The Milindapanha also related the striking–though apparently apocryphal–story of how Nagasena gave an image of the Buddha to Menander. In fact, despite being an Indo-Greek (and thus familiar with the worship of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses) Menander did not encourage the manufacture of Buddha images: the Theravada form of Buddhism that he followed, forbade it. Nor did he imprint the Buddha’s face on his coins. Instead, he used the Buddhist symbol of the dharmachakra, the ‘wheel of transformation’, to signal his religious affiliation.
Menander, Azes and Kanishka were kings who patronized Buddhism and promoted its dissemination. All of them were aware of the fact that they were treading in the shadow of a far greater king–one who had united not just Uttarapatha with Buddhist doctrines, but the whole of India. No Buddhist visitor to Swat–Chinese, Kushan or Indian–ever forgot the influence of Emperor Ashoka. The Chinese pilgrims described how Ashoka’s stupas, said to number 84,000, were found all over India. They demarcated the contours of his pan-Indian empire.
The Buddha’s ashes were still warm, in the fifth century BCE, when his disciples divided him up–cremated corpse, urn and coals–into ten neat parcels. One parcel was allocated to each of the ten nascent Buddhist states, whose kings had them entombed in stupas. Two hundred years later, Ashoka broke these stupas open, and had the relics redivided into tiny portions which were distributed all over India. Where before there were ten stupas, now there were thousands. With this action Ashoka achieved two things. He made a public declaration of how far his writ as king could stretch. And he single-handedly turned Buddhism from one of many competing sects into a national, exportable religion.
Had Ashoka not taken up Buddhism with the zeal of a convert, Buddhism would probably have faded away–just as its founder predicted. Instead, Ashoka–who became the overlord of the biggest-ever Indian empire, and was probably weaned on stories of the great Greek Sikunder (Alexander), and who could have remained just another bloodthirsty ruler–did something unusual.
In the tenth year of his reign (254 BCE), having defeated all his enemies, Ashoka toured India, preaching non-violence to his people. Then, after his 256-day round trip was over, he began putting up monumental stone slabs all over his empire, inscribed with a message to his people. Part sermon, part confession, part self-promoting advert, Ashoka’s fourteen edicts make startling reading, with their hard-headed combination of humility, patriotism, imperial violence. Ashoka urges his subjects to take up the law of dhamma (the Buddhist version of the Sanskrit word dharma, meaning ‘good works’) and give up frivolous festivals (women, in particular, are prone to performing ‘vulgar and time-wasting ceremonies’). He asks them to stop eating meat–then confesses to his own household’s consumption of ‘two peacocks and a deer, though the deer not always’. He expresses ‘deep remorse’ for conquering the eastern province of Kalinga, but warns the forest people that ‘the Beloved of the Gods has the power to punish them if necessary.’ And he reveals his omniscience:
At all times, whether I am eating, or am in the women’s apartments, or in my inner apartments, or at the cattle-shed, or in my carriage, or in my gardens–wherever I may be–my informants keep me in touch with public business. Thus everywhere I transact public business.
It was a form of control, a way of letting them know that Ashoka was watching them.
Ashoka’s semi-Buddhist, semi-authoritarian edicts were a legislative work of art. But they have puzzled historians, who have identified in them some archetypal Buddhist positions (such as the criticism of Vedic sacrifice and superstitious habits) and simultaneously an absence of standard Buddhist doctrines (most notably, the concept of Nirvana). Was Ashoka adapting Buddhism to his own non-sectarian purposes? Or did his edicts reflect the form that Buddhism took before it was systematically codified?
Like the stupas with which he liberally adorned India, Ashoka’s inscriptions staked out his empire. In the core provinces, the message was inscribed on pale pink sandstone pillars. On the periphery–in the lands ruled by regents or princes–the edicts were scratched on any handy rock, sometimes on three adjacent boulders, at crossroads or near large settlements. The message was abbreviated in some places, lengthened in others, but the theme was the same: Ashoka’s subjects were as one within ‘my vast domain’. Standing at Shahbazgarhi on the road from Taxila to Swat beside one of the northernmost carvings, running my hand over the faded lettering, it is extraordinary to think that this same, personal, pious, generous and intimidating message resounded here on this grassy hillside, as it did in the jungles of Bihar, the deserts of Rajasthan and along the Coromandel coast.
