The two volumes under review, Wakhan Quadrangle and Pamirian Crossroads by Hermann Kreutzmann, are concerned with spaces in highland Asia (and their inhabitants), that were transformed through contestation, geographical exploration, espionage and intrigues into territories and spheres of influence by European colonial powers during the so-called “Great Game” in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Today, these territories consist of high valleys and mountain plateaus (well over 3,000 meters above sea level): parts of northeastern Afghanistan (Wakhan Corridor and Pamiri Khurd and Pamiri Kalaan); much of the southeastern section of post-Soviet Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan; the westernmost regions of eastern Turkestan (Sarikol and Taghdumbash Pamirs and Tashkorghan) of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of Peoples Republic of China (PRC); and the northern areas of Pakistan (earlier autonomously controlled by quarrelling mirs of Hunza-Nager, Gilgit, and Chitral). Until the mid-nineteenth century these highlands were unknown places of mystery waiting to be “discovered” by the colonial agents of tsarist Russia and British India. In the 1890s, Lord Curzon, himself an explorer of the Pamirs, described the area, as a “No Man’s Land,” the “lost Roof of the World,” and “pieces on the chessboard … [in] a game of the dominance of the world” (quoted in Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 35). But these foreboding high mountain valleys were already well known to those who had claimed them as places of refuge, and were traversed as passageways by merchants and earlier adventurers on the ancient Silk Routes for at least two millennia.

The tale of colonial dominance in High Asia and the topic of the Great Games has become a virtual industry for myth-making, but it has also spurred considerable recent academic research, as reflected in the extensive bibliographies of the volumes under review.Footnote ¹ Wakhan Quadrangle and Pamirian Crossroads are by far the best and only examples of comprehensive comparative studies covering the entire territories of Wakhan and the Pamirs straddling all four countries. In the Wakhan Quadrangle, Professor Kreutzmann meticulously unpacks the history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geographical explorations of these regions by Russian, British, and even in some instances Chinese colonial spies, political agents, adventurers, as well as native munshis (scribes and secretaries), and their scientific boundary-making missions. The story of the explorations of the Wakhan Quadrangle entailed “asymmetric power relation[s],” reflected in the expansion of major European empires into the region, but Kreutzmann seeks to reveal the complexities of explorations on the ground. Thus, in Wakhan Quadrangle he moves beyond the widely known and benighted European explorers and their heroic feats of discovery, to purposefully focus on the significant roles of those whose important contributions, intentional or not, have been left unacknowledged or ignored. That is, he uncovers the neglected histories of forgotten

It is, indeed, remembering and assessing the contributions of these unsung players of the “Great Game,” especially native collaborators, with which Wakhan Quadrangle is primarily concerned.

In this vein, the most important contribution of this book, from the author’s own perspective as well as to this reviewer, is highlighting the roles of some two dozen “Mohammedan explorers” or “indigenous intermediaries,” named, anonymous, or referred to by titles such as

Nain Singh, “Major Montgomerie’s Original Pundit,” was apparently awarded the Gold or Patrons Medal of the British Royal Geographic Society in 1877, which was extraordinary in view of the fact the European leaders of the expedition, brothers Adolph, Hermann and Robert Schlagintweit, were not recognized at all (Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 65). Disguised as traders and pilgrims, their route sketches and topographical maps of a wide region from the eastern Himalayas and Tibet extending to the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush fed data to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTSI). Kreutzmann correctly asserts, without the “active spying, accurate route reconnaissance and intelligence gathering” of such dedicated natives, what GTSI accomplished would have been impossible (Wakhan Quadrangle, pp. 43, 247).

To illustrate the important contributions of these native intermediaries in the Wakhan Quadrangle, Kreutzmann focuses his attention on the report of one of the remarkable native explorers, Munshi Abdul Rahim. In the winter of 1879‒80, he was dispatched by his handler, Major John Biddulph, for an urgent “political” mission from Gilgit to Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan through Wakhan. For the valuable report he produced, Munshi Abdul Rahim is “definitely one of the forgotten explorers of the Wakhan quadrangle, but his report deserves due attention” asserts Kreutzmann (Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 8). Munshi Abdul Rahim’s ethnographic account, Journey to Badakhshan, with Report on Badakhshan and Wakhan, coincided with the moment when anthropology was born in the context of colonialism. The colonial context informed the munshi’s descriptions of the geographical, social and cultural structures of Badakhshan and Wakhan while serving the British Raj. Kreutzmann relies on a facsimile copy of Munshi Abdul Rahim’s Journey to Badakhshan, in English, from the Conservation Division of the Library of Congress (Wakhan Quadrangle, pp. 150‒87). This account, originally written in Persian, translated into English in 1885, provides invaluable information on Wakhan and Badakhshan, including genealogies of the mirs, rulers and their relations with the wider regions (Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 110). Also included is ethnographic information on climate, agriculture, taxes, religion, marriage customs, demographics of “tribes,” architecture, animal husbandry, commercial goods, including sales of slaves and their points of origin, and more of critical relevance to our understanding of current situation. Kreutzmann offers critical commentary, updating and contextualizing the importance of Munshi’s report on Wakhan as an independent principality at the time of his visit (Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 105). As Munshi Abdul Rahim’s report has been widely neglected and few biographical traces remain of his life and background, Kreutzmann’s analysis stands out for its long-term value.

