Others wore no clothes at all. Two miles outside Taxila, the Greeks came across fifteen naked wise men who laughed at their cloaks and knee-high boots. They demanded that the foreigners should undress if they wanted to hear some words of the ancient wisdom of India. ‘But the heat of the sun,’ wrote one of Alexander’s men, ‘was so scorching that nobody could have borne to walk barefoot, especially at midday.’ So the Greeks kept their clothes on, and the senior guru questioned them about Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes. Later, the gurus, still naked, dined at Alexander’s table: ‘[They] ate their food while standing,’ wrote one witness, ‘balanced on one leg.’
Although Alexander only stayed at Taxila for a matter of weeks, his visit changed the course of the city’s history. Visiting the museum at the entrance to the archaeological site, I wandered through the rooms looking at the Gandharan sculptures, some of which dated from nearly a thousand years after Alexander’s death. Even the Buddha, that symbol of Eastern philosophy, had undergone a process of Hellenisation: his grace and easy sensuality was thoroughly Indian, yet the images in the Taxila museum were all defined by Western ideas of proportion and realism; moreover the Buddha was wearing a toga, European dress.
Most remarkable of all was the coin room. Over an entire wall were scattered the gold and silver coins of a millennium of Taxila’s rulers. It wasn’t just that the coins were all modelled on Greek originals. What was amazing were the names of the rulers: Pantaleon, King of North India; Diomedes, King of the Punjab; Menander of Kabul; Heliochles, King of Balkh. They hinted at the strange, hybrid world these kings inhabited. They brought East and West together at a time when the British, the only other Europeans who ever succeeded in ruling the area, were still running through prehistoric fogs dressed in bearskins. The coins of Heliochles of Balkh were typical: they showed a Roman profile on one side – large nose, imperial arrogance in the eyes – but on the reverse Heliochles chose as his symbol a humped Indian Brahmini bull.
Outside, among the ruins – which are spread out over a distance of some fifteen square miles, and overgrown with hollyhocks and wild foxgloves – it is this strange mix of Europe and Asia that continues to grip the imagination. At Sirkap on the edge of Taxila, the Bactrian Greeks founded a classical Greek quarter in 190 BC. It was to be the New Taxila, a great advance on the old city, and they carefully laid out the streets in a grid of straight lines, like a chessboard. As at Athens, a magnificent boundary wall loops around the residential areas and rises up to the fortified citadel, Sirkap’s answer to the Parthenon.
From there you can stand on the citadel walls and see the expanse of houses unfold beneath you. It is a scene of striking – almost suburban – regularity: it could be any modern New Town, except that each street is punctuated with Buddhist shrines, not supermarkets, and that the whole city was built nearly two hundred years before the birth of Christ. Most intriguing of all, one of the shrines bears the insignia of the double-headed eagle. Centuries later the same symbol was to become the crest first of Byzantium, then of the Habsburgs, and finally of Imperial Russia. Its first appearance, here in a lost city on the edge of the Karakorums, is one of Gandhara’s great unsolved mysteries.
My favourite of the Taxila ruins, I decided, was that of the monastery of Julian, named after its founder, an Imperial Roman envoy who converted to Buddhism. The monastery was always a place of retreat, and even today, a ruin, it still retains its original calm. I arrived there late in the evening, just as the smoke from the village fires was forming a perfect horizontal line above the fields. At the foot of the hill, below the olive groves, leathery black water-buffaloes sat with their legs folded beneath them. Above, there were parakeets among the olives, and as I walked up the hill flights of grasshoppers exploded from beneath my feet.
I was shown around by the elderly chowkidar, who as a young man had participated in Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation of the site. He was a fascinating old man, and as he explained the function of the different ruins the monastery came to life. Soon I could see the orange-robed monks tramping clockwise around the stupas, queuing for their food in the refectory, or snuffing out their oil lamps in their austere stone cells.
Best of all, I could visualise the builders. They were men with a sense of humour, for they had included in the design a hundred little conceits, all lovingly pointed out by the chowkidar. Here were a series of grotesque Atlantes – they had narrow Mongol features, handlebar moustaches and giant earrings – groaning as they sank under the weight of the stupa which was resting on their shoulders. Here – and this was obviously the chowkidar’s favourite – was a scene from the temptation of the Buddha: as he sat meditating under an arch, two girls appeared around the corner flashing their breasts at him, trying to distract him from his spiritual quest. Round the base of the stupa the chowkidar pointed out more temptresses – some extending their legs, others baring their bottoms, others proffering amphorae of wine: ‘Girls, dancing, drinking – all no-problem to Mr Buddha. He liking only prayer, preaching and hymn-singing,’ said the chowkidar approvingly. ‘Buddha-sahib is very good gentleman.’
Remarkable as these remains are, it is difficult at first to understand how the warlike Pathans could be descended from the gentle Hellenistic philosophers who created the civilisation of Buddhist Gandhara. Yet they are, and if you visit the museum in Peshawar you can slowly begin to understand the connection which links the warlike tribesmen in the bazaar to the philosopher-soldiers of Alexander’s army.
