From Nomadic to Sedentary Life: A Study of the Bakarwal Community of Pakistan

Abstract

Nomadic and transhumant people are widely spread all over Pakistan and retain a distinct culture, caste and ethnicity. This dissertation explores the life trajectories of a transhumant community the Gujar Bakarwals in Northern Pakistan. Despite being marginalized by colonial and post-colonial bureaucratic hurdles they traverse large distances to provide pasture to their livestock while avoiding the ever increasing bureaucratic as well as other hurdles in their movement. This strategy is only partly successful and they are left with no option to give up this mode of life as they are failing to meet the ever increasing restrictions of the forest officers. An in-depth analysis of the colonial history followed by the unsympathetic attitude of the present day forest bureaucracy is followed by the cultural practices of the Gujar Bakarwals from the economic, marriage, religious outlook and more. The actual migration process of two clans the Allaiwal and the Kaghani Bakarwals depict the minute details of the strategies they adopt to pursue their traditional lifestyle. The conflict between the forest officer and the Bakarwal this thesis argues is based on the application of colonial era textbook knowledge and laws in the post-colonial period; this is reinforced by in-depth review of the roots of forest related laws that suited the colonial powers and how the present day forestry curriculum with no mechanism to empirically study the impact of nomadic grazing on natural forests is in place. They struggle for a little understood system of long distance transhumance that supports a distinct culture and pastoral economy. Bakarwal with large unreported breed of goats and horse use vertical mobility to take benefit of seasonality between the summer and winter pastures. Gujar Bakarwals have a diaspora in the northern districts of Pakistan and Indian held Jammu and Kashmir. Their sedentarization is an ongoing process all over the study locale of Pakistan’s four administrative units of this study at the Punjab, Azad-Jammu and Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The Bariyankhel clan undertakes the longest annual migration of all the known pastoral nomads in Pakistan. They enjoy their stay at Deosai the most due to the availability of kin, abundance of grass and least interference by the state functionaries. Neither the Bakarwals nor their livestock are recognized in the national censuses. Literature on pastoral nomadism in Pakistan is negligible or does not exist. They operate in a vacuum in the absence of a definition of indigenous people, or policy on pastoralism. In this study Grounded Theory methodology was used with anthropological techniques to study the lifecycle, framing of research questions and analyze the factors that lead to their sedentarization. Results reveal that voluntary planned sedentarization is an ongoing process that was accelerated due to events of the last 70 years. As a survival strategy the Bakarwals continue to find newer winter pastures and alternate migratory routes. British colonial legacy in the shape of knowledge and power exercised through the continuum of the forest department is the single effective player that shapes the fate of the pastoralist culture. Protected Areas established throughout the range in strict legal sense render their very existence illegal. This study finds that the concepts of ‘ecology’ and in particular of ‘carrying capacity’ of the 1960’s form the basis of the power of the forest officers, that is different from the native’s perception of the same space. This study ends with suggestions that include crafting policy on nomadic grazing and to stimulate research into the biophysical and social sciences on pastoralism and may lead to design an informed policy on the subject. Key words: Nomad, Gujar, Bakarwal, Sedentarization, Grounded Theory, Indigenous Knowledge, Desiccation Theory, forests, National Parks, UNESCO Biosphere Reserves