Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  This is the closest that most people get to the Sajjada–seeing him from a distance as he sits on a hay bale to signify his ‘poverty’. In all the years that they have visited Jhok, Iqbal and Fida have never once met him. In Sindh these men (they are always men) are treated like gods, expect royal respect and generally meet only with rich devotees, politicians–or foreigners.

  We send a message to the Sajjada, and permission to see him is quickly granted. As we climb the steps of the white marble complex set back from the tomb, my friends mutter between themselves about its opulence. Sufis value poverty but the building is infused with the cool glamour of a Saudi Arabian sheikhdom. It is entitled–apparently without irony–Qasr-e Qalandar, ‘Palace of the Wanderer’. The Sajjada himself–dressed in dazzling white–has four wives, a sign of immense wealth in Pakistan. The first is his relative (an arranged marriage), the second is French (‘I like to dominate her,’ he tells me provocatively), the third lives in the capital, Islamabad, and the fourth is special and kept in a ‘secret location’.

  The Sajjada openly admits to being a ‘landlord’, that scourge of his ancestor. He says he owns 1,400 acres (the legal limit in Pakistan is 150 irrigated or 300 unirrigated acres); and that if the people are poor it is because the Punjabis and the army have taken all the jobs. Sindh’s problems were caused by the ‘criminal, wanted people’ who came here at Partition; peasant rights are not a concern. Instead, what exercises him inside his palace is ‘male-female separation’. ‘Man is like fire, woman like cotton,’ he says by way of explanation; and if I am mystified at the time by the cottonwoolliness of this statement, later it strikes me as logical that the male belief in purdah should increase incrementally with the number of wives you keep. In the centres he has established in England, Germany, Africa and India, this is the Sajjada’s primary goal. ‘There are many young girls in London,’ he says to me that evening, ‘who have stopped eating pork and wearing bikinis.’

  It is sad that the message of a great Sufi reformer has come to this, and Fida and Iqbal are disillusioned. But the lesson I learn in Sindh is that the descendants of saints are universally unreliable. Some sajjadas boast sweetly to me of their expensive Italian clothes, fleets of Mercedes cars, and credit cards from American Express. Others describe the ‘small, boneless djinns’ they have communed with or talk of the devilishness of their fellow sajjadas (competition for rural devotees is intense). All demand izzat–honour and respect–from their illiterate peasant followers. The devotees who visit the shrines are expected to give money, livestock or even their children in lifelong service to the sajjada. There are lurid stories about the droit de seigneur that sajjadas exercise over the pretty daughters of their murids; and one sajjada points out to me his murids’ children, whom he has taken in as unpaid workers for life, as they serve us tea. It is a form of voluntary slavery, a measure of the Sindhi peasantry’s economic desperation–and an indication of their spiritual devotion.

  I question the Sajjada on the contradiction between the message of Shah Inayat and his own position as a landlord. ‘If Shah Inayat was alive today, what would he say about the state of Sindh? The peasants are still poor, there are still big landholdings…’ But the Sajjada simply smiles: ‘Shah Inayat is alive. Whatever I am saying, Shah Inayat is saying. I am Shah Inayat.’

  Mashkoor alone does not seem perturbed by the Sajjada’s words. ‘These sajjadas are all the same,’ he says afterwards. ‘They are feudals.’ He is not here for the politics. He is here for the music.

  The descendants of saints may bear little or no philosophical resemblance to their forebears; the devotion extended to them by a disenfranchised peasantry may be wholly bemusing; but there is one thing that makes the shrines inspiring places: the music. The death-anniversary parties of the most popular saints bring together the best musicians from all over Sindh.

