[Chawmos, a festival of Pakistan’s tiny Kalash community, is a portrait in contrasts: solemn ritual and joyous dancing, gender segregation and public flirtation, togetherness and isolation.]
By Rebecca Conway
The Kalash are a group of about
4,000 people who live in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, where they practice
an ancient polytheistic faith. Each year, they come together for Chawmos, a New
Year festival that coincides with the winter solstice and is marked by dance,
animal sacrifice and highly prescribed roles for men and women.
The two-week festival is a portrait
in contrasts: snow and fire, solemn ritual and frenzied activity, gender
segregation and public flirtation, community and isolation.
While the coronavirus has forced
the world to adopt social distancing, the Kalash have practiced being a
community in isolation for millenniums.
The Kalash, whose wooden houses
cling to the craggy hillsides of three valleys in Pakistan’s often unruly
northwest, are the country’s smallest minority group. The overwhelming majority
of Pakistan’s more than 200 million people practice Islam.
Despite the seclusion of the
Kalash, the outside world has crept closer, bringing changes to their way of
life.
Their faith is often compared to an
ancient form of Hinduism, but the origins of the Kalash are a mystery. Some
believe they are descended from the forces of Alexander the Great; other
anthropologists contend they are migrants from nearby Afghanistan.
Their religion incorporates animistic traditions of
worshiping nature as well as a pantheon of gods, whose members in some
instances bear resemblances to the Vedic gods of ancient India. Chief among the
Kalash gods is Balumain, the lord of heaven, to whom the festival is dedicated.
For the Kalash, cleanliness and
holiness are inextricably linked. Areas of the villages and valleys where they
live are designated “pure,” and access to them is sometimes restricted by
gender or may first require a ritual bath. The Kalash believe places and people
are most likely to be visited by Balumain only after they have been cleaned and
sanctified.
During the year, Kalash women must
bathe and wash their clothes and dishes away from their homes. During their
periods and when they give birth, they stay in menstruation huts. These are
community spaces that are the exclusive domain of women, unlike the huts found
elsewhere in the region, including in
Nepal, where women are left alone and die from exposure and other
causes every year.
As the Chawmos festival begins each
December, the women take part in a purification ritual. Held in a temple, known
as a jestekan, or in an open space away from their homes, women and girls hold
bread that has been baked for them by male family members.
A male relative then showers them
with water, and waves burning juniper branches over their heads. Only then can
women pass freely between the valley’s villages and homes to take part in the
festivities.
In the lead up to the holiday, the
men grind flour at a communal mill and bake their loaves at home or in the
jestekan. The women gather at a bath house, where they wash their
vibrant-colored dresses and wrap their hair in long braids.
In order to stay and witness the
festival unfold last year, I joined the women of a family with whom I was
staying in their purification ritual. I watched as, one by one, they stepped
forward to be encircled by a trail of flame.
At the start of Chawmos, the crisp
winter air is filled with the scent of fresh baked bread and burning juniper,
and neighbors greet one another with baskets of fruits and nuts.
What follows is 14 days of song,
dance and ceremony. A group of women, often from the same family or clan, will
form a circle and begin singing and dancing, their arms intertwined and their
eyes half-closed in prayer. As the women sing, other women and men join the
ring and the circle grows larger and louder.
When moved, a young woman will
break from the group and dance in the middle of the circle. Sometimes, a woman
or a man from her family will join her. But often, a young man will enter the
ring to dance with her. Their dance is different: The couple face one another,
their eyes locked. They are courting.
In the first days of the
celebration, young people often find a spouse; the women often make the first
move.
“The girl goes to the boy’s family
maybe for a few weeks or a month and then when she comes back home they will
get married,” said Bibi Jan, a woman of about 80. “No one else
decides, it is up to them what they choose.”
The dancing, as well as the
flirting, is fueled by locally brewed mulberry wine. The role of women and the
consumption of wine in the community contrast with the mores of their Muslim
neighbors, who sometimes attend the festivals as tourists.
“The way they worship and the way
men and women marry — and just interact generally — is very different from
surrounding communities,” said Wynne Maggi, an anthropologist who has studied
the Kalash.
The festival, the most important of
the year, is also a time for the Kalash’s local leadership to deliberate over
the serious challenges facing the culture.
The Kalash find themselves
increasingly squeezed by outsiders buying up land and moving in. And for many
years, the Kalash have been wary about the threat from Islamist militants who
see their faith as sacrilege.
They face environmental threats, as
well. The trees that protected the valleys from floods caused by rain and
glacial melt are being removed, sometimes illegally, at an alarming rate. The
dearth of trees and changes to weather patterns resulting from global warming
has resulted in recent years in devastating flash floods that destroy homes,
bridges and crops.
Younger members are leaving the
area for greater educational and employment opportunities. Government schools
all teach about Islam, and each year some young Kalash decide to convert,
locals say. A new road has made access to the area easier, and tourists are
increasingly visiting the Kalash valleys, where most people exist largely on a
mixture of subsistence farming and livestock husbandry.
Saifullah, a Kalash leader, who
goes by only one name, said his biggest concern was outsiders buying land to
build hotels in an effort to court tourists.
The hotels are often on or near
land considered sacred to the Kalash, and the Muslim-owned accommodations are
seen as depriving the community of tourist dollars, which has led to
resentments.
“The Kalash will never finish,”
said Mr. Saifullah, 61. “But of course the population is going down if they
can’t get enough land to stay here.”
Aslam Baig, 29, who returned to the
valley from Lahore, where he works, said many young people have left to find
work.
“It’s very hard because we don’t
have internet, we don’t have newspapers, and then you have to go to cities to
find out about the jobs,” he said.
But during the Chawmos
celebrations, many of these problems are momentarily forgotten.
The festival culminates with a
late-night torch procession through the tiny villages in the Kalash valleys;
flickering lights weave down through forests, heralding the start of a final
evening of dancing. The hillsides echo with song.
The Kalash dance around a bonfire,
linking arms and chanting prayers for the year ahead.
