by AJAY KAMALAKARAN
Zahedan, which is close to the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, was once a major entry point for Sikhs looking for opportunities in Iran.
In the early 1930s, when Reza Shah Pahlavi went on a tour of Iran’s easternmost outposts, bordering India, he saw a group of turbaned men with long flowing beards dressed in white robes. As the story goes, he asked some locals about the turbaned men and was told that they were Zahids, or holy men from Hind. The small town, then called Dozdaab, was renamed Zahedan – the city of holy men.
Dozdaab, or Zahedan, is in the Iranian province of Sistan and Baluchestan (the official spelling in Iran). There is some confusion about the original name of the town. “Dozd” means thief in Farsi, while “aab” means water, which makes some people believe the name meant “water thief”. Others have said the place was at one time notorious for thieves from the part of Balochistan that was under British control. According to this telling, the name is a Baloch word that means outpouring of water.
While some scholars in South Asia and Iran say the Sikh community started coming to the small town in the early 1900s, historical records of the Sikh community in Iran date back to the early 1920s. During the First World War, German and Ottoman agents had penetrated deep into Persia and had their eye on the Indian frontier. Alarmed with the possibility of an invasion of India, the British rulers began constructing a strategic railway link connecting Quetta with Iran. It was at this time that enterprising Sikhs began moving to Dozdaab.
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