Before Ashoka, no Indian king had thought of carving public messages to their people ‘in stone’, as Ashoka himself pointed out, ‘so that it might endure long and that my descendants might act in conformity with it’. Prior to Ashoka, language in India was barely even a written affair–the entire corpus of the Vedic religion was predicated on memorizing, not writing down, holy Sanskrit verses. Indeed, it was Ashoka’s colossal carving project that introduced writing across the Indian subcontinent. ‘All modern Indic scripts’–bar that as yet undeciphered script used five millennia ago in the Indus valley–descend from Ashoka’s Brahmi.
Subsequent Buddhist tradition has vaunted Ashoka’s quasi-sacred status: his humble ancestry has been assimilated to that of the Buddha’s own family; Sinhalese tradition has his consecration falling exactly a hundred years after the Buddha’s Nirvana; and a legend was even formulated showing the Buddha meeting (and endorsing) Emperor Ashoka in a previous incarnation. In fact, Ashoka’s family appears to have hailed from Gandhara, and during his life he spent much time there–serving as viceroy in Taxila when he was a prince, and paying the town particular attention as emperor; he may even have died there.
For Ashoka, whose own capital was in east India, the ‘peoples on the western borders’–with their dangerous proximity to the still-threatening Greek and Persian empires–required careful management and frequent admonition. Ashoka mentions the Greeks at several points in his edicts, and his behaviour suggests that he was hypersensitive to goings-on in the Indus valley, where these foreigners had infiltrated. His grandfather had won back the lands along the Indus from Seleucus, Alexander’s viceroy, and the treaty they signed included the exchange of women and envoys. Ashoka would thus have grown up with first-hand experience of Greeks (the ladies in the harem included Seleucus’s daughter). In the edicts, he emphasized his special friendship with five foreign kings in the West: Ptolemy, Magas, Alexander, Antigonus and Antiochus. The Greek connection was a source of prestige and power. Even so, he did not want another Seleucus harrying his empire. Guarding the frontier along the Indus river was essential to the integrity of his India.
The edicts, therefore, went up in strategic places in the north-west: two in Ashoka’s frontier lands, at Jalalabad and Kandahar, and three in Uttarapatha, at Taxila, Mansehra (on the Kashmir road) and Shahbazgarhi. In the rest of India, the language of the edicts was Ashoka’s home dialect of Magadi, and the script was Brahmi (probably inspired by Greek, and invented specifically for the edicts). But at Jalalabad they were written in Aramaic; at Kandahar (the oldest known inscription) in Aramaic and Greek; and at Mansehra and Shahbazgarhi, in Kharoshti script, a local version of Aramaic.
Even the key concepts of Ashoka’s religious propaganda were explained in Hellenistic and Zoroastrian philosophical terminology. The Buddhist word dhamma became eusebeia in Greek (meaning ‘piety, loyalty, reverence for the gods and for parents’). In Aramaic it transmogrified into ‘Truth’ or ‘the conduct of the good’, reflecting ideas in Zoroastrianism.
Both trade and religion needed writing in order to spread beyond the borders of India, and it was Ashoka who brought these three elements together. The purest form of Sanskrit was spoken in Uttarapatha, and now Ashoka employed masons from the area to inscribe the edicts all over his kingdom (scribes from the north-west signed their names in Kharoshti on the edicts in southern India).
As a result of the attention which Ashoka paid to the Indus lands, the world west of the river re-entered the political and religious sphere of mainland India and the Buddhism which had begun there. As at Butkara, it was Ashoka’s religious, administrative and architectural structure that other kings built on, and his reputation that they vied with. Above all, it was Ashoka who recognized how important Uttarapatha and the frontier regions were, both for the strategic defence of his kingdom and for the spread of his imperial and religious dogma.
Ashoka’s legacy endured for centuries after the emperor’s death but it could not last for ever, and if there were any Buddhists left by the time Sultan Mahmud reached Swat, there are none here today. Standing amidst these ruined and abandoned stupas, the past seems forlornly distant.
