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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
ChIAP. XXX. THE PROVINCE OF PASHAI
165
and the Tibetans still regard that locality as the classic ground of sorcery and witchcraft.
Hiuen Tsang says of the inhabitants : " The men are of a soft and pusillanimous character, naturally inclined to craft and trickery. They are fond of study, but
pursue it with no ardour. The science of magical formulae is become a regular professional business with them. They generally wear clothes of white cotton, and rarely use any other stuff. Their spoken language, in spite of some differences, has a strong resemblance to that of India."
These particulars suit well with the slight description in our text, and the Indian atmosphere that it suggests ; and the direction and distance ascribed to Pashai suit
well with Chitral, which may be taken as representing Udyána when approached from Badakhshan. For it would be quite practicable for a party to reach the town of Chitrál in ten days from the position assigned to the old capital of Badakhshan. And from Chitrál the road towards Káshmir would lie over the high Lahori pass to DIR, which from its mention in chapter xviii. we must consider an obligatory point. (Fah-hffan, p. 26 ; Koeppen, I. 70 ; Pélerins Boud. II. 131-132.)
[ " Tao-lin (a Buddhist monk like Hiuen Tsang) afterwards left the western regions and changed his road to go to Northern India ; he made a pilgrimage to Kia-the-milorto (Káshmir), and then entered the country of U-clz'ang-na (Udyána). . ." (Ed. Chavannes, 1-tsing, p. 105.)—H. C. ]
We must now turn to the name Pashai. The Pashai Tribe are now Mahomedan,
but are reckoned among the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, which the Afghans are not. Baber mentions them several times, and counts their language as one of the
dozen that were spoken at Kabul-in his time. Burnes says it resembles that of the
Kafirs. A small vocabulary of it was published by Leech, in the seventh volume of the J. A. S. B., which I have compared with vocabularies of Siah-posh Kafir, published by Raverty in vol. xxxiii. of the same journal, and by Lumsden in his Report of the
Mission to Kandahar, in 1837. Both are Aryan, and seemingly of Professor Max Müller's class Indic, but not very close to one another.*
Ibn Batuta, after crossing the Hindu-Kúsh by one of the passes at the head of the Panjshir Valley, reaches the Mountain BASHÁI (Pashai). In the same vicinity the
Pashais are mentioned by Sidi 'Ali, in 1554. And it is still in the neighbourhood of
Panjshir that the tribe is most numerous, though they have other settlements in the hill-country about Nijrao, and on the left bank of the Kabul River between Kabul
and Jalalabad. Pasha and Pasha-gar is also named as one of the chief divisions of the Kafirs, and it seems a fair conjecture that it represents those of the Pashais who resisted or escaped conversion to Islam. (See Leech's Reports in Collection pub. at Calcutta in 1839 ; Baber, 140 ; Elphinstone, I. 411 ; J. A. S. B. VII. 329, 731, XXVIII. 317 segq., XXXIII. 271-272 ; I. B. III. 86 ; J. As. IX. 203, and/ R. A. S.
iv. s. V. 103, 278.)
The route of which Marco had heard must almost certainly have been one of those leading by the high Valley of Zebák, and by the Doráh or the Nuksán Pass, over the watershed of Hindu-Kúsh into Chitrál, and so to Dir, as already noticed. The difficulty remains as to how he came to apply the name Pashai to the country southeast of Badakhshan. I cannot tell. But it is at least possible that the name of the Pashai tribe (of which the branches even now are spread over a considerable extent of country) may have once had a wide application over the southern spurs of the HinduI~úsh. - Our Author, moreover, is speaking here from hearsay, and hearsay geography without maps is much given to generalising. I apprehend that, along with characteristics specially referable to the Tibetan and Mongol traditions of Udyána, the term Pashai, as Polo uses it, vaguely covers the whole tract from the southern boundary of Badakhshan to the Indus and the Kabul River.
* The Kafir dialect of which Mr. Trumpp collected some particulars shows in the present tense of the substantive verb these remarkable forms :—Ei sz n, Tzï sis, siga sé; Inlet s2na s, Wï sik, Sig-é sin.
t In the Tabakát-i-Násiri (Etliot, II. 317) we find mention of the Highlands of Pasha-Afroz, but nothing to define their position,
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