Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The Indus is also a river prone to heavy silting, so dams do not last long here. The gigantic Tarbela reservoir, constructed in the 1970s, has grown so thick with silt that it is forecast to be entirely inoperable by 2030. Even the fickle World Bank, which for the first sixty years of Pakistan’s existence urged dams on developing nations, has come round to the view that they do more harm than good.

  But Pakistan’s lack of water in relation to need is now the priority, and the government considers dams to be the only answer to the problem. The President, General Pervez Musharraf, who nine years before his coup wrote a paper in London on South Asia’s water security, has put his moustachioed military clout behind the building of dams, and in particular Kalabagh on the Punjab–Frontier border, the most contentious dam of recent times–condemned both by Sindhis, who fear that even less water will come downstream, and by people from the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), whose land will be flooded. Some of the more pessimistic Pakistanis predict that the double stranglehold of the Punjabi Army on both politics and water will push the country into a second civil war.

  As he lay dying in 1539, Guru Nanak’s final words were of his birthplace. ‘The tamarisk must be in flower now,’ he said; ‘the pampas grass must be waving its woolly head in the breeze; the cicadas must be calling in the lonely glades.’ Nanak was grateful all his life to the Punjabi landscape. Its rivers and trees, animals and birds were a constant inspiration to his poetry:

  Worshippers who praise the Lord know not His greatness,

  As rivers and rivulets that flow into the sea know not its vastness.

  …

  As the Chatrik bird loves the rain

  And cries for a few drops to slake its thirst

  As the fish gambols in the waters,

  Nanak is athirst for the Name of Hari.

  He drinks and his heart is filled with joy.

  Nankana Sahib today is a dry and dusty place. During Nanak’s lifetime the village stood in the middle of the ‘Neeli Bar’, the forest of blue deer (nil gai), but within years of the British taking over the Punjab, neither trees nor deer were left. The woods disappeared, uprooted to make way for the huge wheat and rice fields. Babur hunted rhinoceros in the jungles of northern Punjab; Sikh outlaws took refuge in the lakhi (a central forest of a hundred thousand trees); and up until the late nineteenth century, ‘lions, tigers, leopards, panthers, bears, wolves, hyenas, wild boars, nilgai’ roamed through the Punjab’s forests. British irrigation projects (and trigger-happy officials) eliminated the lions and tigers, and Pakistan’s pesticide-fed, dam-led, intensive agriculture projects have exterminated all the rest. Of all the lands along the Indus, the Punjab has changed most in the past two hundred years.

  Deforestation has obvious short-term gains–with mechanized agriculture, the bigger the fields, the bigger the return. But trees keep the land supple and moist–and deforestation can create deserts. Downriver from Nankana Sahib are the desiccated remains of Harappa, a city from the third millennium BCE, which despite its extraordinary sophistication, collapsed and perished probably because its citizens over-exploited forest and water supplies–a stark provocation to sustainable resource use, though one blithely ignored by modern Pakistani landlords.

  And thus at Guru Nanak’s birthplace, where Pakistan-despising pilgrims are unable to bathe in the sarovar, it is dust which they take home with them to India as a sacred souvenir. In the hallway of the central gurdwara, I pass a woman crouched on the floor, pulling back the mats that have been laid there and squirrelling away the dust in a twist of paper. ‘What is she doing?’ I ask a man in a sunshine-yellow turban. He bends down and scoops up some dust in his fingers: ‘We regard the dust of Nankana Sahib as holy,’ he says, and drops it on to his tongue like sherbet.

  That evening I return to Lahore, and pay a last visit to the Dera Sahib Gurdwara. Here, standing on the edge of the red-light district, between Emperor Aurangzeb’s sublime sandstone mosque and the royal fort, encircled to the north by the waterless River Ravi, is the shrine of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

  Sitting in a tiny office near the Maharaja’s tomb, sipping sweet milky tea, is a Sikh who fled from Pakistani Punjab to India at Partition, and fled back again in the 1980s. Manmohan Singh Khalsa shares a name with the Indian Prime Minister, but he dismisses his namesake as a ‘puppet’. A member of the guerrilla army that led a ‘terrorist’ campaign for Khalistan, an independent Sikh state, Manmohan Singh claimed asylum in Britain in the 1980s after the Indian Army stormed the Golden Temple. Declared a wanted man by the Indian Government, Lahore is the nearest he has been to Amritsar since then.