The most obvious link is material. In the wonderful friezes of sculpture which illustrate the ancient Buddhist scriptures, the Gandharan sculptors included details from the everyday life they saw around them, details which one can still see repeated in the lives of the people of the Frontier today. The writing tablet and reed pen which the Buddha uses as a child are still used in the more remote Frontier primary schools. The turbans which the Gandharan chieftains sported in the sixth century AD have yet to disappear, and many of the tribesmen still dye their beards, just as they did when Nearchus wandered through the streets of Taxila in the third century BC. The sandals of the Bodhisattvas are still worn; their musical instruments still played; their jewellery still manufactured in the silver bazaar today. Even the design of the houses remains more or less unchanged by the passage of time.
But the link with the world of Gandhara runs even deeper than this. The Peshawar museum is home to one of the most magnificent collections of Buddhist images in existence. Room after room is filled with spectacular black-schist figures, standing, meditating, preaching or fasting. The images follow a prescribed formula. The physique is magnificent: muscles ripple beneath the diaphanous folds of the toga. The saviour sits with half-closed eyes and legs folded in a position of languid relaxation. His hair is oiled and groomed in to a beehive topknot; his high, unfurrowed forehead is punctuated with a round caste-mark. His face is full and round, the nose small and straight, the lips firm and proud.
It is only when you have stared at the figures for several hours that you realise what is so surprising about the Gandharan version of the Buddha: it is its arrogance. There is a hint of rankling self-satisfaction in the achievement of nirvana; a sneer on the threshold of enlightenment. This is the Buddha as he was in life – a prince. And soon you realise where you have seen that haughty expression before – outside in the bazaar. Unlike the tendency to grovelling subservience which you find in some of the other peoples of the subcontinent, the Pathans meet your gaze. Hawk-eyed and eagle-beaked, they are a proud people; and as the Buddhas demonstrate, their poise and self-confidence directly reflect that of the Gandharan Bactrian Greeks who sculpted these images in the plains of Peshawar nearly two millennia ago.
The institution that perhaps most directly links the modern Frontier with the area’s primeval past is the blood feud. These small but incessant inter-family battles cause literally thousands of deaths every year, the ancient penalties of the system magnified a hundred times by the killing power of modern weaponry.
What most surprised me was the level of culture of some of the families caught up in the cycle of violence. Blood feuds sound the preserve of mafiosi, but in the North-West Frontier the most gentle and civilised families are involved in tit-for-tat killings of appalling brutality.
Hajji Feroz din-Khel is a charming old man who lives in a tumbledown stronghouse near the tribal village of Barra. He has twice visited Mecca, has eighteen grandsons and is held in great respect by everyone in Barra, where he is the main landlord and the honorary muezzin in the mosque. He has a long white beard and on a dark night could easily be mistaken for Father Christmas. Yet with his own hands he has murdered three men and a number of children. This is what he told me:
‘Feuds usually start over a dispute about land or money. In this family we have feuds with two other families, both of which started simultaneously about forty years ago. Those two families have formed an alliance against us although they are not related. I have lost a father, two sons and one nephew aged about seven. The other two families have lost nine people altogether, so at the moment we are winning.
‘The feuds started over a completely petty matter. There was a stream which flowed between our lands. It was divided by a line of stones, and on our side of the stream the water was diverted to a water mill. One day I was removing some of these stones to build a wall. My neighbour saw me and said, “Stop, these are my stones.” We had a quarrel and I insulted him. The next day he killed my father, Faizal Akbar.
‘After thirty years of killing we arranged a truce. But that truce was broken last year. My youngest brother Said Lal was walking along the road towards Barra when a car stopped and five men jumped out. They tried to kidnap his son who was walking with him. Said Lal shot at them and chased them away, but as they went one of them sprayed his machine-gun behind him. They killed my nephew. He was only seven.
‘Despite this killing I want to make a settlement. But the other side have had more people killed, so they have to get their own back.’
I visited the Hajji several times during the autumn I was staying in Peshawar, and on my last trip I saw the effects of the blood feud for myself. Up to then, all the talk of guns and violence had been just that – talk. Now I saw what it actually entailed, the stark reality.
It was late afternoon and I was chatting to the Hajji in the shade of his verandah. We drank tea and the Hajji told me about his most recent visit to Mecca. Suddenly four men came rushing in, screaming in Pushtu. The Hajji rose to his feet, apologised to me and made straight for his jeep. ‘There has been some trouble in the bazaar. My brother tried to kidnap a man who owed him money. The man resisted. Now Said Lal’s been shot.’
I sat in the Hajji’s house for an hour before the messenger came. Said Lal was dead. His body had been brought back to a house further down the road.
By the time I got there about a hundred people had gathered in and around the compound. The Hajji greeted me, his face distorted with sadness, but his eyes dry. He whispered a prayer and went back in to the house. I could hear muffled wailing from the women within the harem, but the men outside were completely silent. They sat on charpoys (string beds), heads lowered, hands cupped around their faces. Others pulled their beards. The dry, silent male mourning seemed much worse than the noisy grief of the women. Despite the frequency of violence in the tribal territories, the shock of loss was no less tangible here than it would have been anywhere else.