An immediate consequence of Munshi Abdul Rahim’s report, Kreutzmann suggests, was the flight of Ali Mardan Shah, then Mir of Wakhan, with many of his subjects to Chitral (1883) and then to Yasin (1886) in British India. The exodus was prompted by the creation of Afghanistan as a buffer state, as part of the Great Game, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1879‒80) and the installation of Amir Abdur Rahman, the “Iron Amir,” as its ruler with dominion over Wakhan (Wakhan Quadrangle, pp. 109‒12). As such, the plight of Ali Mardan Shah was among the earliest consequences of the mapmakers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, and their counterparts in Russia, and Qing China (Wakhan Quadrangle, pp. 24‒8) who parceled up the Wakhan Quadrangle amongst themselves in the process of mapping Afghanistan. By the time of Forsyth’s mission in 1873 (considered a milestone in British explorations) “scholarly curiosity and economic interests had been replaced by competitive colonialism, imperial designs and considerations of boundary making” (Wakhan Quadrangle, p. 60).

During the Great Game, the strategic interests of colonial powers had shifted from the coastline harbors to the inner terrains of Central Asia in what Owen Lattimore has calledthe Pivot of Asia. Footnote ² “Forward Policy” was advocated in Britain by Henry Rawlinson, for territorial acquisitions, economic exploitation, and conquest justified by racial and class domination, in the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and the Pamirs. Mikhail Veniukov, responding to Rawlinson, advocated for “‘return’ of part of Slavs to the neighborhood of their [Aryan] prehistoric home” near the sources of the rivers Oxus and Indus, “where they must create an entirely Russian border-country as the sole guarantee of the stability of our [Russian] position in Turkestan” (Wakhan Quadrangle, pp. 31‒2). Russians and Chinese eventually transferred millions of Slavs and Huns to the region, as part of their policies of demographic aggression, a policy still in effect in Xinjiang, China, albeit with disastrous consequences for the indigenous peoples of the region and beyond (see Pamirian Crossroads, pp. 482‒3). The Wakhan Quadrangle, divided among four nations, has continued to be of considerable interest for explorations (anthropological, botanical, and geographical) as well as intelligence gathering until now. Numerous missions and their activities are discussed in the final chapters, “Sequel” and “Postscript.” Beginning with the mission of Moulana Burhanuddin Kushkaki, a scribe of General Nadir Khan (later Shah) by Shah Amanullah to Qataghan and Badakhshan and the Afghan Pamirs (1921), the Soviet expedition to Afghanistan (1924), the joint Soviet‒German expedition to Alai Pamirs (1928), German and Austrian mountaineering and botanical expeditions to Badakhshan and Wakhan in 1935, the 1960s, and 1970s, and restarted after 2002, among others. The consequences of these and earlier outside colonial interference in the lives of the inhabitants of these remote, but not so isolated regions of High Asia is also discussed briefly in the Wakhan Quadrangle.

In the second volume, Pamirian Crossroads, Kreutzmann examines the effects of physical geography (high altitude, extreme cold, short growing season, and inaccessible terrain) together with differential impacts of altered political geography on the peoples of the Wakhan and Pamir quadrangle. Building on his analysis in the Wakhan Quadrangle, he raises two critical questions in Pamirian Crossroads: What did “scientific boundaries” imposed by European colonialists dividing these territories and their inhabitants mean to the Kirghiz (Kyrghyz) pastoral nomads and the Wakhi agro-pastoralists in High Asia, and how have they responded to them? (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 244). Also, given the similarities of their physical environments, why and how have trajectories of Wakhi and Kirghiz communities’ lives in each of the four countries evolved so differently?