  After being relegated to a field during the daytime concert, women have of course been banned altogether from the sixty-five musical performances being held simultaneously this night in the grounds of the shrine complex, the dargah. But as an unveiled foreigner I am not really a woman, and so with exultant Mashkoor in the lead we wind from one musical gathering to another, listening to flautists from northern Sindh, to old men playing the surando (a stringed violin-like instrument), to dancers leaping and jumping as they pluck the one-stringed yaktora. In a small tented space at the far end of the dargah is a singer from Umerkot, the desert town where Emperor Akbar was born. He is seated on the ground, playing the harmonium with accompaniment from a tabla player, and singing poetic compositions from all along the Indus–those of Bulleh Shah (an eighteenth-century Punjabi poet), of Aijaz Shah (a Sindhi poet), and even the newly-minted love-song of a student of pharmaceuticals to his beloved university of Jamshoro. As each performance draws to a close, the audience fills the night air with its untranslatable cry of appreciation: ‘Wah wah!’

  We leave Jhok Sharif at dawn. Sufi Huzoor Bux is waiting for us in front of his house. He is in defiant mood. ‘Raag and music is very nice,’ he says, ‘but it is nothing more than escapism. It does not provide the poor with those things they are lacking.’

  I ponder this comment over the next two months, as I travel up the Indus from shrine to shrine. Sufi Huzoor Bux’s characterization of music as escapism is true, but the peasants of Sindh have much to escape from. Apart from providing free musical concerts and holidays to the poor, shrines also give refuge to the repressed. In cities where nightclubs, dancing and intoxicants are banned, a shrine’s Thursday night Qawwali provides a legal party. At the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi in Karachi, working-and lower-middle-class men dance in groups around small fires, flirting with hijras, and smoking marijuana. Further north along the river, inside the magnificent shrine of the maverick thirteenth-century saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the drumming at dusk looks like a rave, as women (some shrouded in burqas, others with their long hair loose and tangled with sweat) swing their upper bodies to the beat of the enormous kettledrums, fling their heads back and forth, and expend as much pent-up energy as they can before collapsing on the ground, exhausted. In Hyderabad, at Makki Shah’s tomb in the middle of the crumbling Kalhora-built fort, the Kaccha Qila, purdah-bound women of all social classes give even fuller vent to their emotions. They come to scream and shout and tear their clothes and beat their breasts in the women-only open-air enclosure formed by two of the fort’s slowly disintegrating brick walls. Every time I visit Makki Shah’s tomb, women are running backwards and forwards under the trees, uttering wordless shrieks, or rocking themselves frantically in a corner. A young housewife whom I meet at Makki Shah explains to me that she comes here every month or so, ‘when I feel my djinn taking control of me’ she had arrived this morning, and now, at three in the afternoon (after a day of running and screaming), she felt better and was about to go home. (Months later I have my own experience of being unremittingly cooped up, in a Pashtun village home. As the family watch, I take the servant’s bike and, cycle round and round the courtyard in a bid to ride out my frustration, remembering the women from Makki Shah.)

  Some women at this shrine are clearly suffering from serious mental-health problems but, for the majority, the shrine provides temporary respite from their poverty, repression and lack of autonomy. Surveys conducted in Pakistan by international medical journals corroborate this impression: over half the population of low-income housewives suffer from anxiety and despair. Proper mental health care for Pakistan’s lower classes is non-existent, and for the ill, sad and lonely, shrines are often their only recourse.

  Each shrine, then, serves a slightly different function: Makki Shah for the mentally unhinged; Sehwan Sharif for the repressed ravers; and Sachal Sarmast for the lovers of ecstatic poetry. But it is at Bhitshah, the home of Shah Abdul Latif, that all these are combined, and it is here that I experience the greatest musical and social event in Pakistan.

  Shah Abdul Latif was twenty-eight years old when Shah Inayat was executed, and perhaps becaus
e of this he never challenged the feudal powers directly. However, his outlook was demotic and he expressed it linguistically, in sung poems that have woven themselves into the soul of Sindh. As a Sindhi professor of literature tells me, it was he ‘who made Sindh live. After the Indus, Latif.’

