Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  For Robertson, this could mean only one thing. As he saw it, all the ‘essential components’ of the Afghan Kafir religion tallied with the Rig Veda–their Indr to the Vedic Indra, their Imra to the Vedic Yama. This led him to speculate that the Kafir religion represented an early ‘protest movement among tribal Aryans’.

  Linguistics was on Robertson’s side. The Kafirs in Afghanistan spoke an archaic form of Indo-Iranian, and the Kalash language, like that spoken in the rest of Chitral, is one of the most ancient in the Indo-European linguistic group–older even than Rigvedic Sanskrit. From this, linguists have guessed that the Kalash were living in Chitral at least from the second millennium BCE–perhaps before the Rig Veda was codified. Maybe the priests with their sacred hymns moved on towards the Indus, leaving the Kalash behind to become, as the linguist Georg Morgenstierne put it in 1932, ‘the only existing remnants of ancient Aryan religion not affected by literary traditions’.

  As I sit watching three Kalash women hoeing a maize field, like exotic crested birds in their orange and black headdresses, I find that I am already being seduced by the easy parallels that can be drawn between Kalash and Rigvedic culture. But there are, unsurprisingly, serious gaps in the theory. The Kalash today have no special reverence for agni (fire), and they consider the cow, sacred to the Rig Veda, unclean.

  But there are constant reminders of how central the river has been to both societies. During the spring festival, held after the snow has begun to melt and the rivers to swell, Kalash women are allowed into the upper valleys, and then a young girl is made to invoke: ‘O Khodai, Supreme God, lead the stream to flow in its normal course. Don’t let it jump here and there and bring floods.’ The word for God is borrowed from the Muslims, yet the prayer itself is more reminiscent than anything else in modern Pakistan of the incessant Rigvedic plea: ‘Thou…didst stay the great stream…at their prayer didst check the rushing river…make the floods easy to cross, O Indra.’

  A century ago, the Kalash were still performing sacrifices to the river god Bagej: animals were burnt on the banks of the river and their heads were thrown into the water. Even in the drabber twenty-first century, it was the river that Fazlur chose as the place for his wife’s conversion to Islam. It may never be possible to prove a direct cultural or genetic inheritance between the Kalash and the Aryans; but the effect of these people’s shared riverside habitat has not changed with the centuries. Water still exerts its power on the imaginations of the people who live here, just as it did on the minds of the Rig Veda’s authors. This legacy is witnessed all over Chitral and Gilgit.

  From the Kalash villages I wind north on a tour of Chitral’s ancient grave-sites, with Mir Hayat, curator of the local museum. A bustling young man with kohl-etched eyes, the curator sees Aryanism all around us. As we drive, he counts off Chitral’s plethora of ‘Aryan artefacts’ on his fingers. His colleagues in Peshawar, he tells me, have even sent bones dug up from the ‘Aryan’ graves to America for DNA testing–they hope to prove a genetic link between the dead Aryans and living Kalash.

  We reach the village of Ayun, a Muslim settlement that neighbours the Kalash villages but is outside the shadow cast by the mountains and thus weeks ahead in the agricultural cycle. (In Rumbur and Bumboret the wheat was green; in the flood plain of the Kunar river, the terraced fields are a ripe sun-gold.) ‘As soon as we begin excavating,’ the curator says, ‘the local people start looking for treasure.’ Clay pots were discovered in the 1920s, which were later linked by a Cambridge archaeologist to the arrival of ‘Indo-European-speaking’ people in the second millennium BCE. Ever since then, every farmer in Ayun has dug up his fields in search of pots to sell to antique dealers.

  We have come to see a villager who has just unearthed five such ‘Aryan’ ceramics. Usually he keeps them locked away beneath his bed, but at Mir Hayat’s insistence, he brings them outside and lays them in the sun. ‘There was an even bigger one,’ he says, ‘but I gave it to an American man last summer.’ He picks out a small greyish pot from the pile. ‘This is for you,’ he says, as he places it in my hands. ‘I can’t take this,’ I say–alarmed at yet more of their archaeological heritage being casually misplaced. But the curator whispers to me in English: ‘Give it to the museum. This man never lets us take his pots. Say thank-you nicely.’ And so, for about twenty minutes, I am the owner of a supposedly three-millennia-old piece of pottery; such is the perilous state of archaeology in Pakistan. ‘I’ll put your name on the acquisition card,’ says Mir Hayat, and grins.

