Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  On a quiet Friday morning in February, just before I leave Sindh behind and travel north to the Punjab, I am standing in the Hindu library on the island of Sadhubela in Sukkur, admiring the luminously coloured nineteenth-century paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses that have been preserved here. I can see the divine lovers Radha and Krishna, elephant-headed Ganesh, and even Zindapir (skimming over the Indus on four palla fish). But the biggest, most resplendent and prominent paintings are of a white-bearded man sitting cross-legged on the ground and listening to his disciples. ‘Who is that?’ I ask the young Hindu librarian. ‘Our Spiritual Master,’ the librarian says, ‘Guru Nanak Sahib.’

  Most Hindus in Sindh are Nanakpanthis, followers of Guru Nanak. The boundary between Sikhism and Hinduism is less defined in Sindh than elsewhere in the subcontinent, and during the 1881 and 1891 censuses, Nanakpanthis could not decide whether they were ‘Hindu’ or ‘Sikh’ and gave different answers each time. To this day in Pakistan, many temples and gurdwaras are combined in a way that is not the case in India (where Hindu-Sikh relations deteriorated seriously in the 1980s, and Sikhs still protest against the 1950 Indian Constitution which defines them as a Hindu sub-caste). In Sukkur every temple has a room set aside for veneration of the Adi Granth, the Sikh holy book. The boatman who rowed me across the river told a story which intertwines Sikh and Hindu traditions: according to local legend, Guru Nanak came to Sadhubela ‘to talk with Varuna, our God of Water’. (Hindus in the 1920s, by contrast, claimed that he came to scold the Muslim guardians of Zindapir’s shrine.)

  ‘The Sikhs have got it all wrong,’ the librarian says. ‘Guru Nanak did not mean for a new religion to be created–just like he did not believe that Hindus and Muslims should be separate. He was a Hindu reformer.’

  Guru Nanak was born in 1469 to high-caste parents in the west Punjabi village of Talwandi, now called Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. As an infant he displayed all the usual proclivities of mystics: periods of silence, an aversion to education, sudden numinous pronouncements. Sent first to a Hindu priest for primary education, then to another for a grounding in Sanskrit, and finally to the Muslim maulvi for lessons in Persian (the language of court and administration), Nanak surprised each of them in turn with his special spiritual erudition. He also tried several careers before becoming a mystic. He worked as a shepherd–a bad one, for he allowed the sheep to escape; as a shopkeeper–he gave away rations to the poor, and finally as a clerk for the local Nawab.

  Then, early one morning in 1499, as he was bathing in a river, he vanished. Distressed, his family and friends searched for him for three days. The Nawab ordered the river to be dredged, but to no avail. At last, on the fourth day, Nanak mysteriously reappeared. He did not say where he had been–later Sikh hagiographers maintained that he had disappeared to heaven to commune with God–but whatever had happened, it was clear that he had changed. His first action was to give away his clothes. Then he spoke, saying, ‘There is no Hindu, no Muslim.’ The people whispered that his time in the river had curdled his brain. But Nanak shrugged off the rumours, and from this moment onwards–to the despair of his in-laws–he embarked on a quest for spiritual harmony.

  Until Nanak’s nativity, Talwandi was a modest, run-of-the-mill hamlet between two rivers. Four and a half centuries later, when I visit Nankana Sahib, I traipse around six different gurdwaras commemorating every detail of Nanak’s famed childhood. There is a gurdwara where he was born, another where he went to school, a third in the alley where he played as a child, a fourth near the tree he sat under, a fifth in the field where he tended buffalo, and a sixth marks the spot where he was shaded from the sun by a cobra.

  There is also a sacred tree, an empty concrete sarovar (bathing tank)–and several thousand Sikh pilgrims from India. The Pakistan Government allows carefully monitored pilgrimage groups from India to visit three holy places: Nankana Sahib, Lahore and Panja Sahib in far western Punjab. The visits are scrutinized down to the last detail–‘even our hotel room numbers are written on our visas,’ an old Sikh lady tells me. As I sit talking with Sikh pilgrims on the lawn outside Nankana Sahib’s impressively large, yellow-painted, domed and pinnacled central gurdwara, they point out their Pakistani Intelligence minders–uncomfortable-looking men lounging on the grass not quite out of earshot, sipping sticky soft drinks.

