Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  So many things break–so many hours are spent idling in the backwaters–that it is late afternoon when we reach Keti Bunder (a wretched little port rendered practically defunct by the desiccation of the river) and dark by the time we get to the main channel of the Indus. Baboo had planned by now to be three hours further north, in the mouldering town of Kharochan (the ‘Venice of the Delta’, I was told by a friend in Karachi, who had evidently never been there). Instead, we spend the night on an island in the Indus.

  It is pitch-black when we arrive, and the village is absolutely silent, in the manner of places without electricity. I take off my shoes and strap my bag on to my back; Ali Nawaz balances a plank from the edge of the boat, and one by one we step down through the mud and into the dark. Three sleepy men with their heads wrapped in scarves come down to meet us. We are invited to spend the night in a large low building–the school, I am ashamed to discover in the morning (all Sindhi schools double as guest rooms and meeting halls; some don’t see any use as schools at all). A child brings water for us to wash our feet, and then we sit sipping tea in the candlelight, as the men exchange sombre news in solemn voices. Amidst the unfathomable Sindhi, I hear a name that I recognize. ‘Yes, Alexander Burnes came here on his tour of the Delta,’ Ali Nawaz says, translating for me into Urdu what the men have said about the nineteenth-century East India Company servant (and spy). ‘The Delta was great once,’ Baboo tells me.

  In the morning, only boys arrive for lessons at school. Girls spend all day fetching water from the hand pump half a mile away. A year ago the government built a large reservoir on the edge of the village–but they never filled it. Heavy irrigation upstream means that mitha (sweet; drinking) water is scarce downstream in the Delta; the water that surrounds them is namkeen, saline. I am taken on a tour of the village. We walk up the mud street, in and out of its identical wooden huts (a bedroom with ventilation flaps, a lean-to kitchen and bathroom). The village is so poor that it is spotlessly clean: there is no rubbish (none of the usual blue plastic fluttering from bushes, dusty sweet wrappers or litter of silver cigarette papers); nothing is bought, nothing is disposed of. I cannot see any animals (the tea we drank last night was sweet but milkless); the adults look weary, defeated; the children look malnourished.

  We squelch back through the mud to the boat. It is a coldish morning and the wind is whipping up the water, but Baboo has a sudden surge of enthusiasm: he wishes me to see the Ozymandias metropolis of his childhood. Soki Bunder is now a mile-long mud flat, fringed with mangroves, much like any other in the Delta. But it holds a secret. Soki means rich in Sindhi–and sixty years ago, Baboo says, it was a town famous throughout the Arabian Sea for its fine textiles and wealthy traders. Baboo’s mother was brought here as a child to be treated by one of Soki Bunder’s famous hakims (doctors); his grandmother is buried in the now-buried graveyard. There is nothing left; the sea has carried all but the foundations away.

  The mud is smooth and dense, and we stub our toes on the worn golden sandstone slivers, which is all that remains of the headstones. Baboo crouches reverently in front of his grandmother’s grave, muttering prayers. Further ahead, he points out the remains of the bazaar, the hundred-horsepower rice mill, and the courthouse. We gather round a small squarish brick foundation. ‘A washroom,’ says Baboo. ‘A masjid,’ says one of his crew. ‘A temple,’ says Ali Nawaz’s uncle. ‘The Delta was great once,’ Baboo says again. ‘Before Partition, Sindh was a rich and prosperous nation.’

  From Soki Bunder we sail upstream to Kharochan, one of the few functioning towns left in this decaying island world. The jail–once the pride of the place–is falling down. The grove of date palms has been killed off by the salt which the land sucks in from the coast. A lunatic called Monday stitches nets all day and unpicks them every night. Men sit outside the dispensary, sipping tea and lamenting the state of their heritage. When I stop to buy some sugarcane candy from the grocer’s shop, an old man in a dirty shirt and thick black grimy glasses shouts at me, gesticulating angrily. ‘What is he saying?’ I ask. ‘He is mad,’ says Baboo without listening. ‘He thinks the British were bad.’ But the doctor disagrees: ‘He is praising your people.’ ‘Why?’ I feel embarrassed. ‘The Raj dispensed good justice,’ the doctor says. ‘Look at us now,’ puts in a fisherman. ‘Everything was cheap in British times,’ Baboo concurs. ‘Japanese sugar was ten paise a kilo!’ says an octogenarian farmer. ‘But why did the British send our Hindu brothers away to India?’ says the doctor; and Baboo thumps the table: ‘And why did they let the Punjab steal our Indus?’