  There are more signs of archaeological depredation at the site of the old Kalash fort a few miles away upriver, where Mir Hayat’s school-friend lives. A combination of professional and private excavations, Mir Hayat tells me, has revealed that this site has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, ‘at least since the time of the–’ ‘…Aryans,’ I finish for him. Mir Hayat rewards me with a gracious smile. ‘You are a very fast learner, Ellis.’

  While Mir Hayat waits for us outside, his friend leads me inside his traditional Chitrali home of mud-smeared walls, heavily carved black wooden beams, three young wives, and many more young children. In the main living area, fetchingly illuminated by the sunlight which streams through the large hole in the roof, is a big round pot that looks as if it was fired last week. In a grain store there is another pot buried beneath the mud floor and filled–I put my hand down and feel around–with decaying pomegranates.

  The Archaeological Department does its best to preserve the excavation sites, but it is already involved in one court case and litigation is lengthy and expensive. Ten years ago, I am told, villagers would never dishonour graves by stealing from them. But where archaeologists lead, international antique smugglers, Pashtuns from down-country, and the astronomical prices they pay, follow.

  The next day, serenaded by plaintive local love-songs, we drive north along the deep red and brown gorges of the Mastuj river. Parwak is a small village in the mountains wedged between the Afghan border and the high mountain pass leading to Gilgit. It is said to be on the heroin-smuggling route and is thus considered by the archaeologists–even those from Peshawar, where everything is contraband–to be ‘dangerous’. It is a dramatic place, one of those sudden plains that open up like an unfurling fist in a landscape rendered claustrophobic by mountains. To the west is Tirich Mir, the highest peak in Chitral, which the linguist Morgenstierne considered a candidate for Meru, the sacred mountain of the Hindu scriptures.

  The graves, dated to 1600 BCE, were found just beyond the junction of the rivers and they prove, says Mir Hayat, that the people who lived here were goat-and stone-worshippers. One group of bodies was buried in a circle around a large boulder; a skeleton was found with the skull of a goat next to its head. Across the river, high on a hill facing the mountain of Tirich Mir, is an ancient stone circle. Since Mir Hayat was last here, however, the boulders have been dynamited into pieces by villagers looking for gold.

  From here, Mir Hayat points out the plateau of Parwaklasht, where the archaeologists found another stone circle-lined grave. To reach it, we cross the river again, and climb up a goat path to the plateau, which now rises above us like the mud wall of a medieval Muslim fort. When the people who built these stone circles lived here, the river ran across the plateau; since then it has eroded a ravine hundreds of feet below and nobody can subsist here any more.

  Because of the absence of modern settlements, Parwaklasht is the first place I have been where my Rigvedic imagination can run wild. As we stand on the plateau, looking around us at the villages which crouch like fecund animals at the point where mountain streams join the valley, the songs of the Rigvedic poets suddenly make sense. For nine months of the year, the rivers here are frozen solid, but now the streams cascade downwards in energetic white spurts. The ‘waters are set free’, the poets sang, like cattle released from their pens, like the milk of cattle, like sperm.

  The rivers having pierced the air with a rush of water, went forth like milk-cows…exuber
ant with their full udders…their water mixed with butter and honey.

  We solicit from you, Waters, that pure, faultless, rain-shedding, sweet essence of the earth, which the devout have called the beverage of Indra.

  The Rig Veda, like the Bible, evokes a land flowing with milk and honey.

  Thanks to the floods, I have a chance to think about Indra’s special beverage all week. When Mir Hayat and I reach Mastuj, the village just north of Parwak, we find that the road ahead up to the Shandur pass has been washed away. ‘You cannot go onwards to Gilgit,’ announces the curator over lunch. ‘You will have to come back with me to Chitral.’ ‘What about going north to the Baroghil pass?’ I suggest, thinking of the grave-site at Brep, but he shivers, plainly thinking of the heroin smugglers. As we are sipping tea and considering this dilemma, a man appears. He is Yusuf, the local Engineer Inspector. He has a wife in purdah, a house here in the village, five sons of varying ages who can ‘protect me’, and a cherry orchard.

  Engineer Yusuf and I arrive at his house to find his sons on the roof, picking the red fruit and loudly counting the days (approximately seven) until the annual Shandur pass polo match between Chitral and Gilgit. Five thousand Pakistanis and VIP guests and foreign dignitaries are expected (says the eldest), ten thousand (corrects the Engineer), twenty thousand (confirms the youngest)–and the road still isn’t open. For fifty-one weeks of the year, Mastuj exists in the dark amnesiac part of Pakistan’s national consciousness; for seven glorious days the VIPs and Pashtun tourists will make it feel like the centre of the world as they trundle past in jeeps on their way up through the mountains.

