The founding of the Khanate of Kalat

In the previous chapter, we saw Humayun pass through Balochistan in defeat, by way of Sibi, Mastung and Kandahar. This chapter begins the third part of our story, “The Khanate of Kalat”. In the sixteenth century, Kalat was a remote town between the Mughal and Safavid empires. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had become the centre of a state that ran its own affairs until the arrival of the British in 1839. We have two kinds of sources on how this change came about. One is the tribal traditions that British officers and travellers wrote down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The other is the modern research that has tested those traditions. We shall present the two separately.

Kalat before the Khanate: the traditions

Most of what we know about the early history of Kalat is tradition, not history. The Balochistan volume of the Imperial Gazetteer of India, published in 1908 and compiled by R. Hughes-Buller, states plainly that, according to “all tradition”, the former rulers of Kalat were Hindus named Sewa. According to the British traveller Henry Pottinger, the town was often called “Kalat-i-Sewa” even in his time. In the tradition he heard, the last Raja, Sewa, was deposed by a chieftain named Kumbur. The Gazetteer also says that the Mirwaris, from whom the Ahmadzai family later descended, claim Arab origin. The Gazetteer records all this as tradition, not as historical fact.

These traditions were written down even before the British officers. Henry Pottinger wrote “Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde” in 1816, after his journey of 1810. It has separate chapters on the Baloch and Brahuis and on the history of Kalat. Charles Masson, who lived in the region from 1826 to 1838, published his narrative of journeys in 1842. In 1843 he published a memoir on Eastern Balochistan in a separate volume. These writings are listed in the bibliography of the Imperial Gazetteer, whose compilers made them and the tribal accounts the basis of their history.

The shadow of Mughal Kandahar

One thing confirmed by Mughal records is the region’s link with Kandahar. According to the Gazetteers of Quetta-Pishin and Sarawan (1907), the Ain-i-Akbari, the official book of Akbar’s reign, shows Shal (today’s Quetta) and Mastung in the eastern part of the sarkar of Kandahar in the late sixteenth century. In the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Brian Spooner writes that the recovery of Kalat became possible when Mughal power weakened in Kandahar. In the Iranica article “Brahui”, Josef Elfenbein looks at this link from the other side. Mughal interest in the west was growing from Akbar’s reign, and the governor of Kandahar ruled a large area to the south. When Mughal expansion peaked under Shah Jahan, he says, this very pressure led to the emergence, for the first time in history, of a strong and organised state, the “Brahui Confederacy” or Khanate of Kalat.

Mir Hasan and Mir Ahmad Khan: the start of the Ahmadzai line

Iranica describes the tradition of the khanate’s founding thus. When Mughal power declined, the Brahui chieftain Mir Ibrahim Khan Mirwari retook Kalat. He declined to rule himself and handed the khanship to his brother-in-law, Mir Hasan. Iranica calls Mir Hasan “the first khan of the Baloch”. Mir Hasan died childless, and power passed to Mir Ahmad Khan Qambarani, after whom the Ahmadzai family is named. The Sarawan and Jhalawan volumes of the district gazetteers of Balochistan (1907) tell the tradition somewhat differently. The Brahuis expelled the Mughal governor of Kalat. They asked Mir Ibrahim Khan Mirwari, who lived in Jhalawan, for a son to be their chief, and he sent his grandson, Mir Hasan. According to the Sarawan Gazetteer, Mir Hasan and his successors ruled Kalat for twelve generations. In 1666-67, Mir Ahmad took the throne and defeated the Mughal governor, Agha Jafar, and took Mastung.

A caution is needed here. The sources do not agree even on the date of 1666. Elfenbein calls Mir Ahmad Khan I a Mirwari and puts his reign at roughly 1660 to 1695. According to him, Yusuf Gichki, a former secretary of the last khan, called 1666 a printing error. Elfenbein also writes that the first certain mention of the Brahuis in history is in Mughal accounts of the seventeenth century, and that too in connection with the Khanate of Kalat. In other words, the state whose founding we are describing is also the first firm trace of this people in history. The Imperial Gazetteer too begins “authentic history” with Mir Ahmad and treats what came before as tradition.

Sarawan and Jhalawan: the tribal structure

The Khanate of Kalat was no ordinary monarchy. According to the Jhalawan volume of the Gazetteer of Balochistan (1907), the tribes of the Brahui confederacy were divided into two large parts. Sarawan means the tribes “above”, or to the north, and Jhalawan the tribes “below”, or to the south. “Jhalawan” comes from the Balochi word “jahl”, meaning below or south. The Gazetteer also says these two divisions probably took their present form in the early eighteenth century, in the time of Mir Abdullah Khan, about fifty years after the founding of the khanate. In 1904, in “The Baloch Race”, Longworth Dames wrote that these groups of Sarawan and Jhalawan are collectively Brahuis and speak the Brahui language.

According to Elfenbein, the khanate’s power rested from the start on a complex system of alliances and patronage. It included the major Brahui tribes (the Qambarani, Mirwari and Iltazai), the Rind and Lashari Baloch, and the Dehwar cultivators. The Imperial Gazetteer writes that when Mughal power weakened, the first problem of the Ahmadzai khans was to bring cohesion to the “loose tribal organisation” of the state. This was done by distributing a share of every conquest among the poor hill tribes. One chapter of the same Gazetteer is titled “Kalat always a dependent State”. According to it, the rulers of Kalat were never fully independent. They obeyed the orders of the earlier Mughal emperors and the rulers of Kandahar, and supplied troops when asked. In other words, the khan’s power was bound on one side to the tribal chiefs and on the other to the great empires.

What was made, and what was not

By the end of the seventeenth century, Kalat had a political structure with two pillars: the Ahmadzai khan, and the Brahui and Baloch tribes. The third pillar, the revenue of the Kachhi plain, was still to come. According to the Kachhi Gazetteer, Mir Abdullah Khan, a contemporary of Nur Muhammad Kalhora of Sindh, invaded the plain, which was then being governed on behalf of the Kalhoras. Those battles are the subject of the next chapter. The “founding” of the khanate was not a single day or a single battle. It is a layer of traditions, from beneath which a state slowly emerges.

Next Sunday: Mir Abdullah Khan: the battles of the Kachhi plain and the first expansion of the khanate.