The Religion of the Kalash People

1. Introduction

In the high western valleys of the Chitral District, where the Hindu Kush falls away toward the Afghan frontier, lives a community of some three to four thousand people who are, in a precise and remarkable sense, the last of their kind. The Kalash—known to their Muslim neighbours as the Kalasha, and historically as the Siah Posh (“black-robed”) or simply kafirs, “unbelievers”—are the only people of the Hindu Kush who still practise the pre-Islamic religion that was once common across the whole mountain region. They are concentrated today in three small valleys, Bumburet (Mumuret), Rumbur (Rukmu), and Birir (Biriu), each opening southward off the Chitral River, and they form the smallest distinct ethnoreligious group in Pakistan.

Their religion is not a curiosity attached to an otherwise ordinary mountain people; it is the organising centre of their identity. The Kalasha word dastoor encompasses at once “religion” and “custom,” and it is by their dastoor—their gods and sacrifices, their festival calendar, their rules of purity, their distinctive treatment of women, marriage, and the dead—that the Kalash distinguish themselves from the surrounding Muslim population and understand themselves as a people. To convert to Islam, in the community’s own reckoning, is to leave the Kalash; religion and ethnicity are, for them, two names for the same boundary.

The significance of this small religion is out of all proportion to the number of its adherents. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, a related polytheism flourished across the border in the region the Afghans called Kafiristan, “the land of the unbelievers.” In 1895–96 the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman Khan conquered and forcibly converted that country, renaming it Nuristan, “the land of light”; temples and images were destroyed, priests killed, and the old religion extinguished within a generation. The Kalash valleys, having passed under the more tolerant suzerainty of the Muslim rulers of Chitral, were spared this fate. As a result, the Kalash today preserve—precariously, and in altered form—the only living example of what scholars increasingly treat as an archaic Indo-European religious world that once stretched across the mountains.

This article offers a synthetic account of that religion. It is a review rather than a report of original fieldwork: it draws together the classic ethnographic record, the major interpretive frameworks of the past half-century, and recent genetic and historical scholarship, and it makes particular use of a primary document of unusual value—Paolo Graziosi’s 1961 description of the wooden statue of the goddess Dezalik, the only known anthropomorphic image of a living Kalash divinity, which he photographed and measured inside a women’s house in Bumburet in 1960. After situating the Kalash within the longstanding debate over their origins, the article treats the structure of the divine and the pantheon, the all-pervading opposition of purity and impurity, sacred space and sacrifice, the institution of the bashali, the religious specialists, the cycle of festivals, the rites of death, and the world of spirits, before turning to the question of religious change and survival.

2. Names, Sources, and the Question of Origins

The Kalash have suffered from their reputation. For more than a century, popular writing has cast them as the lost descendants of Alexander the Great—blue-eyed, wine-drinking Europeans stranded in the mountains by the Macedonian conquest of the fourth century BCE. The image is romantic, durable, and almost entirely without foundation. Augusto Cacopardo (2011) has shown that traditions of Alexandrian descent form no part of indigenous Kalasha knowledge; they are a graft from outside, encouraged by colonial observers and, more recently, by tourism and diplomacy. Genetic research has been still more decisive. Studies of the Y chromosome found no meaningful Greek contribution (Firasat et al. 2007), and a genome-wide analysis characterised the Kalash as an ancient genetic isolate whose distinctiveness is the product of early divergence and prolonged drift in their mountain seclusion, not of any recent European admixture (Ayub et al. 2015). The HLA survey by Mohyuddin and colleagues (2004), one of the documents underlying the present review, likewise reported an immune-gene profile that is largely unique and differs from both Greek and neighbouring northern Pakistani populations, consistent with a long-isolated people who may represent a remnant of ancestral Eurasian or early Indo-European pastoral populations rather than migrants from the classical Mediterranean.

Linguistically the Kalash belong unambiguously to South Asia. Their language, Kalasha (Kalashamon), is a Dardic tongue of the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-Iranian, related to Khowar and the other languages of the region rather than to anything European. Their own oral tradition traces their origin not to Greece but to a mythical homeland called Tsiyam (Tsiam), a place of memory rather than of map. The convergence of language, oral tradition, and genetics points in a single direction: the Kalash are an integral and very old part of the indigenous fabric of the Hindu Kush, not intruders within it.

