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  Empires of the Indus

  Empires of the Indus

  The Story of a River

  ALICE ALBINIA

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2008 by Alice Albinia

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Albinia, Alice, 1976–

  Empires of the Indus: the story of a river / Alice Albinia.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-06322-6

  1. Indus River—History. 2. Indus River Valley—History.

  3. Indus civilization. I. Title.

  DS392.I5.A43 2010

  954.91—dc22

  2009054275

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  ROBERT MATHERS

  (1953-1991)

  Contents

  Illustrations

  Map

  Preface

  1. Ramzan in Karachi

  2. Conquering the Classic River

  3. Ethiopia’s First Fruit

  4. River Saints

  5. The Guru’s Army

  6. Up the Khyber

  7. Buddha on the Silk Road

  8. Alexander at the Outer Ocean

  9. Indra’s Beverage

  10. Alluvial Cities

  11. Huntress of the Lithic

  12. The Disappearing River

  Glossary

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.

  Section One

  1. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder and first Governor General of Pakistan. Pakistan Archives, Islamabad. Photographer unknown.

  2. A man offering camel rides on Clifton beach, Karachi.

  3. M.A. Jinnah in a political street mural, as the leaders of Pakistan like to show him, piously attired in so-called Islamic dress.

  4. The dry bed of the River Indus.

  5. A man stands in the Indus downstream of the Kotri Barrage, Hyderabad, Pakistan.

  6. The ‘Sheedi’ descendants of the freed African slave Bilal, in Hyderabad, Pakistan.

  7. Gulabi, a visitor to Bilali house, Badin, Pakistan.

  8. Worshippers at the shrine of Sachal Sarmast in northern Sindh, Pakistan.

  9. Men gather to listen to music played at the death-anniversary celebration of Shah Inayat, Sindh, Pakistan.

  10. Eighteenth-century tombs of the families who ruled Sindh before it was colonized by the British.

  11. Sohni crossing the river. A painting from the Qalandrani Leghari tombs near Johi, Sindh, Pakistan. Artist unknown.

  12. Mohanas, Indus boat-people, arriving at the shrine of Khwaja Khizr, near Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan.

  13. A riverside scene of hell, carved in marble, from the Sadhubela temple, near Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan. Artist unknown.

  14. Uderolal or Zindapir, riding on a palla fish. Painting from Zindapir temple, Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan. Artist unknown.

  15. Sikhs bathing at the Golden Temple, Amritsar, Punjab, India.

  16. An Indian pilgrim at the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.

  17. A Kochi nomad in Afghanistan.

  18. The photograph of Sami-ul-Huq which hangs in his hujra, next to the madrassah he runs in Akora Khattak, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan.