  Everywhere I go that week, the Engineer’s sons come with me: north to the graves at Brep, or south again to Parwak. One evening, we get back to the house to find Engineer Yusuf squatting by the fire in the kitchen and looking–for him–quietly excited. His men have built a temporary bridge over the flooded road, and now at last the Pashtun tourists can drive up to the Shandur pass with their wads of rupees and illicit bottles of gin and packets of marijuana; the VIPs, of course, will be coming by helicopter. That night the boys roll up their sleeping carpets, pack some roti, and the next morning we set off up the mountain with a kiss from mother.

  At the top of the mountain road, we overtake a long line of men and cows: ‘Shepherds from the village of Laspur,’ says the Engineer. ‘During the summer they live by the lake with their cow and goat herds.’ Lake? Migratory shepherds? My Rigvedic ears prick up. Lakes, according to the Vedist Harry Falk, are key to Rigvedic topography–especially lakes that sedentary pastoralists live beside; above all lakes where temporarily resident shepherds tend cows for a living. Moreover, the hillside is luminous with strokes of colour, there is snow on the ground still, and the streams are running like milk. We round the last bend in the road, and then the lake comes into sight. What an incongruous pastoral scene it is. Cows are grazing on the reeds at its edges. Clouds drift incandescent across the lapis-blue sky.

  The Shandur pass is 3,734 metres high, so the air is thin, and I am breathless and dizzy by the time I make the short journey up from the shores of the lake towards the cluster of stone huts on the green and purple hillside. Four shepherd boys are hitting a ball with a miniature wooden polo stick when I arrive; an old woman in a yellow shawl and Chitrali cap is sitting on the steps of her house in the sun. One of the boys, a twelve-year-old in a Royal Mail sweater, shows me around his home. Identical to all the others on the hillside, it rises like a little heap of brown sugar from the square lines of the stone boundary walls. The two main rooms (a kitchen and a storeroom) are circular, and roofed with wooden branches filled in with a cone of gorse and heather. A one-gallon ghee tin is the chimney. In front of each hut is a verandah made from grey and black stones, as speckled as the goats. And adjacent to each verandah is a Rigvedic cow-pen. (‘They have stepped over all barriers like a thief into the cow-pen.’)

  As I am wondering whether it is the lack of oxygen that is encouraging these allusions, the shepherd children gather round and quiz me. ‘Where is your husband?’ they ask as I ask them about their religion. They tilt back their heads and demand: ‘Where have you left your children?’ as I speculate about the ‘Shamanism’ reportedly practised here as late as the 1950s. ‘Did your husband,’ they say, ‘give you permission to come here?’

  They tell me that their cousins are playing for the Laspur team. ‘Have you always lived here in the summer?’ I ask. ‘We used to live down there’–a boy with a green Pakistan cap points towards the lake, ‘but we moved up after the maindak jumped into the milk.’ Maindak? They mime for me. A frog. I sit down on the wall of the cow-pen, pull out my copy of the Rig Veda, and as the boys go through the contents of my bag, I read:

  When the heavenly waters came upon him dried out like a leather bag, lying in the pool, then the cries of the frogs joined in chorus like the lowing of cows with calves.

  The thin air is making me obsessive. Soon I’ll be brewing soma and conducting asvamedhas with the polo ponies.

  Soma is probably local to these parts–it is said to be made from a mountain plant–but the polo ponies at Shandur, being large Punjabi imports, do not resemble those given in sacrifice by Vedic-era humans in northern Pakistan. Chitrali ponies, on the other hand, though too small for polo, might have made good votive offerings: the horse skeletons at Dir were barely ‘135cm up to the withers’, small and just right for pulling chariots, like the tough ancient breed from Siberia.

  For three days I watch from the hill as the lakeside fills up with men: local villagers, Pashtun touts, Punjabi holidaymakers and even a handful of foreign tourists. Engineer Yusuf surveys the fresh white helicopter circles his men have painted on the grass, the newly trimmed seating and the long line of free-standing toilets, with obvious satisfaction. At night there is Chitrali dancing. By day the rumour goes round: the President is coming. I bump into friends of mine from Swat, seven men who have driven up with a box of plucked chickens, a luxury tent and ten bottles of Peshawar’s finest smuggled vodka.

