The Bakarwals
The Bakarwals, like their counterparts, the Gujjars, are Himalayan pastoralists who migrate seasonally with their flocks of sheep and goats in search of green pastures. They have long relied on adaptable social and ecological strategies to thrive in harsh and severely disadvantaged environments along with other herding communities in the region, such as the Chopans (local shepherds).
As such, we provide an overview of the people referred to as ‘Bakarwals’ in this section of the chapter, drawing on a sizable corpus of historical and anthropological literature currently available on them.The Bakarwals are primarily goat and sheep herders in the northwest Himalayas, alternating between summer and winter pastures in the greater Himalayan and Pir Panjal ranges. They are mostly found in the Poonch, Rajouri, Kathua, and Kishtwar districts of the Jammu division in the winters and the high altitude passes of all districts of Kashmir division. Based on the availability of grasses for their livestock and the rising of temperatures, the Bakarwals start their journey from their winter pastures in April and take about two months to reach the meadows in Kashmir. There they spend around six months tending to their sheep and goats and, with falling temperature and the exhaustion of grasslands, the tribe starts their downward journey in September/October every year. With a population of over one lakh (census 2011), researchers disagree on the origins of Bakarwals. Cunningham (1871) attributes their origin to the Scythian tribe1, which conquered Kabul around 100 BC and established settlements in Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, eventually establishing the Gujjar empire. Smith (1904) attributes them to the white Huns, who arrived in India in 465 AD as nomadic hordes. Munshi (1944) took the opposite position, claiming that Gujjars are not a foreign breed but are descended from Indians.
He asserts that Gujjars were once kings who ruled over Rajputana, Malwa, and modern Gujarat (the whole region was known as Gurjjaradesa - the land of Gujjaras). However, their dominion ended with the demise of the Chalukya Empire in the late 13 th century AD2 (Bamzai 2007).Huthi, a Georgian3 academic who travelled to India in 1967 to study the Gujjars, advanced the Georgian origin theory. He was able to establish a relationship between the Georgian tribes and the Indian Gujjars after conducting research on the Gujjars in northern India. He believes that a number of cultural and linguistic similarities, as well as oral traditions and archaeological evidence, suggest that the tribe may have Central Asian ancestors (Sofi 2019). While Cunnigham believes Gujjars are descended from the eastern Tartar Kushan and Yachi tribes (USSR), the majority of experts believe Gujjars are Georgian (Bhardwaj 1999). Additionally, the Gujjar and Bakarwal communities are linked to Central Asia by the fact that the term Gujjar was coined in Turkey4 and was first used by Central Asian Turks in the third millennium BC (Rahi 2011). Based on the ethno-archaeological studies conducted during this research and the archaeological research in the area (Spate 2019) it can be asserted that pastoralist communities in the northwest Himalayas retained flexible ethnic identities, dynamic settlement and subsistence patterns, and maintained trade and exchange relationships with adjacent groups over this historical period, similar to the pastoralists in Kenya as studied by Sobania (1988).
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