It is on this foundation that the most influential modern interpretation rests. The Italian anthropologists Alberto and Augusto Cacopardo (2001) proposed the concept of “Peristan”—a name for the whole belt of pre-Islamic mountain cultures that once ran from Nuristan through Chitral, Gilgit, and the Indus Kohistan, a kind of “counter-civilisation” set in cultural and political opposition to the state societies of the lowlands. In this view the Kalash are the last living window onto Peristan: a single surviving outpost of a religious and social world otherwise known only from nineteenth-century reports and from reconstruction. The philologist Michael Witzel (2004) argues, on the basis of names, myths, and rituals, that Kalash religion preserves an unusually large number of features comparable to the religion of the Ṛgveda and to the common Indo-Iranian inheritance behind both Vedic India and ancient Iran—so much so that it can be read, with due caution, as a window onto a pre-Vedic or Vedic-era mentality preserved into the present.

The classic ethnographic record that makes such interpretation possible is itself worth naming, for much of it is old and fragmentary. Sir George Scott Robertson’s The Kāfirs of the Hindu-Kush (1896) remains the great source for the related, now-vanished religion of Nuristan; for the Kalash proper, the foundational twentieth-century work includes Georg Morgenstierne’s linguistic studies, R. C. F. Schomberg’s travel account Kafirs and Glaciers (1938), the Danish ethnographer Halfdan Siiger’s preliminary fieldwork (1956), Paolo Graziosi’s Italian anthropological missions of 1955 and 1960, and Karl Jettmar’s synthesis Die Religionen des Hindukusch (1975). Later fieldwork by Peter Parkes, by the French team of Viviane Lièvre and Jean-Yves Loude, and by Wynne Maggi, together with the recent comparative and ethnographic work of the Cacopardos and the linguistic documentation of Jan Heegard Petersen, has greatly deepened the picture. Even so, the religion has never been fully described from within, and any account must reckon with significant variation among the three valleys and with more than a century of change.

3. The Structure of the Divine

Kalash religion is genuinely polytheistic, but its many gods are arranged around a single high creator. The supreme being is Dezau (Ḍezāw; also addressed by the borrowed term Khodai), whose name derives from the Indo-European root meaning “to shape” or “to build”—the maker, the one who formed the world. Dezau is remote and uncontested but receives little direct cult; in the familiar pattern of the deus otiosus, the high god stands behind creation while the practical business of religion is transacted with a crowd of lesser, nearer deities and spirits. These lesser gods are known collectively as the Devalog (dewalók, “the divine people”), and it is to them that altars are raised, goats sacrificed, and prayers addressed.

How best to label this system has been debated. Some recent writers—often drawing on the community’s own self-presentation, and on the analogy with Hinduism that the Indo-Aryan language invites—describe it as the worship of one God with reverence to minor deities, a “form of ancient Hinduism.” Others stress its animistic and ancestral character: nature is alive and inhabited, and the dead and the spirits are constant presences. The scholarly mainstream, following Witzel and the Cacopardos, treats it as a distinct Indo-Iranian polytheism of great antiquity, structurally akin to Vedic religion in its pantheon and rituals but developed along its own lines and overlaid, like all the religions of the region, with later influences. These descriptions are less contradictory than they appear: a remote creator, a society of active gods, a dense population of spirits, and a cult of ancestors are all genuinely present, and the Kalash themselves see no difficulty in holding them together.

4. The Pantheon

The reconstruction that follows is necessarily composite. Names, spellings, and the relative prominence of particular gods vary from valley to valley and from one observer to another, and the philological etymologies—drawn chiefly from Witzel (2004)—are proposals, not certainties. With those cautions, the principal divinities are these.

Dezau — the creator and high god, maker of the world (see above), the ultimate but distant authority behind the Devalog.

Sajigor (Sajiɡōr; also Sajigror), identified by Witzel with Indra and bearing the epithet Shura Verin (Šúra Werín, “the hero, the unrivalled Indra”). Sajigor is a god of strength and war and one of the great altar-deities of the northern valleys; the famous sanctuary that bears his name is a principal site of seasonal sacrifice.

