Brahui people

1910 Brahui Photo of Quetta

The Brahui (Brahui: براہوئی) or Brahvi people, are an ethnic group of about 2.2 million people with the vast majority found in Baluchistan, Pakistan. They are a small minority group in Afghanistan, where they are native, but they are also found through their diaspora in Middle Eastern states.They mainly occupy the area in Balochistan from Bolan Pass through the Bolan Hills to Ras Muari (Cape Monze) on the Arabian sea, separating the Baloch people of Balochistan to the west and the Sindhi people of Sindh in the east. The Brahuis are almost entirely Sunni Muslims. There is a varied pattern of language use among the Brahui: some of the constituent groups predominantly speak the Dravidian Brahui language, others are bilingual in Balochi and Brahui, while others are speakers only of Balochi.

Origins
The fact that other Dravidian languages only exist further south in India has led to several speculations about the origins of the Brahui. There are three hypotheses regarding the Brahui that have been proposed by academics.

One theory is that the Brahui are a relict population of Dravidians, surrounded by speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, remaining from a time when Dravidian was more widespread.

A second theory is that they migrated to Baluchistan from inner India during the early Muslim period of the 13th or 14th centuries.

The third theory says the Brahui migrated to Balochistan from Central India after 1000 AD.
The absence of any older Iranian (Avestan) influence in Brahui supports this last hypothesis. The main Iranian contributor to Brahui vocabulary is a northwestern Iranian language, Baluchi, Sindhi and southeastern Iranian language, Pashto.However, the Brahui do not have higher genetic affinity with Dravidian populations in India than other neighboring Indo-Iranian Pakistanis. Pagani, et al., conclude that this shows that the Brahui, although speaking a Dravidian language, had their Dravidian genetic component completely replaced by Indo-Iranian speakers, suggesting that the Brahui are descendents of a previous relict population whose genomes were replaced when more recent Indo-Iranian speakers arrived in South Asia. Linguistic findings and oral histories of the Brahui however say otherwise.


The history of the Brahui emerges from total darkness with the displacement of a shadowy Hindu dynasty in Kalat called Sewa by the Mirwani Brahuis. There is a Mughal interlude and then Brahui ascendancy again.

— Murray Barnson Emeneau, Language and Linguistic Area: page 334


It is said that a Hindu dynasty, the Sewa by name, ruled over this part of the country prior to the seventh century, Kalat is still known as Kalat-i-Sewa.

Tribes

There are three groups of Brahui tribes. The "nucleus" consists of the Achmadzai, Gurguari, Iltazai, Kalandari, Kambrani, Mirwari, Rodeni and the Sumalari, which altogether account for only a small proportion of the total number of Brahuis. The majority of the population is divided up between the Jhalawan Brahuis (which include the tribes of the Bizanjars, Harunis, Muhammad Hasnis, Mengals, Siapad, Nicharis, Pandranis, Sajdis and the Zahris), and the Sarawan Brahuis (comprising the tribes of the Muhammad Shahi, Bangulzai, Kūrd, Lahri, Langov, Raisani, Rustamzai, Sarparah, Satakzai, Shahwani and Zagar-Mengal).

Language

Main article: Brahui language

The Brahui language is a Dravidian language, even though it is very far from South India. It is mainly spoken in the Kalat areas of Balochistan, Pakistan, and in Southern Afghanistan, as well as by an unknown very small number of expatriates in the Persian Gulf states, Turkmenistan, as well as Iranian Balochistan. It has three dialects: Sarawani (spoken in the north), Jhalawani (spoken in the southeast), and Chaghi (spoken in the northwest and west) The 2013 edition of Ethnologue reports that there are some 4.2 million speakers; 4 million live in Pakistan, mainly in the province of Balochistan. Due to its isolation, Brahui's vocabulary is only 15% Dravidian, while the remainder is dominated by Balochi, and Indo-Aryan languages (for example, of the number names from "one" to "ten," "four" through "ten" are borrowed from Persian). Brahui is generally written in the Perso-Arabic script and there is even a Latin alphabet that has been developed for use with Brahui.

Dialects
Kalat, Jhalawan, and Sarawan, with Kalat as the standard dialect.

At present Brahui is spoken in Pakistani Balochistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Sindh and the Persian Gulf Arab states.

Genetics

Brahuis display a variety of Y-DNA haplogroups, the most important being haplogroup R1a1a-M17(35% to 39.09%) - with its mass diffusion among populations of Central/South Asia and associated with the early eastern migrations of Indo-Iranian nomads. Haplogroup J, which is found among other subcontinental peoples and more typical of Near-Eastern populations occurs at 28%. Other, relatively minor, low-frequency haplogroups among the Brahui are those of G, L, E1b1a, and N. These haplogroups show that the Brahui population genetics are largely indistinguishable from those of Indo-Iranian speakers which are adjacent to them, like the Balochi and Makrani, but different from those further away, such as Sindhi.

According to Quintana-Murci et al. (2004), the Brahui population has a high prevalence (55%) of western Eurasian mtDNAs and the lowest frequency in the region (21%) of haplogroup M*, which is common (∼60%) among the Dravidian-speaking Indians. So the possibility of the Dravidian presence in Baluchistan originating from recent entry of Dravidians of India should be excluded. It also shows their maternal gene pool is similar to Indo-Iranian speakers. The present Brahui population may have originated from ancient Indian Dravidian-speakers who may have relocated to Baluchistan and admixed with locals; however, no historical record supports this. So it is suggested that they are the last northern survivors of a larger Dravidian-speaking region before Indo-Iranian arrived. This would, if true, reinforce the proto-Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis.