Makran

Makran is a semi-desert coastal strip in Balochistan, in Pakistan and Iran, along the coast of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Quotes

• Hiuen Tsang considered the script which was in use in Makran to be 'much the same as India', but the spoken language 'differed a little from that of India.'
  • Al-Hind: Early medieval India and the expansion of Islam, 7th–11th centuries By André Wink Page 137

• Even Makran remained independent with varying degrees of freedom commensurate with the intensity of resistance so that as late as 1290 Marco Polo speaks of the eastern part of Makran as part of Hind, and as “the last Kingdom of India as you go towards the west and northwest”.
  • Yule, Ser Marco Polo, II, quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

• Further evidence in the Chachnama makes perfectly clear that many areas of Makran as of Sindh had a largely Buddhist population. When Chach marched to Armabil, this town is described as having been in the hands of a Buddhist Samani (Samani Budda), a descendent of the agents of Rai Sahiras who had been elevated for their loyalty and devotion, but who later made themselves independent. The Buddhist chief offered his alligience to Chach when the latter was on his way to Kirman in 631. The same chiefdom of Armadil is referred to by Huen Tsang 0-Tien -p-o-chi-lo, located at the high road running through Makran, and he also describes it as predominantly Buddhist, thinly populated though it was, it had no less than 80 Buddhist convents with about 5000 monks. In effect at eighteen km north west of Las Bela at Gandakahar, near the ruins of an ancient town are the caves of Gondrani, and as their constructions show these caves were undoubtedly Buddhist. Traveling through the Kij valley further west (then under the government of Persia) Huien Tsang saw some 100 Buddhist monasteries and 6000 priests. He also saw several hundred Deva temples in this part of Makran, and in the town of Su-nu li-chi-shi-fa-lo-which is probably Qasrqand- he saw a temple of Maheshvara Deva, richly adorned and sculptured. There is thus very wide extension of Indian cultural forms in Makran in the seventh century, even in the period when it fell under Persian sovereignty. By comparison in more recent times the last place of Hindu pilgrimage in Makran was Hinglaj, 256 km west of present day Karachi in Las Bela.
  • Al-Hind: Early medieval India and the expansion of Islam, 7th–11th centuries by André Wink page 135

• Makran, ‘the frontier of al-Hind’ in the early Arab conquest (futuh) literature, is identified by the geographers of the ninth to twelfth cen­turies as the territory extending ‘about fifteen days travelling from Tlz to Qusdar in the district of Turan’. The geographers commonly use the term al-Hind to denote the regions east of the Indus, while including Makran in as-Sind. The historian Tabari took Makran to be a separate region between the Persian province of Kirman on one side and al-Hind on the other: ‘ . . . the region of Makran . . . is situated beyond Kirm­an and Fars, between the kingdoms of Sind and Hind . . . and cUman. . . ; Makran borders on Kirman and Hind, (while) the sea separates it from cUman’. It is equally common, however, even in the geograph­ical literature, to find Sind conflated with al-Hind in a single term. And since the Makran coast was the westernmost portion of Sind, or a west­ ern dependency of Sind, it is then found that al-Hind (‘India’) is not just the country east of the Indus but includes Makran, starting from Tlz. Al-Biruni thus says that ‘the coast (sahil) of al-Hind begins with Tiz, the capital (qa?ba) of Makran, and from there extends in a south­ eastern direction towards the region of Debal (ad-daybal).. These various statements from the Arabic sources show that Makran was effectually regarded as a frontier zone, but yet as distinctly Indian territory. And this is conform to the view which has been current in anti­quity - when Makran was known as Gedrosia - and down to com­paratively recent times. Pliny the Elder for instance writes in the first century A.D. that ‘the river Indus . . . is the western boundary of India {ad Indum amnem qui est ab occidente finis Indiae)’, but adds: ‘in fact, most authorities do not put the western frontier at the river Indus but include four satrapies, (those of) the Gedrosi (Makran), Arachotae (Qandahar), Arii (Herat), and Parapanisidae (Kabul), with the river Kabul as the final boundary..’ In the sixth century the Nestorian Patriarch Jesujabus considered India to begin from the coast of Persia, i.e. from Fars, about the Persian Gulf. Medieval European literature introduced a tripartite division of India: ‘India Major’, which extended from Malabar to the east; ‘India Minor’, adjoining Persia and embracing Sind and Makran; and ‘India Tertia’ which was Zanzibar. Nicolo de Conti, in the fifteenth century, similarly divided India in three parts: one, from Persia to the Indus (Makran and Sind); a second, from the Indus to the Ganges; and a third, beyond the Ganges. And Marco Polo, in 1290, speaks of the eastern part of Makran - which he calls Kij-Makran after its main inland town - as ‘the last kingdom in India as you go towards the west and north-west’, a kingdom which at that time claimed an independent status, probably under a Muslim ruler.
  • Wink A , Al-Hind, The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Volume 1 ,133