Mahandeo (Mahandéo, from *mahān deva, “great god,” and cognate with the Nuristani Mandi/Mon), the god of crops and also a god of war and the negotiator between human beings and the highest deity. Mahandeo is among the most widely venerated of the gods across all three valleys, his shrines a fixed point of the ritual landscape.

Balumain (Balimain), the culture hero and demigod at the heart of the great winter festival. Balumain is believed to visit the valleys from the mythical homeland Tsiyam at the winter solstice, his coming sometimes announced by earthquakes. Oral tradition makes him the teacher of the Kalash: he showed them the sacred fire of juniper, the rite of sowing wheat with the blood of a young goat, and the manner of celebrating the winter feast itself. He is partly androgynous, able to appear as male or female, and is closely associated with the place called Indra’s seat.

Indra and Warin — the Indra figure survives both in Sajigor’s epithet and in the festival site indrunkot (“Indra’s place”), said in some accounts to belong to Balumain’s brother In(dra), lord of cattle. A war-god Warin/Werin also appears in the older record, again echoing the martial Indra of the Vedas.

Munjem Malik (munjem from *madhyama, “middle,” with the Arabic malik, “king”), the Lord of Middle Earth, who in myth killed his own father—precisely as the Vedic Indra slays his father in the Ṛgveda, one of Witzel’s clearest instances of an inherited Indo-Iranian motif.

Jestak (Jéṣṭak, from *jyeṣṭhā, “the eldest”), the goddess of domestic life, of lineage, marriage, and the family. Her seat is the clan house or lineage temple, the Jeṣṭak Han, where ancestors are honoured and where much of the dancing of the festivals takes place. She is the divine guarantor of the household and the descent group.

Dezalik (Ḍizálik), called the sister of Dezau, the goddess of childbirth, of the hearth, and of the life-force; she protects women and children. Dezalik corresponds to the Kafir goddess Nirmali of Nuristan (Indo-Iranian *nirmalikā) and, as the next section describes, is the one Kalash divinity to be represented by a known anthropomorphic image—the wooden statue kept in the women’s house and documented by Graziosi (1961). In some accounts she is conflated with, or stands beside, a great mother-goddess figure (Dizane/Disani) of the wider Peristani pantheon.

Sorizan and Goshidai — two pastoral gods who guard the herds across the year. Sorizan (Sorizán) protects the flocks through autumn and winter and is thanked at the winter festival; Goshidai watches over them until the late-summer Pul feast and is thanked at the spring festival. Their alternation marks the rhythm of transhumance on which Kalash life depends.

Behind this Kalash pantheon stands the larger and now-lost pantheon of Nuristan, recorded by Robertson before its destruction: the creator and sky-god Imra (from Yama Rājan), the great goddess Disani, the war-god Gish, and the rest. The correspondences—Dezalik with Nirmali, Mahandeo with Mandi, the shared figure of Indra—are the surest evidence that the Kalash and the converted Kafirs of Nuristan once drew on a common religious inheritance, the Peristani world of which the Kalash are the last witnesses.

5. Purity and Impurity: The Governing Polarity

If a single idea organises Kalash religion, it is the opposition between the pure and the impure. The Kalasha terms are onjeṣṭa (ónǐeṣṭa), “pure” or “sacred,” and pragaṭa (prágaṭa), “impure” or “polluted.” This is not a simple opposition of good and evil. Both poles are necessary; the danger lies in their confusion. To mix what should be kept apart—to let the impure touch the pure—is to cause pollution, and pollution brings illness, misfortune, and the anger of the gods. Much of Kalash ritual is, in effect, the continuous work of keeping the two domains in their proper places and of purifying what has strayed across the line.

The polarity is mapped, above all, onto the vertical landscape of the valleys, an analysis worked out most fully by Peter Parkes (1987). The heights are pure: the high pastures and peaks, the abode of the gods and of the mountain fairies, are the most onjeṣṭa of places. Descending, one passes from purity toward impurity, until at the valley bottom—the fields, the graveyard, the women’s house, and, pointedly, the settlements of the surrounding Muslims—one reaches the most pragaṭa zone of all. In Parkes’s well-known scheme, the pure domain comprises the mountains, juniper and holly-oak, the wild markhor and the domestic goat, the honeybee, the high altars, the goat-stables, and men; the impure domain comprises the lower valley, onions and garlic, cattle, sheep, hens and eggs, the bashali, the graveyard, and women. Animals are graded by the same logic: the markhor, which lives highest, is purest of all; the goat, which grazes the high pastures and is held to be strong and intelligent like a human being, is pure; the sheep, the cow, and above all the chicken and its egg, which belong to the valley floor, are impure. The Kalash themselves, living in their villages between the high pastures and the lowland Muslim world, occupy a deliberate middle ground between the two extremes.

