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 Udyana when approached from Badakhshan. For it would be quite
practicable for a party to reach the town of Chitral in ten days from the
position assigned to the old capital of Badakhshan. And from Chitral the
road towards Kashmir would lie over the high Lahori pass to DIR, which
from its mention in chapter xviii. we must consider an obligatory point.
(Fah-hian, p. 26; Koeppen, I. 70; Pelerins 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-che-mi-louo (Kashmir), and then entered the country of
U-ch'ang-na (Udyana)...." (Ed. Chavannes, I-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 Mueller's class Indic, but not very close to one another.[1]
Ibn Batuta, after crossing the Hindu-Kush by one of the passes at the head
of the Panjshir Valley, reaches the Mountain BASHAI (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 seqq., XXXIII.
