Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Alexander now began his fateful march on through the Punjab. He had probably been apprised by Puru of the fact that the Herodotean view of India was faulty; but if so, he kept it secret from his men. The army had crossed two Indian rivers already. By the time it reached the Chenab, the river had overflown its banks and water was racing across the surrounding fields, inundating the Greek camp, and clogging the hooves of every weary horse. The soldiers waded across the Chenab; then they forded the Ravi; and at last they arrived at the banks of the Beas. A fifth, angry Indian river was breaking point for Alexander’s homesick army.

  In Greece, where the streams dry up in summer, the sea is the patriotic motif of mythology. The monsoon-fed rivers of India were alien objects; even the rivers of Europe–those ‘navigable watercourses’, such ‘limpid’, ‘delicious’ waters–were wonders of nature for Strabo and Herodotus. Every Greek had a passion for the Nile, which they had recently colonized. When Alexander saw crocodiles in the Indus, and bean plants on its banks–similar to those he had seen in Egypt–he jumped to the pleasing conclusion that the Indus was the source of the Nile, and hence that the Mediterranean must be nearby (which gives some indication of his geographical confusion).

  Today the Punjab is a semi-arid irrigated landscape of monocultural crops; but in the fourth century BCE it was thick with forests populated by rhinoceros, tigers and snakes. Hanging from the trees like a curse was a ‘tree-pod’, ‘as sweet as honey’–the banana?–which gave the soldiers such bad dysentery that Alexander forbade his troops to eat them. Maybe morale would have held in the dry uplands of Afghanistan or Persia. But here in the boggy Punjab–where every forward march brought on foot-rot and every night the fear of snakebite, where fevers spread under a cloud of malarial mosquitoes–the endurance demanded was too great. Rumours began spreading through the camp about the true, vast nature of the land that Alexander was attempting to subdue. Sensing the mutinous feeling, Alexander called a meeting of the regimental commanders.

  The Greek king was young and impetuous, and in the past his men had loved him for it. Alexander knew the strength of that feeling, and with huge confidence, he rose to his rhetorical best. ‘It is sweet for men to live bravely,’ he told them, ‘and die leaving behind them immortal renown…it is through territory now our own that the Indus flows…the land is yours; it is you who are its satraps; the greater part of the treasure is now coming to you, and, when we overrun all Asia, then by heaven I will not merely satisfy you, but will surpass the utmost hope of good things each man has.’

  Unfortunately, Alexander’s army failed to appreciate the historical importance of this moment. There was silence. Eventually, a veteran called Coenus stood up to speak for them.

  Alexander was renowned for his irrational longings–for his desire, as Arrian put it so well, to do ‘something unusual and strange’–a desire which had carried him through Persia to the edge of India. The word Arrian used for this feeling was pothos. For Homer in the Odyssey, this nebulous word conveyed the sense of homesickness; for Plato, of erotic desire; but Arrian’s Alexander experienced pothos as a bid for heroic status. Pothos afflicted Alexander at critical moments in his journey–the most important, spectacular and disastrous of these being in India. He was ‘seized with a longing [pothos] to capture’ Pirsar; he was ‘seized with a yearning [pothos] to see the place where the Nyseans honoured Dionysus’ he had a ‘longing [pothos]’ in Taxila that one of these ‘Indian sophists who go naked…should live with him’. Finally, when he reached the Arabian Sea he ‘had a longing [pothos] to sail out and round from India to Persia’.

  It was this powerful word that Coenus now threw back at Alexander. In the Greek the word is repeated three times: the soldiers, said Coenus, longed to see their parents (if they were still alive); they longed to see their wives and children; and they longed to see their homeland. Coenus stopped speaking, and the audience erupted with emotion–some weeping with nostalgia, others raging against their cruel commander. The army had had enough of the Iliad. Like Odysseus’ men, all they wanted was to go back home.

  Alexander angrily dismissed his officers. The next day, he called them back to tell them that he was going on into India alone; and then he retired to his tent to sulk like Achilles. He sulked for one day, for two, for three: until he saw that the army would not be shamed into doing what he wanted, and so, like Achilles, he was forced to compromise. The gods came to his aid. When he offered sacrifices on the banks of the river, the omens for continuing the march into India were unfavourable–and his men shouted for joy.

