Chitrali (Kho)

Chitral & Ghizer

The sitar, the pakol, and the polo ground at the top of the world.

The Kho are the largest community in Chitral, and Khowar, their language, is the one that ties the district together. It is spoken from the lower valleys up to the Afghan border and eastward into Ghizer, and it functions as the common tongue between the smaller language communities that share the same mountains.

Chitral has a reputation in Pakistan for gentleness and for music, and the two are connected. The Chitrali sitar is a long necked, lightly strung instrument played in a style built around melody rather than rhythm, and the repertoire of instrumental tunes and sung verse attached to it is one of the richest oral literatures in the north.

The other thing Chitral is known for is polo, played on a high, rough ground with no rules worth speaking of. The tournament at Shandur pass, on a plateau above 3,700 metres between Chitral and Ghizer, is the largest gathering in the region and the closest thing the two districts have to a shared annual event.

The land

Where this happens

Chitral sits in the Hindu Kush rather than the Karakoram, drained by the Chitral river and closed in by Tirich Mir, the highest peak in the range, which is visible from a great deal of the valley. The passes east to Gilgit are high and seasonal, and the road south through Lowari was closed by snow for months at a time until a tunnel changed that, so the district spent most of its history oriented as much towards Central Asia as towards the rest of Pakistan. Side valleys run off the main one in every direction, and each has kept its own dialect, its own tunes and, in several cases, its own language.

The language

One thread of many

Khowar

Vulnerable

Family: Dardic branch of Indo-Aryan
Speakers: No verified figure yet
Script: Perso-Arabic

Khowar is the strongest of the Dardic languages of Chitral and functions as the district lingua franca, which gives it a security the smaller languages around it do not have. It is written in a Perso-Arabic alphabet, has a body of published poetry and song, and is broadcast on local radio. Its vulnerability is of a different kind: it is losing vocabulary rather than speakers, as Urdu and English terms replace Khowar ones in education, work and administration.

Sample vocabulary is deliberately absent. Words and pronunciations belong to speakers, and we will not publish them from memory or guesswork.

Craft, dress & music

Made by hand

Instrument making sits at the centre: the Chitrali sitar, along with the drums and flutes that accompany it, made by craftsmen who are usually players themselves. Woollen weaving produces the shu cloth used for coats and, most famously, the pakol, the rolled woollen cap that spread from these valleys across the whole of the Hindu Kush. Embroidery, silverwork and woodcarving round it out.

We have no photography from Chitrali (Kho) yet. Rather than fill this space with images of somewhere else, we have left it empty.

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What’s at risk

Khowar is not endangered in the sense that a few thousand speakers are, but the deepest parts of it are. The instrumental and sung repertoire is held by an ageing generation of players, much of it never recorded, and a tune that is not passed on is simply gone. The smaller languages of Chitral are in a far more serious position, and because Khowar is the language they shift to on the way to Urdu, its own health matters to them as well.

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