I called by appointment on the Khan's wives, sixteen in number. An ordinary tribesman marries as many wives as he can afford to house and keep. Poverty and monogamy are not allied here. Women do nearly all the work, large flocks create much female employment, and as it is "contrary to Bakhtiari custom" to employ female servants who are not wives, polygamy is very largely practised. On questioning the guides, who are usually very poor men, I find that they have two, three, and even four wives, the reverse of what is customary among the peasants of Turkey and Persia proper. The influence of a chief increases with the number of his wives, as it enlarges his own family connections, and those made by the marriages of his many sons and daughters. Large families are the rule. Six children is the average in a monogamous household, and the rate of infant mortality is very low.
The "fort" is really picturesque, though forlorn and dirty. It is built on the steep slope of a hill, and on one side is three stories in height. It has a long gallery in front, with fretwork above the posts which support the roof, round towers at two of the corners, and many irregular roofs, and steep zigzags cut in the rock lead up to it. The centre is a quadrangle. When I reached the gateway under the tower many women welcomed me, and led me down a darkish passage to the gallery aforesaid, which has a pretty view of low hills, with mulberries and pomegranates in the foreground. This gallery runs the whole length of the fort, and good rooms open upon it. It was furnished with rugs upon the floor, and two long wooden settees, covered with checked native blankets in squares of Indian yellow and madder red.
I had presents for the favourite wife, but as one man said this was the favourite, and another that, and the hungry eyes of sixteen women were fixed on the parcels, I took the safer course of presenting them to the Khan for the "ladies of the andarun." Yahya Khan sent to know if it would be agreeable to me for him to make his salaam to me, a proposal which I gladly accepted as a relief from the curiosity and disagreeable familiarity of the women. There was a complete rabble of women in the gallery, with crawling children and screaming babies—a forlorn, disorderly household, in which the component parts made no secret of their hatred and jealousy of each other.
I pitied the Khan as he came in to this Babel of intriguing women and untutored children—of women without womanliness and children without innocence—the lord and master of the women, but not in any noble sense their husband, nor is the house, or any polygamous house, in any sense a home.
The wife who, I was afterwards told, is the "reigning favourite" sat on the same settee as her lord, and he ignored the whole of them. Her father, Bagha Khan, asked me to give into his care the present for her, lest it should make the other wives jealous.
Yahya Khan rules a large part of the Pulawand tribe, 1000 families, and aspires to the chieftainship of its subdivisions, among which are the Bosakis, Hajwands, Isawands, and Hebidis, numbering 2800 families.[10]
YAHYA KHAN.
He is a tall, big, middle-aged man with a very wide mouth, and a beard dyed auburn with henna—very intelligent, especially as regards his own interests, and very well off, having built his castle himself.