  Before the army turned for home, they performed one last task for their leader’s reputation. Alexander had twelve huge altars built to the Olympian gods–‘as broad and high as the greatest towers’–and also some outsized mangers, horse bridles and huts containing eight-foot beds. According to Arrian these were ‘thank-offerings to the gods’ but Quintus Curtius gave a more cynical interpretation: Alexander’s ‘intention’, he observed, was ‘to make everything appear greater than it was, for he was preparing to leave to posterity a fraudulent wonder’. Perhaps the Greeks’ tower-like altars were a riposte to this land of ‘tower-like’ elephants. The Indus valley had defeated Alexander; but he wanted to give the impression that his retreat was a triumph.

  Alexander’s adventures in the Indus valley were not over, however. Refusing to march back home the way he had come–through Afghanistan–he announced instead that he wished to sail down the Indus to the sea (as Scylax had done). But this time, he would take no chances with the Indian river deities: and so, on the banks of the Jhelum, at dawn, he made sacrifices to the usual Greek gods. Then, going on board ship, he poured a libation into the river from a golden bowl, and ‘called upon the Acesines [the Chenab] as well as the Hydaspes…he also called upon the Indus.’ Only now, once Alexander had appeased the river gods of India, and the Indus had joined the Greek pantheon, was the fleet ready to depart.

  Unfortunately, Alexander’s soldiers–not being great navigators of rivers–were ‘struck dumb with amazement’ when they saw the rough and roaring confluence of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers. At least two longboats, with all on board, were lost, and Alexander himself was almost drowned. After that, the army had to fight the fierce Malloi tribe at the point where the Punjab rivers join the Indus–a reminder if any were needed that India was full of strong kings and unfriendly armies. It took the army nine months to half-sail, half-fight its way down the river. Some soldiers drowned, some were killed, and Alexander received a near-fatal wound in the chest. His men, believing him dead, despaired at being left without a leader in ‘the midst of impassable rivers’ with ‘warlike nations hemming them in’. Despite his grave condition, Alexander forced himself to appear before them on deck, and to raise his hand to show he was alive. Once again, the emotional army ‘wept involuntarily in surprise’ and sprinkled him with a confetti of ribbons and flowers.

  At last the army reached the sea–leaving in its wake a trail of cities named after the king, his horse or his victories, each with its own dockyard. At the river’s mouth, Alexander spent some time exploring the twisty river channels of the Delta, and made more lavish sacrifices. He knew that the salt water he could taste on his lips was not that of the world-encircling Outer Ocean–that he had not, in fact, reached the edge of the earth–but it was better than nothing. Alexander sailed out into the sea, and like Nestor in the Odyssey, sacrificed bulls to Poseidon. Then he threw the bulls, and the golden libation bowls, into the water. It was a typically ebullient climax to a campaign that had almost ended in disaster.

  Alexander died two years later in Babylon–some said of poison, others of fever (malaria, contracted in the Indus valley?). He died, it is said, just as he was preparing a campaign to Arabia, because the Arabs, despite being worshippers of Dionysus, refused to recognize Alexander as a god.

  Throughout his life, Alexander looked to his posthumous reputation. He took historians with him to India, and when they refused to eulogize him properl
y, he put them to death (this was the fate of Callisthenes). After his death, his obedient campaign historians wrote authorized versions of his Indian conquest, and this gave rise to a series of contradictory accounts, eulogistic or condemnatory, by subsequent Greek and Roman writers. These, in turn, fed the popular medieval Romances. And it was here, centuries after his death, that Alexander really came into his own–as an East-West pop-hero.