  But I soon tire of polo, even if it is a local sport, played on the most archaic form of transport. Once the first match is over, and I have witnessed the dancing on the pitch and happy male cheering, I say goodbye to the Engineer and his sons, fold up my tent, and buy a seat in a jeep taking villagers down into Gilgit.

  Ever since I crossed the Lowari pass into Chitral, the landscape has been growing by turns lusher and starker. We alarm a herd of feral cows with huge horns as we accelerate down through a meadow of flowers. The turquoise lake at the head of the Gilgit valley breached its banks this summer, and the glinting waters are still lapping at the houses in the flood plain (‘the wide dispersed waters that shine with many colours, the honeyed waters’). At the crest of the hill above the lake, the jeep stops and we climb out to appreciate the beauty and destruction that the river has wrought. The jeep driver stoops down to pick wild flowers from the verge to tuck beneath his white woollen cap. From here to Gilgit, the road along the river is perilously balanced between the water on one side and the rock face on the other.

  Gilgit is part of the disputed Northern Areas, a mountainous land that was marked on Soviet maps as part of India. Like Pakistan’s tribal districts, it has tax-free status, and the usual combination of timber smuggling and car running–but without the clannish Pashtun code. Many of the people are Ismailis, devotees of the Aga Khan, who tells them that purdah is unnecessary, ‘two children are enough’, and that they must ‘think in English, speak in English, dream in English’. Here you feel a different sphere of influence: less Afghanistan and Iran than China and Central Asia.

  The jeep drops me in the village of Goopis. From here I hitch a lift in a small battered car–smugglers again; I pity the buyer they are scamming with this one–up into the narrow, sombre valley of Yasin.

  According to the Peshawar archaeologists, this valley was one of the migration routes of the Aryans. There have been no excavations here, but I have come across a refere
nce to ancient stone circles in a book by John Biddulph, who was Britain’s Political Officer at Gilgit in the late nineteenth century, at a time when this whole area was an unknown and therefore disconcerting place for the colonial authorities. In 1880, Biddulph wrote a brief paragraph on Yasin’s ‘remarkable stone tables of great antiquity’. He drew no pictures or maps of their location; and since then there has been no archaeological study of their meaning and history. As we drive towards Yasin village, my only fear is that, as at Parwak, they will already have been destroyed.

  In Yasin, I am told to report to the Magistrate. But the Magistrate strokes his beard and says, ‘We just blew up the stone circle to find the gold inside.’ ‘No!’ I say, distressed, though hardly surprised. Happily, he is joking. Or partly joking. He takes me that evening to an orchard on the banks of the river where there is a stone circle–larger than the one at Parwak–with a tree growing in the middle. The stones sit deep in the earth, shoulder to shoulder as Biddulph described. I count. Seven stones are missing–removed to build the new Sunni mosque, so I am told when we locate the landowner.

  The next day I hire a jeep and drive up the valley almost to the border with Afghanistan, asking comically in every village we come to for pattar ka chowk (‘stone roundabout’: the best I can do in Urdu). Just north of Yasin village, where the River Tui meets the Yasin, there is a Muslim shrine with ibex horns above the door (a practice dating from Neanderthal times 40,000 years ago, when graves were decorated with ibex horns). Nearby, there are three distinct, though diminished stone circles, an ancient cemetery perhaps. The river in this valley flows south-east, which according to the Satapatha Brahmana is the very best location for a Vedic burial ground.

  I climb the hill that rises steeply above the river. On the plateau at the top, stone circles spring out from the craggy terrain and disappear again when I draw near, like teasing children. Twice the ‘circles’ turn out to be three or four large boulders, where the gaps in between have been filled with smaller stones. I see several huge flat table-stones; boulders that have been split in two; stones that have been upended; and on one rock, a carving of an ibex with a curly tail and horns almost as long as its body. Most distinctive of all is a standing stone, cut roughly on the top and both sides, a small flat boulder at its foot like a table or sundial, with the shadow sharp upon it. Twenty years ago, when the German archaeologist Karl Jettmar visited Gilgit, he found that people still had memories of a time when such stones were sacred. Once the entire village, men and women, would come to the hillside to drink and dance beside these stones ‘in complete sexual abandon’. The standing stone was the seat of the protecting spirit of the ancestors, and the smaller stone at its foot was used for carving up the sacrificial goat. There used to be many such stories about the worship of stones in these remote and independent valleys.