The Ismaili Singhs of upper Chitral: An untold story of Sikh legacy in the mountains of Pakistan

This summer, I spent several weeks in Lahore. The oppressive heat across the plains of Pakistani Punjab was quite unbearable, so I decided to escape north to Chitral for about 10 days. A few Lahori friends and I hired a 12-passenger van and headed north.

We headed out of Lahore via the motorway — first to Islamabad and then through Mardan (very close to Peshawar), past the Dir mountain ranges to the steep ascent of Lowari Pass (at an elevation of about 10,000 feet), and crossed a 10-km-long tunnel.

On the other side of the tunnel was Chitral Valley. The scene instantly reminded me of the Banihal tunnel in India, on the other side of which lies the lush green Kashmir valley.

Chitral Valley, situated in the northern area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North West Frontier Province) in Pakistan, is located significantly north of the Indian region of Leh and Ladakh. North of it lies the Afghan-controlled Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of land that separates Chitral from Tajikistan.

Chitral is a place of breathtaking beauty, and the locals, seemingly immersed in a deep sense of peace, are a sight to behold. It is no wonder that Chitral is often associated with happiness.

The flat southern area of the valley is referred to as lower Chitral, while the northern mountainous part is upper Chitral.

Upper Chitral has snow-capped mountains rising straight from rivers swollen with ice-cold waters from melting glaciers above. It includes Qaqlasht Meadows, Torkho Valley, and many other gems of nature in Upper Chitral.

During this visit to the small town of Booni in Upper Chitral, I was captivated by a freestyle polo game at the Booni Polo Ground. At half time, a player caught my eye with his polo shirt emblazoned with 'Singh Polo Club'. This was a surprising sight, as the use of 'Singh' as a religious name is typically associated with Sikhs, a community not found in Booni.

As the game progressed, I approached the player during the break. The player, Bashir Singh, revealed to me that they were proud descendants of Sikhs who settled in the Upper Chitral valley in the early 1850s. This revelation was quite surprising and piqued my curiosity, as it was not documented in any book of Sikh history, despite my extensive reading.

Back at my guest house, I delved online into research, but found nothing other than some information on the Sikh regiment from the famous 1895 siege of Chitral — some of whose personnel settled later in the city of Chitral and married local women.

The next day, I met Bashir and Babbar Singh, a well-known Chitrali singer with a melodious voice. Both of them were Ismaili Muslims, who understood spoken Punjabi but could not speak it.

Babbar invited me to meet an elder of their community to gain a better understanding of their history. He drove me from Booni to the nearby rural riverside village of Singhandae (village of Singhs), near Awi, which has over 250 Singh families in the area known as Singhandae.

Meer Wali Khan Singh, an uncle of Babbar Singh, is a knowledgeable retired school principal. He has a detailed family tree going back to the 1850s. He shared that there were over 500 Ismaili Muslim families in Upper Chitral with the last name ‘Singh’.

He shared the Singh family tree and elaborated that the first Singh to arrive in the upper Chitral Valley was Gulab Singh, a Sikh soldier from the Maharaja of Kashmir. He came to the Mehtar of Chitral in the 1850s in search of better economic opportunities and settled in upper Chitral. The Mehtar saw his leadership skills and appointed him the Hakam (ruler) of the upper Chitral region from Rashun to Gasht near Laspur.

Gulab Singh maintained the Sikh religious identity, followed by Rabat Singh, Budad Singh, and Bahadur Singh, all of whom upheld the Sikh faith. Mehndi Singh, the son of Bahadur Singh, was the first in the family to convert to Sunni Islam, but he retained the ancestral family name of Singh in honour of his Sikh roots.

Meer Wali Khan shared that all Ismaili Singhs of Booni are descendants of Mehndi Singh. Over the past 75 years, they have adopted Ismaili Islam, yet they proudly retain the Singh surname, a testament to their deeply rooted Sikh heritage.

Today, over 500 Ismaili Singh families call upper Chitral their home, with the largest population of about 250 families in Singhandae. Other villages with significant Singh populations in the order of decreasing Singh population are Mehragram, Rashun, Parwak, Dukandeh, and Gasht.

It needs to be noted that these Singhs of upper Chitral did not descend from the early 1800s’ Sikh traders of Chitral or the Sikh regiment that participated in the 1895 siege of Chitral. The 1901 census of Chitral, carried out by the British, indicated that approximately 20 per cent of the population was Sikh — they mostly left for India in 1947, and a few converted to Islam to stay back.

Although the Ismaili Singhs of Upper Chitral do not follow any Sikh religious practices, some of them can understand spoken Punjabi.

The facial features of the Ismaili Singhs are quite Chitrali, but their eyes still reveal their past hidden Punjabi ethnic and Sikh heritage.

The most well-known Singh of Singhandae is a woman, Suriya Bibi, Deputy Speaker of KP Assembly and the first woman ever elected on a general seat in the history of Chitral.

When I visited the village of Singhandae this July, I was told that I was the first Sikh to visit the village since 1947.

Walking around the village, I was struck by the seamless integration of Ismaili Muslim Singhs into the Chitrali society. They have fully embraced the Chitrali way of life, yet they honour their Sikh ancestors by retaining their last name as Singh while practising Islam.

(The writer is a US-based history enthusiast and scholar with deep roots in South Asia and the United States of America. He is a faculty member at The Ohio State University and  Director of Jeevay Sanjha Punjab)