  As we sit together in the gathering dusk, I think how dramatically this ancient river has changed in the past few decades. Imagine the disbelief, had you told the British officials, who coveted the Indus from the early seventeenth century, that one day this darkly swirling river would actually run out; had you prophesied then that the exhaustion of this river in the twenty-first century would be in part the legacy of their irrigation projects. For three hundred years after the British first saw it, the Indus was the ‘mighty river’, capricious, frustrating, desirable. Nobody could have guessed that one day, down here in the Delta, there might be no fresh water left.

  Sir Thomas Roe was the first ambassador from England to the Mughal court, sent there at the East India Company’s behest. In his first letter home to the Company, written on 24 November 1615, he alerted them to commercial prospects on the ‘commodious’ ‘River Syndhu’. Over the next five years, Roe often mentioned the ‘famous’ and ‘very requisite’ Indus, the waters of which were navigable, whose inhabitants wove some of the finest cloth in the region. But alas, as he put it plaintively in 1618, ‘We must wring it from Portugal.’ In 1613, the Portuguese had threatened to burn Thatta’s port if the English were allowed to trade there. They controlled all European commerce from the Delta, and the East India Company, which had only been granted its charter by Queen Elizabeth in 1601, was not yet powerful enough to take them on.

  By 1635, however, the English had beaten the Portuguese from Bombay and negotiated a more favourable position at the Mughal court. As yet, they had nothing to sell which the Indians wanted to buy. Roe had cringed with embarrassment after his goods were rejected:

  all those guilte glasses on paste, and the others in leather cases with handles, are soe meane, besids so ill packt, that noe man will except [accept] of them of guift, not buy; they are rotten with mould on the outside and decayed within…your pictures not all woorth one penny…Here are nothing esteemed but of the best sorts: good cloth and fine, rich pictures, they comming out of Italy over land…they laugh at us for such as wee bring.

  For now, all was in India’s favour. The English were prepared to pay hard silver for Sindhian cloth. As the Company merchants wrote to London in 1636:

  of all sorts of Indian goods none are in such request as those of Synda nor finde more reddie vend, as being in reguarde of their substance and coullers most requireable.

  The Company’s initial efforts to establish a depot at Thatta, however, were scuppered by the ‘depredations’ of an English pirate, William Cobb, which ‘disgraced us from thence’. But by 1639 the affair had ‘overblowne’ sufficiently to allow the Company to settle some traders at Thatta. Back in London, the Directors urged their merchants to ‘continuate that Scinda residence’, for ‘the goods received from thence are the flower of the whole parcel.’

  It was Company cost-cutting that resulted in the depot’s closure in 1662 (along with those at Agra, Ahmedabad and Basra). Almost a hundred years later, in 1758, the Company tried a second time, opening another warehouse to export red and white rice and doing a slow trade in English crimson velvet and woollen cloth of the most sombre colours: ‘clove, cinnamon, purple, and the dark greens’. The Kalhoras, a local family who had just wrested control of Sindh from the Mughals, paid tribute to an Afghan conqueror partly in Company woollens.

  But the Kalhoras did not trust the British, whose position in India had strengthened considerably by this
time, and in 1775 they evicted the Company merchants. Soon afterwards, the Kalhoras were succeeded by the Talpur family as rulers of Sindh, and again the British tried to return. This time it was local Hindu merchants–founders of ‘Crotchy’ (Karachi), now an up-and-coming port–who placed an embargo on the presence of the British there. But in the end the Talpur family gave in to Company entreaties, and Nathan Crow was sent as the British Agent to Karachi and Thatta.

  By now the British wanted their agent to act not only as a broker of trade but also to spy for the Company. The Talpurs were highly suspicious, spying on Crow in their turn, and monitoring his correspondence, social life and exports. In May 1799, a few months after Crow arrived in Karachi, Tipu Sultan, the great Muslim leader of south India, was defeated and killed by a British army. Immediately afterwards, Muslim powers from all over the region–Kandahar, Muscat, India–wrote to the Talpurs warning them of British perfidy. In 1800, Crow was expelled.

