Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  India made Sultan Mahmud’s career. The country was rich. The people were Hindus, so plunder and murder could be legitimized as jihad against the polytheist infidel. Mahmud made a speciality of looting Indian towns with massive temples, and he always (except when his baggage was washed away in the Indus) returned laden with booty.

  Thanks to jihad, Mahmud’s territories expanded. Ghazni was transformed into a dazzling imperial city. Foreign ambassadors came to gawp at the jewels–diamonds ‘as big as pomegranates’–laid out on carpets in his palace. Volunteers flocked to his army to become ghazis–holy warriors. Mahmud himself was invested with the highest religious dignities from the Caliph in Baghdad: a robe of honour, permission to call himself ‘Sultan’, and a clutch of honorific titles for posterity: ‘The Guardian of the State and of the Faith’ ‘The Lustre of Empire and the Ornament of Religion’ ‘The Establisher of Empires’. It is difficult to gauge the impression that Mahmud made on India at the time. But India’s impact on the Islamic world was instant and phenomenal.

  Ever since the dawn of Islam, India–vast, rich, exotic–had posed a problem for Muslims. In the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, Muhammad himself aspires to conquer it: jihadis who fight against India, he is said to have avowed, ‘will be saved from hellfire’. The famous Moroccan merchant Ibn Battuta described how the pre-Islamic prophet Sulayman (Solomon) travelled to a mountain in Sindh, looked down into India and saw nothing but darkness. India was black and wicked–but it possessed great material and intellectual treasure. Arabs had been profiting from the Indian spice trade for centuries. Indian scholars visited Baghdad in the eighth century, and Arabic translations were made of important Sanskrit texts on astronomy, philosophy and medicine.

  In the early eighth century, when Muhammad bin Qasim arrived on the coast of Sindh, Al Hajjaj, the Caliph, ordered him to cooperate with the local Hindus–‘give them money, rewards, promotions…give them immunity [aman],’ he wrote. Immunity made the Hindus into the dhimmi–the ‘protected’, like the Jews and Christians. Henceforth, to have fought them would have been fitna (internal strife), not jihad. Nevertheless, there was no explicit Qur’anic justification for this stance. It was thus an issue open to interpretation.

  Three hundred years later, when Sultan Mahmud wished to make his name and fortune, the Hindus and their idols became a legitimate cause for warfare. Mahmud presented his raids on India as victories for Sunni Islam–and the Caliph agreed. (‘The King,’ wrote the historian Ferishta, ‘caused an account of his exploits to be written and sent to the Caliph, who ordered it to be read to the people of Baghdad, making a great festival upon the occasion.’) Yet five hundred years later still–when Emperor Akbar was on the throne in Delhi–the juridical pendulum swung back again. Abul-Fazl, Akbar’s chief historian, wrote with great distaste of Sultan Mahmud’s misplaced iconoclasm. ‘Fanatical bigots representing India as a country of unbelievers at war with Islam,’ he thundered, ‘incited his unsuspecting nature to the wreck of honour and the shedding of blood and the plunder of the virtuous.’ Even in Sultan Mahmud’s day, there were Muslims who took this view. The most important of these was Alberuni.

  In 1017, Mahmud–as was his wont in the summer months when the Indus was impassable–turned his attentions north-west to the independent country of Khwarizm (in modern Uzbekistan). He invaded it, annexed it, and returned home to Ghazni followed by lines of prisoners. Among them was a man named Abu Raihan Alberuni, an astronomer, philosopher and mathematician. Alberuni had already read widely about India in Arabic translations of Sanskrit texts, but he had never been there. Over the next thirteen years, as Sultan Mahmud’s field of war in India expanded steadily eastwards, Alberuni travelled in his wake–not fighting but talking, not killing but learning. Alberuni had a deep regard for Indian thought–and the book that he published on his return was a scholarly masterpiece.

  At the very same time that Al Utbi, Sultan Mahmud’s secretary, was eulogizing jihad against the Indians, Alberuni was learning Sanskrit, conversing with pandits, and compiling a systematic record of Indian thought. He had to tread carefully. He was writing a book about one of the greatest civilizations in the world–from the court of an orthodox Sunni iconoclast. ‘This book is not a polemical one,’ he wrote in his Preface, and insisted, ‘I shall not produce the arguments of our antagonists in order to refute such as I believe to be wrong.’ ‘My book,’ he wrote emphatically, ‘is nothing but a simple historic record of facts.’ Some scholars interpret his History of India as intended to disparage Sultan Mahmud’s campaigns in India. But it is difficult to tell. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed wonderful exploits,’ Alberuni wrote, ‘by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people.’ Is this praise, or disapproval?