In addition to the textual materials from Wakhan Quadrangle, Kreutzmann also uses data from his own fieldwork in Wakhan Crossroads to grasp what he calls the “Zeitgeist”—i.e., spirit of the times or the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era—of the land and its peoples. Wakhan Crossroads is the culmination of a nearly four-decade labor of love, collaboratively carried out with his spouse, Dr. Sabine Felmy. It is a longitudinal, comparative study of changes and continuities of the divided Wakhi and Kirghiz communities, based on visiting the same communities over time in each country, and tracing the steps of Munshi Abdul Rahim’s 1879 journey from Gilgit to Faizabad through Wakhan to assess the forces of change and adaptive dynamics of the Kirghiz and Wakhi over the last century and a half.

Historically, the Kirghiz and Wakhi have played significant parts in facilitating and hindering contact across the Wakhan and Pamirs.Footnote ³ They raided each other’s communities as well as travelers for plunder and capture of slaves, and also were victims to enslavement, being sold in slave markets by others near and far until the late nineteenth century (Pamirian Crossroads, pp. 295‒306). They, especially Wakhi Moulais (adherents of a minority, Isma‘ili sect of Shi‘a Islam), suffered chronic insecurity and oppression at the hands of local rulers who exploited them as a medium of exchange for taxation, payment of tributes, and bride price or dowry during aristocratic marriages. Both groups used mobility as a means to cope with changing political circumstances as much as meeting the seasonal needs of their herds (Pamirian Crossroads, pp. 295‒316).

Kreutzmann places Wakhan and the Pamirs within the much larger geographical sphere referred to as Zomia (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 34, map).Footnote ⁴ The term, coined by Willem van Schendel, refers to the “frontiers of multiple [resource rich] areas being connected” by high mountain ranges such as those stretching in the heart of Asia, from the Hindu Kush across the Himalayas to the highlands of Thailand and Laos, connecting inner Asian steppes in the north with South and Southeast Asian plains, and the Middle East and Europe to the west (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 34, map). The earliest explorers of the mountainous region of Wakhan and the Pamirs may have been Chinese traders and pilgrims to India and western Asia during the Tang dynasty (r. 618‒709 CE). The latest were European explorers in the nineteenth century looking for “natural and scientific boundaries” for their imperial domains, with major consequences for the peoples of this region.

After imposition of scientific borders and the onset of Bolshevik and later Chinese communist revolutions, the once masterless mountains of Zomia in the Wakhan became a virtual cul-de-sac due to closed bordering policies. The independence of the Indian subcontinent from Britain and the creation of Pakistan in 1948 had a considerable impact on Wakhi communities who became settled in northern Pakistan and disputed Kashmir. Afghanistan exercised minimal presence in the Pamirs and much firmer control on its portion of Wakhan before and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the era of jihad resistance during the 1980s, the civil war and rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, and their removal by US‒NATO intervention from 2001 until the present. These developments have had drastic, but differential effects on the Kirghiz and Wakhi.

In Wakhan Crossroads, Kreutzmann examines the many modern developmental projects that have affected the region, including Soviet collectivization and nationalizing measures, Chinese communal and minority (minzu) policies, together with their modernization experimentations, Afghanistan’s exploitation and neglect, Pakistan’s attempts at administrative integration, and the Agha Khan’s religious reform and economic development efforts. The impact of road construction, especially of the Pamir Highway connecting Rajon Ishkashim with Murghab in the eastern Pamir since the 1930s, is a subject closely examined in the book. Kreutzmann examines other road-building schemes, such as the Chinese connecting Kashgar to Tashkurgan by motorable road since 1958, the Pakistani- and Chinese-built Karakoram Highway connecting Gilgit and Hunza via the Khunjerab pass with Tashkurgan and Kashgar since the late 1970s, and Afghanistan’s limited efforts to build a road connecting Faizabad with Qalaye Panja and Sarhadi Baroghil since the 1960s. Also explored are China’s “One Road, One Belt” scheme and its radical implications for the construction of a road link between Tajikistan’s eastern Pamirs and the Pak-China Friendship Highway via Kulma Pass, which would establish a short connection between Gorno-Badakhshan and Xinjiang (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 121), and the construction of five bridges over the Oxus River (Amu Darya) to reconnect Shughnan and the Wakhan areas of Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan with Afghan Badakhshan.