  ‘Khalistan Zindabad [Long Live Khalistan],’ Manmohan Singh says, and laughs: ‘In India they would put me in jail for saying that.’ (The Pakistan Government, by contrast, welcomed–even armed–Khalistan fighters.) He is unrepentant about losing his Indian homeland. ‘I could not live in Occupied Punjab,’ he says. ‘In Pakistan Sikhs have more freedom. Sikhism was born here. Maharaja Ranjit Singh ruled from Lahore. Muslim and Sikh culture is the same.’ In London, he has founded the World Muslim-Sikh Foundation to celebrate ‘our common language, customs and tribal background’. ‘What about Partition?’ I ask. He frowns. ‘That nafrat was caused by Brahminism, the black spot on Asia.’

  ‘If Sikhs are so happy in Pakistan,’ I say finally, ‘why are there no Sikhs in the army?’ I am thinking of the ultimate irony: that the Pakistan Army, which has its roots in Sikh martial traditions, has never conscripted a single Sikh. But Manmohan Singh has a triumphant answer. ‘General Pervez,’ he says, ‘is very good for Sikhs.’ He tells me how he talked with Musharraf for ‘three and a half hours’ after the General became Dictator. ‘I said, “Take Sikhs in the army.” He said, “OK.” And now there is a Sikh, the first in Pakistan’s history. He joined two months ago. A young boy from Nankana Sahib.’

  Manmohan Singh sits back and drains his cup of tea. It is dark outside, and the last prayer of the day is being called from the Badshahi Masjid. We sit and listen in silence, for the mosque is famous not only for the vastness and perfection of its red sandstone courtyard but also for the beauty of its muezzin’s voice. ‘The first Sikh soldier in the Pakistan Army…’ says Manmohan Singh, and I add: ‘From the village where Guru Nanak was born…’ As we sit in the dark, listening to the azan, I wonder when the converging rivers will divide.

  6

  Up the Khyber

  1001

  ‘Once the water of Sind is crossed, everything is in the Hindustan way.’

  Emperor Babur, c. 1526

  LEANING OVER THE rampart of Attock fort on the banks of the Indus, I look across the river, contemplating the contrasts. Behind me are the Punjabi plains, regimented army cantonments, women in rainbow-hued headscarves and men with well-trimmed moustaches. Ahead are the blue Afghan hills, frontier towns, Kalashnikov-clutching smugglers, and women in burqas. Even the river maps the confluence of these worlds. Below me, the Kabul river streams in from the west, brown with silt and turbulent with Pashtun intrigue; the Indus flows in from the east, icy-blue with glacial mountain snow-melt. For a few hundred yards after they join, the brown Kabul and blue Indus flow side by side; only once the water has passed in front of Attock fort, do the colours merge. It is here that generations of Indian generals have stood, keeping watch over this crossing, wary of Afghan invaders.

  Babur, like other medieval Muslim adventurers who galloped down from Samarkand, across Afghanistan and through the frontier passes, had long cherished the idea of conquering India. In 1526, after several unsuccessful attempts, he broke through the defences and defeated the Sultan of Delhi. For a Central Asian nobleman in search of a kingdom, India, as Babur saw it, offered two supreme rewards: ‘it is a large country, and has masses of gold and silver.’

  Only once he got there did he discover that the people were plain, the architecture abysmal and the conversation paltry. There weren’t even any musk melons, candlesticks or horses. ‘Hindustan is a country that has few pleas
ures to recommend it,’ he wrote dismissively in his memoirs. But while Babur’s friends quickly grew sick of the heat and dust and begged to return to their homeland, the new Emperor was adamant. The future of his dynasty lay east of the Indus:

  Give a hundred thanks, Babur, that the generous Pardoner

  Has given thee Sindh and Hind and many a kingdom.

  If thou have not the strength for their heats,

  If thou say, ‘Let me see the cold side,’ Ghazni is there.

  And so, with Afghanistan–chilly Ghazni–on the distant horizon as solace for the homesick, Babur moved to the plains of north India, and made north India the centre of his kingdom. For the next three centuries India would be ruled by emperors whose grandsire was an Uzbek.