  Alberuni spent several years in India, teaching Greek philosophy and being taught Hindu concepts in return, and he seems to have come to the conclusion that Hellenic and Indian thought, despite their polytheistic trappings, essentially boiled down to a monotheistic system. He drew favourable comparisons between Hindu religious concepts –such as creation–and those in the Qur’an. Later he admitted that although he developed a ‘great liking’ for the subject, he found it hard going at first, especially as ‘in that respect I stand alone in my time’. Moreover, there was plenty in Hinduism which he found opaque; ‘the Hindus entirely differ from us in every respect,’ he wrote on the subject of religion; ‘we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa…They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited and stolid.’

  Of course, Alberuni’s book was ample proof that India had much to be vain about. Even Sultan Mahmud could not help but be affected by the country’s grandeur. Mahmud is said to have so admired the stone architecture of temples in Mathura that he found himself unable to destroy them. Having sacked the temple of Somnath, ‘the beauty of its inhabitants, its alluring gardens, flowing rivers and productive soil’ tempted him to settle there (his soldiers wouldn’t hear of it). He pardoned a Hindu king, Nunda Ray, on account of an extremely flattering poem the Hindu sent him. He even had a coin minted with Arabic on one side and the kalma (Islamic creed) translated into Sanskrit on the other–which, shockingly, described the Prophet Muhammad in strictly non-Islamic terms as an ‘avatar’ of God. Maybe the great iconoclast himself anticipated Emperor Akbar’s rampant eclecticism.

  ‘India’ was a populous country and in contrast to the notion later peddled by Europeans–that the Hindus, effeminized by the enervating climate, were easily conquered by hardy mountain Muslims–the armies Mahmud found him self up against were formidable. Al Utbi calls the Indian soldiers ‘obstinate opponents’ and Mahmud clearly developed a grudging admiration for them. Indians were highly prized as mercenaries: Mahmud had a Hindu division in his army, who lived in a special Hindu quarter in Ghazni, and he used them to devastating effect against heretic or rebel Muslims. (In Zarang they sacked the Friday mosque, killed all the worshippers within it, and murdered some Christians as well.)

  Mahmud also learnt from Hindu battle formation. In addition to their redoubtable numbers, the Indians had a tactical advantage–elephants. In an age of spears, bows and maces, the elephant (‘headstrong as Satan’) was a coveted weapon and there was something of an arms race to possess them. Mahmud claimed elephants as booty from Indian kings, he gave them as rare presents to honoured friends, and he counted them as carefully as he weighed his enormous diamonds. They were also used to intimidate his enemies. Firdawsi, author of the Shahnamah (Book of Kings), is said to have fled Ghazni in disguise after the Sultan vowed to have him trampled to death by elephants. Even the Caliph was threatened. ‘Do you wish me to come to the capital of the Caliphate with a thousand elephants,’ he shouted at the Caliph’s ambassador, after the latter had refused to give him Samarkand, ‘in order to lay it to waste and bring its earth on the backs of my elephants to Ghazni?’

  Even more frightening than India’
s elephants were its rivers. Nowhere could have been more different from the dry highland steppes which Mahmud was used to than the lush green mosquito-ridden Punjab. Rivers–crossing them, drowning in them, fighting battles upon them–became a major motif of Mahmud’s Indian invasions, and one which he never entirely mastered. His army waded across them (the Sultan on an elephant, his generals on horseback) and if the rains were heavy, or a campaign mistimed, the river could scupper everything. Rivers were not a natural part of Mahmud’s military expertise. Al Utbi described the end to one campaign, when the Sultan ‘returned to Ghazni in triumph and glory…but as his return was during the rains, when the rivers were full and foaming, and as the mountains were lofty, and he had to fight with his enemies, he lost the great part of his baggage in the rivers, and many of his valiant warriors were dispersed.’ To medieval Muslim historians, the Punjab was the land of the ‘seven dreadful rivers’. None was more dreadful–none more ‘deep and wide’–than the Indus.

