Ibn Batuta, after crossing the Hindu-Kush by one of the passes at the head of the Panjshir Valley, reaches the Mountain BASHAI (Pashai).  In the same vicinity the Pashais are mentioned by Sidi ’Ali, in 1554.  And it is still in the neighbourhood of Panjshir that the tribe is most numerous, though they have other settlements in the hill-country about Nijrao, and on the left bank of the Kabul River between Kabul and Jalalabad. Pasha and Pasha-gar is also named as one of the chief divisions of the Kafirs, and it seems a fair conjecture that it represents those of the Pashais who resisted or escaped conversion to Islam. (See Leech’s Reports in Collection pub. at Calcutta in 1839; Baber, 140; Elphinstone, I. 411; J.  A. S. B. VII. 329, 731, XXVIII. 317 seqq., XXXIII. 271-272; I.  B. III. 86; J.  As. IX. 203, and J.  R. A. S. N.S.  V. 103, 278.)

The route of which Marco had heard must almost certainly have been one of those leading by the high Valley of Zebak, and by the Dorah or the Nuksan Pass, over the watershed of Hindu-Kush into Chitral, and so to Dir, as already noticed.  The difficulty remains as to how he came to apply the name Pashai to the country south-east of Badakhshan.  I cannot tell.  But it is at least possible that the name of the Pashai tribe (of which the branches even now are spread over a considerable extent of country) may have once had a wide application over the southern spurs of the Hindu-Kush.[2] Our Author, moreover, is speaking here from hearsay, and hearsay geography without maps is much given to generalising.  I apprehend that, along with characteristics specially referable to the Tibetan and Mongol traditions of Udyana, the term Pashai, as Polo uses it, vaguely covers the whole tract from the southern boundary of Badakhshan to the Indus and the Kabul River.

But even by extending its limits to Attok, we shall not get within seven marches of Kashmir.  It is 234 miles by road from Attok to Srinagar; more than twice seven marches.  And, according to Polo’s usual system, the marches should be counted from Chitral, or some point thereabouts.

Sir H. Rawlinson, in his Monograph on the Oxus, has indicated the probability that the name Pashai may have been originally connected with Aprasin or Paresin, the Zendavestian name for the Indian Caucasus, and which occurs in the Babylonian version of the Behistun Inscription as the equivalent of Gaddra in the Persian, i.e. Gandhara, there applied to the whole country between Bactria and the Indus. (See J.  R. G. S. XLII. 502.) Some such traditional application of the term Pashai might have survived.

[1] The Kafir dialect of which Mr. Trumpp collected some particulars shows
    in the present tense of the substantive verb these remarkable forms:—­
    Ei sum, Tu sis, siga se; Ima simis, Wi sik, Sige sin.