  Section Two

  19. All that remains of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

  20. A seventh-century CE Maitreya Buddha in the Swat valley, Pakistan, before it was damaged by extremists.

  21. Underground cells from the largest Buddhist monastery complex yet excavated in the Swat valley.

  22. Locals with what is believed to be the handprint of Alexander the Great.

  23. My host in Kaladaka, the Black Mountains, northern Pakistan.

  24. Mansoor and Ferooza, Gujar shepherds on Pirsar, the ‘Aornos’ of the ancient Greeks, northern Pakistan.

  25. Kalash girls, Bumboret, Chitral, Pakistan.

  26. A graveyard of wooden coffins in the Kalash village of Bumboret, Chitral, Pakistan.

  27. A stone circle, probably an ancient burial mound, near Yasin, Gilgit valley, Pakistan.

  28. A prehistoric carving of archers in the hills near Gakuch, Gilgit valley, Pakistan.

  29. A prehistoric carving of a huge human outline incised into a rock on the banks of the Indus near Chilas in Pakistan.

  30. Menhirs at Burzahom, Srinagar, Kashmir, India.

  31. A recently discovered upper Palaeolithic rock carving above Bomoi village.

  32. A Dard woman from one of the clusters of villages on the banks of the Indus in Ladakh, northern India.

  33. Drokpa at their encampment two days’ walk from the source of the Indus, Tibet.

  34. Senge Khabab, the ‘Lion’s Mouth’: the source of the Indus in Tibet.

  Preface

  IN A LAND where it seldom rains, a river is as precious as gold. Water is potent: it trickles through human dreams, permeates lives, dictates agriculture, religion and warfare. Ever since Homo sapiens first migrated out of Africa, the Indus has drawn thirsty conquerors to its banks. Some of the world’s first cities were built here; India’s earliest Sanskrit literature was written about the river; Islam’s holy preachers wandered beside these waters. Pakistan is only the most recent of the Indus valley’s political avatars.

  I remember the first time I wanted to see the Indus, as distinctly as if a match had been struck in a darkened room. I was twenty-three years old, sitting in the heat of my rooftop flat in Delhi, reading the Rig Veda, and feeling the perspiration running down my back. It was April 2000, almost a year since the war between Pakistan and India over Kargil in Kashmir had ended, and the newspapers which the delivery man threw on to my terrace every morning still portrayed neighbouring Pakistan as a rogue state, governed by military cowboys, inhabited by murderous fundamentalists: the rhetoric had the patina of hysteria. But what was the troubled nation next door really like? As I scanned the three-thousand-year-old hymns, half listening to the call to prayer, the azan, which drifted over the rooftops from the nearby mosque (to the medley of other azans, all slightly out of sync), I read of the river praised by Sanskrit priests, the Indus they called ‘Unconquered Sindhu’, river of rivers. Hinduism’s motherland was not in India but Pakistan, its demonized neighbour.

  At the time, I was studying Indian history eclectically, omnivorously and hastily–during bus journeys to work, at weekends, lying under the ceiling fan at night. Even so, it seemed that every where I turned, the Indus was present. Its merchants traded with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. A Persian emperor mapped it in the sixth century BCE. The Buddha lived beside it during previous incarnations. Greek kings and Afghan sultans waded across it with their armies. The founder of Sikhism was enlightened while bathing in a tributary. And the British invaded it by gunboat, colonized it for one hundred years, and then severed it from India. The Indus was part of Indians’ lives–until 1947.

  The very name of India comes from the river. The ancient Sanskrit speakers called the Indus ‘Sindhu’ the Persians changed the name to ‘Hindu’ and the Greeks dropped the ‘h’ altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates–India, Hindu, Indies. From the time that Alexander the Great’s historians wrote about the Indus valley,
spinning exotic tales of indomitable Indika, India and its river tantalized the Western imagination.

  Hundreds of years later, when India was divided, it might have been logical for the new Muslim state in the Indus valley to take the name ‘India’ (or even ‘Industan’, as the valley was called by an eighteenth-century English sailor). But Muhammad Ali Jinnah rejected the colonial appellation and chose the pious neologism Pakistan, ‘Land of the Pure’, instead. He assumed that his coevals in Delhi would do the same, calling their country by the ancient Sanskrit title, ‘Bharat’. When they did not, Jinnah was reported to be furious. He felt that by continuing to use the British name, India had appropriated the past; Pakistan, by contrast, looked as if it had been sliced off and ‘thrown out’.

  During the two years that I lived in Delhi, I wondered about these things–the ironies, misnomers and reverberations of history. But perhaps, to my sun-baked imagination, it was the river itself that was most enticing. I dreamt about that river, which begins in Tibet and ends near Karachi in the shimmer of the Arabian Sea; I tried to picture those waters, which emperors had built forts beside, which poets still sang of, the turbulent, gold-bearing abode of snake-goddesses.

  When at last I reached Pakistan, it was to map these layers of history and their impress on modern society. During the past sixty years, Pakistanis have been brutalized by the violence of military dictatorships, enraged or deceived by the state’s manipulation of religion, and are now being terrorized by the West’s War on Terror. But Pakistan is more than the sum of its generals and jihadis. The Indus valley has a continuous history of political, religious and literary ferment stretching back thousands of years; a history which Pakistanis share with Tibetans and Indians. The intertwining of those chronicles, memories and myths–that is the inheritance of the people who live in the Indus valley.

