British tried to persuade both China and Afghanistan to stake their claim to the territory. Finally, in 1895, an agreement was reached with Moscow which gave the bulk of the Pamir region to Russia, while the Pamir Gap went to Afghanistan. To this day it juts out from Afghanistan to the Chinese border, forming a wedge between Tajikistan and Pakistan. The agreement meant that at no point did Russia and British India share a common frontier. For the British it meant that a definitive limit had been placed on Russia’s advance towards India.
But when the British and the Russians carved up the Pamir region, no one thought to consider the people who actually lived there. The Pamiris are a distinct people. They speak a variety of related languages, a branch of the wider Iranian language group. These languages are quite distinct from Tajik, which is a variant of Persian, a separate branch of the Iranian language tree. In Gorno-Badakhshan, the valleys leading up to the high Pamir plateau have their own languages and dialects. They are not all mutually intelligible. Shugni, spoken in Khorog, is quite different from Wakhi, spoken in the Wakhan Valley. Apart from Gorno-Badakhshan, in Tajikistan, Pamiris also live across the Panj, in Afghan Badakhshan, as well as smaller numbers in adjacent regions of Pakistan and China. None of the Pamiri languages are spoken by more than a few tens of thousands of people, and some by only a few thousand. All are endangered. Pamiris in both Tajikistan and Afghanistan mostly also speak Tajik. Travelling in the Wakhan Valley, my Shugni-speaking driver communicated with the locals in Tajik.
I asked a Pamiri in Khorog whether he was not worried about the future of the Pamir languages, with their small numbers of speakers, that some of them might before long disappear? In a world of satellite television (even houses in the most remote mountain villages I visited have satellite dishes), internet and international travel, what chance would such small languages have? Might it not perhaps be better to standardise them, to sacrifice some of the diversity in an attempt to preserve at least something, as had been done in several other places? Not at all, he said. In their diversity, the Pamiri languages are like a beautiful bouquet. He described efforts to agree on an alphabet for Shugni, to give it a more secure future as a written language. In Afghanistan, he said, some were already writing Shugni in the Persian alphabet. But in Tajikistan, few Shugni speakers were familiar with that, being used to reading and writing Russian and Tajik in Cyrillic. He proposed that all should agree to write Shugni in the Latin alphabet, with which many in both Tajikistan and Afghanistan were already familiar.
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the position of Pamiris within Tajikistan has been thorny. During Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s, most Pamiris supported the United Tajik Opposition. In 1992, Gorno-Badakhshan declared independence, later rescinded. The Pamiri region was placed under blockade by government forces, and Pamiris in Dushanbe and other parts of Tajikistan were among groups targeted in massacres and ethnic cleansing by pro-government supporters. Resentment, to a greater or lesser degree, remains widespread. More than once during my stay I heard Pamiris objecting to the fact that, in the government offices in Khorog, people were required to speak Tajik, even though they were almost all Pamiris. A common refrain among Pamiris is that they would like the notional autonomy of Gorno-Badakhshan to be real, in practice.
The tensions between Pamiris and the Tajikistan authorities exploded again one year before my visit, in July 2012. A friend in Khorog sent me anguished emails about the situation, about how the town had been cut off by government forces, whose snipers had been shooting into the town from the surrounding hills. The fighting was sparked by the stabbing in Iskhashim, a small town south of Khorog, of Abdullo Nazarov, the head in Gorno-Badakhshan of the GKNB, the successor of the KGB in Tajikistan. Nazarov was brought to Khorog, where he died a few hours later. Tajikistan’s military were brought in to try to arrest those accused of the killing, above all Tolib Ayombekov, who had been a leader of the opposition forces in Gorno-Badakhshan during the civil war.
The civil war was brought to an end by a UN-sponsored agreement in 1997, with Russia standing behind it. Opposition figures were brought into government. Ayombekov became a local head of the border agency. Over subsequent years, such opposition figures were sidelined and removed, but not in Gorno-Badakhshan. Some saw the crackdown in 2012 as an overdue settling of accounts, seeing the murder of Nazarov as just an excuse for an operation that had been planned in advance. Conspiracy theories abounded in Khorog. Why, people asked, was there a delay in taking Nazorov to hospital? Some told me that Nazarov’s death was due to a dispute over drug smuggling. Tajikistan is one of the principal conduits for drugs being trafficked out of Afghanistan. The authorities in Dushanbe had also accused Ayombekov of involvement.
The clashes reportedly left dozens dead, including many soldiers. I was told by people who were there that local people, women prominently among them, had demonstrated in the streets, hampering the military operation. The government called off the operation. The following month, Ayombekov surrendered, and was placed under house arrest, although he continued to move freely around Khorog. Announcing his surrender, which came shortly before a visit to Khorog by President Emomalii Rahmon, Ayombekov made complimentary statements about the benefits the president had brought to Gorno-Badakhshan, fuelling speculation about a deal.
During my visit, Khorog appeared calm and normal, although I was told that tension continued to simmer beneath the surface. But Pamiris themselves are divided about their feelings towards Tajikistan. Some, notably those I had met abroad, in the diaspora, appeared wholly negative towards a country with which they did not identify at all. But for many more, for good or ill, Tajikistan is their country, and they have to make the most of it. A teacher in Khorog, notwithstanding his gripes about the position of Pamiris, told me he could not imagine Gorno-Badakhshan outside of Tajikistan. A young man now living in Dushanbe, back in Khorog on a visit to his home town, expressed annoyance at people, especially those who lived comfortably abroad, who created difficulties for their fellow Pamiris, including those living in Dushanbe, with their opposition to life in Tajikistan. For him it was natural that people working in the government offices in Khorog should have to speak Tajik, the official language of the state.