The polarity has an unmistakable gender dimension, and it is the source of the institution that has most fascinated outsiders. Men are aligned with the pure, pastoral, high domain—with the goats, the altars, and the gods; women, in the periods of menstruation and childbirth, are aligned with the impure and must withdraw to the women’s house at the edge of the village. It would be a serious mistake, however, to read this as a simple statement that women are of lesser worth. The impurity in question is situational and biological, not moral, and Wynne Maggi’s ethnography (2001), pointedly titled Our Women Are Free, documents the considerable social autonomy of Kalash women—their freedom to choose and to leave husbands, their public presence at the festivals, their boldness of speech—a freedom that struck nearly every visitor and that coexists with the ritual rules of seclusion. The pure–impure structure is a religious cosmology, not a measure of human value.

Oral tradition supplies a charter myth for the spatial division of the sexes. It is told that the great shaman Nanga Dehar, in trance, shot two arrows: where the black arrow fell would be the sacrificial altar and the centre of onjeṣṭa energy, to be approached only by men; where the red arrow fell would be the women’s house and the centre of pragaṭa energy, to be approached only by women. The two energies are held to be equally real and equally necessary, and the community’s concern is to keep them separate. Purification, when separation fails, is achieved chiefly by the aromatic smoke of burning juniper, by water and bathing in the river, by fire-brands waved over the impure, and by the blood of sacrifice.

6. Sacred Space, Altars, and Sacrifice

Kalash worship has historically centred not on enclosed temples in the lowland sense but on open-air altars set in pure, often elevated places, and on the lineage houses. The altars are built of wood and stone and were traditionally adorned with carved animal heads—horses and the wild markhor—sacred to the gods to whom they belong: the great sanctuary of Sajigor, the shrines of Mahandeo, and others. Here the central act of the religion is performed: the sacrifice of goats.

The goat is the proper sacrificial animal precisely because it is pure, a creature of the high pastures. At the altar its blood is sprinkled, juniper is burned so that its fragrant smoke ascends to the gods, and libations—of milk in season, and of the grape wine for which the Kalash are known—are offered. Wine, forbidden to their Muslim neighbours, is made and drunk by the Kalash and has its place in religious life; bunches of grapes are among the offerings, as Graziosi found laid before the goddess in the women’s house. Ritual at the altars is the work of men in a state of purity—elders, lineage heads, and, on the great occasions, specially purified boys—for the high altars belong wholly to the onjeṣṭa domain from which women are excluded.

The complementary sacred space is the lineage temple, the Jeṣṭak Han, sacred to the goddess Jestak. It is the house of the descent group and of its ancestors, a place of offering and, equally, a place of dancing: the collective dances of the festivals, performed by men and women together in circles to the beat of drums, are themselves bound up with the sacred and are among the most visible expressions of Kalash religion. Between the high male altar and the lineage house of the ancestors, Kalash sacred geography reproduces in built form the same polarity that orders the whole religion.

7. The Bashali and the Goddess Dezalik

At the opposite pole from the high altar stands the bashali (bašáli), the women’s house—the building set apart, below the village and near the river, to which women withdraw during menstruation and, above all, for childbirth. It is the most impure space in the Kalash world, ringed by an area forbidden to others; and yet it is also a shrine, for it is the dwelling of the goddess Dezalik, who protects women and the newborn. The paradox is exact and instructive: the most pragaṭa place is at the same time a sanctuary, sacred in its own register and under its own divinity.

