Whose Past and Whose Future: Free Love and Love Marriage among “Kafirs” of the Hindukush in an Early Nineteenth-Century Persian Ethnography

This paper deals with some practices and conceptions relating to love and marriage in a now-extinct pre-Islamic culture of the Hindukush, as described in an extremely precious, yet very little-known, Persian ethnographical source (ca. 1840). Written by a munshī from Peshawar under instructions from the French general Claude-Auguste Court, who was then in the service of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, this is probably the single most important pre-Robertson source about the "Kafir" cultures of Nuristan. While a complete translation and thorough study of the unpublished document, by Stefano Pellò and Alberto Cacopardo, is now forthcoming, in these brief notes we show how free love and love marriage, often perceived as "modern" concepts in many parts of Asia, were envisioned by Tak and Shamlar, two elders from pre-Islamic Kamdesh. The paper compares this representation with conceptions and practices among the present-day Kalasha of Chitral. Since the latter have recently become the subject of much misrepresentation and the target of mass tourism, it is necessary to emphasizes that the matters here discussed strictly concern only the internal relations between the members of the group.