Documentation of the Balochi minstrel performing art tradition as an endangered genre
Pahlawan Charag and his musical group are performing Balochi historical poems. Photo of (right to left) Karim, Pahlawn Ali, Haji Sedigh, Pahlawan Charge and Bank Mohammad by Barkat Baram, 2024. Click on image to access collection.
| Language | Balochi |
| Depositor | Maryam Nourzaei |
| Affiliation | Uppsala University |
| Location | Iran |
| Collection ID | 0782 |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/3b26363a-7947-4c36-89ba-4dd6d45fe1ed |
Summary of the collection
The Balochi minstrel performing art tradition is an endangered genre as it is currently only performed by three professional minstrels called _Pahlawan _along the coast in Rask and Dashtiyari in Sistan and Balochistan, province in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The collection is the outcome of an ongoing project documenting Balochi _Pahlawan_ tradition, in particular oral poems. The project is a collaborative effort between myself and a group of Balochi community members who are involved in designing the collection content as well as collecting and recording data. The deposited data consists of various topics such as legends, religion, love, and history. The data has been recorded in video and audio-only formats.
Group represented
The group presented here is the Baloch. Balochi is mostly spoken in southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan, but is also found in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Oman and the UAE. All Baloch people call themselves Baloch except for Koroshi people, who call themselves either Korosh or Qashqai, although their language is Balochi.
I would like to extend my special gratitude to Pahlawan Sohrab, Pahlawan Charagh, Pahlawan Haji Sayed, and Pahlawan Esmail for providing information regarding the Balochi minstrel traditions and kindly performing these poems. My special thanks go to the wives in the families for being extremely welcoming and generous hosts to all the audiences. With respect to musical groups, I would like to thank Haji Sedigh, Bayk Mohammad, Karim and Waja Ali for playing musical instruments.
Language information
The Balochi language belongs to the northwest Iranian branch of the Iranian languages, which in turn belong to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. It has three main dialects: Southern, Eastern and Western Balochi. Each of these dialects presents its own sub-divisions (see Jahani and Korn 2009)
Collection contents
In the current version of the collection, the corpus consists of approximately 80 hours of recorded naturally the minstrels’ performing.
History;
Love;
Legends;
Religion.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users of any part of this collection should acknowledge Maryam Nourzaei as the main investigator, and Abdul Naser Pasand, Mohammad Salim Pasand and Jahan Bakhsh Gorgich and as core members of the research team. The main participants who have shared their narrations should also be acknowledged by name. The relevant information is available in the metadata.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Nourzaei, Maryam. 2024. Documentation of the Balochi minstrel performing art tradition as an endangered genre. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/7c0690b3-9433-4f23-b2af-b478fb341916. Accessed on [insert date here].
