Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  When Alexander set out from Greece to conquer the world, his most urgent priority was to better the exploits of his rival, Emperor Darius the Great of Persia, who had invaded ‘India’ two centuries earlier. None of the campaign historians Alexander took with him to India mention Darius, but they were certainly aware of him. A century before, the Greek historian Herodotus had called Darius the discoverer of ‘the greater part of Asia’. He had be come so, Herodotus explained, by despatching a sailor called Scylax to navigate the Indus from Attock (where the Kabul river joins the Indus) downstream to the sea. Scylax, who thus mapped 1,400 kilometres of the Indus, became the first Westerner to describe ‘India’, and gained a reputation as ‘the bravest man in early Greek history’. And Darius, meanwhile, annexed the Indus to his empire.

  For Darius, conquering the Indus valley was a lucrative venture. As Herodotus attested in his Histories, the Indus valley was engorged with gold; the natives wore clothes made of ‘tree-wool’, and they paid ‘a tribute exceeding that of every other people, to wit, three hundred and sixty talents of gold dust’. This was enough to spur on any army. It was from Herodotus that Alexander would have heard of the Nile-like crocodiles in the Indus, and it was Herodotus who first compared the Indians and the Ethiopians: both have black skin, he wrote, and black semen. The Alexander historians appear to have written Darius and Scylax out of their accounts in order to disguise how closely Alexander was following in the Persian king’s footsteps.

  But for an army trying to conquer a country, Herodotus was part of the problem; he had conceptualized India as the Indus valley: a river-shaped country that ran east to the Ocean on the edge of the world. This is what Alexander the Great was expecting during the eight years and 18,000 kilometres it took to reach India from Greece. He had no maps, his men spoke no local languages. He relied entirely on luck, local guides–and the gods.

  After reaching Jalalabad (in eastern Afghanistan), Alexander split his army. Hephaestion, his lover, marched due east through the Khyber or Michni pass towards the Indus. But Alexander went north up the Kunar river valley–ostensibly to subdue the already famously intransigent northern hill tribes–and across what is now the Nawa pass into Pakistan. I want to follow Alexander’s journey from Kunar–until recently the home of goat-revering pagans–into northern Pakistan; but I have also had my fill of illegal border-crossings. For a change, I decide to apply for permission.

  On a hot day in May, I dress in my most floriferous shalwar kameez, buy a copy of Aurel Stein’s book on Alexander’s northernmost Indus battle, and make an appointment to see the Dictator’s army spokesman. Sitting in an austere air-conditioned room at army headquarters in Rawalpindi, the cantonment town adjacent to the Pakistani capital, I explain to the moustachioed General before me that I am travelling up the Indus from its mouth to the source, and telling the history of the land that is today Pakistan: ‘I now want to follow, on foot, the route of Alexander the Great from Afghanistan, along the Indus to Pirsar,’ I say. ‘Pirsar?’ he asks. ‘The huge rock above the Indus where Alexander fought the hill tribes,’ I say, smiling at the absurdity of what I am about to ask: ‘To get there I need to cross the Pakistani border at the Nawa pass.’

  Disconcertingly, the General smiles back. He compliments me on my ‘excellent’ Urdu and ‘gorgeous’ dress sense, and then he rings the secretary of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATA] in Peshawar. We both know that the Nawa pass is not an official crossing-point–but never mind that: ‘A tribal escort will be waiting.’ We don’t discuss how I am going to get through Kunar, or what the Afghans will say when I turn up unannounced at the border. ‘Alexander came here two thousand years ago,’ he jokes as I leave. ‘Today it is Alice.’ ‘We have different objectives,’ I reply, disconcerted by the parallel with Alexander Burnes, who hubristically compared himself with Alexander the Great (and accurately, for both were on imperialist missions). ‘But how old are you?’ the General asks; and I am forced to confess: ‘Twenty-nine.’ ‘The age that Alexander was when he came here,’ the General says, and laughs.

  My second trip to Afghanistan is the quintessence of bad timing. It is early summer, and the annual cross-border terrorism is just beginning. The day I enter Afghanistan via the Khyber pass, there is a huge suicide bomb in a mosque in Kandahar. The significance of this event is immediately apparent, for it marks the return of the Taliban, with a movement more violent than the first.

