only woollen cloth is made in the country. Of late years long robes
from Chitral and Badakshan have been imported by the wealthy,
as well as the material for loose cotton trousers and wide shirts.
Clothing, always hard to obtain, is precious property. Formerly
little girls, the children of slaves, or else poor relations, used to be
sold in exchange for clothes and ammunition. Mahommedans
eagerly bought the children, which enabled them in one transaction
to acquire a female slave and to convert an infidel. Men go bareheaded,
which wrinkles them prematurely, or they wear Chitral
caps. Certain priests, and others of like degree, wind a strip of
cotton cloth round their brows. Siah-Posh women wear curious
horned caps or a small square white head-dress upon informal
occasions. Females of other tribes bind their heads with turbans
ornamented with shells and other finery. Excellent snow gaiters
are made of goat’s hair for both sexes, and of woollen material for
women. Boots, strongly sewn, of soft red leather cannot be used
in the snow or when it is wet, because they are imperfectly tanned.
For the ceremonial dances all manner of gay-coloured articles of
attire, made of cheap silk, cotton velvet, and sham cloth-of-gold,
are displayed, and false jewelry and tawdry ornaments; but they
are not manufactured in the country, but brought from Peshawar
by pedlars. Woollen blankets and goat’s-hair mats cover the
bedsteads—four-legged wooden frames laced across with string or
leather thongs. Low square stools, 18 in. broad, made upon the
same principle as the bedsteads, are peculiar to the Kafirs and their
half-breed neighbours of the border. Iron tripod tables, singularly
Greek in design, are fashioned in Waigul. A warrior’s weapons are
a matchlock (rarely a flintlock), a bow and arrows, a spear and the
dagger which he never puts aside day or night. The axes, often
carried, are light and weak, and chiefly indicate rank. Clubs, carefully
ornamented by carving, are of little use in a quarrel; their
purpose is that of a walking-stick. As they are somewhat long,
these walking-clubs have been often supposed to be leaping-poles.
Swords are rarely seen, and shields, carried purely for ostentation,
seldom. Soft stone is quarried to make large utensils, and great
grim chests of wood become grain boxes or coffins indifferently.
Prettily carved bowls with handles, or with dummy spouts, hold
milk, butter, water or small quantities of flour. Wine, grain,
everything else, is stored or carried in goatskin bags. Musical
instruments are represented by reed flageolets, small drums, primitive
fiddles, and a kind of harp.
Isolated and at the outskirts of every village is a house used by women when menstruating and for lying-in. Children are named as soon as born. The infant is given to the mother to suckle, while a wise woman rapidly recites the family ancestral names; the name pronounced at the instant Peculiar Customs. the baby begins to feed is that by which it is thereafter known. Everybody has a double name, the father’s being prefixed to that given at birth. Very often the two are the same. There is a special day for the first head-shaving. No hair is allowed on a male’s scalp, except from a 4-in. circle at the back of the head, whence long locks hang down straight. Puberty is attained ceremoniously by boys. Girls simply change a fillet for a cotton cap when nature proclaims womanhood. Marriage is merely the purchase of a wife through intermediaries, accompanied by feasting. Divorce is often merely a sale or the sending away of a wife to slave for her parents in shame. Sexual morality is low. Public opinion applauds gallantry, and looks upon adultery as hospitality, provided it is not discovered by the husband. If found out, in flagrante delicto, there is a fiscal fine in cows. There is much collusion to get this penalty paid in poor households. Funeral rites are most elaborate, according to the rank and warrior fame of the deceased, if a male, and to the wealth and standing of the family, if a woman. Children are simply carried to the cemetery in a blanket, followed by a string of women lamenting. A really great man is mourned over for days with orations, dancing, wine-drinking and food distribution. Gun-firing gives notice of the procession. After two or three days the corpse is placed in the coffin at a secluded spot, and the observances are continued with a straw figure lashed upon a bed, to be danced about, lamented over, and harangued as before. During regular intervals for business and refreshment old women wail genealogies. A year later, with somewhat similar ritual, a wooden statue is inaugurated preliminary to erection on the roadside or in the village Valhalla. The dead are not buried, but deposited in great boxes collected in an assigned place. Finery is placed with the body, as well as vessels holding water and food. Several corpses may be heaped in one receptacle, which is, rarely, ornamented with flags; its lid is kept from warping by heavy stones. The wooden statues or effigies are at times sacrificed to when there is sickness, and at one of the many annual festivals food is set before them. Among the Presungal there are none of these images. Blood-feuds within a tribe do not exist. The slayer