Popular Poetry of the Baloches, was written in 1907 by Mansel Longworth Dames (1850-1922) who was a scholar of oriental and Portuguese language. Mr. Dames passed the Indian Civil Service examination in 1868, and on his arrival in India in 1870 was posted to the Punjab commission, where he served continuously till his retirement in 1897, with an interlude in 1870, during which he was on special duty with the troops during the Second Anglo-Afghan war. Much of his service was passed in the trans-Indus district of Dera Ghazi Khan, where he had opportunities for studying the Baluch people (Baloch) and became an authority on the various dialects of the Baluch and Pashto languages.