  During the Middle Ages, the Alexander Romance–a Greek prose story of his life that merged history, epic and fable–spread all over Europe, from Athens to Iceland, acquiring embellishments as it went. In some versions, Alexander went up to heaven in a basket and down to the bottom of the sea in a glass barrel. In others, he received prophecies from Indian talking-trees, lost soldiers to the Indus crocodiles, and was reprimanded for his ambition by naked Brahmin philosophers. The ballad-singers of medieval Europe loved Alexander’s foolhardy courage. In an age when the countries east of Constantinople had once again become a mystery, his peregrinations beyond the bounds of the known world tantalized all of Christendom. Even theologians read the Alexander Romance–and wondered if the ‘tree-pods’ described therein could possibly be the fruit that Eve gave to Adam in Paradise. Didn’t it say in Genesis, ‘the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden’? Was the Indus one of the rivers of paradise? The legend of Prester John, a fictional Christian ruler of a lost kingdom somewhere in the Orient, was inspired by this conflation of the Alexander Romance and biblical exegesis. In the letter he wrote to the medieval monarchs of Christendom, Prester John boasted of the River Indus: ‘Encircling Paradise, it spreads its arms in manifold windings through the entire province.’

  Startlingly, at the very time that Alexander’s conquest of the east provided a heroic model for medieval Christian kings and knights–intent on reclaiming the Christian lands from the Muslim infidel–Muslims also began to eulogize Alexander as a hero. In the Middle East, Alexander metamorphosed from a daredevil conqueror into a monotheistic preacher. Passing through Hebrew and Christian-Syriac translations into Arabic, a version of Alexander’s story apparently entered the Qur’an, where he appears as the mysterious character Dhul-Qarnayn, the ‘two-horned one’ (an epithet derived perhaps from the legend that Alexander was the son of the Egyptian ram-headed god Amon). The Prophet Muhammad was told in a revelation of Dhul-Qarnayn’s journey from the West to the East, where he ‘saw the sun rising upon a people…exposed to all its flaming rays’. As Allah’s ‘mighty’ agent on earth, Dhul-Qarnayn was readily accepted by early Muslims as a minor prophet–though some modern Muslim scholars now repudiate any link to the pagan Alexander.

  This Muslim version of the Alexander story was carried south to Ethiopia, and north to Mongolia. Horsemen in the Pamir mountains of Central Asia told Marco Polo how their steeds were descended from Alexander’s Bucephalus. The Persians whom he had conquered, made him the hero of the Iskandarnamah, their national epic–the son not of Philip now, but of Darius; no longer a worshipper of rivers but a ghazi, a holy Islamic warrior who led the way for Sultan Mahmud, Emperor Babur and countless others:

  Alexander…spurred by religious ardour, shouted, ‘Charge! For these are infidels, and if we kill them we will be ghazis.’

  And thus even now in northern Pakistan–in the very place where Alexander forded the Indus, worshipped it as a god, and killed the hill tribes–modern-day Pashtuns still claim him as their forebear.

  9

  Indra’s Beverage

  c. 1200 BCE

  ‘Unconquered Sindhu, most efficacious of the efficacious, speckled like a mare, beautiful as a handsome woman.’

  Rig Veda, c. 1200 BCE

  THE PEOPLE WHOSE coffins Alexander the Great burnt, once ruled the whole of north-west Pakistan, but their likely descendants today live in just three hill villages, 150 kilometres north of Pirsar. With their pantheon of gods, night-time harvest-dances and cowrie-shell headdresses, the Kalash have so far held out against history’s homogenizing tendencies. Instead, their distinctiveness has roused a chorus of noisy speculation. During the past century the Kalash have been hailed as Slavs by Russians, Alpine shepherds by Italians, Alexander’s children by Athenians, and Englishmen by maverick colonials (albeit in a story by Rudyard Kipling). Now the Pakistanis, following boldly where European anthropologists went before, have proclaimed them the key to India’s Aryan mystery.

  The search for the Aryans has unsavoury forebears. The Rig Veda, India’s most ancient Sanskrit text, enshrined the notion of the Arya: ‘noble’ Sanskrit-speakers pitted against their uncouth enemies, the Dasas. Subsequent Sanskrit law books and epics testify to the perpetual struggle to define who were Arya, and who were not. Traditionally, Indians have assumed that the descendants of the Arya can be found among the caste-Hindus, with Brahmins at the top of the hierarchy.