The rules surrounding the bashali were recorded by every serious visitor, and they agree closely. Schomberg reported that a woman must pass six days and nights there during menstruation; all births take place within it, so that a Kalash person asked where he was born will name not his village but the bashali. An old woman of the village attends the birth, but she must first undress and leave her clothing outside, and afterwards bathe in the river—even in the depth of winter—before she may re-enter the village; the women themselves bathe in the river before returning. Food is brought and set down outside the building. A man who strays, even by accident, into the forbidden zone must be purified, traditionally by the sacrifice of a goat. A woman who dies in childbirth in the bashali is buried apart, in a secluded place set aside within the cemetery. The whole institution is the cosmology of purity and impurity made architecture.

It is here that the document at the heart of this review acquires its importance. In September 1960, during the second Italian anthropological mission to Chitral, Paolo Graziosi and his companions passed the bashali of Brun and Anish in the Bumburet valley at midday, when its occupants were at work in the fields. The door gave way at a push, and inside the dark, windowless room—some 4.7 by 4.4 metres, its roof carried on four squared wooden pillars, with a pentagonal hearth of five stones in the centre—they found, on a low stone altar in the corner, the wooden statue of the goddess Dezalik. Graziosi was able to photograph, sketch, and measure it before withdrawing. As he emphasised, this was a discovery of real moment: although Siiger had heard that an image of the goddess was kept in the women’s house, no scholar had been able to enter and see it, and its very existence had been doubted.

The statue itself Graziosi described in careful detail. Roughly 98 centimetres high, carved from a thick plank of deodar wood and blackened with the soot of generations, it is a schematic, almost flat figure rather than a sculpture in the round. The head is a diamond enclosing a second, deeply incised diamond; the shoulders are pointed, the legs rigid and in low relief, the arms and feet absent. Three concentric ovals are engraved on the breast and abdomen, and a vertical groove runs down the body to the groin, where it widens into a triangular cavity enclosing a triangular prominence—plainly a representation of the vulva. Siiger had already noted that the goddess’s name was also given to a yoni figure said to stand in the bashali, and Graziosi’s statue answers that description. Before it lay offerings: bunches of grapes and a basket of osiers. The presence of an altar distinct from the working hearth, and of offerings upon it, led Graziosi to conclude that the bashali was not merely a place of confinement but a true place of worship—the shrine of the goddess who protects childbirth.

The wider point Graziosi drew is one of the few firm generalisations about Kalash religious art. Among the Kalash, he observed, the gods are otherwise not represented at all: the numerous anthropomorphic statues that stand in and near the villages are funerary and commemorative, images of the human dead, not of divinities. The Dezalik statue was, to his knowledge, the single exception—the only living Kalash divinity given a carved, anthropomorphic form. Kalash religion thus tends strongly toward aniconism where its gods are concerned, in contrast to the rich divine imagery that Robertson had recorded in neighbouring Nuristan, and the women’s goddess of the bashali stands out as the one image that escapes this rule.

Graziosi’s report carries, finally, a sombre demographic note that frames the whole subject of this article. He had a census taken of the three valleys in 1960; it returned 1,391 Kalash against 2,230 Muslims, where only five years earlier the Kalash had numbered close to two thousand—clear evidence, he wrote, of the steady advance of conversion to Islam. He counted only five bashali surviving in all three valleys, and predicted that they, and the pagan culture they belonged to, were destined to disappear as the Kalash converted. More than sixty years later that prediction has been partly fulfilled and partly defied, but the trend he documented has continued.

8. Religious Specialists: The Shaman and the Elders

Kalash religion has no priesthood in the institutional sense—no ordained clergy, no temple establishments. Ritual authority has rested instead on two figures: the shaman and the elder. The central religious specialist of the older Kalash world was the dehar (dehâr), the shaman or seer. Brought into trance, most often by the smoke of burning juniper, the dehar became the mouthpiece of the gods and the mountain fairies: he prophesied, diagnosed the causes of misfortune and pollution, sanctioned and timed ritual, and conveyed the will of the supernatural beings who, in the Kalash view, own the land and its resources. The myths themselves are framed as instructions transmitted through such shamans, and the great dehars of the past—Nanga Dehar above all, to whom the founding of rituals and the arrow-myth of the altar and the bashali are ascribed—are remembered figures of oral tradition. Lièvre and Loude devoted a study to this Kalash shamanism, which they recognised as the living heart of the religion.