  Mahmud’s adversaries were not stupid, and whenever possible, they used the Indus against him. The Punjabi king, Anandpal, refused to allow Mahmud to cross it in 1006; Daud, the Karmatian ‘heretic’, hid on an island in the middle of it; and the Jats–determined river people, probably ancestors of the independent-minded Sikhs, who knew the river’s every bend and quirk–harassed Mahmud’s army incessantly as it marched wearily north along it on its return from Somnath in 1026.

  It was perhaps the final indignity of being pursued by the Jats that gave rise to the story of Sultan Mahmud’s last battle–fought on the Indus. All his other campaigns were conducted on dry land with elephants and maces; yet in 1026 the field of battle switched to the river. Mahmud built 1,400 boats, each equipped with a triple spike–one spike sticking out of the prow, two on either side–with which he pierced and sank the Jats’ ‘four-thousand-strong’ fleet. The story was written up by Mahmud’s historians as his swansong, for he never went back to India. By 1030 he was dead.

  Sultan Mahmud’s descendants had neither his energy nor his wanderlust, and the Ghaznavid dynasty soon petered out. But for Central Asian noblemen like Babur a precedent had been set. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni had shown the way–and over the next five centuries, hordes of Muslims followed him. As Babur wrote, clearly delineating a genealogy of holy warriors, ‘From the time of the revered Prophet down till now three men from that side have conquered and ruled Hindustan. Sultan Mahmud Ghazi was the first…I am the third.’ The Pakistan Army, in turn, has cast itself as Sultan Mahmud’s heir in anti-India aggression, naming its new ballistic missile ‘Ghazni’.

  By the time I am shooed from the walls of Attock fort by a Pakistani rifle, an idea has taken shape. Despite (or perhaps because of ) the dangers that every sensible and informed Pakistani warns me of, I feel a need to travel back to–as Babur put it–‘the cold side’, to see the homeland of these invaders, and to understand from this vantage point what it was that drew them across the river.

  On a jaunty spring morning a week later, I am in a car at Torkham, the Khyber crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the six months that I have been in Pakistan, I have never been so excited as by this hackneyed rite of passage: going up the Khyber. I collect my entry stamp, look around me at the piles of used car parts (doors, gear sticks), at the women in their pleated blue burqas, at the wide open sky above my head. It is an eight-hour drive to Kabul, through well-watered plains fringed by the Tora Bora mountains, down a long avenue of trees lined on either side by the green orchards of Jalalabad, along the foaming brown torrent of the river, and up into the rugged hills that have guarded Kabul for centuries. I stare out of the window at the abandoned Russian tanks, the busy teashops, the Central Asian faces. I feel glad the road is so bad that the journey takes twice as long as it did in the sixties.

  In Kabul, I camp in a cold house with no hot water inhabited by ten French journalists. That night they take me to an ex-pat party in a smart part of town where there is beer, electricity and dancing. None of them want to come to Ghazni. ‘Mais la route, elle est bonne,’ they tell me (‘But the road is good’).

  Ghazni lies on the Kabul–Kandahar road, which was built with great fanfare by the US Army and is still practically the only monument in the country to their great democratic project. It gleams black and confident. We speed through quiet villages, past herds of goats moving across the brown hillside like shoals of fish. It takes two hours to reach Ghazni, a little faster than Emperor Babur’s estimation that ‘those leaving Ghazni at dawn may reach Kabul between the Two Prayers’.

  Sultan Mahmud’s illustrious capital is a small town now–even in Babur’s day it was merely ‘humble’–but its twin twelfth-century towers, sultan’s tomb and crumbling citadel (sacked by the British in the nineteenth century; today littered with rusting green rocket-launchers) reverberate plaintively with its fraught history. Even the Taliban have made their mark: they smashed up the town’s Buddhist statues in 2001.

  It is raining when we arrive. I sit in our four-by-four, with its cracked windscreen, transfixed by the Ghaznavid victory towers in the distance. ‘It is too dangerous,’ says Zebi, my driver, as I point out the sights. He points to the red spots of paint along the roadside: landmines. ‘Let’s go and see the police and get an escort.’ But the police chief isn’t in: they send us to see the Minister for Culture. The Minister is in Kandahar: try the Governor. And the Governor is in a meeting. His deputy, an overworked Tajik with ruddy cheeks, gives me a glass of green tea, a plate of sweets, and regrets that I need written permission from Kabul to visit Afghan antiquities. I am walking back down the Governor’s regal staircase, through a crowd of soldiers, turbanned petitioners and small tea-boys, when someone comes running after me. ‘I have facilitated your visit,’ says the deputy.

