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Dards, Dardistan, and Dardic:
an Ethnographic, Geographic, and Linguistic Conundrum
by John Mock, Ph.D.
The Karakoram presents exceptional ethnic, geographic, and linguistic diversity,
where high mountains and intervening deep river gorges often mark the
boundary lines of ethnic and linguistic features. This topography, however,
has channeled rather than blocked human movement, so that there has been
persistent contact between the various people speaking different languages.
The present social and linguistic fabric of the Karakoram is a result of
continual processes of convergence and divergence.
A lineal taxonomy of the languages of the Karakoram presents us with a
snapshot of genetically related languages at one moment, but does little to
illuminate the ongoing change due to contact, and gives no indication of the
interrelationship between neighboring but genetically unrelated (i.e., not
sharing a common ancestor) languages.
Early British efforts placed almost all the peoples and languages of the
upper Indus River between Kashmir and Kabul into one group, distinguishing
only the ethnically and linguistically Tibetan Balti people as a separate
group. This unitary classification, however, obscured the distinct identities
of all other peoples and their interrelationships. Not only was there a
conflation of ethnic identity, but the resulting conflated ethnicity was then
employed as a linguistic classification, which provided the basis for a
geographic classification. Each term carried with it social, political, and
ideological baggage, resulting in the conundrum of Dard, Dardistan, and
Dardic. Looking at how and why this conundrum came about will help us
understand the implications of choices we make in categorizing the diversity
in the Karakoram.
No people in the Karakoram and vicinity today refer to themselves as
Dards, their country as Dardistan, or their language as Dardic. The word dard
itself is unknown in any languages of the area, except as a loan word from
Persian via Urdu, in which it means "pain". Why should a term with
no self-referentiality be so widely used by scholars today? The work of
Fussman (1972), Tucci (1977), Müeller-Stellrecht (1979), Jettmar (1980), and
Vohra (1982; 1983; 1988; 1989) offers representative examples of the varying
usage of the term "dard" by scholars.
Greek and Roman References
In a well-known and much repeated story, Herodotus (4th century B.C.) mentions a war-like
people on the frontier of India, near to whom are found gold-digging ants.
Herodotus provides the name Dadikai for one of the groups living on
India's frontier, which was then the seventh satrapy of the Achaemenian
empire. Writing much later,
Strabo (64 B.C. to A.D. 23) and Pliny (A.D. 23 to A.D. 79) repeat
Herodotus' story and name the war-like people Dardae. Alexander, whose
travels provide much of the data for classical geography of India, apparently
did not meet any Dard people, but he did go to a place called Daedala.
Curtius reports Alexander fought against people called Assakenoi in Daedala.
Tucci assumes the Assakenoi were a Scythican tribe whose name derives
from the word for horse (Tucci 1977:29). Herodotus' Dadikai may be the
Persian name for the darada given in the Puranic lists, which Strabo
and Pliny applied to the war-like people whom they equated with Curtius' Assakenoi.
Hence, Herodutus' original citation appears to have been derived from Puranic
sources. Finally, Ptolemy
gives us a map that shows the Indus River arising in the country of the daradrai
(map in McCrindle 1885),
a term that appears to be received from Sanskrit epic and Puranic sources.
These Sanskrit references to Daradas, although they cannot be assigned any
historicity, indicate that the Darada were known to those familiar with such
texts. Singh cites references in the Vayu, Brahmanda, Markandeya,
Vamana, and Padma Puranas (Singh 1972). Daradas are also
mentioned in the Brhatsamhita, and in Manu, where they are classified
pejoratively as Mlecchas. Mahabharata refers to them as degraded
Kshatriyas (XII 35, 17-8 in Singh 1972). Rather than a specific people, the
term Dard may have been used to characterize a fierce people, residing in the
northwest, outside the boundaries of civilization. David White, in discussing
the European, Chinese, and Indian traditions regarding these people, points out
that "they are a negativity, a blank space on the fringes of the
conceptual map of these traditions' self-centered universes" (White
1991:117).