Alongside, and increasingly in place of, the shaman stand the kazi (qazi) and the clan elders—the guardians and interpreters of the dastoor. It is the kazi who declares that the time of the winter festival has come, and the elders and lineage heads who coordinate the sacrifices and lead the community through the ritual year. Their authority is the authority of knowledge and of ritual purity rather than of office. The decline of the dehar—there are now few or no fully recognised shamans active in the valleys—is among the most consequential changes in modern Kalash religion, shifting its centre of gravity from prophetic mediation with the gods toward the conservation of inherited custom by the elders, and tying religious continuity ever more closely to the transmission of tradition as such.

9. The Ritual Calendar and the Great Festivals

The rhythm of Kalash religion follows the rhythm of the agro-pastoral year, the movement of flocks between valley and high pasture and the cycle of sowing and harvest. The Kalash distinguish two kinds of religious occasion: festivals proper, marked by song, dance, and feasting, and other rites—no less religious—that are performed without music or dancing. Among the latter are a series of seasonal sacrifices, such as the late-winter and spring offerings at the sanctuary of Sajigor, the purification of the goats’ milk that opens the dairy season, and the Pul feast at the September full moon. The framework of the year, however, is given by three great festivals.

Joshi (Chilam Joshi), the spring festival, is held in mid-May to welcome the coming of summer and the return of the fairies to the mountains, and to seek protection for the fields and the flocks as the agricultural season opens. It begins with a “Milk Day,” on which libations are made from milk that has been stored for the preceding ten days, after which milk is distributed among households for the duration of the feast; the valleys are ritually purified with goat’s milk while celebrants carry branches of walnut and holly. The pastoral god Goshidai is thanked for his guardianship of the herds. Joshi is also a season of courtship: it is at the festivals, in song and dance, that young men and women find and choose their partners, a freedom of marriage that is itself a celebrated feature of Kalash life.

Uchau (Uchal), the late-summer festival, falls around August and gives thanks for the harvest and especially for the dairy produce of the high pastures—the cheese and butter of the season—together with the ripening of the grape and the walnut. With the related Pul feast it marks the gathering-in of the year’s plenty and the descent of flocks and people from the summer pastures.

Chaumos (Chawmos, Caumus), the winter-solstice festival held over roughly two weeks in December, is the greatest and most sacred event of the Kalash year and the one most fully studied—by Loude and Lièvre, and at length by Augusto Cacopardo in his monograph Pagan Christmas (2016). It marks the end of the agricultural cycle and the turning of the year, and its great themes, as Cacopardo analyses them, are regeneration, fertility, and communion: the renewal of the world and of the community at the dead point of the year. The festival is dedicated to the culture hero Balumain, who is believed to come from Tsiyam for its duration, visible only at his first mythic visit and now merely felt to be present.

The sequence of Chaumos enacts the logic of the whole religion. The kazi declares its opening as the setting sun sinks behind an appointed tree; juniper smoke is offered at the shrines of the gods and in the goat-sheds. The first days consolidate the social order, with ceremonial visiting between the up-valley and down-valley sections of the community, a ritual antagonism of mocking songs that is then dissolved into reconciliation and feasting—an enactment of communion among people. After a pause of two days, during which wheat is milled into flour for the sacred days, the most solemn phase begins. The impure and the uninitiated are now strictly excluded; purification is required of all who would take part, achieved by waving a fire-brand over women and children and by a special juniper fire-rite, conducted by a shaman, over the men.

In the sacred days the “old rules” of the gods are said to be suspended, in the manner of year-end and carnival rites the world over, and the ordinary order is briefly inverted. The men divide into two parties: the pure sing the honoured songs of the past, while the impure sing wild, passionate, and deliberately obscene songs to a different rhythm. There is a ritual exchange of sex, men dressing as women and women as men, in keeping with Balumain’s own androgyny. On the most sacred day the drum and the flute are forbidden, and only the human voice may be raised. At the place called Indra’s seat, the indrunkot, the ancestors are impersonated by pure young boys, who hold to one another in a human chain and wind through the village—a rite that Witzel compares to the Vedic anvārambhaṇa, the holding-on of the sacrificers. Offerings are made to the ancestors at the lineage shrines of the goddess Jestak.