  Until Shah Abdul Latif began composing poetry, Muslim poets and saint-versifiers in India wrote in Persian. The antecedents of this language were grand (Rumi, Hafiz), its metaphors imported (nightingales, roses), and both the poet’s persona and his subject (the Beloved) were courtly and male. Shah Abdul Latif, like Luther, spoke to the people in their own tongue. He read and quoted Rumi just as he read and quoted the Qur’an, but his subject matter was entirely local. He sang of farmers and fisherfolk, camels and crocodiles, the seasons and the stars–the very being of peasant life. It was the Indus, though, the river at the heart of Sindhi life, which was the silent protagonist of many of his songs. In the eighteenth century, the Indus was used far more than it is today–for travel, for transport of goods, for recreation as well as for irrigation–and Latif describes it in all its moods: its high waves and whirlpools and treacherous quicksands, the boats that sail upon it and the pilgrims and merchants that traverse it. He journeys, in his songs, out through the Delta and on to the high seas, across small creeks and freshwater lakes. Water is a blessing and rain, like the Prophet, is rahmat: Divine Grace. But the river is also dangerous, and crossing it is an allegory of the torturous passage from life to death.

  Latif’s Risalo (the generic name in Sindh for a collection of poetry) is divided into thirty surs (song chapters), most of which retell the stories and legends that have been recounted along the banks of the Indus for generations. Perhaps Latif’s most significant departure from the Persian tradition was to follow the indigenous Indian custom of having female, not male protagonists. It is women’s voices that are heard in his songs. In a land where women are inhibited and curtailed by tribal notions of honour and quasi-religious concepts of purdah, the attention that Latif paid to women was revolutionary.

  The poems begin just as the heroine is struggling with the great moral trial that defines her and which represents on an allegorical level the Soul’s yearning for God. Every Sindhi villager knows how to sing the songs of Latif, and often, as I sit in a Sindhi village with the stars in the indigo sky the only light, the warm breeze blowing across my skin, the rustle of maize in the fields and the lowing of buffalo the only other sounds, listening to a farmer singing ‘Sur Sohni’ or ‘Sur Sassui’, it is easy to mistake the centuries and be cast back to the dark night when Sohni drowned in the tempestuous, treacherous Indus.

  A potter’s daughter, Sohni was married against her will to her cousin, but she had always loved Mehar, a merchant who took up buffalo-herding and pipe-playing to woo her. Every night, Sohni crossed the river to meet him. One night, her sister-in-law, having observed her assignations, substituted the fired pot that Sohni was using as a float, for an unbaked one, and when Sohni plunged into the river as usual, the waters of the Indus soaked into the soft clay and the pot dissolved in midstream. Latif begins his poem at this moment, as Sohni is being swept to her death:

  Pot in hand, trust in God, she enters the waves;

  Her leg in the dogfish’s mouth, her head in the shark’s,

  Bangles twisted, hair drifting through the water,

  Fishes, big and small, crowd around her

  Crocodiles waiting to devour her.

  The Indus is also central to the story of Sassui, Latif’s other favourite heroine, a Hindu orphan discovered in the Indus by a Muslim washerman, and brought up as his child. When she grows up, Sassui falls in love with Punhu, a Baluch noble who pretends to humble birth in order to woo her. His aristocratic family is enraged by this folly and abducts him one night while Sassui is sleeping. Latif recounts Sassui’s long journey on foot in her lover’s wake across the Baluchistan desert, where she dies, far from the Indus lands that were her home.

  In the desert west of the Indus are several constellations of eighteenth-century graves, the last resting-place of many of the Kalhoras, and their murids, the Talpurs. These pale, sand-coloured tombs, with their huge onion domes and thin cupolas which now rise eerily isolated from the desert, enclose like sentinel fingers a rare and delicate portrait of eighteenth-century life in Sindh. But they are so remote that I would never have found any of them were it not for the headmaster of a local school, the only man in the district who knows where they are; and they are so dispersed that it takes three days to visit them all. After hours of driving through the desert, a cluster of domes shimmers into view in the distance. Sometimes we find five, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty thirty-foot-high domes in one group, silhouetted against the pale blue sky in silent grandeur, and around them, scattered like pebbles, scores, or even hundreds, of smaller stone tombs.