  This book recounts a journey along the Indus, upstream and back in time, from the sea to the source, from the moment that Pakistan first came into being in Karachi, to the time, millions of years ago in Tibet, when the river itself was born. Along the way, the river has had more names than its people have had dictators. In Sindh it is called ‘Purali’, meaning capricious, an apt description of a river which wanders freely across the land, creating cities and destroying them. Sindhis also know it as ‘Samundar’, ocean, a name evocative of the vastness of the river within their landscape and civilization. For Pashtuns on the frontier with Afghanistan the Indus is simultaneously ‘Nilab’, blue water, ‘Sher Darya’, the Lion River, and ‘Abbasin’, Father of Rivers. Along its upper reaches these names are repeated by people speaking different languages and practising different religions. Baltis once called the Indus ‘Gemtsuh’, the Great Flood, or ‘Tsuh-Fo’, the Male River; here, as in Ladakh and Tibet, it is known as ‘Senge Tsampo’, the Lion River. Today, in spite of the militarized borders that divide the river’s people from each other, the ancient interconnectedness of the Indus still prevails.

  The river gave logic to my own explorations; it lies at the heart of this book because it runs through the lives of its people like a charm. From the deserts of Sindh to the mountains of Tibet, the Indus is worshipped by peasants and honoured by poets; more than priests or politicians, it is the Indus they revere. And yet, it is a diminished river. The mighty Indus of Sanskrit hymns and colonial tracts was heavily dammed during the twentieth century. Beginning with Britain’s profit-driven colonization of the lower Indus valley, and extending through sixty years of army-dominated rule in Pakistan, big dams have shackled the river, transforming the lives of human and non-human species on its banks and in its waters. Now when I think of the Indus I remember the eulogies of Sanskrit priests, Greek soldiers and Sufi saints. Their words come down to us across the centuries, warning of all there is to lose.

  1

  Ramzan in Karachi

  1947

  ‘Hell is before him and he shall be given to drink of festering water.’

  Qur’an 14.16

  A HEAD EMERGES from a hole in the road, dripping with water. Naked shoulders follow, and a naked torso. Arms lift through the water, lean heavily on the tarmac; and with a great effort the man heaves himself out of the sewer and lies on the street, gasping for breath. He is wearing only a pair of white pyjama trousers–now grey and wet. The hole from which he has surfaced swirls darkly with putrid water.

  The day is pleasant, and he rests for a moment, in this smart residential area in south Karachi, warming himself in the sun. Minutes pass silently–it is a quiet afternoon in those slow hours leading up to the breaking of the fast at sundown. Eventually, he sits up, lowers himself into the hole again, until the water reaches his navel, then his armpits. Then he takes a deep breath, holds his nose, and ducks down beneath the surface.

  I have come across this scene by chance, as I cut home through a housing colony. I am fasting for the first time; I feel weak and tired. The city today was difficult to fathom: even the non-fasters were irritated or wan with collective Ramzan exhaustion. I fainted, in the morning, when the obstetrician in a slum hospital described the baby he had just delivered–‘three whole days the mother spent in labour, being ministered to by a dai, an untrained midwife. By the time she was brought into hospital, the baby was dead.’ He had to cut it into pieces to pull it out. (‘Maternal mortality worries me most, though,’ he said, as soon as I came round. ‘They die on the potholed road just trying to get here.’) At noon, I sat in the British-built law courts–a grand, pillared enclave aloof from the city, where two-thirds of the incumbents were flouting the fast laws.

  My last appointment of the day took place deep within a congested north Karachi basti, in the tiny turquoise-painted flat belonging to six large hijras. Ayesha, the chief transvestite, was wearing gold lamé and dancing to the music of a Bollywood song when I arrived. The sickly-sweet smell of marijuana lingered in her bedroom as she introduced me to her fiancé, a slim young man in a leather jacket. She wiggled her hips briefly to the music, and then related the grim story of how, when she turned sixteen, her guru cut off her penis. (She had drunk four bottles of hooch to numb the pain; and four days later, when they pulled back the bandage, she was sick from the stench.) As I left, she prodded her breasts: ‘Give me some money for the operation.’