There is, though, one facet of the Buddhist empire that is still in robust existence. Late one evening, driving through Mingora bazaar, I notice a teashop full of young men, crowded around a television, watching Laila Majnun, the Indian musical film of an old Arabic love-story. Just as Uddiyana’s masons copied vine leaves from Roman terracotta jars, so it was Buddhist animal tales that travelled west along the Silk Road and into The Arabian Nights, and now it is Indian actors singing Indian songs, who are acting out an Arabic tale of forbidden love for men in Pakistan. That night, those transfixed Swati faces seem to attest to the enduring eclecticism of the Silk Road.
And so the next morning, it is the modern denizens of the Silk Road whom I set out to meet. Today the looms of Swat weave polyester instead of raw Chinese silk, but vibrant merchant networks still endure here–albeit in a nebulous and illicit way.
For twenty years following Partition, Swat remained a semi-autonomous princely state, ruled by the Wali, a hereditary leader. Then in 1969, Pakistan’s first military dictator, General Ayub Khan, absorbed Swat into his Republic. In order to soften the blow, the Dictator and the Wali cut a deal: tax-free status for thirty-five years. That time has now run out, but every time Pakistan’s Finance Minister tries to reimpose taxation, Swat takes no notice. It is not just for its mountain peaks that Swat is called the Switzerland of Pakistan. The region has become a scenic factory for luxury goods–anything on which the down-country duty is exorbitant. Lubna’s Wonder Wax for Ladies is made in Swat, as is lipstick, and Fair & Lovely skin-lightening cream. That’s the legitimate stuff. Then there’s the black market goods, the smuggling.
In Mingora’s main bazaar I have tea with Salman, a man with fair hair and green eyes from north Waziristan. Salman keeps his wife in gold chokers and silken burqas by driving untaxed cars very fast from Afghanistan, through the Tochi pass to Bannu, and across the Frontier’s patchwork of taxed and tax-free states. Smugglers, the police chief in Jalalabad told me (but Afghans are forever badmouthing Pakistanis), will pay thousands of rupees to rent a ‘diplomatic gate-pass’ from members of the Pakistan embassy in Kabul. With this precious documentation, vehicles can cross the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan unchecked, into Waziristan, or any of the seven other tribal agencies along the border. ‘I have a network of drivers in each agency,’ Salman explains to me, and gestures to his phone, lying on the tea-stained table: ‘With mobiles we are in constant contact to avoid the police posts.’ He sips his tea thoughtfully for a moment, and then looks up: ‘Are you free next week? If you were sitting in the front seat, nobody would stop me.’
Although there are rigorous checkpoints on the roads out of Swat, the police cannot staff the rivers. And while it would be hard to float a car upwards, there is little to stop goods being transported downstream. Timber, in particular, has been a lucrative export out of Swat since at least the second millennium BCE. Early in the morning, in a small riverside town famed for ‘the beauty of its ladies’, I meet an old man with a white cap, shaved upper lip and religious air. The sweet-smelling wood in the timberyard Aziz runs is smuggled. It is brought down by river, at night, from the thick forests of upper Swat. The wood is strapped together in twenty-foot batches. To the top are attached four inflated tractor inner tubes: lifebelts for the pilots, who steer the wood along the fast-flowing river. The ice-cold journey takes three or four hours; and every year some of Aziz’s men drown on the job. ‘Very dangerous work,’ he says. ‘You understand?’
Pirating, too, is big business in Pakistan. In Swat it is not just lookalike Kalashnikovs and fake Indian DVDs that are magicked through the mountains. The latest luxury items to take to the Silk Road are passports. Scans and electronic systems have made things difficult, but not impossible, for passport pirates; and Afghan identity papers are easy to recreate. Aziz has a cousin who recently reached London by uncertain means–and with all the wrong papers. Threatened with deportation, he rang Aziz and asked him to arrange an Afghan identity certificate and driving licence. Neither Aziz nor his cousin had ever set foot in Afghanistan–but ‘in Pakistan,’ says Aziz, ‘everything is possible.’ Four days and five hundred rupees later, Aziz picked up the papers ‘from my contact’ and sent them to London. The Swati dropout became a refugee from the Taliban.
