Talpur Erotic

The Talpur are a Baloch tribe that made itself Sindhi, and for sixty years made itself the state. Their ancestors came down from the Baloch highlands into the lower Indus valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, took service with the ruling Kalhoras as soldiers and landholders, and then, after the Kalhoras had two of their chiefs killed, turned on them. Mir Fateh Ali Khan Talpur won the field at Halani in 1783, and the tribe ruled Sindh from Hyderabad until Charles Napier's army broke it at Miani and Dubbo in 1843. Most Talpurs still live where the dynasty planted them: Hyderabad, Tando Muhammad Khan, Tando Allahyar, Mirpur Khas, Sanghar, Badin and Khairpur. The honorific Mir, carried as a given name by many Talpur men, is the quickest way to spot one on a ballot paper or a land record.

Language tells the story of assimilation. Balochi, a Northwestern Iranian language, is the ancestral tongue, but Sindhi, which is Indo-Aryan, is what nearly every Talpur speaks at home, and the Talpur court wrote in Persian. In religion they stand slightly apart from their neighbors: the ruling Mirs were Twelver Shia, and many Talpurs remain so in a province that is mostly Sunni, though Sindhi Sufi devotion cuts across the divide, and the Khairpur Mirs were patrons of the poet Sachal Sarmast. The dynasty split into three houses named for founding ancestors: the Shahdadani at Hyderabad, the Sohrabani at Khairpur and the Mankani at Mirpur Khas. Khairpur backed the British in 1843, kept its princely state, and did not give it up until 1955, when it was folded into West Pakistan.

Two things about Talpur rule rarely reach the guidebooks. The first is the chauyari, the four friends: Mir Fateh Ali governed jointly with three brothers, a collective arrangement the British found baffling and the Sindhis found workable. The second is the shikargah, the riverside hunting preserves the Mirs fenced off along the Indus. The British cited them as proof of misrule. They are also the reason stretches of riverine forest survived into the twentieth century. The Talpur tombs at Hirabad in Hyderabad, with glazed kashi tile and painted interiors, and the fort at Kot Diji built by Mir Sohrab Khan, are the dynasty's most visible leftovers. The tribe's political weight has not gone anywhere. Talpurs are among the largest landholding families in lower Sindh, and since independence the name has supplied the province a governor and the country a defense minister.