I was still holding my notebook, and my cameras were slung over my shoulders; I was a journalist intruding on a moment of private tragedy. It would have been quite wrong to stay. At the gate, I passed a friend of the din-Khels whom I had met with the Hajji earlier in the month.
‘What will happen now?’ I asked.
‘There will be a truce for the funeral,’ said the man, ‘and then the Hajji will be required to recover his honour.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘It means,’ said the man, ‘that he must seek revenge.’
Blood on the Tracks
LAHORE, 1997
It is barely dawn, and the sky is as pink as Turkish delight. Yet already, at 5.45 a.m., Lahore Central Station is buzzing like a kicked hive.
Bleary-eyed, you look around in bewilderment. At home the milkmen are abroad at this time, but no one else. Here the shops are already open, the fruit and vegetables on display, and the shopkeepers on the prowl for attention.
‘Hello my dear,’ says a man holding up a cauliflower.
‘Sahib – what is your good name?’
‘Subzi! Subzi! Subzi!’
‘Your mother country?’
A Punjabi runs up behind the rickshaw, waving something horrible: a wig perhaps, or some monstrous vegetable. ‘Sahib, come looking! Special OK shop! Buying no problem!’
Lahore station rears out of the surrounding anarchy like a liner out of the ocean. It is a strange, hybrid building: the Victorian red-brick is imitation St Pancras, the loopholes, battlements and machicolations are stolen from some Renaissance palazzo – Milan perhaps, or Pavia – while the towers are vaguely German, and resemble a particularly extravagant Wagnerian stage set. Only the chaos is authentically Pakistani.
As a tape of the Carpenters’ greatest hits plays incessantly on a Tannoy, you fight your way through the surge of jammed rickshaws and tottering red-jacketed coolies, through the sleeping villagers splayed out on the concrete, past the tap with the men doing their ablutions, over the bridge, down the stairs and on to the platform. In the early-morning glimmer, Platform 7 seethes with life like a hundred Piccadilly Circuses at rush hour. Porters stagger towards the first-class carriages under a mountain of smart packing cases and trunks. Further down the platform, near third class, solitary peasant women sit stranded amid seas of more ungainly luggage: cages and boxes, ambiguous parcels done up with rope, sacks with lumpy projections – bits of porcelain, the arm of a chair, the leg of a chicken. Vendors trawl the platform selling trays of brightly coloured sweetmeats, hot tea in red clay cups, or the latest film magazine. Soldiers wander past, handlebar moustaches wobbling in the slipstream.
The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than twenty-three thousand miles of railway in all. It was the biggest, and most costly, construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.
By 1863 some three million tons of rails, sleepers and locomotives had been shipped to India from Britain, in around three and a half thousand ships. Engineers had looped tracks over the steepest mountains in the world, sunk foundations hundreds of feet in to the billowing deserts, bridged rivers as wide and as turbulent as the Ganges and the Indus. It was an epic undertaking, even by the standards of an age inured to industrial heroics.
The railways also brought about a social revolution. There could be no caste barriers in a railway carriage: you bought your ticket and you took your place. For the first time in Indian history a Maulvi who spent his days contemplating the glorious Koran might find himself sitting next to an Untouchable who skinned dead cows. Moreover, as journey times shrank, India became aware of itself for the first time as a single unified nation. As the bullock cart gave way to the locomotive, a subcontinent disjointed by vast distances and primeval communications suddenly, for the first time, became aware of itself as a single geographical unit. It was the railways that made India a nation.
Ironically, a century later, the same railways also made possible the irreparable division of the subcontinent. The partition of India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947 led to what was probably the greatest migr
ation in human history. More than twelve million people packed up and left their homes and their countries. Muslims in India headed en masse for Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs made their way in the opposite direction. In the course of the mass migration, suppressed religious hatreds were viciously unleashed: over a million people lost their lives in the riots and massacres that ensued. Yet Partition would have been impossible without the railways; and it was on the railways that much of the worst violence took place. Lahore station was the eye of that whirlwind.
The fate of Lahore remained uncertain until the final maps of the boundaries between the two nations were released on 14 August. In the event the city went to Pakistan, just fifteen miles from the Indian border, and Lahore and its people were torn apart. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fought their way to the station to flee to India. At the same time train after train began arriving from south of the border carrying hundreds of thousands of Muslims to their new homeland. The station became a battleground.
On the night of Independence the last British officials in Lahore arrived at the station. They had picked their way through gutted streets, many of which were littered with dead. On the platforms they found the railway staff grimly hosing down pools of blood and carrying away piles of corpses on luggage trolleys for mass burial. Minutes earlier a last group of desperate Hindus had been massacred by a Muslim mob while they sat waiting quietly for the Bombay Express. As the train finally pulled out of Lahore, the officials could see that the entire Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from every village. Their lives’ work was being destroyed in front of their eyes.
The massacres of Partition brought the Raj to a cataclysmic close. Now, only half a century later, that period can seem as distant as that of the Romans. But the buildings – like Lahore station – still survive. They are the keys which can unlock the history of a period, a history which, though it may seem impossibly foreign, is as much part of the British heritage as that of the Indian subcontinent.
The Age of Kali Page 34