Pakistan as a whole has such a laissez-faire attitude to taxation that none of the smugglers I meet are the least abashed when discussing their trade. To my surprise, they open up their illegal operations to my queries with a blasé calm–only afterwards do they display their anxiety. By the time I leave Swat, smugglers are inundating my phone with fretful messages asking me to change their names and details.
One of the most lucrative and damaging forms of smuggling is in art history. British and French explorers r art from the Frontier Province during the colonial era, to museums or private collections (via smart art shops in Piccadilly). But there is still much left to pilfer. The Archaeology Department does its best to preserve the plethora of Buddhist statues and relics that remain in this valley–but such is the fear of illegal antiques trafficking in Pakistan that most of the statues excavated after Partition have been locked up in museums. Inside the stupas are empty niches where the Buddhas used to stand; outside, a flock of young boys sell fake Gandharan coins or pocket-sized statues. Those images that remain–on immovable rocks–bear the marks of the Taliban’s Sultan Mahmud-style vandalism: the faces bashed away, the bodies dismembered. Clustered along the river–and thus the modern highway–Buddhist carvings in Swat make easy prey for angry Muslims.
During the first few weeks I spend in Swat, every Buddhist carving I see appears to have been hideously, recklessly disfigured. It is only towards the end of my time here that I come across the one Buddha in this entire valley that is still untouched. It stands in a narrow gorge north of Butkara, high above the river, its back against the hillside, accessible only through groves of fruit trees, along the edges of wheat fields, past straw-roofed houses which smell of wood smoke. Carved fluidly into pinkish-yellow sandstone, it is a seven-metre-high Maitreya Buddha–the Messiah-like Buddha of the future, whose cult probably began here in Uddiyana. The Buddha’s legs are crossed, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes closed in tranquil meditation. Visited only by shepherds, the statue thus endures as a rare memorial; a glimpse of what the valley must have looked like in the days when the kings were Buddhist, when caravans of silk passed through the valley, and when Chinese monks braved the dragons and sorcerers of the Indus river to visit Uddiyana’s holy places.
In 2007, local Taliban groups finally took control of Swat, under the direction of Maulana Fazlullah, son-in-law of the radical preacher, Sufi Muhammad. One object of puritanical attack was the last intact Maitreya Buddha: it was dynamited, and its head and shoulders drilled away. The fanatics, then, have largely succeeded in obliterating Swat’s pre-Isla
mic, Buddhist past.
8
Alexander at the Outer Ocean
327 BCE
‘The Indus is bigger than any river in Europe…This was the river which Alexander crossed with his army, and so entered India.’
Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, c. 145 CE
ALMOST TWO THOUSAND years ago, Plutarch described the meeting between Alexander the Great of Macedon and an Indian boy, ‘Sandracottus’. This child, Plutarch attested, never forgot that the foreign king came ‘within a step’ of conquering India. In fact, Plutarch’s story was a wilful exaggeration of Alexander’s prowess. In 327 BCE, Alexander had barely subdued the Indus valley, India’s namesake. Two years after he returned from India to Babylon he was dead. The string of cities called Alexandria which he had founded in eastern Persia and western India were washed away in the region’s many rivers or repossessed by the locals; the soldiers he had stationed there marched home in long foot-columns; and his empire was divided up between his companions. So imperceptible was Alexander’s impression upon India that none of the residents thought his visit worth recording in such literature as survives. Instead it was young ‘Sandracottus’–Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka’s grandfather–who by 305 BCE had won back all the land along the Indus that Alexander had taken. It was Chandragupta Maurya who accomplished what Alexander had failed to do, and united India as one empire.
But in Greece, nothing could eclipse the exploits of the ‘world conqueror’. Alexander was too adept at manufacturing his own myth. And India was too marvellous. The tales his companions told on their return–of the country’s gold, elephants and rivers–were the gloss and burnish of the Alexander legend.
Empires of the Indus Page 22