Using British archival documents as well as Persian published sources, this study examines how the borderland of Baluchistan, especially the city of Dozdab (Zahedan), experienced the impact of centralization and nation formation in the early Pahlavi period. At the beginning of the Pahlavi period, Dozdab was rapidly emerging as the railhead of the Nushki-Dozdab railway built by the British during World War One. Nearly forty percent of the inhabitants were British subjects from India, especially Sikhs, who moved to the city as truck drivers and traders. Many Baluchs in surrounding areas were formerly or currently paid by the British either as former soldiers of the Indian Army or to protect trade routes and other infrastructure. How did the centralization policy under Reza Shah affect these communities that posed threat to state control on both sides of the border? To what extent did the newly established Pahlavi regime succeed in integrating Baluchistan into the Iranian nation?
This study is significant for several reasons. First, the history of Baluchistan, particularly during the Pahlavi period, remains largely unexplored due in part to the relative lack of sources compared to other peripheries such as Khuzestan and Azarbaijan. Second, Dozdab offers an unusual case among Iran’s peripheries due to the existence of Sunni Baluchs and an exceptionally large percentage of foreign residents who lived alongside Iranian citizens (cf. segregation in Abadan). Third, it challenges the assumption that southeastern Iran remained a backwater of modernity compared to other relatively well-studied areas.
As this study will demonstrate, although state control over Baluch minorities increased during the Reza Shah period, Dozdab and Baluchistan remained a hotly contested frontier where both nomadic and settled inhabitants took advantage of the shaky control of the colonial Indian and Iranian governments. The Pahlavi state’s standard policies of militarily subjugating tribes and promoting modern education among them did not restrict the physical movements of smuggled items and people such as Baluch minorities and Indian nationalists, whose mobility had increased thanks to the development of transportation infrastructure.