Three inscriptions on rocks along the Indus and Gilgit Rivers in the
southern reaches of the Karakoram provide the earliest epigraphic references
to Dard kings. One is found on rocks where the present-day road between
Gilgit and Skardu crosses the Gilgit River, over a bridge known as the Alam
bridge, now called the Farhad bridge. The inscription is in poor Kharosthi,
and Fussman has read "daradaraya", meaning "King of the
Dards" (Fussman 1978:1-6). The second inscription is found at Chilas
Terrace, near to Chilas village along the Indus River, south of the junction
of the Gilgit River and the Indus River. It has been discussed by Dani (1983)
and more recently by Hinuber (1989).
Hinuber publishes a transliteration of daratsu maharaja sri
vaisravanasena ssatrudamanah, which he translates as "The glorious
Vaisravanasena, the subduer of enemies, great King in the land of the
Dards" (1989:59). Hinuber interprets these Brahmi inscriptions as
referring to the same king Vaiaravanasena, and dates them to the 4th or 5th
centuries A.D. He remarks that this king "is the second oldest king of
the Dards known by name, preceded only by the daradaraya mentioned at
Alam bridge in a Kharosthi inscription" (1989:59). These inscriptions
appear to be the only known self-reference to a Dard people.
Kalhana, in Rajatarangini
(Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir), first mentions "the Darada
country" as the location of a Vihara built by king Surendra (Stein
1979:I, 93, 17). Surendra is the fifth king after Ashoka, whom Kalhana
identifies as the familiar Ashoka of the 3rd century B.C.
Daradas are next mentioned, along with Bhauttas and Mlecchas, as impure people during
the reign of Mihirakula,
calculated as from Laukika dates 2372-2442 (Stein 1979:I, 312-6, 46). Sircar
gives dates of A.D. 515to A.D. 545 for Mihirakula, based on an inscription at
Gwalior (Sircar 1965:424-5).
Stein offers a footnote to the reference to Mihirakula's reign, which is
worth quoting in full:
The Daradas are the
modern Dards regarding whose territory and ethnography Drew, (Jummoo,
pp. 393 sqq)., may be consulted. Their seats, which do not seem to have
changed since the time of Herodotus, extend from Citral and Yasin across the
Indus regions of Gilgit, Cilas, and Bunji to the Kishanganga Valley in the
immediate north of Kasmir. The tribes inhabiting the latter valley are meant
in most passages in which the Chronicle mentions the Daradas or Darads.
In Rajatarangini, these people are mentioned as residing to the
north of Kashmir, and as frequently attempting to invade Kashmir and/or
intrigue with factions in Kashmir. They are next mentioned during the latter
part of the reign of Lalitaditya-Mukt pida, around A.D. 750, who "did not tolerate the
continual wine-drinking of the Darads" (Stein 1979:IV, 169).
Dards are next mentioned during the reign of Shankaravarman, A.D. 883 to A.D. 902
(Stein 1979:V, 152-155, 206). Kalhana goes on to name several Dard rulers:
Acalamangala, during the reign of Ananta of Kashmir, A.D. 1028 to A.D.
1063 (VII, 167),
Vidhyadhara Shahi during the reign of Harsa, 1089-1101 A.D. (VII, 913),
Jagaddala during the reign of Uccala, A.D. 1101 to A.D. 1111 (VIII, 209),
Manidhara during the reign of Sussala, A.D. 1112 to A.D. 1120 (VIII, 614),
Yasodhara during the reign of
Jayasimha, A.D. 1128 to A.D. 1149 (VIII, 2454).
During Kalhana's own time, the Darad ruler joined forces with an
opposition faction and fought against Jayasimha, only to be defeated (VIII,
2764-2873). Clearly, Kalhana identified people living in the Karakoram region
northwest of Kashmir as Darads. Whether they were one distinct ethnic group,
or whether the term broadly signified the unruly wine drinkers living in the
mountains cannot be determined.