  This is an abandoned land, for the farmers were long ago encouraged to forsake the traditional irrigation provided by the hill torrents and migrate east to the dam-managed Indus green belt. The headmaster gestures to the sand that stretches endlessly in every direction, as far as the eye can see. ‘This area was once lush and fertile,’ he says. We cross a long earth ridge. ‘This is the Kalhoras’ old canal system,’ he says. ‘It once irrigated this entire area. But today we cannot even do what the Kalhoras did in the eighteenth century.’ He bends down and runs some sand through his fingers. ‘Only camels can survive here now.’

  Blasted by the desert’s searing heat, I step inside a tomb. There is a clapping of pigeon wings, and I gasp as I look around. Inside is a torrent of colour and life. Frescoes cover every inch of the curved walls and domed ceilings. In the corners, and trailing along the architrave, are spiky-topped pomegranates, purple aubergines and plump yellow mangoes. The ceiling is a dense swirl of ochre, blue, red and green flowers. The borders between the pictures are filled with animals, fish and birds: pelicans with stripy fish in their beaks, monkeys climbing a date palm, amused-looking cattle.

  The main compositions on each of the four walls depict local eighteenth-century folklore, history and society. Religion is represented by mosques, rosaries, water pots for ablutions and Qur’ans laid open on stands with the words flying up from the pages into the air like a spell. There are illustrations of domesticity: a husband and wife sit together on a charpay, a sword and musket laid carefully under the bed; a mistress is fanned by her maid. There are pictures of the outside world: a boat sails along the Indus; men stalk tigers; a camel treks slowly through the desert. High up on the wall of one of the tombs, a fierce battle is being waged between sword-wielding horsemen and warriors on elephants. Everywhere is evidence of the vanished water that once kept these people, plants and animals alive. The tombs stand here in the sand like an unheard prophecy–a bleak warning to a country where agricultural land is rapidly disintegrating into salt marsh or desert sand.

  Like the river, the tombs are unprotected, and this rich culture is on the verge of being lost. In Europe such a treasure would sustain an entire tourist industry. Here, they stand in a windswept desert, blown by the sand, visited only by the occasional porcupine, or tomb raiders who mistakenly dig up the graves in the hope of finding treasure (the Kalhoras never buried goods with their dead). Islamic attitudes to the representation of humans wavered, and in eighteenth-century Sindh there was clearly little anxiety about human depiction (not to mention ‘male-female separation’)–but unfortunately several of the faces, especially those of the women, have recently been scratched out by iconoclasts intent on imposing their own censoriousness on the past. The structures, too, are falling apart. Cracks run doggedly through every dome, and in many of the grandest, the summits of the domes have collapsed, letting in the sky.

  Of all the scenes painted on these walls, the most moving are those taken from the songs of Latif. Sassui is here, desperately pursuing the abducted Punhu along the riverbank. Sohni clasps a pot to her bosom as she swims across the river, chased by a crocodile and a shoal of fish. Her husband stand
s on one side, twirling a rosary in his fingers; on the other, waiting amidst his herd of buffalo, is Mehar, holding his reed pipe. In the modern heat of the desert, pictures like these augur the disappearance of the Indus that once nourished this verdant eighteenth-century botany, was the source of these fat (now virtually extinct) palla fish, and provided the tranquil-menacing scene for Latif’s Risalo.

  Every year for three days, these eighteenth-century scenes are also memorialized in music during Shah Abdul Latif’s urs. Men and women, villagers, townspeople, city professionals, Sunni, Hindu and Shia, come from all over Sindh to Bhitshah, the village north of Hyderabad which Latif made into his musical retreat. Every night of the year, from dusk to dawn, local musicians sing the entire Risalo in front of Latif’s shrine. During the urs the village of Bhitshah opens its arms wide and welcomes crowds of devotees, each with their own camp kitchen, tents and fire, each with their own team of singers. Throughout the village, inside the shrine, along the narrow streets, into the fields beyond, the music of Latif fills the air.

  Latif invented an instrument, the tambooro, and a new musical verse, the vai. His songs, with their female protagonists, are recited by groups of male musicians in a raw, haunting falsetto. They are technically difficult to sing, and the Sindhi is archaic and hard even for native speakers to understand. But there is something in the completeness of their form, or the sincerity with which they are sung, that makes them understandable to everybody.