  Babur was not the first Muslim king to cross the Indus, and where he trod many more would follow. The Lodhis whom he had usurped from the throne of Delhi were a Pashtun family, and Humayun, his Kabul-born son, barely lasted a decade before he was usurped by an Afghan, Sher Shah Suri. Humayun’s son Akbar learned from his father’s mistake: beware of men from Kabul.

  Modern Afghanistan is an ethnic mix of Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtuns (Pathans or Pakthuns, the ungovernable tribesmen from both sides of Afghanistan’s eastern border). But when Babur and his descendants referred to ‘Afghans’ they meant the Pashtuns–entirely different stock from the Mughals. Babur’s mother’s family were Mongols descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, and his father’s were Turkic-speaking Timurids. Babur was conscious of his heritage, and he bequeathed an iron principle to his descendants–out-and-out suspicion of Pashtuns. Babur’s grandson Akbar in turn spelt it out to his followers: on no account were these ‘brainless’, ‘turbulent’ and ‘vagabond’ people to be made governors, given major army commands or senior bureaucratic posts. Even their wives were to be excluded from royal weighing ceremonies (when the monarch’s weight in gold was given away to the poor). ‘It is a rule in the Mughal empire,’ wrote the seventeenth-century Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, ‘not to trust the race of Pashtuns.’ The Persians got the top jobs, the Turks ran the army, Hindus looked after imperial finances. Only the Pashtun-Afghan tribesmen were routinely passed over for promotion. (The stereotype of Pashtun unruliness, it is tempting to think, originates with the Mughals.)

  In the 1580s, Akbar began building a big red sandstone fort at Attock, on the Punjabi side of the river. Looking out towards the land of the Afghans, the fort was designed to defend Akbar’s empire from his scheming half-brother in Kabul. It was named ‘Attock Banaras’ to twin it with ‘Katak Banaras’ fort on the eastern extremity of India–and it was placed on this riverine ‘boundary’, wrote the court historian Abul-Fazl, as a ‘noble barrier’ between ‘Hindustan and Kabulistan…for enforcing the obedience of the turbulent’. The fort was the perfect symbol of how far–in half a century–the Mughals had travelled from their Central Asian past.

  Nor has the fort lost any of its Mughal symbolism in the past sixty years: requisitioned by the Pakistan Army as a maximum-security detention centre and military court, Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s husband, was incarcerated and Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister whom President-General Musharraf deposed, was tried by the army here. As I am standing looking over the wall of the fort’s Begum Sarai, I hear a shriek, and turn to see a teenage Pakistani soldier running towards me, waving his gun. ‘This is army property,’ he says as soon as he gets his breath back, ‘and forbidden to outsiders. Get out before my seniors catch you.’

  Emperor Akbar managed to contain the Pashtun threat through constant vigilance along the Indus. But in the vastly expanded Mughal empire of the seventeenth century, the peace could not last. During the reign of Akbar’s great-grandson Aurangzeb, Pashtun resentment turned to war.

  Emperor Aurangzeb was a Muslim zealot: he quickly gave up the pluralistic practices of his grandsires, abandoned the royal fashion for celebrating Hindu festivals and culture, instituted regulation trouser-and beard-length–his modern incarnation is the Taliban. Since roughly the time that Sultan Mahmud, the warring Afghan, invaded their country in the eleventh century, the Pashtuns have been Muslim. But where Islamic law clashes with Pashtunwali (the Pashtuns’ unwritten code of conduct) it is tradition, not religion, that prevails. ‘I am a drinker of wine,’ wrote the great Pashtun poet, Khushal Khan Khattak, ‘why does the Priest quarrel with me?’

  Khushal Khan Khattak, a Pashtun chief from a village near the Indus, was not shy of making his disgust with Emperor Aurangzeb public:

  I am well acquainted with Aurangzeb’s justice, and equity,

  His orthodoxy in matters of faith…

  His own brothers, time after time, cruelly put to the sword,

  His own father overcome in battle.

  (Even Aurangzeb’s venerable ancestor did not escape Khushal’s scorn. ‘Babur, King of Delhi,’ the poet pointed out, ‘owed his place to the Pashtuns.’)