Feeling neglected by the distant, resented government in Dushanbe, Pamiris have relied on the Aga Khan, the leader of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam to which most Pamiris adhere (most Tajiks, by contrast, are Sunni). Like many people from Britain, I had known of the Aga Khan principally as a fabulously wealthy racehorse owner. Among Pamiris he is revered, frequently referred to as His Highness Aga Khan IV. His Aga Khan Foundation has projects in different parts of Tajikistan, but it is his own people, the Ismaili Shias, that have been the greatest beneficiaries. Thanks to his assistance, they staved off hunger under the government blockade during the civil war. He established a branch of the Central Asian University in Khorog, which among other things offers courses in tourism. Pamiri students have received grants enabling them to study abroad. In almost every Pamiri house I visited a portrait of the Aga Khan was prominently displayed. In the village of Langar, on the Tajikistan side of the Wakhan Valley, the local Khalifa, the religious leader of the village, pointed out to me a smart little building which he told me had been specially built for the visit of the Aga Khan.
The Pamiris have esoteric religious practices. There are no mosques as such, but rather meeting houses, where people meet to pray. Sometimes these are in peoples’ private homes. In Langar, I was taken to the meeting house by the Khalifa, who was also the owner of the guesthouse where I spent the night. Colourfully painted on the outside, its interior was laid out like a traditional Pamiri house of the sort I stayed in in several homestays in the mountain villages. These apparently simple houses have raised, carpet-covered platforms around a central square. There is usually no furniture, people sitting and eating on the platforms. At night thin mattresses and eiderdowns are laid out for sleeping.
Apart from a doorway, light comes only through a skylight in the centre of the ceiling. But the layout of these houses is full of religious symbolism. My guide when I went trekking in the Bartang Valley explained it to me before bedtime in the Pamiri House where we stayed. Five pillars represent the family of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and, for Shias, the first Imam. One represents Mohammed himself, a second is for his daughter and Ali’s wife, Fatima, a third is for Ali, and the other two are for their sons, Hassan and Hussein. The pillars are also said to represent the five pillars, or principles, of Islam. Some suggest they may even pre-date the Pamiris’ conversion to Islam and go back to the five key deities of the Zoroastrian faith. In the meeting house in Langar, the pillars were also decorated with the pagan symbol of the sun, a symbol I also saw in the Pamiri house in the Bartang Valley, on the cross beam between the Hassan and Hussein pillars. The beams across the ceiling represent the first seven Imams of Ismailism (Ismailis differ from other Shias in that they recognise Ismail Ibn Jafal as the seventh Imam, and are also known as Seveners) and the six prophets revered in Islam, including Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, as well as Mohammed.
Pamiri religious practices are unorthodox in other ways, in addition to the pagan symbols in their houses. Contrary to the usual Moslem prohibition on human likenesses being displayed in mosques, the meeting house in Langar contained representation of Imam Ali and the Aga Khan. Then there are the roadside shrines decked out with huge ibex horns. The first I saw of these was in the Bartang Valley. The driver of the minivan I and my guide had hired to drive us asked if we could stop a little while so he could pray. I hung back while the two of them carried out their devotions, and then had a look. Like others I saw later in the Wakhan Valley, it was a walled enclosure, with ibex horns sitting atop the walls. Within was a small, simple building at the base of a rock face, with pictures of Ali and the Aga Khan above the entrance. Inside the building was a kind of grotto, with holes in the rock where offerings had been left. As with other shrines in the Pamir region, the holes in the rock must have had some spiritual significance to the people, which had somehow come to be overlaid with Islam, a very thin veneer for the folk religion of the people who went there.
In Langar, the Khalifa demonstrated the kind of music he played during the prayer meetings, accompanying his singing with a stringed instrument. He told me that in Pamiri meeting houses, men and women prayed together, not separately as is usual in most Moslem countries. When I pointed out how unusual it was that there were pictures of people in a Moslem place of prayer, he did not appear to know what I was getting at. He was flexible about his religion. Of all the places I stayed in throughout my travels in Gorno-Badakhshan, his was the only house where I was offered alcohol. The Khalifa drank it himself. Travelling back to Dushanbe, a couple of Pamiris returning to the capital after a summer holiday in their home region told me that the religious practices of the Pamiris were frowned upon by other Ismaili Shias. They urged me to go to the Ismaili centre in Dushanbe to get a better impression.
Tourism is just beginning to take off in Gorno-Badakhshan, visitors drawn to the unspoiled beauty of the mountain landscapes. For now it is small-scale and still rather rough and ready. But guest houses and homestays are starting to proliferate, as well as travel agencies. Barring further instability like that seen in 2012, further development of the tourism industry seems assured. Young Pamiris learn English, as well as other European languages, looking for careers as guides. The money is very good by local standards. The question is whether the distinctiveness of Pamiri culture can survive the onslaught of modernisation and rising prosperity? Will not people from other parts of Tajikistan be drawn in by the opportunities presented by the newly buoyant tourism? The isolation that has protected the Pamiris for so long is almost certainly coming to an end.
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