Two features of Chaumos bear especially on the reproduction of the religion. The first is the initiation of children, and particularly of boys, into full membership of the tribe—the ritual passage, as Cacopardo (2008) shows for the distinctive Birir version of the festival, from the impure world of domestic life into the pure, pastoral order of adult Kalash men. The second is the rite of the Budulak (buḍáḷak), the “shepherd king,” in which a strong prepubescent boy is sent up into the mountains to live with the goats through the summer—a passage into the purest and most masculine of domains. Through such rites the winter festival is the great engine by which Kalash religious identity is transmitted to each new generation; it is also, today, the occasion that draws the largest crowds of outside tourists, with all the strain that attention brings.

10. Death, Funerary Ritual, and the Afterlife

The traditional Kalash response to death is, to outside eyes, its most startling feature: death has been met not with mourning but with celebration. A funeral was an occasion of feasting, music, and dancing, on the understanding that death is a passage rather than an ending—indeed a kind of promotion. Oral tradition, again traced to the shaman Nanga Dehar, holds that the soul departs to “the other world of the peaks,” a place midway between the human and the divine; and because it is at those high altitudes that the fairies dwell, ascent to them is a movement toward purity and honour. The vertical cosmology of onjeṣṭa and pragaṭa thus extends even into the afterlife, the dead rising, as it were, toward the pure heights.

The treatment of the body followed from the same scheme. The Kalash did not inter their dead in the ground; the corpse was placed in a wooden coffin laid on the surface of the cemetery—the graveyard being a pragaṭa space at the valley floor—and the coffins were sometimes left open. For the honoured dead, and above all for prominent men, a carved wooden effigy (the gandau or gandao; also gundurik) was erected: a standing or equestrian figure, or a seated figure raised on a pillar at the edge of a village. These are the commemorative statues that Graziosi distinguished so sharply from the single divine image of Dezalik—images of human beings, not of gods. The right to such a memorial was earned, in life, through the great merit-feasts (sharuga) by which a man converted wealth into renown.

This complex has very largely collapsed. Under the disapproval of the surrounding Muslim majority, and with the additional pressure of a market that prized the old effigies as art—many were stolen and now stand in museums and private collections far from the valleys—above-ground burial, the open coffin, and the carving of memorial statues have been almost entirely abandoned in favour of ordinary in-ground burial. Studies of Kalash funerary change, such as that of Ali and Chawla (2021), frame the transformation as a movement between resilience and assimilation: the celebratory funeral survives in attenuated form, but the gandau and the merit-feast that sustained it belong increasingly to memory. The decline of the funerary statues, together with the rarity of the bashali and its goddess, measures the wider erosion of the material religion.

11. Spirits, Fairies, and the Animate Landscape

For the Kalash the world is full and owned. Beyond the gods proper, the high country is inhabited by the suchi (súči), the mountain fairies—beautiful female spirits of the pure pastures and peaks, owners of the wild goats, which are reckoned their flocks. The fairies are sources of revelation, reached through the trance of the shaman, and they may help or harm; their favour is bound up with the purity of the high places, and their presence is among the reasons the heights are sacred. Their more violent male counterparts are the varoti (varōti), wilder and more dangerous spirits of the same upland world. Lower down, female earth-spirits associated with the soil and the household guard the fertility of the fields and the home.

This animation of the landscape is not decorative; it is practical theology. Because the pastures, springs, trees, and peaks belong to gods, fairies, and spirits, they must be approached with care and ritual respect, and their resources used within bounds set by their true, unseen owners. Peter Parkes and others have shown how this religious ecology underwrites the management of the high pastures and the symbolism of livestock; the Kalash relation to nature is mediated at every point by the beings who are held to share and to own it. Demons and ambivalent figures also belong to this world—among them Jestan, the demonic counterpart who appears on earth as a dog and at whom the gods are said to hurl the stones that are shooting stars—together with later notions of jinn absorbed from the Islamic surroundings, and the ever-present dead.

12. Islamisation, Conversion, and the Politics of Survival

The Kalash religion has been contracting for a very long time. Muslim rule was established in Chitral from the fourteenth century, and from that point the Kalash—who, as recent historical work argues, once held a chiefdom of their own across a far wider territory—were gradually displaced from power and from much of their land, and conversion advanced. By the close of the nineteenth century the related religion of Nuristan had been destroyed outright, leaving the Kalash valleys as the last refuge of the old faith. The twentieth-century decline that Graziosi quantified in 1960 has continued into the present, so that the Kalash are now a minority even within their three valleys, their numbers of practising adherents counted in the low thousands.