  In 1664, Aurangzeb despatched a contingent of the imperial army west of the Indus to deal with this impertinent rebel, and Khushal was at last brought in chains to India. But four years later, on his release, Khushal returned home unrepentant, and rallied the Pashtuns to rise up against the Emperor. The Mughal army could manoeuvre effortlessly in the open plains of Hindustan but in the rocky terrain of the Frontier it was no match for Khushal’s guerrilla tactics. Aurangzeb camped for two years at Attock, trying to raise the low morale of his troops: ‘against no people,’ wrote Khushal’s Victorian translator, ‘did he make more strenuous and futile efforts.’ Like the Army of the Indus, NATO forces, and the Pakistan Army, Aurangzeb’s men could make no headway against the Pashtun rebels holed up in the Afghan mountains. Like his frustrated successors, where warfare failed, the Emperor turned to bribes. He bought off one of Khushal’s sixty sons–that was enough. Khushal died heartbroken, a fugitive far from home. His dying wish was to be buried where ‘the dust of the hoofs of the Mughal cavalry’ would not light upon his grave.

  Khushal was a prolific author and while he may have lost the war of swords he won the war of words. He wrote over three hundred and sixty works–poems about the Frontier’s rivers and mountains; treatises on falconry, turbans and medicine; a travel book in verse; a prose autobiography. In particular, he wrote about women. Kama Sutra-like, the Diwan (his collection of odes) enumerates the carnal qualities of women from different Pashtun tribes; it boasts of his prowess (fifteen women a night); it eulogizes the author’s ‘organ’ and dispenses sex tips to eager young boys. In the current repressive climate, the sex bits have become an embarrassment for Khushal’s family who recently tried to get them excised from his oeuvre, and a poetic anomaly for the Pashto Academy at Peshawar University which is unable to teach them, let alone discuss them, for fear of the repercussions. Yet they exist–a poignant reminder of life before the mullahs took over.

  It is odd then that, despite his pious proclamations, persecution of Shias, and model theocracy, Aurangzeb has never really become a hero for Pakistanis. Some textbooks state gratefully that he upheld the ‘Pakistani spirit’. But in general, notwithstanding his Islamic huffing and puffing, Aurangzeb (who even endowed some Hindu temples) is a little too Indian. The heroes Pakistani rulers love–the ones they name their ballistic missiles after–are the medieval Afghan idol-breakers and Hindu-killers. Of these the first and most illustrious is the eleventh-century Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.

  Like the Mughals after him, Sultan Mahmud was a Turk, on his father’s side. But his mother was an Afghan from Zabul, and this has allowed both Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns to claim him as one of their own. Mahmud’s father was a slave. Yet the son became–as a maulvi in Afghanistan later puts it to me proudly–the ‘first President of our country’. He was not a Pashtun; and yet the Pashtuns love him.

  Mahmud grew up in a borderland of overlapping worlds. His forefathers came from the Turkish steppes; he was born in Ghazni, 150 kilometres south-west of Kabul; his religious life was dictated by Arabia, and his culture by Persia. All thes
e spheres were equally import ant. He studied Arabic, picked up Persian, and spoke Turkic at home with his slaves. His mother’s birthplace became his kingdom; his father’s nomadic people provided the backbone of his army; the Sunni Caliphate in Baghdad gave his rule religious authority; Persian poets imbued his court with glamour. As if this was not enough, Mahmud himself added another ingredient to this intoxicating mix: India.

  Other Muslims had reached India long before Mahmud. Muhammad bin Qasim–seventeen-year-old nephew of the Caliph–invaded Sindh in 711. Arab traders probably built mosques along the south Indian Malabar coast before that. But the journeys that Sultan Mahmud made across the Indus were far more significant than these minor incursions.

  When Sebuktigin, Mahmud’s father, arrived in Ghazni at the end of the tenth century, it was little more than a village. There was one strategic advantage: proximity to India. In good weather it took barely a month to reach the River Indus. For Mahmud, a small energetic man with a wispy beard and endless enthusiasm for going on journeys, this was like striking gold. During his thirty-year career as a jihadi, Mahmud marched into India twelve, thirteen, or even seventeen times ‘on the path of Allah’. By 1030 he had managed to wage religious war–if not annually, as he had hoped–at least every other year, by following the tributaries of the Indus down to the river and into India. Sometimes he took the difficult, northern Khyber pass road (if he wished to fight the Hindus near Peshawar). Once he went south to Kandahar and through the deserts of Sindh to Gujarat to destroy the stone lingam–sacred symbol of Lord Shiva’s penis–in the Somnath temple. But the most direct path to the Indus was east, through what is now north Waziristan, currently Al-Qaeda’s favoured base in Pakistan.