Free Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

with a famous name.
    There’l be a use for you.’21 Pakistan has plenty of famous regiments, and local chieftains have been fortifying hil tops for thousands of years.
    They may yet cope better with the future than the successful elites of today’s world.
    A NOTE ON KINSHIP TERMS
    That kinship is of critical importance in Pakistan is something on which al the academic experts agree – which is nice, because they tend to agree on nothing else about the subject. For me, the definitive word was said 100 years ago by the great British civil servant and ethnographer Sir Denzil Ibbetson. After an official career lasting decades in the Punjab, he wrote:
    An old agnostic is said to have summed up his philosophy in the fol owing words: ‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am not quite sure that I know that.’ His words express very exactly my own feelings regarding caste in the Panjab. My experience is that it is almost impossible to make any statement whatever regarding any one of the castes we have to deal with, absolutely true though it may be for one part of the province, which shal not presently be contradicted with equal truth as regards the same people in some other district.22
    Thus the English term ‘tribe’ can be translated into several different local words, which overlap with other English meanings. Qaum can mean tribe, people, ethnicity or even nation. Zat is related to the Indian word jati, for a ‘sub-caste’ in Hinduism. ‘Tribe’ can also mean several very different things in different parts of Pakistan. Among the Baloch tribes (not just in Balochistan but in Sindh and southern Punjab as wel ), a tribe means something like the old clans of Scotland, a tightly knit group under an autocratic chieftain.
    Among the Pathans, however, while tribal membership is a tremendously important marker of identity and status, the tribes are divided into endless rivalrous sub-tribes, for which new leading men emerge in every generation. Meanwhile in Punjab, the Rajputs, Jats, Guj ars and others were presumably tightly knit nomadic tribes in the distant past, but long ago spread out and intermingled territorial y across the whole of what is now northern India and Pakistan (the Guj ars have given their name to a state in India as wel as a city in Pakistan, among many other places).
    Original y assimilated to the Hindu caste system as kshatriyas (the warrior caste) thanks to their conquests, many Jats, Guj ars and Rajputs later converted to Islam or Sikhism. Within Pakistan, they have no col ective overal political identity at al , but have a certain community of sentiment, including a strong sense of superiority to everyone else, and a strong preference for marrying each other. An appeal to fel ow Rajput or Jat feeling may gain some limited help when al else fails. More important in terms of loyalty and mobilization is the local sub-clan, as in Chauhan Rajput, Alpial Rajput and so on. The Sayyids and Qureishis are groups peculiar to Islam, being (ostensibly) descendants of the Prophet and his clan, and therefore of Arabic origin. Yet their role and status in South Asian Muslim society has certain limited affinities to that of the Brahmins in South Asian Hindu society.
    Meanwhile, other kinship groups are descended straight from the lower castes of the Hindu system. These include the kammi artisan and service groups of the towns and vil ages; and below them, the old untouchables and tribals, who are so far down the system that no one even bothers much if they are Muslim, Hindu or – what most real y are – pre-Hindu animist. As in India, these last are the most vulnerable groups in Pakistani society, liable to be preyed on economical y and sexual y by local dominant lineages and by the police.
    As to effective political roles within kinship groups and in wider politics, this spreads outwards from the khandan – denoting both the immediate family and the extended family (often a joint family, in which