Kreutzmann considers the modernization policies that have changed the way of life of Kirghiz pastoral nomads towards sedentarization and urbanization and how the Kirghiz have proved their agility in coping with rapidly changing conditions. To outside observers, Kirghiz pastoral nomads were wicked and rough: Ellsworth Huntington, a geographical determinist, regarded them as the antithesis of western civilization and modernity (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 344-45), the Chinese called them “Bruts” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 346), and the General Staff of India characterized “their nomad life, and the barrenness of the mountains on which they live, [to] have produced in them a bold, enterprising character, and [with] the ability to find their way about, in any locality, and under any circumstance” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 346). The Kirghiz of Murghab district in Tajikistan have transformed their two kolkhoz and five sovkhozes into five councils (jamuat). They had enjoyed some amenities, such as schools and health care during the Soviet era. Now, some 7,000 strong at their district center, have lost their fodder production territory in Kyrgyzstan and 980 square kilometers of rangeland ceded to China by Tajikistan to resolve disputed borders.

Tashkorgan, the old hub connecting Silk Road trade routes to the Indian subcontinent via Hunza, and the Afghan Pamirs with China, has become a large Hun and Uighur city of 18,000 people in the past two decades, seriously affecting the access of Kirghiz of Sarikol and Taghdumbash to their summer pastures in the Pamir (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 458). In the Kizil Sue Autonomous District, in Xinjiang, China, Kirghiz mobility is drastically restricted to short distances within their district, and their long-distance vertical migration to Kashgar is banned. Stone and mud houses built by the Chinese government have become settlements for Kirgiz commune members and winter fodder supplies are delivered to them by trucks from Kasghar. What is more, Kirgiz herd sizes have seriously declined during the Cultural Revolution and the old commune system has recovered drastically under the Den Xiaopeng’s Four Modernization plan resulting in pasturage degradation, necessitating reductions of their herds as well as limiting their range to restricted seasonal use.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kirghiz of the Afghan Pamirs, whom this reviewer studied in the early 1970s, had taken refuge in the Great and Little Pamir valleys of Afghanistan from the Osh regions of what came to be the USSR. They had coped well in their new abode under closed frontier conditions by reorienting their economic and political relations almost exclusively within Afghanistan. The Soviet-inspired communist coup in Kabul in 1978 and the subsequent Soviet invasion in 1979 forced a Kirghiz exodus by their capable leader, Haji Rahman Kul Khan, to Ishkomen and then Gilgit, Pakistan, before their resettlement as refugees in Van, Eastern Turkey. A small number of the refugees who returned from Pakistan after a year to the Little Pamir, plus the Kirghiz of the Great Pamir, live precariously, suffering from chronic food insecurities, pervasive opium addiction, and the lack of social services provided by the government of Afghanistan. They have also lost much of their pasturage to their Wakhi neighbors while receiving some critical assistance from the Agha Khan organizations since 2001, and are debating relocation to Kyrgyzstan.

The Wakhi occupy nine major valleys straddling four countries (see Pamirian Crossroads, p. 143 map, 140‒5, 236). Self-identifying in the upper Amu Darya as khik/xic, and their language as Khik/Zik, they are pejoratively referred to in the Brushuski languages in the Hunza area of Northern Pakistan as guich/guiski (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 132). Russians and Soviet scholars have introduced more confusion by classifying them as Tajik or Mountain Tajik, Sart, Ghalcha, and Pamirians. Of Iranian stock, the Wakhi, like other smaller language communities in the area, are multilingual, speaking Tajik/Dari/Persian, Uighur, Brushuski, or Urdu as the lingua franca appropriate in their specific contexts. They concealed their Moulai or Isma‘ili Shi‘a faith from their Sunni persecutors in the area. Flight was their only effective defense when threatened. In recent decades, however, with the re-establishment of contact by the Agha Khan, their spiritual leader, the fortunes of the Wakhi have improved in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.

Writing in 1896, Ole Olufsen reported that in the Afghan Wakhan, “the tax was levied with extreme severity; only favorites of the prince [Mirs] owned land, and the lower classes were entirely plundered” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 245). Badakhshani dignitaries were held hostage after 1883 by Amir Abdur Rahman, the Pashtun ruler in Kabul, but when his successor, Amir Habibullah, ordered them released, he levied additional taxes and conscription to his army, resulting in the flight of “more people from Wakhan seeking refuge in the British northern territories” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 264). Tsarist Russia had prohibited the Wakhan Isma‘ilis from visiting their spiritual leader, the Agha Khan, then living in British India, “as His Highness is no friend to Russia” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 263). The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution caused further flights of the Wakhi to the Afghan side, British India, and Chinese Turkistan. Tensions and competition by Russia, Britain, and China in eastern Turkestan in the 1910s had placed additional tax burdens on the Wakhi in Xinjiang as their “subjects” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 265).