  In a large pre-Partition house opposite Nanak’s birthplace, I meet another of Pakistan’s hybrid breeds. Tall, strapping Pathan Sahab–as he is known to his neighbours–wears a dark red Sikh turban, yet he hails from Parachinar, one of the ‘tribal agencies’ that border Afghanistan. In 1947, Punjabis massacred each other as they migrated in different directions to their respective new countries, and this is why it is with some trepidation that Indian Sikhs tour Pakistan today (‘Security is tight, in case of bad elements’). But the Pathan or Pashtun Sikhs–those born in the Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan–did not go to India at Partition. Again and again I am told that ‘the Muslims protected us.’ ‘They held jirgas,’ says Pathan Sahab, ‘and the tribal elders decreed that we should stay.’

  This triumph over sectarianism has not endeared the Pashtun Sikhs to their Indian guests. Despite their shared religion, the Sikhs of Pakistan and the Sikhs of India do not embrace each other as brothers. ‘We are Pashto-speaking, they speak Punjabi,’ explains Pathan Sahab; adding, apologetically, ‘We were rustic village people when we came here from the Frontier. Our women did purdah, we were uneducated.’ The Indian pilgrims tend to agree. ‘There are language problems,’ says a young teacher from Jalandhar; ‘Pakistan is small, its cities are small,’ adds a businessman from Chandigarh; ‘This country has got very behind educationally,’ says a salesman of electronic goods. They seem to regard the Pashtun Sikhs as eccentric, un-pukka, slightly embarrassing imitations of themselves. ‘They are sahajdhari,’ someone whispers: uninitiated.

  The Pashtun Sikhs are probably a legacy of Ranjit Singh’s huge nineteenth-century empire, which, in the Maharaja’s own words, extended ‘to the limits of the Afghans’. It is possible that they are descendants of converts made by the sixteenth-century Sikh missionary, Bhai Gurdas, who travelled to Kabul. They may even be offspring of those Pashtuns whom Nanak met on his voyages west of the Indus. But a month later, in the Afghan town of Ghazni, I meet a small Sikh community of cloth traders, and they tell me that ‘We Sikhs came here from India with Sultan Mahmud.’ This is unlikely, for the iconoclast sultan died 439 years before Guru Nanak was born (he did, though, have an Indian contingent in his army). But the comment, inaccurate though it is, reflects once again the interleaved histories of the Indus valley. Everybody’s story jostles with everybody else’s, and the image of the five rivers, winding like the fingers of a hand through the Punjab, illustrates the alternate convergence and division of the state’s tangled history.

  For a religion that grew up in the land of five rivers, it is natural that Sikhism should have water at the heart of its rituals. There are many legends about Nanak’s watery experiences in rivers, lakes and oceans–he made the dry wells of Mecca brim with water, converted the Muslim river saint Khwaja Khizr, and was led to God through a pool of water in the south Indian desert. Every Sikh pilgrimage involves imbibing, bathing in, or giving thanks for the cold river water that fills the gurdwaras’ tanks. Sikhs in the Indian Punjab are forever undressing and submerging their bodies in these cool dark ‘pools of nectar’. At Baisakhi, the spring festival, they decorate cauldrons of water with flowers in gratitude for the annual mountain snow-melt. The tank of the Golden Temple in Amritsar ‘lies in the heart of this great [Indus] river-system’, say the Sikh authorities; it symbolizes the ‘future confluence of world-cultures into a universal culture’ and represents a five-thousand-year-old continuity with the communal city baths of the Indus Valley Civilization.

  ‘But we cannot bathe at Guru Nanak’s birthplace,’ the Indian Sikhs at Nankana Sahib complain. The holy bathing tank is dry. ‘Pani ka masla [water problems],’ says Pathan Sahab. Britt
le brown leaves blow across the tank’s concrete base and no pilgrim deigns to go near it. The lack of water is a symbol of the Sikhs’ own absence.

  But Pakistan does possess some holy Sikh water. Panja Sahib is the second most important Sikh site in the country, commemorating a spring that Guru Nanak created for his followers. When a local Muslim saint refused to let Nanak drink from a hilltop fountain, and rolled a rock down to squash him, the Guru put out his hand to stop it and water gushed out. The place is still sacred to both faiths. Muslims climb the hill to the shrine of the implacable saint, and Sikhs perambulate around the fish-filled sacred pool at the bottom. The water here is so delicious that Emperor Akbar cried ‘Wah wah!’ on tasting it (the name of nearby Wah Cantonment immortalizes this moment). I even meet a canny Muslim businessman who is developing a bottling plant at Panja Sahib to export vials of holy water to the Canadian Sikh diaspora.

