Pakol
It is typically made of wool and found in a variety of earthy colours, such as brown, black, grey, ivory, or dyed red using walnut.
The cap's practical design allows pulling it down to cover the ears and neck in cold weather and rolling it up for warmer temperatures.
[7][8] It then proved tempting for some writers to link the pakol to the Indian campaigns of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BC.
According to another erroneous belief of the place of its direct origins, the pakol has a very recent history in Nuristan Province, where it is widely worn nowadays, going back no older than the late nineteenth century, but the same headgear is also relatively young in neighbouring Chitral District.
[4] Apparently at some time the people of Chitral and adjoining regions started to include an extra round piece of material to form a flat crown.
[12] John Biddulph in his Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (1880), referred to the "rolled woollen cap" and ascribed it to the Shina people of Gilgit, Astore and the surrounding areas in present-day northern Pakistan.
[4] Biddulph also tells that in other parts to the west of modern northern Pakistan, such as Wakhan, Chitral and Sarikol, the people used to wear small turbans.
In Gilgit, Astor, and the greater part of Yaghestan the rolled woollen cap mentioned by Mr. Drew is commonly worn.
[14][15][16] It was adopted first among the Pashtuns of Pakistan as a replacement for the large turban, especially in the main cities, as for instance in Peshawar,[17] owing to village traders, who were also responsible for its spread and popularity, initially expanding their businesses, eventually coming to dominate a large area of the Peshawar's old city, popularly known as Qissa Kahwani.
[21][22][23] [20] Today, the pakol commonly worn by people of all social classes and backgrounds from Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as in parts of India, such as in Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi.
[16] Pakols must have spread at a quick pace among the locals, now renamed Nuristanis, after and partially as a consequence of the conquest of Kafiristan by Abdul Rahman Khan of Afghanistan.
[25] The opening up of the valleys to increased contact and trade, and the population's conversion to Islam, induced the residents to abandon their previously distinctive hairstyle and cover their heads with hats.
In those years, people from all over Afghanistan, but especially from among the Tajik population of Panjshir, who lived in an area bordering Nuristan, donned the pakol in order to show their opposition to the government.
[4] At that time the pakol again gained popularity, while the Pashtuns from the south and southeast of the country, who used to form the core of the Taliban movement, still preferred to wear a turban.
[20] A columnist with a valley based newspaper, said about the cap that it became popular in the 1950s after being sported by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