  In Jalalabad, I stay with Hafizullah, a man my age whose house was a weapons’ depot during the war. That night, we drink white wine together in his hujra with the local chief of police, and the smell of tobacco flowers rises from the garden. ‘My guards will take you to Kunar tomorrow,’ says the policeman. ‘You’ll be at the Nawa pass by sundown.’ I ring the Secretary of FATA. He says the escort will be waiting.

  But the next day the policeman has changed his mind. ‘Early this morning there was an attack at the Nawa pass,’ explains Hafizullah. ‘Al-Qaeda tried to take the border post, and our men shot an Afghan and an Arab. The attackers carried sophisticated weapons. I’ll speak to the Foreign Ministry in Kabul.’

  The people in the Foreign Ministry find my journey distasteful; they decide that it is part of a conspiracy by the Pakistan Army. ‘We have no clearance for a foreigner to cross at Nawa,’ they say. ‘Who authorized it?’ ‘We Afghans don’t trust the Pakistanis,’ says Hafizullah to me patiently. ‘Maybe the Pakistan Army wants to make trouble. We Afghans will look bad if you are killed in Kunar. You told them that you were going to be there today. Don’t you think it is a coincidence that the attack happened on the same day?’ Nevertheless, Hafizullah rings a friend from the province, a religious-looking man with a big red beard. ‘You will go with him in a local taxi,’ he says. ‘Al-Qaeda only blow up four-by-fours in Kunar. How do you look in a burqa?’

  The third day dawns. I wait in Hafizullah’s house for the man with the beard. I pace up and down in my burqa. Eventually, in the afternoon, a car draws up outside the house. It is Hafizullah’s cousin. ‘Hafizullah is in a meeting with the US Army,’ the cousin says. ‘The Americans say Kunar is a war zone. They say you are crazy to even try and go there. They want you to go back to Pakistan.’ The cousin drives me to the border. The next news I hear from the region is that Al-Qaeda have shot down a Chinook helicopter, killing sixteen US soldiers.

  It is Hephaestion, then, whom I follow into Pakistan.

  Back in Peshawar, the Secretary of FATA sits in his office surrounded by turbanned petitioners looking pleased by reports that Al-Qaeda has attacked the border post–so pleased that he packs me off to the Pakistani side of the Nawa pass that day, with a contingent of fifteen khassadar (guards) in their distinctive black uniforms. We drive north through the tribal agencies, areas that foreigners need permission to enter, parallel with the Durand Line, past abandoned Afghan refugee villages and the former training camps of the Afghan warlord Hekmatyar. It is barren country but the hills that Alexander marched through loom blue and tempting in the distance. The tribal escort stop for lunch and prayers in a small village; and at the Malakand border, they hand me over to the guards from Bajaur. ‘Sikunder-e-Azam-wali,’ they say to each other on the radio: the Alexander the Great girl.

  ‘How is Queen Elizabeth Taylor?’ the boys from Bajaur ask me as we wind up into the hills. When we get to the pass, I leave the guards on the road and climb up along the barbed-wire fence to the top of the ridge that divides Pakistan from its neighbour, from where I can look down into Afghanistan at the snaking Kunar river. But the fifteen-man escort becomes collectively nervous. The youngest recruit is sent up to bring me down. Ten years ago the Nawa pass wasn’t even manned. In today’s political climate, they are all very jumpy.

  They lead me to a building where lunch is waiting, and there we sit together on the floor, feasting hungrily on mutton rice, yoghurt and apricots, before driving in convoy down the unpaved road on the route that Alexander took through Bajaur. It is harvest time, and men and women are in the
fields, tying wheat into piles. The fields are boxed in by pink and grey drystone walls, which lead to mud-smeared houses. Beside each house is a tall stone tower. ‘What is that for?’ I ask the guard sitting next to me. ‘Shooting enemies from,’ he says.

  I spend that night in Bajaur’s small capital, in a generic colonial rest-house, where I am visited by the local historian over dinner. He tells me that it was here that Alexander was hit in the leg by an arrow, and a little further on is a village, Sikundro, now a paramilitary base, the name of which means ‘Alexander Stopped’ in Pashto. ‘We Pashtuns admire Sikunder-e-Azam very much,’ he says. ‘You do know that Alexander is our ancestor?’ I nod politely.

