CHITRAL
Amid the foothills and dense forest of the Bumburet valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Chitral district, the sounds of the national anthem and morning prayers ring out everyday from a small primary school. It is the only private primary school belonging to the ancient Kalash tribe, and around a hundred children are currently enrolled there.
Bakhtoor Shah arrives at the school early every morning to line the children up for assembly. He is the school’s principal and belongs to the Kalash community himself — a community counted among the oldest civilizations in Pakistan and the world.
20 years without government support
According to current figures, the Kalash population numbers around 4,125 people.
He said the school had also tried to secure funding from various non-governmental aid organisations, without success. According to Log Rehmat, last year’s returns on the fund were so low that the school had to dip into the fund’s principal just to keep running.
The school has one other source of income: a museum on its ground floor, which charges tourists fifty rupees per ticket, plus an additional fee of 150 to 200 rupees for anyone taking photos or videos on a phone or camera — proceeds that also go into the school fund.
The Kalash tribe has no written religious scripture; knowledge is passed down orally from generation to generation. That is why, alongside the official curriculum, the school teaches Kalasha as a formal subject, while one day a week is devoted to hands-on lessons in culture, religious festivals and sacred sites.According to Bakhtoor Shah, the school does not teach the everyday, colloquial Kalasha spoken at home, in the market or in the fields — the aim instead is to teach children the original, classical form of the language. From nursery through fifth grade, students work through eighteen specially developed workbooks that let them read and write folk songs, traditional stories and religious material in their own language.
This curriculum was not easy to build. Log Rehmat said it took nearly twenty years of work to give Kalasha a writing system. Along the way, both Arabic and Persian scripts were tried, but local people found both difficult to read and write. Two Australian linguists and one American linguist worked with local language experts — including Imran Kabir and Tash Nag — to develop a Kalasha alphabet, numerals and dictionary.
Finally, at a 2003 conference in Islamabad, local linguists’ demands led to an agreement to teach and write Kalasha in the Roman script, and the eighteen workbooks were later developed on that basis.
Log Rehmat insists that real protection for the language will only come once the wider curriculum itself is written in Kalasha. “The government had textbooks for Kalasha up to fifth grade prepared — but in Urdu. That does nothing to protect the language, and those books were never even implemented in practice. The curriculum needs to be in the Kalasha language itself; only then can this ancient language be protected.”
Gul Mina, a fourth-grade student, studies Kalasha language, culture and religion alongside her other subjects. “After studying Kalasha from nursery to fourth grade, I can now read and write in my own mother tongue,” Mina said. She wants to become a doctor when she grows up.
Pashmina, a fifth-grader, has only a few months left at the school. She says that once she finishes fifth grade, she will move to the nearest girls’ high school to continue her education — but there is no arrangement there to teach her mother tongue.
Pashmina is not alone. According to the school’s teachers, all students move on to nearby government schools after fifth grade, where there is no provision at all for Kalasha language, culture or religion. The teachers say that, fortunately, by the time children complete the eighteen workbooks, they have gained enough grounding to read and write their own language independently — but beyond that, there is no government mechanism to build on or maintain that skill.
This school exists only in the Bumburet valley, while children in the Kalash tribe’s three other valleys have no facility at all to learn their mother tongue. Bakhtoor Shah says the institute wants to open branches of the school in other valleys too, but financial constraints have made that impossible so far.”It’s extremely difficult for children from the other valleys to come here to study every day, because poverty, long distances and difficult terrain make it impossible for parents to bring their children back and forth daily.”
In 2012-13, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government added regional languages — including Pashto, Hindko, Khowar, Saraiki and Kohistani — to the official school curriculum, but Kalasha was left out of that list. Bakhtoor Shah says the federal government has worked on religious texts for minority communities across the country, but the Kalash community’s own texts still have not reached educational institutions, even after years have passed.
For Bakhtoor Shah, this is not merely an administrative problem — it is a question of a civilization’s survival. “Kalasha is among the world’s languages at risk of extinction. Many young people in the new generation have already forgotten their own language, which is a deeply saddening thing.”The local community is demanding that Kalasha be made part of the official curriculum not just up to fifth grade, but all the way through higher secondary level, so that the new generation is not completely cut off from its language and identity.