Hazara

Hazara may refer to:

People

Places

in Pakistan

in Afghanistan

Hazara, Pakistan

Hazara (Hindko/Urdu: ہزارہ‎, Pashto: هزاره‎) is a region in the North-Eastern part of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It is located east of the Indus River and comprises six districts: Abbottabad, Battagram, Haripur, Mansehra, Kohistan, and New District Torghar.

History

Name

"The origin of the name Hazāra is obscure." This source continues: "It has been identified with Abisāra, the country of Abisares, the chief of the Indian mountaineers at the time of Alexander's invasion.

The name Hazara has also been derived from Urasā, or 'Urasha', an ancient Sanskrit name for this region, according to Aurel Stein. Some Indologists including H. C. Raychaudhury, B. N. Mukerjee, B. C. Law, J. C. Vidyalankar, M. Witzel, M. R. Singh and K. N. Dhar concur with Stein's identification of modern Hazara with ancient Urasa. e when under the British.

It is also possible that the name Hazara comes from the phrase Hazara-i-Karlugh.

Evidence from the seventh-century Chinese traveller Xuanzang, in combination with much earlier evidence from the Indian epic the Mahabharata, attests that Poonch and Hazara District of Kashmir had formed parts of the ancient state of Kamboja, whose rulers followed a republican form of government.

Hazaras

The Hazaras (Persian: هزاره) are a Persian-speaking people who mainly live in central Afghanistan, Hazara Town in Balochistan, Pakistan and Karachi. They are overwhelmingly Twelver Shia Muslims and make up the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

The dialect of Persian which they speak is called Hazaragi, which is more precisely a part of the Dari dialect continuum (one of the two main languages of Afghanistan), and is mutually intelligible with Dari.

Etymology

Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire in the early 16th century, records the name Hazara in his autobiography. He referred to the populace of a region called Hazaristan, located west of the Kabulistan region, north of Ghazna and south-west of Ghor.

The conventional theory is that the word Hazara derives from the Persian word for Thousand (Persian: هزار‎‎ - hazār). It may be the translation of the Mongol word ming (or minggan), a military unit of 1,000 soldiers at the time of Gengis Khan. With time, the term Hazar could have been substituted for the Mongol word and now stands for the group of people.