Burusho Erotic

The Burusho live in the high valleys of Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin in Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan, where the Karakoram throws up some of the most vertical terrain on the planet. They are best known to linguists for one stubborn fact: their language, Burushaski, has no demonstrated relatives. It sits among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Tibetan, and Turkic neighbors and resembles none of them. Every serious attempt to link it to another family — Caucasian, Yeniseian, Dravidian, even Basque — has failed to convince the field. For a population of perhaps 100,000 people wedged between three of the world's great language groups, this is unusual, and it is the single most cited piece of evidence for the theory that the Burusho are descendants of a pre-Indo-European population that was elsewhere overwritten.

Religious life splits them along valley lines. Hunza is overwhelmingly Ismaili, followers of the Aga Khan, whose network of schools and development programs has reshaped the valley over the past half-century — Hunza's literacy rates, women's education in particular, are conspicuously high for the region. Nagar, just across the river, is Twelver Shia and more conservative in tone; the contrast between the two banks is sharp enough that locals will point it out before you ask. Yasin and the smaller Burusho pockets are mixed. The Ismaili presence is recent in historical terms — the conversion took hold in the nineteenth century — and replaced an earlier layer of Shia and, before that, pre-Islamic practice whose traces still surface in seasonal observances and folk belief.

Until 1974, Hunza and Nagar were princely states, ruled by hereditary mirs who answered to nobody in particular for most of their history; the kingdoms were absorbed into Pakistan only when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto abolished them. The terrain enforced this isolation. The Karakoram Highway, punched through to China in the 1970s and 80s, ended it. Subsistence has long meant terraced apricot, mulberry, and wheat cultivation on irrigated slopes — water diverted from glacier melt through channels that are themselves engineering inheritances, maintained by communal labor. The Burusho also acquired, over the twentieth century, a slightly mythologized reputation in the West for longevity and health, much of it inflated by mid-century travel writers; the underlying picture is more ordinary, but the diet and the altitude and the walking are real enough.