Two Essays on Baloch History and Folklore by Sabir Badal Khan

During the early 19th century the British came in direct contact with the Baloch, first with those living in the Punjab and Sind, and later with those in Balochistan proper.They began studying the Baloch as an ethno-national group, their language, literature, folklore, tribal structure, physical features, and so on, forming theories and suggesting hypotheses regarding their origins and relations with other nations and peoples. With the passage of time, however, a northwest Iranian origin theory came to be the widely accepted one. This thesis was established on three basic grounds: first, from the Balochi oral tradition which claims that the Baloch came from a place called Alab/Alap, identified as Aleppo in Syria by Western writers and later followed by some local writers too; secondly, their mention in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi where they are sometimes shown along with the people of Gilan and Dilam, regions situated on the Caspian Sea regions; and thirdly, on the basis of their language, which is classified as belonging to the northwestern group of Iranian languages having close affinities with Kurdish and other languages of that branch. Dr. Sabir Badal Khan discusses all this data into detail in this book.
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