  Panja Sahib, which stands on the lip of the frontier with Afghanistan, is ‘proof’, says Pathan Sahab, ‘that Guru Nanak visited my native place, that we Pashtuns are original Sikhs too’–although, if his many biographies are to be believed, there was barely anywhere that Guru Nanak did not travel to. After he emerged from the river in 1499, he lived a peripatetic life for the next two decades. In sixteenth-century India, one way to search for life’s meaning was to run away and join the faqirs. Nanak took with him his best friend, a low-caste Muslim musician called Mardana, and like Sufi qalandars or Hindu yogis, wanderers in search of the Truth, they roamed all over India together.

  According to Sikh tradition, Nanak and Mardana made four major journeys, following the points of the compass as far as they could go in each direction. They went east, to the Hindu holy places at Mathura, Benares and Prayag (Allahabad); south, to the Buddhist headquarters of Sri Lanka; and north through the Himalayas to the hallowed mountain of Kailash in Tibet where the Indus rises. Finally, they disguised themselves as Muslim hajjis–pilgrims–in leather sandals, blue pyjamas and bone necklaces, and took a boat west–to Mecca, Medina and Baghdad. ‘Proof’ of this journey, too, exists at Nankana Sahib, where a gold-plated gazebo inside an enormous, incongruously polished and expensive glass case encloses a cloak embroidered with Qur’anic verses, the Caliph’s farewell gift. (Indian Sikhs, however, who have a cloak of their own in India, regard it as a fake.)

  Nanak is also one of the few people who has journeyed along the Indus both near its source in Tibet, and south through the Punjab and Sindh to the sea. What did such restless itinerancy denote? Later, with the benefit of hindsight, Nanak would sing of how

  Religion lieth not in visiting tombs

  Nor in visiting places where they burn the dead

  Nor in sitting entranced in contemplation

  Nor in wandering in the countryside or in foreign lands

  Nor in bathing at places of pilgrimage.

  If thou must the path of true religion see,

  Among the world’s impurities, be of impurities free.

  If it did anything, travelling cured Nanak of attachment to religious frippery. He had visited all the important pilgrimage places of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and rejected them all. Henceforth, as he wrote, ‘The wind is the guru; water, father; mother, the great earth.’ He returned to the Punjab, bought some land on the banks of the River Ravi, ‘donned worldly clothes’, and articulated what it was he believed in.

  Guru Nanak had become a purist. When pressed, it became clear that there was not much in other religious systems that he endorsed. He did not believe in asceticism–his disciples were supposed to participate fully in the world, while leaving time in the early morning and evening for meditation and prayers. He did not believe in reincarnation, avatars or caste–as a child he famously refused to wear the Brahmin sacred thread that his father tried to force upon him. He also lost caste–deliberately, presumably–by crossing the kalapani, the ‘black water’, the sea, during his voyage to Mecca.

  He criticized the decadent ruling powers. Over the previous five hundred years, the Punjab had borne the brunt of raids by Afghan kings, Muslims who often used religion to justify invasions of India. Lying directly on the route from Kabul to Delhi, the Punjab’s granaries, orchards and herds were regularly pillaged to feed Muslim soldiers on the move. During Nanak’s childhood, north India was ruled by the Lodhis, Pashtun kings, whom he later characterized as hopelessly decadent. But they were paragons of virtue compared to the man who usurped them, Babur from Uzbekistan–the first of the Mughal emperors–who conquered north India in 1526. Guru Nanak encountered Babur’s army at first hand–hagiographical stories tell of how he was ordered to grind wheat like a slave until Babur recognized his virtue and released him. But Nanak himself spoke of Babur only to censure him:

  Bringing the marriage party of sin, Babur has invaded from

  Kabul, demanding our land as his wedding gift, O Lalo.

  Modesty and righteousness have both vanished and false-

  hood struts around like a leader, O Lalo.

  If Babur caused chaos in the Punjab, Guru Nanak made it his mission to give his people something to live for. He rejected the caste-bound Brahmins as ‘butchers’ and the Muslim kings as Satanic exploiters, and centred his sect around Punjabi peasant identity. He wrote all his poetry in Punjabi, and while this has inhibited the spread of Sikhism outside the Punjab, it also defined the community and fostered its sense of nationalism. In his 1963 History of the Sikhs, Khushwant Singh described Guru Nanak as ‘the first popular leader of the Punjab’, and put the esteem in which he is held down to his fine Punjabi verses.