Stein's note (Stein 1979:I, 312-316, 46ft) exemplifies the assumption of a
link between the people referred to by classical Greek authors as
"daradrai" and people in the Karakoram regions northwest of
Kashmir. Stein refers to Frederic Drew, a colonial officer, as the
ethnographic authority on the Dards as a people. Prior to Drew, however, the
Dards were first mentioned by Mir Izzet Ullah, who was the assistant to the
chief veterinarian of the East India Company, William Moorcroft. Izzet Ullah
was sent by Moorcroft from Kashmir via Leh to Yarkand, in search of horses.
His notes were translated from Persian into English and published in the Quarterly Oriental Magazine of Calcutta in 1825.
In them he mentions "Dardi, an independent mountain tribe, three or four
marches north from Dras, who speak the Pashtu as well as the Daradi
language" (Izzet Ullah 1843:286). This would most likely refer to the
Astor Valley, across the Deosai Plains from Dras, where today, as then, Shina
is spoken and Pushtu would be most improbable.
H.H. Wilson, sometime Boden professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University,
prepared Moorcroft's own notes for posthumous publication. He added a
footnote in reference to Izzet Ullah's report, linking the Dards to classical
Greek and Sanskrit accounts, "Few people can be traced through so long a
history in the same place as these, as they are evidently the Dáradas of
Sanscrit geography, and the Daradae, or Daradrae of Strabo" (Wilson in Moorcroft 1841:II,
266). It is as if Wilson has discovered those very people whom
classical geographers led him to expect to find inhabiting the Karakoram.
The connection between past and present thus established, the term became
accepted through repeated usage. G.W. Leitner emerged as an unabashed
advocate of the ethnographic and political reality of the Dards and
Dardistan, writing that "the country is known, since my visit in 1866,
as 'Dardistan', [even though] the name 'Dard' was not claimed by any of the
race that I met" (Leitner 1983:59).
Although Robert B. Shaw mentions in a footnote that "I have heard the
Drás people of that [Dard] tribe apply [the name Dard] to their parent stock
in Astor under the form Dardé" (Shaw 1878:27ft), no other writer
on the area confirmed his assertion.
The 1919 Glossary
of the Tribes and Castes of Punjab and North-West Frontier Province
informed its readers that "the tribes which occupied the modern
Kafiristan, Gilgit, and Chitral were called Pisacha or 'eaters of raw flesh',
and traditions of ritual cannibalism still survive among the Shins of Gilgit,
the Wai and Bashgal Kafirs and in Dardistan. Indeed the Dards of Gilgit had a
reputation among the Kashmiris for cannibalism as late as 1866"
(Ibbetson, Maclagan, and Rose 1919:25).
End Notes
1. The Nuristani languages (Morgenstierne's "
Kafir" languages) include Kati, Wasi-weri, Ashkun, Kalasha-ala, and
Tregami. These languages retain phonological features which cannot be derived
from Indo-Aryan, but rather, only from Indo- European. See Masica 1991: 461-3
for a succinct discussion of the basis of this distinction.
2. Strand's classification that appeared in print
(Strand 1973) should be regarded as an incomplete version. The table
presented here is an updated version of that classification (Strand 1998,
personal communication). Strand's most recent publication on the topic, "The Tongues of
Peristân", is to appear in the The Gates of Peristan by
Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo.
3. Peter Hook, who conducted field work in Ramban
village, reports, he " could not discover anything called Rambani. The
language of the place is called Zundhari…and the differences between Poguli
and Zundhari did not strike me as decisive" (Hook 1997, personal communication).
4. Burushaski's grouping,
toegther with Caucasion and Basque, withing a "Macro-Caucasian"
phylum, part of a larger "Dene-Caucasin" family, has been proposed
(Bengston 1991a, 1991b). Hermann Berger, however, remarks that "the
structural similarity (of Burushaski) with Basque and Caucasian…is obvious,
but what is still missing are really convincing etymologies…" (Berger
1985:37), a point of view he has recently confirmed (Berger 1995, personal
communication).
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