  He shows me into an enormous room, past a conference table around which fifteen veiled Afghan women are sitting in silence, to a sofa by the window. I sit down opposite six turbanned bearded men and a clean-shaven man in a beige two-piece suit. The one in beige must be the translator. But which is the Governor?

  I address the bearded men collectively in reverent Urdu. I explain my love for their great hero, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. I beg permission to visit the town’s ‘dilchaspe puranewale cheez’ (heart-pleasing old things; the word ‘antique’, I find out later, would have done just as well–it exists in Arabic). The man in beige bursts out laughing. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks in English. ‘London,’ I say. ‘I have been to London many times,’ he tells me. But it is only when he gets to his feet, walks languidly towards the door–and the men in beards scurry after him–that I realize: he is the Governor, the youngest in Afghanistan at ‘thirty-six’, he says (‘thirty-eight,’ the Americans tell me later). ‘And,’ says one of the French journalists on the phone from Kabul, ‘an obligatory date for every foreign female aid-worker.’ ‘Sultan Casanova of Ghazni?’ I ask. The Frenchman is not impressed. ‘Prends soin de toi,’ he says (‘Take care’).

  Weeks later I look through my photos from the trip to Ghazni. Photos of the Governor smiling flirtatiously at the Americans, at his maulvi advisers, at my camera, and even–in a clipping from a Paris news-weekly–at the French Defence Minister. ‘You are Sultan Mahmud come again,’ jokes the US Colonel to the Governor that afternoon during a meeting which I attend. ‘He seized slaves from India–you will swoop down and abduct ladies of the Bollywood-type.’ The Governor laughs coyly. ‘Most hated governor in Afghanistan,’ the Colonel tells me afterwards in private. ‘Well-connected dangerous guy. Will probably be President.’ The next day, when I follow the Governor during his tour of Ghazni province, the Colonel rings every now and then to give him (as he puts it) ‘very nice advices’. ‘An American stooge,’ says a Pashtun friend in Kabul. ‘The people don’t like him. But if the Americans want to make him King…’ He shrugs.

  Sultan Mahmud was famous for having a romance with a man: Ayaz, his slave. Pashtuns–Afghan and Pakistani–are notorious for preferring male to female love
rs. But the Governor of Ghazni, like most Pashtun men, denies that homosexuality is widespread. ‘You do revere Sultan Mahmud though, don’t you?’ I ask him that evening, and the Governor rises to the soundbite. ‘The Pakistanis and the Afghans love him for different reasons,’ he says. ‘We love him because he made our city great. They love him because he fought the Indians. Goodnight.’

  I spend three days in the Governor’s guesthouse. We are twenty at breakfast–the Governor and I the only beardless ones–round a table of goat in various stages of dismemberment. Ghazni is gearing up for its Independence Day celebrations and the Governor spends his days attending endearingly disorganized practice marches. I join the Americans in their heavily fortified but shambolic progress through the province, or pick my way round the town’s mined antiquities. I also meet several of the women who have publicly taken off their burqas–the aspiring politician, the TV presenter, the Education Department official–and are now, for the first time in years, politely asking men to treat them as equals.

  Still, when all twenty of the Governor’s guests go to the Police Stadium in the evening for atans, the first public concerts since the fall of the Taliban, there are, as usual in Pashtun society, no Afghan women. An adolescent singer is up on stage. Three hundred men are sitting in the dust. Ten men are dancing in a circle. The Governor’s bearded henchman, a former Taliban collaborator, lumbers on to the dance floor. Everyone cheers. Then a teenage boy joins the group. He stamps his feet. He twirls his hands. He flicks his hair. The crowd goes wild. ‘Time to leave,’ says the Governor.

  And time for me to leave Ghazni, I decide the next morning. I get a lift with one of the Governor’s friends to Gardez, capital of the neighbouring province. There, I am sitting having lunch alone in the women’s section of a roadside restaurant–a delicious meal of mutton and mint which I eat reclining like a king on a red velour bolster–when I am joined by ‘Intelligence’, in the form of an affable Colonel who interrogates me about the purpose of my visit. Like many Pashtun Afghans who have spent some time as either refugees or trainee Mujahideen in Pakistan, the Colonel speaks Urdu. ‘Take care of yourself, Bibi,’ he says as he leaves.