A SKETCH ON THE COMPOSITION OF GANDHARA
From our investigations thus far, a satisfactory picture of the ethnic and social composition of the ancient polity of Gandhara has emerged which shall be briefly delineated below. Gandhara originated as a Vedic tribal governorate, which became a Persian Satrapy (province) with the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire in 550 BC and remained directly or indirectly under Persian rule and influence till the overthrow of Sassanid Persia 1100 years later. In about 670 AD Hunnic Hindu “Shahiya” Rajputs established their rule over lower eastern Khorasan which was to last for 350 years till the Muslim Turk conqueror Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi overthrew them and with that the name of Gandhara began to decline after having been in use for 2700 years. But Turco-Iranian rule, now in Muslim form — was restored in the area after the Ghaznavids — by the Tajik Ghurids and their Swati vassals in the form of the Sawad-Gabr Kingdom. This perpetuated the basic character of the pre-Islamic Persian socio-political order and it was maintained throughout the Delhi Sultanate era of which Sawad-Gabr (Swat) and its parent Sultanate of Kashmir were dependents.
Thus we can say that the arrival here of the Indo-Timurids (Mughals) and their Afghan Sarabani henchmen by 1520 saw the final overthrow of the last vestiges of the classical 2000 year old ancient Persian political, social and ethnic order of Peshawar Valley and its attached regions of Swat, Bajaur, and Hazara — the area that was once called Gandhara. And since that time the historical greatness for which this area was once known has not only declined, but remained under a permanent cloud.
The Afghans-Pashtuns who have dominated this area for the last 500 years — have done nothing to justify that domination during this period; they never succeeded in coalescing to form a larger and stable political conglomeration out of their fractious and unsettled tribal character. In fact their character has served as an influence for disruption, destruction and permanent instability.
The ruling and Iranic remnants of the preceding ancient Persian era which are now discernible to us are the Swatis + Shalmanis, Barakis, Karlani Pashtuns and about 15 other minor Pashtunised vassal tribes, dominated by the genetic Haplogroup G2a.
The Shalmani Dehqans were the original administrative and landowning elite of Sassanid Gandhara. They spoke their own Middle Persian related dialect called Dehqani. At that time, the Swatis were in Sistan, and moved north to Balkh (Bactria) after Yaqub-e-Lais expelled them in 872 AD. They joined the Shalmanis in Gandhara after the Samanids are said to have expelled them from Balkh eastwards towards Panj and the Pech region of Kunar in the 10th Century. There the Swatis became influential among the Shalmani Dehqans. After that they were all converted to Islam under the Ghaznavids in the 11th Century, and by the 13th Century such people were also known as Tajiks. It should be noted that in his “Kitab-ul-Hind”, Al-Beruni refers to the mountains west of the Indus in the Peshawar region as “Koh-e-Shamilan”. Shamilan may have been a distorted pronunciation of “Shalman” and there is still a large region bearing the latter name in the same mountains north of the Khyber Pass.
The Saka-Dardic mixture called Tirahis — now known as the Karlani category of Pashtuns — were also prominent and were variously the junior partners and rivals of the local Iranian ruling apparatus. At that time the Dardic cultural influence in the Tirahis was quite powerful but has since subsided and been replaced by total Pashtunisation — spawning the Afridi, Dilazak and Khattak tribes. The Tirahis are known to have lived to the southwest of Gandhara also.
The Barakis spoke their own separate Iranian language. It seems that they were Mithraic in character, and were appointed in some capacity as a vice regnal elite by the Sassanid Shah to govern the Tirahi tribes in the long forgotten past. They still exist in small pockets at widely scattered locations in Logar (Afghanistan), South Waziristan and in three villages on the outskirts of Peshawar. In the last named location they are now totally Pashtunised, retaining only their ethnonym. Logar and Waziristan lay in other satrapies outside the domains of Gandhara. Barakis are still held in high regard by the locals and their language is still spoken — it is called “Barjista” which means exalted in Farsi, another fact indicative of their once high status, now lost to time.
The vast majority of the rest of Gandhara’s population in late Sassanid and Hindu Shahiya times comprised of Indic lower caste menials, artisan classes and petty merchants known collectively as Hindkis, who spoke a Prakrit dialect now known as Hindko.
Gandhara was therefore an ideal example of a good Indian-Iranian combination: an Indian majority territory, ruled and administered by Persia.