The Arrival of the Paliqi
In 970, John I Tzimiskez deported a population of Paulician heretiocs from the Balkans to settle them in Anatolian Philippopolis as border troops. En route, the deportees rebelled, killing their guards and declaring their stated intent to return to their homeland in the Balkans against all odds. The following campaign against their ragtag band lasted for a shocking four years and cost the emperor's army dearly, but by the spring of 975, the Paulician band - swollen by more deported Paulicians and Bogomils from the Byzantine Balkans whom the imperial government considered a security risk in the light of this development - was forced across the border into Abbasid territory.
They were not welcome. Arab forces awaited them to find out more about them and, on being reliably informed that they were troublemakers, dangerous robbers, and not Christians, offered the stark choice: convert to Islam and be allowed to settle, or leave. Thousands took up the offer - the exact number will never be known, but the Paliqi still have legends about the renegades whose unquiet ghosts, tormented by the knowledge they will eternally be bound to earth, haunt the wide lands of Iraq. But wherever charismatic leaders took matters in hand, bands of heretics once more began trekking east, away from their persecutors.
The details of their journey are sketchy, surviving only in legend and occasional mentions in local chronicles. By 1060, a wandering tribe of Palawqi, metalworkers and horse traders, are mentioned in the Punjab. In 1105, the Jin garrison in Lintao records the entry of Pao Li from Xia territory. In 1167, the Song magistrate Li Yanggong describes the Pao Li as a group defined by its religious practices, which he compares to Buddhism. In 1132, the Palaqi are mentioned as a mercenary force in the army of Prola II. By the 1300s, the wandering Palaqi tribes are a familiar sight all over Northern India.
The modern Palaqi have suffered much from the attentions if the Raj and the modern Indian state. To the British rulers, they were a romantic oddity and classed as a martial race, though there were never enough recruits for them to be militarily significant. Palaqi men, with their traditional braided beards, long swords, silver-headed riding whips and lavishly decorated guns, were a favourite subjects of artists and popular as saises and personal attendants with many officers of the Raj. The police took a dimmer view of the mobile and often criminal ways of the nomad populations and frequently resorted to bullying tactics to keep them away. In the 1960s, attempts were made to settle the Paliqi, and children were forcibly taken to Hindi schools. By that time, many of the tribes had turned from their traditional occupations of horse-training, metalwork, caravan management and dacoitry to petty retail and trucking. Numerous Paliqi families today make a living in the trucking business, while others have assimilated intro the settled population, often sinking into abject poverty. The old Paliqi language, a dialect of Urdu heavily laced with Slavonic and Turkic loanwords, is only spoken by the old generation today. Most Paliqi use Hindi as their everyday tongue. They still practice remnants of Paulician Manicheeism, though it survives mostly as ritual in a heavily syncretic form. The Indian census counts the Paliqi as Hindu, and they were expelled from pakistan along with the Hindu population during the partition.
As of 2005, freight forwarding magnate Sanjay Duss, an assimilated Paliqi, has begun funding Paliqi schools and is offering scholarships for gifted children to attend higher education. Learning the Paliqi language is a condition of these opportunities. Pentecostal churches have discovered the Paliqi as a 'lapsed Christian' tribe and are stepping up efforts to convert them.