  Between here and the Indus, Alexander campaigned more viciously than anywhere else in Persia or India. The kings of the Punjabi plains were models of royal courtesy; but the hill tribes chose not to abide by the invaders’ rules. They fought bitterly, ran away through the hills if defeated, and refused to be held to the terms of Macedonian treaties. During the six months that he spent marching from Jalalabad to Pirsar, Alexander massacred as many locals as he could get his hands on. During my journey to Pirsar–a 7,000-foot-high hill on the banks of the Indus, inhabited only in the summer months by shepherds–I will traverse a landscape that in the fourth century BCE bore witness to the Greek army’s systematic brutality.

  In the morning I am taken–on the instructions of the FATA Secretary in Peshawar–to visit Hakim Ayub. ‘His forefathers have been making majoon since the time of Emperor Babur,’ the Secretary had said. ‘The knowledge came from Greece originally. Men use it for…’ he cleared his throat, ‘that thing, if you don’t mind.’ I blushed, and checked later with a knowledgeable friend: ‘Local Viagra,’ he said.

  Powerful aphrodisiacs–along with wine, figs and demands for sophists–were chief among the things exchanged by Chandragupta Maurya and Seleucus Nicator, Alexander’s successor. For the ancient Greeks and Indians, an effective aphrodisiac was gold dust, literally. Unani medicine–practised by hakims, Muslim doctors–was developed in Baghdad during the eighth century ‘from the ashes of the Alexandrian library’ where, thanks to the patronage of the Caliph Harun ar-Rashid, the medical knowledge of ancient Greece was fused with that of Arabia and probably also India. The medical system is still in use today. Hakims are respected members of the community all over the Islamic world, and in Pakistan they do what madrassahs do for education–provide an alternative to the feeble state system.

  The fifteen tribal escorts and I arrive at Hakim Ayub’s house and crowd noisily into the room where he is mixing up his potions. Out on the table is a pestle and mortar, a set of scales and a bunsen burner; the wall behind is lined with wooden cabinets filled with packets, pots and bottles. Hakim Ayub, a courteous man with a bruise on his forehead from years of vigorous namaz, sits the entire tribal escort down on his workshop benches and gives everybody a crystallized amla to eat. This small green fruit has been liberally rolled in silver leaf, and our lips shimmer with the luxury of it. His grandson Aurangzeb allows me to taste the odoriferous arak that they brew in the yard outside. Then the Hakim gives me the recipe for his sex potion.

  He unwraps packets, unscrews pots and announces ingredients for my benefit in his resonant Pashto. Aurangzeb, who speaks Urdu, is my enthusiastic translator. ‘Testicles of the water hog,’ he says, ‘deer’s navel, intestines of the baby camel, sparrow’s brain, lapis lazuli, silver leaf, ground seed pearls, sandfish, pomegranate oil, honey and…’ ‘Is it not haram?’ I ask, and Hakim Ayub looks truly shocked. ‘Halal, it is all halal,’ he says, and mixes in a liberal dollop of hashish butter. I stare at the testicles of the water hog in disbelief; turn over the deer’s navel (musk?) in my fingers. Hakim Ayub adds a pinch of gold dust and the potion is replete: a brown, shimmery lump in the bottom of the pestle. He divides it neatly into two plastic pots. ‘One for you,’ he says, ‘and one for the Governor of NWFP.’

  ‘Only eat a little and you will be laughing and happy,’ he says as I leave with the district police (we are going back into the ‘settled’ areas). ‘Too much and you will become intoxicated.’ ‘Unani means Greek,’ he calls as I wave goodbye from the police van. ‘Alexander would have eaten majoon on his journey. Emperor Babur loved to eat majoon from Bajaur.’

  It is true. During his early incursions across the Indus, Babur only drank wine–it was brought down to Bajaur from the hills by ‘Kafirs’ (non-Muslims) in a goatskin; but a few days later his corruption was complete when he tasted some ‘well-flavoured and quite intoxicating confections’. This majoon had such a remarkable effect on the future Emperor of India that he was unable to attend the evening prayers. Over the next few weeks, as he crossed the Indus for the first time and explored the Punjab by boat, Babur ate majoon made by Hakim Ayub’s forefathers almost every night.

  Bundled into the police van like a parcel, I see the district of Dir pass by in a blur. ‘I’d like to walk, please,’ I say to the police. ‘Walk?’ they echo. ‘Nobody walks. We have instructions to deliver you to Swat.’ ‘But I want to follow Sikunder-e-Azam’s route on foot,’ I explain, ‘by walking, like his soldiers.’ I ring Aslam, friend of the friends I stayed with in Mingora, who has agreed to walk the four hundred or so kilometres with me from Bajaur to Pirsar. ‘Please ask them to let me go,’ I say. ‘We will leave you in Barikot,’ the police retort, ‘after you have signed the register. In Pakistan you must sign the register every day. You must always inform us faithfully of your whereabouts.’