  In the late eighteenth century, East India Company officials began learning Sanskrit. A Company judge, William Jones, quickly discerned that Sanskrit was closely related to Latin and Greek, and by 1786, he was confident enough to declare that all three languages had sprung from one source. The logical corollary of this was that Indian and European peoples must be cousins. Europe had not yet borne the brunt of Darwin’s challenge to the biblical theory of Creation, and Jones clung to the belief that both Europeans and Indians were descended from the sons of Noah, and that Hebrew was older than Sanskrit.

  While the Creation theory was soon undermined, the scrupulous linguistic analyses of nineteenth-century Sanskritists gave credence to Jones’s theory of an Indo-European language group. But as the German Indologist F. Max Müller explained in 1883, many Europeans ‘would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India’. Instead, around the slender historical thread of Sanskrit’s origin was woven an entire mythology–of an ancient, fair-skinned, martial race of Aryans who invaded India on horseback and defeated the uncivilized natives. European reactionaries such as the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart, in an essay of 1826, had explained away the similarity between Indian and European languages by arguing that the Brahmins learned their language from Alexander the Great: the Sanskrit of the holiest Hindu books was ‘a sort of slang, or Gypsey jargon, (a sort of kitchen-Greek)’. As Max Müller himself commented, Stewart’s reaction showed ‘better than anything else, how violent a shock was given by the discovery of Sanskrit to prejudices most deeply engrained in the mind of every educated man’.

  During the twentieth century, Aryan theories took their ugliest turn, as Hitler’s Nazi Party appropriated the vocabulary of Sanskrit studies–the ‘Aryans’, caste purity, the Swastika (an ancient Indian symbol of well-being)–to endorse racism and genocide based on the myth of an Aryan master race of blond-haired Teutons.

  In India, anti-imperialist freedom-fighters struck back, asserting that the Aryans were indigenous to India. Hindus had always believed that their inherent nobleness was home-grown, and the British theory of their mutual Aryan ancestor entering India from the West–precursor of numerous subsequent invasions–was an insult to Indian nationalism. Some argued that Sanskrit was the world’s oldest language, and that mankind had originated from a homeland in the Himalayas. Hindu fundamentalists, almost as blinkered as their right-wing European brethren, began to assert that the Aryans had sallied west from the Ganges and colonized the world with their linguistic dexterity, even teaching the Aztecs their art. At the end of the twentieth century, during the rule of the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–who, as the ‘party of India’, use the ancient Hindu name for the country, ‘Bharat’, rather than the invaders’ neologism, ‘India’–archaeological material was concocted to prove that the Aryans were Made in India.

  There have been equally ingenious attempts to rewrite history over the border, where the vestiges of Sanskrit contained in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language, are routinely denied. A patriotic Pakistani has even shown ‘mathematically’ that Sanskrit was derived from Arabic. In
the post-colonial, partitioned subcontinent, ancient history is capricious.

  Every Aryan-origin hypothesis contains a grain of truth and a veritable Himalaya of speculation. Inevitably, every theory runs up against the same problem–the chasm that yawns between the material evidence of people in the second millennium BCE, and the inscrutable text which gave the world ‘Aryanism’ in the first place.

  The most ancient Sanskrit text in India, revered by all Hindus, nothing could be stranger or more obscure than the hymns of the Rig Veda. ‘Dark and helpless utterances’, Max Müller called them. They implore the gods for favour; they beg the deities of fire and water to listen to their cries. Modern Sanskrit scholars, struggling to interpret their obliquities, have understood them as descriptions of the ritual required to please the gods, as verbal connections between the earth and heaven, or as contests of eloquence between rival tribal poets: ‘Striving for the victory prize, I have set free my eloquence; let the god of rivers gladly accept my songs.’ But the Rig Veda is particularly resistant to scholarly penetration. It engenders two types of scholarship: politicized polemic and extreme academic caution.

  The Rig Veda was composed over many years, from approximately 1200 BCE onwards, and once completed, it was not written down. Rather, it was committed to memory–the sacred mode of transmission. Schools of priests were formed to learn the Rig Veda by heart, and the system appears to have been flawless. The Rig Veda as we read it today is a record of the passions and obsessions of Sanskrit priests three thousand years ago.