of his fellow, even by accident, has to pay a heavy compensation or else become an outcast. Several hamlets and at least one village are peopled by families who had thus been driven forth from the community. The stigma attaches itself to children and their marriage connexions. Its outward symbol is an inability to look in the face any of the dead person’s family. This avoidance is ceremonial. In private and after dark all may be good friends after a decorous interval. The compensation is seldom paid, although payment carries with it much enhancement of family dignity. All the laws to punish theft, assault, adultery and other injury are based on a system of compensation whenever possible, and of enlisting the whole of the community in all acts of punishment. Kafirs have true conceptions of justice. There is no death penalty; a fighting male is too valuable a property of the whole tribe to be so wasted. War begins honourably with proper notice, as a rule, but the murder of an unsuspecting traveller may be the first intimation. Bullets or arrow-heads sent to a tribe or village is the correct announcement of hostilities. The slaying of a tribesman need not in all cases cause a war. Sometimes it may be avoided by the sinning tribe handing over a male to be killed by the injured relations. Ambush, early morning attacks by large numbers, and stealthy killing parties of two or three are the favourite tactics. Peace is made by the sacrifice of cows handed over by the weaker tribe to be offered up to a special god of the stronger. When both sides have shown equal force and address, the same number of animals are exchanged. Field-work falls exclusively to the women. It is poor. The ploughs are light and very shallow. A woman, who only looks as if she were yoked with the ox, keeps the beast in the furrows, while a second holds the handle. All the operations of agriculture are done primitively. Grazing and dairy-farming are the real trade of the Kafirs, the surplus produce being exchanged on the frontier or sold for Kabul rupees. Herders watch their charges fully armed against marauders.
History.—The history of Kafiristan has always been of the floating legendary sort. At the present day there are men living in Chitral and on other parts of the Kafiristan frontier who are prepared to testify as eye-witnesses to marvels observed, and also heard, by them, not only in the more remote valleys but even in the Afghan borderland itself. It is not surprising therefore that the earlier records are to a great extent fairy tales of a more or less imaginative kind and chiefly of value to those interested in folk-lore. Sir Henry Yule, a scientific soldier, a profound geographer and a careful student, as the result of his researches thought that the present Kafiristan was part of that pagan country stretching between Kashmir and Kabul which medieval Asiatics referred to vaguely as Bilaur, a name to be found in Marco Polo as Bolor. The first distinct mention of the Kafirs as a separate people appears in the history of Timur. On his march to the invasion of India the people at Andarab appealed to Timur for help against the Kator and the Siah-Posh Kafirs. He responded and entered the country of those tribes through the upper part of the Panjhir valley. It was in deep winter weather and Timur had to be let down the snows by glissade in a basket guided by ropes. A detachment of 10,000 horse which he speaks of as having been sent against the Siah-Posh to his left, presumably therefore to the north, met with disaster; but he himself claims to have been victorious. Nevertheless he seems quickly to have evacuated the impracticable mountain land, quitting the country at Khawak. He caused an inscription to be carved in the defiles of Kator to commemorate his invasion and to explain its route. Inside the Kafir country on the Najil or Alishang River there is a fort still called Timur’s Castle, and in the Kalam fort there is said to be a stone engraved to record that as the farthest point of his advance. In the Memoirs of Baber there is mention of the Kafirs raiding into Panjhir and of their taste for drinking, every man having a leathern wine-bottle slung round his neck. The Ain-i-Akbari makes occasional mention of the Kafirs, probably on the authority of the famous Memoirs; it also contains a passage which may possibly have originated the widespread story that the Kafirs were descendants of the Greeks. Yule however believed that this passage did not refer to the Kafirs at all, but to the claims to descent from Alexander of the rulers in Swat before the time of the Yusufzai. Many of the princelings of the little Hindu-Kush states at the present day pride themselves on a similar origin, maintaining the founders of their race to be Alexander, “the two-horned,” and a princess sent down miraculously from heaven to wed him.
Benedict Goes, travelling from Peshawar to Kabul in 1603, heard of a place called Capperstam, where no Mahommedan might enter on pain of death. Hindu traders were allowed to visit the country, but not the temples. Benedict Goes tasted the Kafir wine, and from all that he heard suspected that the Kafirs might be Christians. Nothing more is heard of the Kafirs until 1788, when Rennell’s Memoir of a Map of