  Before reaching Swat, Alexander had first to traverse its river (called the Guraeus by the Greeks). According to Arrian, a Roman senator who wrote a history of Alexander’s conquests in the second century CE based on accounts compiled by Alexander’s friends Ptolemy and Aristobulus, ‘He crossed it with difficulty, both because of its depth, and because its current was rapid, and the rounded stones in the river proved very slippery to anyone stepping on them.’ On the other side, he defeated an army of seven thousand Indian mercenaries, built two wooden forts, and then marched south to besiege the hill-top fort of Barikot (where, it is said, the chieftain’s wife visited him that night, keen to conceive a replacement for the son killed by a Greek catapult).

  By now, the local tribesmen had grown weary of fighting Alexander, and so they slipped away in the middle of the night, fleeing east over the Karakar pass and across the ‘rough and mountainous country’ to Pirsar. Alexander went after them, and that is the way Aslam and I are going today, whatever the policemen say.

  Aslam, a lean, reserved man from a village in the far north of Swat, speaker of Urdu, English, Farsi as well as the hill dialect of his village, father of eleven children and repository of knowledge botanical, historical and social, is waiting for me in the Barikot bazaar. I sign the police register, promise not to leave town without due notice, and then Aslam and I sit down in a teashop and study the misinformation of our Pakistani maps, furnished by army headquarters in Rawalpindi (and almost worse than having no maps at all, as Alexander did–large stretches of our journey along the Indus are through apparently blank patches). I also have a map of Alexander’s route prepared by the British governor of NWFP, Olaf Caroe; and the charts of Pirsar drawn up by Aurel Stein in 1926 following his trip there (with one hundred porters, thirty bodyguards, four army revolvers, an Afridi surveyor, the blessing of the Wali of Swat and the financial backing of the colonial Government of India). It was Stein who proposed that Unasar and Pirsar, small mountains on the banks of the Indus, might be the ‘Aornos’ of the Greeks–the site of Alexander’s last major siege, and the symbolic climax of his campaign for world domination.

  Before we set off down the country road to the Karakar pass, Aslam pulls a white sheet-like chador out of his bag for me to wear. I tie it over my head and tightly around my hair, nose and mouth so that only my eyes are showing. ‘You should walk behind me,’ Aslam says. ‘And don’t walk too fast. It would be best if you could pass as a Pashtun lady.’

  The path to Karakar is ston
y, unmetalled and quiet, and during the three-hour walk we see only a shepherd with his flock, one teashop, and some stranded truckers in oil-smeared pyjamas. It is getting dark when we reach Karakar village. None of the houses have electricity–but the mosque is brightly lit. ‘What piety,’ I say, and Aslam looks proud. We leave the road and climb the hill above the village. ‘How far to the pass?’ Aslam asks a villager who is collecting firewood. Only an hour, he tells us, but the problem is the other side; it will take three hours to reach another settlement. He gestures back down the valley to a long low house bordered by green terraces. ‘You can stay there with my in-laws,’ he says.

  I had assumed we would be camping, but Aslam explains that this would be too outlandish. ‘Pashtun hospitality and protection is everything,’ he says. ‘You can stay in the house with the women. I will sleep with the men in the hujra.’ And so it is. For the next fifteen days we walk through places that neither of us has seen before; and every night a stranger gives us food and shelter.

  The house we are taken to that night is large, with a wooden verandah flanked by blackened pillars made from tree trunks, on which hub-caps have been hung as trophies. The eldest brother devotes his retirement to renovating the local mosque, the middle brother works in Saudi Arabia, the youngest at the port in Karachi. The economy of this family is typical of the hill villages–part remittance from abroad, a little local farming, and some work in Karachi if you can get it. Aslam is sent upstairs to the hujra, and I sit down below with the women, who cook our dinner outside, over a pine-cone fire. But they speak no Urdu, and I no Pashto. It is their husbands and brothers, serious bearded men in white Sunni caps, who quiz me on my status. ‘Who is this man you are with?’ ‘If you are married, where is your husband?’ ‘How many children do you have?’ There is some confusion about the object of my journey. ‘Sikunder who?’ they ask me.