  So by the afternoon, I am eager to return to the house where I am staying on the edge of the sea. Then, seeing a human emerging, almost naked, from a sewer, I think for a moment that I am hallucinating from dehydration.

  Sitting nearby in the shade of a tree is another man, fully clothed, who has been watching me watching. ‘Is he cleaning the sewer?’ I ask, pointing down at the water. ‘There’s a blockage,’ the man says. ‘It must be a difficult job,’ I say. The man wipes the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt: ‘They’ve always done it.’ ‘Who?’ I ask, wondering why he assumes that I know who ‘they’ are. ‘The Bhangis,’ comes his straightforward answer. ‘I am the foreman. Only non-Muslims do this sewer work. It is forbidden for us.’

  At the time, I refuse to believe him. But later, when I interview the government officials who control Karachi’s hydrology–bringing fresh water in from the Indus lakes and piping sewage out into the mangroves–it is apparent that this is true. By ‘Bhangi’, the foreman means low-caste Hindus, or low-caste Christian converts–both in India and Pakistan still regarded as ‘untouchable’ according to the ancient and immutable Hindu caste system. ‘Not one Muslim is doing this job,’ the officials say. ‘It is an age-old situation, right from the very beginning of Pakistan. This is dirty water. Any spots of sewerage on clothes is difficult when performing prayers.’

  After the sewer man re-emerges from the water, I take down his number. Then I hurry back home to wash: the smell of the sewer still lingers in my nostrils, and tonight I am going for taravih prayers at the mosque. The Wahhabi-influenced habit of listening to recitations of the Qur’an during Ramzan is, for women, a recent import to Karachi–yet another layer of piety to add to those that already cloak most l
ives here.

  I am not a Muslim, but most Pakistanis take me to be a Christian–and thus one of the ahl-al-kitab, people of the book. Early Islam was influenced by the holy scriptures–and prophets–of Judaism and Christianity, and the ahl-al-kitab have advantages in Muslim polities. As believers in one God they might go to Paradise; if they are women they can marry Muslims; they can certainly, according to my Karachi landlady, go to each other’s worship-places. Tonight she is taking me with her to the mosque.

  At home we eat iftari–the food with which the fast is broken. Then I tie my white cotton dupatta tightly round my head so that none of my hair is showing and we walk along the seafront to the local mosque. My landlady is deeply and conscientiously religious: in many ways she is the textbook Pakistani. Like most well-to-do Muslims, her family claims blood-ties to that of the Prophet. She has Iranian and royal Afghan ancestry; she grew up in Lucknow (India) and Hyderabad (Pakistan), where her father became a popular Sindhi holy man. She is a polyglot, speaking Sindhi, Pashto, Farsi and Urdu. She prays five times a day; but democracy is futile, Africans are backward, and India is dirty. Army rule is best: only the soldiers can hold the country together. Is she a product of patriotic ideology? Or was patriotic ideology formed by people of her ilk?

  The mosque is gaudily strung with fairy lights; hundreds of pairs of shoes line the road outside. Women do not usually go to mosques to pray so the men, as usual, have the spacious main chamber. We are ushered into the courtyard near the toilets. Squeezing on to a prayer mat between a large lady in black silk and a slim teenager in pink floral cotton, out of the corner of my eye I see Arifa, the maid from the seaside house where I am staying. We smile, turn our heads to Mecca (beyond a blank white wall), and in our neat serried rows, start praying. Allah-u-Akbar, I chant in unison with the hundreds of voices reverberating around me. As we fall to our knees, press our foreheads to the ground, rise and fall again, I smell sweet female sweat, the fresh aroma of henna. God is great; the feeling of being part of this mass is exhilarating.