Culture is an integrated system of institutions, ideas, beliefs, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. It is an important factor in shaping and re-shaping the identity of a people. The culture has helped the Baloch to survive and to retain its national identity in difficult times in their national history. This book is a modest effort to discuss the conditions which have ensured the continuity of the Baloch culture, and the inspiring characteristics which still direct the Baloch society. It is an exploration towards understanding the Baloch and its socio-cultural traditions in their proper historical perspective.

Three thousand years ago, a group of Indo-Iranic tribes (called Balaschik at that time) settled in the northwestern Caspian region of Balashagan. Circumstances forced them to disperse and migrate towards south and eastern parts of Iranian plateau. In medieval times, they finally settled in present Balochistan where they became known as the Baloch. During their long and tortuous journey from Balashagan to Balochistan, the Baloch faced persecutions, deportations, and genocidal acts of various Persian, Arab and other regional powers. During 17th century, after dominating Balochistan culturally and politically, the Baloch carved out a nation state (the Khanate of Kalat). In 1839, the British occupied Balochistan and subsequently it was divided into various parts. In the wake of the British withdrawal from India in 1947, Balochistan regained its sovereignty but soon Pakistan occupied it in 1948. The historical account of the Baloch is the story of a pastoralist nomadic people from ancient times to mid-twentieth century. The author outlines the origin of the Baloch state and its variegated history of survival against powerful neighbors such as the Persians, the British and finally, Pakistan. This fascinating research work discovers the background of the long drawn-out conflict between the Baloch and Pakistan and Iranian states.

During the early 19th century the British came in direct contact with the Baloch, first with those living in the Punjab and Sind, and later with those in Balochistan proper. Soon after their arrival in the region, they began studying the Baloch as an ethno-national group, their language, literature, folklore, tribal structure, physical features, and so on, forming theories and suggesting hypotheses regarding their origins and relations with other nations and peoples. While some maintained that the Baloch originated from north-western Iran, others believed they came from Central Asia, from Arabia, or from else- where.1 Among the early British writers, some also opined that while some tribes might have a foreign origin, bulk of the Baloch were the autochthonous population of the country. With the passage of time, however, other theories were abandoned and a northwest Iranian origin came to be the widely accepted one. This thesis was established on three basic grounds: first, from the Balochi oral tradition which claims that the Baloch came from a place called Alab/Alap, identified as Aleppo in Syria by Western writers and later followed by some lo- cal writers too; secondly, their mention in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi where they are sometimes shown along with the people of Gilan and Dilam, regions situated on the Caspian Sea regions; and thirdly, on the basis of their language, which is classified as belonging to the northwestern group of Iranian languages having close affinities with Kurdish and other languages of that branch.

The origin of the Baloch and their history in ancient times has been lost in the dust of history. Writers belonging to the powers with which the ancient Baloch were in perpetual conflicts, produced biased and contradictory accounts about their history and sociology. This work is an attempt to produce a logical picture of a group of Indo-Iranian tribes who migrated en masse from Central Asia 3000 years ago and settled in the north-western region of Balagn or Balkn, in the Iranian Plateau. It is also the account of their sufferings and miseries in ancient times.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province rich with natural gas, gold and copper. Located on the borders of Iran and Afghanistan, land of the Balochs, where the first Baloch confederacy was founded in 1666, has had a bitter history of exploitation and suppression by a strictly centralized federal government heavily influenced by the country’s military. While the central government and the province confronted each other four times since the forceful annexation of the Baloch land into Pakistan in 1948, the ongoing movement entails more systematic and radical dimensions. Malik Siraj Akbar, editor of the The Baloch Hal, the first online English newspaper of Balochistan, takes a look at the last one decade how the dimensions of the Baloch movement changed. A Hubert Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, Malik reveals the “enforced disappearance” of hundreds of Baloch political workers and their brutal murder by the Pakistani security services under a “kill and dump” policy during detention in a phenomenon similar to Argentina’s Dirty War. The book analyzes growing state-sponsored radicalization in secular Balochistan. Malik is the most widely quoted journalist on Balochistan. He insists that the killing of former governor Nawab Akbar Bugti, 79, by Pervez Musharraf’s regime proved as the 9/11 of Pakistan’s relations with the resourceful province. The Balochistan question merits attention of the international community not only for a stable Pakistan but also to provide the world alternative options for a secular buffer state between Iran and Afghanistan if Pakistan falls in the hands of Islamists.