The pressures are several and well documented in the contemporary literature, including the survey by Sodhar and Ali (2025) that forms part of this review. Missionary activity, notably by the Tablighi Jamaat, has been accompanied by the purchase of land and by demographic change; intermarriage and individual conversion steadily reduce the community, and a convert is held to pass irrevocably out of it—Kalash leaders have stated plainly that one who accepts Islam can no longer live as a Kalash. Economic and educational incentives pull in the same direction. The valleys have also known episodes of outright threat: the kidnapping in 2009 of the Greek aid-worker Athanasios Lerounis, who had built schools, a museum, and water systems for the community, and later threats from militant groups, brought the precariousness of the Kalash into national view. To these are added the absence, until recently, of dedicated political representation and formal recognition of the community’s distinct religious identity, and the corrosive, ambiguous effects of modernisation and mass tourism on a small society.

Against these pressures run real counter-currents. Kalash culture has attracted international recognition: in 2018 the Kalash practice of Suri Jagek—the traditional observation of the sun, moon, and stars against the local horizon to regulate the calendar and the festivals—was inscribed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, a measure that both protects and publicises the tradition. The same year saw the election of the first Kalash member of a provincial assembly. There have been sustained efforts at language revitalisation—an alphabet developed with outside help and local elders, a published grammar, and the textual documentation of Kalasha by linguists such as Heegard Petersen—and a growing movement of heritage conservation led in part by the Kalash themselves. The very fact that religion has become the explicit marker of Kalash ethnic identity gives the community a powerful motive to retain it.

There is, however, a paradox in this resilience, and the literature returns to it repeatedly. The more Kalash religion becomes an emblem of identity and an asset of heritage and tourism, the more it is at once protected and changed: foregrounded as culture even as its lived ritual texture—the active shaman, the open coffin and the carved ancestor, the full network of bashali and altars—thins. Whether the religion endures as a living practice, and not only as a celebrated heritage, will depend less on outside attention than on the choices of the Kalash themselves under conditions they do not fully control.

13. Conclusion

The religion of the Kalash is a coherent and ancient system, not a museum of fragments. It is organised throughout by the polarity of purity and impurity, onjeṣṭa and pragaṭa, mapped onto the vertical landscape of the valleys; it is peopled by a pantheon—Dezau the creator, Sajigor and the Indra figures, Mahandeo, Jestak, Dezalik, Balumain, the pastoral gods—whose names and myths point to a deep Indo-Iranian inheritance shared with the vanished religion of Nuristan; it is enacted through goat sacrifice at high altars and lineage shrines, through the great cycle of festivals that culminates in the winter Chaumos, through the institution of the bashali under its protecting goddess, and, formerly, through celebratory funerals and carved ancestors; and it is mediated by the shaman and the elder and lived out among a landscape full of fairies and spirits. It is, in the phrase that the scholarship has made standard, the last living example of the pre-Islamic world of Peristan, and a rare window onto an archaic Indo-European religious mentality.

The popular romance of descent from Alexander, which has so long coloured outside perceptions of the Kalash, obscures a significance that is in truth far greater. The Kalash matter not because they are stranded Greeks—they are not—but because they preserve, into the twenty-first century, a religion whose roots reach back toward the world of the Ṛgveda and the common ancestor of the Vedic and Iranian traditions. That this survival is fragile is beyond doubt; Graziosi’s census of 1960, his five remaining women’s houses, and his single irreplaceable image of the goddess Dezalik already told the story of a culture under contraction. The work of describing it—from Robertson and Schomberg through Siiger and Graziosi to the Cacopardos and Witzel—has itself become a form of preservation. Whether the lived religion of the Kalash will continue is a question that only the Kalash can finally answer; that it deserves to be understood, on its own terms and in its own dignity, is not in doubt.

References

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A note on transliteration and sources. Kalasha terms are given in the simplified forms current in the literature, with diacritics where they aid identification; spellings and the relative prominence of particular deities vary among the three valleys and among observers, and the philological etymologies follow proposals in Witzel (2004). Certain points of myth and festival detail rest on ethnographic and oral tradition and are reported as such.