Paracha

Piracha
Family name
Meaning	Originally meant butterfly
Region of origin	Persia
Related names	Piracha, Peracha, Pracha, Paracha, Ferasha

Piracha (Urdu: پراچہ ; Punjabi: ਪੀਰਚਾ) (also known as Peracha, Pracha, Paracha) is a community in Pakistan. They are native to the hilly Potohar region of north Punjab and areas near the Punjab-NWFP border.

This tribe/clan is believed to have traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan from Iran, mostly in the north which is why there are speculations of them being related to Alexander the Great. Others settled in Makhad in the 12th Century. In Pakistan, they are known as the Pirachas. It is believed the clan settled in what is presently northern Pakistan although a lot have moved into southern Pakistan in areas such as Karachi.

In A Glossary of Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (1911), Horace Arthur Rose, a British bureaucrat serving in the British colonial government in India, devotes an entire section to the history of the Pirachas. It quoted some elders of the tribe saying that the Piracha tribe migrated from Persia as Zoroastrians and became Buddhists in India. They then converted to Islam sometime in the 11th century. This version of the community's origin has been corroborated by Ahmad Hasan Dani in Pakistan through the Ages (2007). In the book, he mentions the names of some of the tribes which accompanied the Kushans, who established an empire in Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan between the first and third centuries. According to Dani, the Kushan were a syncretic people in Persia and Central Asia. They were followers of a faith which was a hybrid of Zoroastrianism and classical Greek mythology. During the rule of Kanishka, the empire became entirely Buddhist. One of the tribes which accompanied the Kushans into what today is Pakistan, was called Pirache which later became Paracha and/or Piracha.

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