In the former USSR and PRC, the Wakhi were granted some form of community self-governance by the creation of the autonomous Gorno-Badakhshan (in 1925/29) and an autonomous county for “Tajiks” in Tashkorgan, respectively. Through the policies of korenizacija in the USSR, the Wakhi received language-focused education and identity, and, via collectivization and land reclamation, their grinding poverty before the revolution was alleviated to some degree. But their population growth considerably outpaced the rate of land reclamation by the 1980s. Some 8,000 of them were relocated in the lowland near Dushanbe and Korghan Teppe, cultivating cotton (Pamirian Crossroads, pp. 273‒4). Their population of 6,000 in the Rajon Ishkashim in 1932 had reached 28,000 by 2002. Literacy, health, and education had also improved remarkably compared to those on the south bank of the river in Afghanistan. Collapse of the USSR followed by the Tajik Civil War (1992‒97) forced many Wakhis to return to Wakhan, increasing poverty and labor migration to Russia. The intervention of the Agha Khan Development Network (AKDN) has begun to reverse these setbacks to some degree. The Wakhis of Sari Kol in China have grown six-fold demographically. Construction of dams and the Karakoram Highway and increased trade with Pakistan has added to their occupational diversity. Decrease in Chinese government extraction and non-payment of religious dues have resulted in prosperity (Pamirian Crossroads, pp. 395‒6).

Under Pakistan’s non-minority policy, the Wakhi had suffered much exploitation in the hands of Mirs of Hunza, Gilgit, and Chitral; they still remain in weak position, with minor exception. Those living in northern Chitral’s upper Yurkhun valley and Broghil on Afghan border are severely pauperized due to remoteness. A situation which has invited more refugees from the conflict ridden Afghanistan to this remote area and allowed the growing of opium and charas (hashish) and trafficking the contraband to neighboring territories. Due to inaccessibility, Agha Khan organizations have not been able to assist them either. On the other hand, Wakhis living in Imit and Gojal in the Hunza region, traditionally very successful pastoralists complementing the Brusho farmers, had kept this often food-deficient area from starvation. Protesting unfair taxation laws of the Hunza Mirs and the Thuma rule, they were able shake off the excessive taxation they were subjected to by their Mirs in 1972. More significantly, as beneficiaries of the Agha Khan’s support for English-medium schools, the Gojal Wakhis have become the model Ismaili community in Pakistan and the region. Their educated leaders have joined national political parties, employment in government, and jobs in Karachi and other cities while their women have taken over shepherding their flocks. They have started Wakhi language radio broadcasting and are the best connected and most affluent of Wakhi communities in the twenty-first century.

Afghan Wakhis, with a violent and oppressive past evidenced by numerous ruins in the valley, seem to be improving their condition. Pir (hereditary spiritual leader) Shah Ismael, with help from the Agha Khan organizations, has taken significant initiatives for positive change. His parentswere escapees from the Soviet side to Qalayee Panja on the Afghan side of the Oxus. Embracing religious reform by Agha Khan, he has built the first Jam’at Khana (prayer hall) near his home. Shah Ismael has also resumed political and administrative leadership, represented the Wakhis in the Afghan Loye Jirgas (Grand Assembly) in Kabul, reinvested the tithe he receives from his disciples in income-generating loans and projects within his community, encouraged and expanded herding in the Pamirs through amanat (giving animals to the long-term custody of poor herders, a system of herd management common among Afghan Kirghiz in the 1970s), bought two pickup trucks to haul goods from Faizabad to Wakhan to lower prices in the area. Shah Ismael has also advocated improving roads and transport, supported building schools and improving education, health care, and tourism, especially mountaineering in the area. On the whole, the future of the Wakhi in Afghanistan seems much brighter than ever before.

These magnificently researched, encyclopedic books, Wakhan Quadrangle and the Pamirian Crossroads, conclude that “the present state of affairs [of the inhabitants of these parts of High Asia] can be perceived as a mosaic of people with diverse life experiences and options despite all ecological and environmental similarities in their locations” (Pamirian Crossroads, p. 431). Kreutzman’s extensive research spanned some forty years, archival sources in numerous languages and collections in Russia, China, the UK, the US, India, and Germany. In these two volumes Kreutzmann includes extremely rare original materials in facsimile—maps, sketches, drawings, photographs of key explorers, persons of interest and local places and peoples—invaluable resources in themselves for decades to come. These well-written, analytically and methodologically sophisticated, sumptuously illustrated, superbly documented, and beautifully produced coffee-table-quality volumes are marvelous additions to the studies of mountain ecosystems in general and critical analysis of all that pertains to the “Great Games” at the “multi-tier playground” of European imperialism in High Asia at the turn of the last century. These are books fit for every academic library and reference collections of specialists and students of Central and Inner Asia.