  For the East India Company, Sindh was proving to be a fractious and intractable province. This baffled British merchants, contrasting as it did with the situation elsewhere in India, for by the eighteenth century the British had acquired land revenue rights all over the subcontinent–and an army. With gunpowder, ships and ledgers, they had founded Madras (1639) and Calcutta (1690), conquered Bengal (1757), subdued the French (1763) and the Marathas (1775–1818), and taken the Mughal town of Delhi (1803). By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British had become the de facto kings of India. Yet over in the western wing of the sub continent–in the intransigent Indus valley–the stubborn natives refused to cede their freedom. Excluded from Sindh by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, thrice evicted from Thatta thereafter, ‘British intercourse with Sinde,’ as James Burnes commented bluntly in 1831, ‘has been rare, and for the most part unsatisfactory.’

  The men who ran the East India Company were classically educated. They knew–through their reading of Arrian, Strabo and Pliny–that for Alexander of Macedon, reaching India (or the Indus valley) was the pinnacle of his world conquest. The author of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek navigation manual, had called the Indus ‘the greatest of all the rivers that flow into the Erythraean Sea’. Pliny the Elder described the Indus (Indus, incolis Sindhus appellatus: ‘the Indus, locally called Sindh’) as the western boundary of India (ad Indum amnem qui est ab occidente finis Indiae). For a Company keen to endorse its presence in the Orient with regal analogies to the glorious Alexander, acquisition of the ‘classic river’ came to seem like the natural (indeed, indispensable) corollary to the attainment of India proper.

  There were some basic obstacles to taking Sindh. By the early nineteenth century, the British still knew astonishingly little about the Indus valley. All was hearsay. For five centuries now, England’s poets and playwrights had described India’s two major rivers. The wondrous Ganges, with its large ‘fysshes’, was first mentioned in a Middle English version of the Alexander Romance. The Indus–India’s namesake–was evoked by Andrew of Wyntoun in his early fifteenth-century Original Chronicle:

  betuix Ynde and Paradiss

  Mony dissert landis lyiss…

  Out of a hill callit Calkasus

  The watter is rynnand of Indus,

  And efter that watter, as we fynd,

  The kinrik is callit of Ynde.

  It was in the seventeenth century, however, that the Indus and Ganges both became popular as symbols of eastern exoticism. King James I of England mentioned the ‘orientall Indus’ and its ‘cristall streames’ in an unpublished poem. ‘To meet old Nereus, with his fiftie girles / From aged Indus laden home with pearles’, wrote Ben Jonson in a masque he put on for Twelfth Night in 1626. ‘Thou by the Indian Ganges side / Should’st Rubies find’, answered Andrew Marvell in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (c. 1646). While the Ganges was always emblematic of lush eastern glamour, the Indus was versatile, and several playwrights twinned it with the Nile, to suggest the vast expanse of Asia. The Indus could evoke the alien mystery of India, or the history and politics of classical civilization.

  Nevertheless, knowledge of where the Indus actually flowed was vague at best. In his letters home, Sir Thomas Roe had repeatedly pointed out the ‘falseness of our maps’, which showed the Indus emptying itself into the sea at the Bay of Cambay in Gujarat. A century later, Company maps were barely any better. Cartography was one of the great advances of the European Enlightenment but when the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste d’Anville began publishing his ‘map memoirs’ of India in the mid-eighteenth century, he relied on the Ancients, Mughal and Persian histories, and contemporary European travel memoirs. D’Anville never visited India, and he was perfectly honest about the paucity of his sources. He apologized that although he personally viewed the Indus as the most important of India’s boundaries, ‘la première connue’ (the first known) of its rivers, the fact remained that it had not been explored by Europeans in recent years, and thus current knowledge of it was–he regretted–woefully imprecise.

  Britain’s chief cartographer in India, James Rennell, travelled to Bengal to survey the province between 1765 and 1771. Nevertheless, when he drew up his all-India map after his retirement, he too relied on literary sources (and in particular records of the Company’s military manoeuvres and marches) to fill in the gaps. Large areas, including the Indus valley, remained terra incognita.

