Kalasha religion

Michael Witzel, the Harvard scholar of the Vedas, has studied the Kalash religion closely from the Indian side. He finds in it the marks of the old religion that the ancestors of Iranians and Indians shared, with echoes of the Rigveda, the earliest Indian hymns, and hardly anything of the Hinduism that grew up afterwards.

That is why it is wrong to call it Hinduism, although people often do. Augusto Cacopardo, who has spent decades in the valleys, puts it plainly: the religion of the Brahmins never reached these mountains, and what the Kalash have grew on its own from a very early base. Some of the names are shared with India, Indra among them, because both come down from the same source and not because one borrowed from the other. Richard Strand describes the old religion of Nuristan as a form of ancient Hinduism with local growth on it, which is the same observation made from the other side of the mountains.

It is also more than a worship of spirits. There are spirits of the mountains and the pastures, but there are also named gods with characters, stories and shrines, and above them a creator who is prayed to everywhere and has no shrine at all.

Every Kalash place, animal and act is either onjesta, pure, or pragata, impure, and a good part of daily life is the work of keeping the two apart. The altars, the goats, the high pastures and the winter goat stables are the most onjesta. The valley floor is less so, and the bashali, the house where women stay during their periods and for childbirth, is the most pragata of all. Men look after the goats and the altars, and women the fields. Juniper smoke makes a thing or a person pure again.

Anyone who has read about old Kafiristan will know this already. The same line ran through Nuristani life, with the same goats and pastures on the pure side and the same women's house outside the village. The division of work between men and women that came with it has outlasted the religion in our valleys.

A Kalash funeral is a feast. The family feeds the valley, food is set beside the coffin, and for a person of standing a wooden effigy might be carved and set up in their memory.

Until recent times the coffin was not buried. It was left above ground in the graveyard, sometimes open. Pakistan's human rights commission records that the custom can no longer be kept, because the coffins were vandalised and the land around the graveyards was taken, and the Kalash now bury their dead.

The effigies are something Nuristan shared. In Kafiristan a wooden figure of a man or woman of standing, seated on a stool or riding a horse, was set up a year or so after the death, and rows of them once stood on our hillsides. A few survive in the National Museum in Kabul.

The religion is followed by about 4,000 people, more than a generation ago, when the number had fallen to about 2,500. Converting to Islam means leaving it for good, and by custom leaving the community. A local count puts conversions now at five to ten people a year.

The law has begun to notice it. In 2017 a court ordered that the Kalash religion be listed on Pakistan's census form, and identity cards can now record it. In July 2026 the provincial assembly passed a marriage law for the Kalash that sets a minimum age of eighteen, requires consent and registration, and leaves divorce and inheritance to Kalash custom.

The strain today comes less from force than from numbers and attention: schooling in other languages, land passing out of Kalash hands, and festivals that draw more spectators than worshippers. The altars, the bashali and the graveyards are not sights. Visitors who are asked to keep away from them should.