The Meaning of Laschcar

As I walked the dog yesterday, I heard a story on PRI's The World in which reporter Mustafa Quadri talked about "lashcars."  The lashcars are defined as an "anti-Taliban tribal militia, or lashcar."  These words were used by the voice introducing the story.

Then Mr. Quadri, sounding very "classic BBC," tells the sad but millenially common story of an area divided by war.  Much of the story comes through through his editing of his interview with Irshad, a lashcar member from Adezai, a village that had become a fort.  Irshad says he knows about "80 %" of the local Taliban because he was involved in local elections and sporting events before the fighting started.  Now, he says, if a Taliban would pick him up, they'd kill him and if he caught a Taliban, the man would be killed.

This true story saddens and horrifies while making me thankful that I don't live in this situation.

Strangely enough, however, my very first response to the story was my response to the word "laschcar."  It brought a mental image of painting of dark menacing man with long mustachios. On boats.  With big swords.   I think I saw this painting when I was in high school.  (Or, Dr's Freud and Jung, did I just dream of that shadow with its long steal/stele?)  Later on, looking at 19th Century paintings in museums, I would run across pictures of "lascars."  The men in the paintings were dark skinned and usually not presented as heroes of the image.  They were often subsidiary characters, decorations, part of "exotic" locals.

So as I listened to Mr. Quadri's story, I felt he was playing on my old, orientalist biases to get me to think of the Afghanis being as different from me as the Victorians imagined these dark skinned men.

It seems to be true that both laschcar and lascar mean a military group of some kind.  But the lascars were not evil, though they were treated and pictured as far less "good and decent" than the white folks of the Victorian period.  Perhaps to justify their misuse. As historian Diane Robinson-Dunn notes,
they were simply "Asian sailors" or sometimes "Asian or African sailors."  They were predominantly Muslim and dark skinned.  And they have an honorable history.  So the old, "white man's burden" images that popped to mind were probably not what Mr. Quadri was intending me to imagine as I listened to the story.  Though he does spend a lot of time emphasizing the bloodiness of the Afghanee quarrel.