  In 1774, the coast was at last mapped by a Company squadron. At least until 1831, however (when the Company surveyed the Indus as far as Attock: about half its length) maps of the Sindh region were compiled mainly from guesswork. And while the river’s ‘furiously rapid’ mountain course was charted in 1842 by G. T. Vigne, the British never managed to map its source, and for a long time they thought the Indus rose in Kashmir.

  If cartography was an imprecise art, the East India Company’s murky impression of the river was clarified somewhat by the accounts of pioneering travellers. In 1638, for example, an Englishman called Henry Bornford managed to sail from Lahore to Thatta in a flat-bottomed boat. But it was the free merchant and adventurer, Captain Alexander Hamilton, who gave the Company most hope, for his New Account of the East Indies, published in 1727, attested that the Indus was navigable ‘as high as Cashmire’.

  Hamilton was scornful of the ‘Tribunal of Map-travellers’, whose ‘Stock of Knowledge is all on Tick’. His detailed description of ‘the Mogul’s Dominions on the River Indus’–far from being an awed account of the river’s classical history–addressed its practical advantages. ‘This Country,’ he wrote, ‘abounds richly in Wheat, Rice and Legumen…they never know the Misery of Famine, for the Indus overflows all the low Grounds in the Months of April, May and June, and when the Floods go off, they leave a fat Slime on the Face of the Ground, which they till easily before it dries, and being sown and harrow’d, never fails of bringing forth a plentiful Crop.’ (Even now in Sindh the fertile kaccha, the land along the riverbank, can yield three crops in a good year.) Moreover, Hamilton wrote, certain stretches of the river were able ‘to receive Ships of 200 Tuns’. This optimistic intelligence would inspire East India Company officers, eager to exploit the Indus for trade and agriculture, throughout the nineteenth century.

  Hamilton’s guide to the river’s commercial potential was matched in importance, for the Company, by George Forster’s much-read Journey from Bengal to England (1798). It was Forster who popularized the potent concept that ‘The Indus forms a strong barrier to Hindostan on the west…Armies at all times have sustained difficulties and damage in crossing the Indus.’ For a Company now anxious to defend its Indian territory from attack by hostile mountain tribes–or more likely, rival European powers such as Russia–Forster’s notion of the Indus as a military barrier was a decisive factor in the Company’s advance towards the river.

  Then again, the very fact that the river’s natural defences had been breached in the past was also a source of great anxiety. As one Company servant wrote, ‘It has been remarked that the difficulties
attendant on the invasion of India, must be estimated, because that Country, has been successfully invaded.’ It was this fear which encouraged the East India Company to stake a claim over not merely the Indus but the countries beyond it too–Sindh and Afghanistan.

  In 1830, the first step towards the annexation of Sindh was made with the compilation of an Indus intelligence dossier. This, the collected ‘Memoranda on the N.W. Frontier of British India and on the importance of the river Indus as connected with its defence’, set out Britain’s two chief concerns–the case for invading Sindh, and the fear of a Russian advance on India. By now, the Company had come to terms with most powers along the river. In 1809, it had made a tribute agreement with the Sikhs east of the Indus. Negotiations with the powers to the west had begun as early as 1800, in response to the feared advance of Napoleon towards India (he had just taken Egypt). Embassies were despatched to Persia, and then to Afghanistan. This left Sindh–a small but strategic province on the lower Indus. Ruled by the Talpur family, without a well-trained standing army, Sindh was considered to be the weak spot.

  Sindh’s rulers knew this. They were also aware that the English were a deceitful race; and for as long as they could, they pursued a policy of isolation: kicking out the Company’s merchants when they got too overbearing, and only grudgingly acceding to the slippery terms of the Company’s treaties.

  The first such treaty, signed in 1809, was extremely short. Its sole aim was to keep out the ‘tribe of the French’: it was not the guarantee of trading interests which the Company hoped for. In 1819, when the Company took the adjacent province of Cutch, it hoped that trading rights in Sindh would follow; but as James Burnes wrote, those ‘haughty and jealous chieftains…viewed the extension of our Empire in this direction with distrust and apprehension’. If commercial advances into Sindh were to be denied the Company, then outright conquest was the only answer. Happily, Sindh–the 1830 Memoranda made this quite clear–would be an easy province to conquer.