  The hymns of Nanak, and the nine Gurus who came after him, together form the Adi Granth, the Sikh’s holy book. Singing the Adi Granth, or listening to it being sung, is the supreme form of worship for Sikhs. But just as the Sikh bathing tanks in Pakistan are empty, so the gurdwaras echo with silence. ‘At Amritsar,’ says an old Indian pilgrim I meet, ‘hymns are sung all day, every day, by musicians seated inside the Golden Temple itself.’ ‘It is a full-time, non-stop, twenty-four-hour concert,’ says another. ‘You must go to India. Sikh worship there is a long melodious musical.’

  For decades, crossing the border between India and Pakistan has been fraught with difficulty. But as I reach Lahore, an Indo-Pakistani détente is announced, and in the wake of political goodwill follow new bus, train and plane services. In Lahore I join a busload of Pakistani businessmen and a clutch of families nervously anticipating reunions with their relatives in Lucknow. Pakistanis secretly pine for the grandeur of the India they lost at Partition, and those who can afford to, make up for decades of separation in trips across the border. But although I journey to and fro between the countries several times over the next month, the only Indian tourists I meet are Sikh pilgrims. Nationalist propaganda in India is a powerful force and most Indians have no reason to travel to what they consider a dangerous, fundamentalist nation. The one Indian returnee on my bus is an Ayurvedic herbalist with a suitcase full of the ‘forty different plants’–liquorice from Afghanistan, gum from Quetta, leaf syrup from Swat–that for thousands of years have been gathered from the mountainous country west of the Indus.

  At Wagah, I step across the artificial line that slices the vast cultivated Punjabi plain in two, and begin searching for differences between the countries. Are the roads better in India? Is it really dirtier and poorer (as Pakistanis often say)? Does it feel freer? I laugh at myself, remembering the Indian writer Manjula Padmanabhan’s description of the journey she made from Pakistan to India as a child in 1960. Sitting on the train, waiting for the shining homeland she had heard so much about to appear from the gloom, she eventually asked–‘When are we going to get to India?’ Her little heart sank when she was told that they had been travelling through India for the past two hours.

  As I am standing, lost in this reverie, and waiting for the Pakistani soldier to check my passport, a truck from India reverses up to the border. Pakistani porters in blue shirts rush over to unload the cargo: huge sides of be
ef (too sacred to be eaten in India; cheap meat for poor Muslims). ‘Such nice Urdu,’ say the Pakistani customs officers. ‘Very nice Hindi,’ says the woman at Indian customs ten minutes later. ‘Sharab? Beer?’ I am asked as I step into India by the Sikh owner of a tea-stall, wise to the thirst of those returning from the Land of Prohibition. The bus for nearby Amritsar arrives, and I sit at the back behind a man in a peacock-blue turban, savouring the freedom from being confined to a special women’s section. The bus passes through green wheat fields, and as we approach the suburbs, I see a long line of small shops advertising ‘Pig Meat’ and ‘Whisky’. In the city centre I stare open-mouthed at the Sikh women, zooming through the traffic on scooters, sacred daggers slung around their waists.

  The omnipresence of Sikhs here is a grim reminder of the reason for their absence over the border–and of the ghoulish way that some Pakistanis commemorate this absence. Pakistan Army officers tell ‘stupid Sikh’ jokes; school textbooks describe Sikhs as ‘murderous butchers’. Larki Punjaban (Punjabi Girl), a film released in 2003 by Pakistan’s veteran film-maker, Syed Noor, depicts a drunkard Sikh father who chops off his nephew’s arm with a meat cleaver, and tries to murder his daughter when she falls for a Pakistani Muslim. When I ask Rukhsana Noor, the film-maker’s wife and scriptwriter, to explain this bigoted representation, she tells me simply: ‘Hindu-Muslim marriage in Pakistan is impossible.’

  Syed Noor’s film transposes on to Sikhs all the worst stereotypes about Muslims–violence, religious intolerance, mistreatment of women. Yet despite the two religions’ mutual distrust, Islam profoundly influenced Sikhism. (‘Islam,’ writes the historian of the Indian and Pakistani armies, Stephen P. Cohen, transformed ‘Sikhism from a pietistic Hindu sect into a martial faith’.) During the lifetime of the first five Sikh Gurus, there was no antagonism between Muslims and Sikhs–who, after all, are monotheistic. Guru Nanak’s Japji, the Morning Prayer, begins with a statement of faith close to the Muslim creed: