Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Then there was the ordeal of fighting their co-religionists. The Northern Areas is predominantly Shia–as is Kargil in India. ‘Wo bhi kafir hain [They too are unbelievers],’ a Sunni officer was rumoured to have shouted at a reluctant Shia soldier. ‘Shoot.’

  Killing Muslims has become a big identity problem for an army whose whole ethos is religious. Sikhs and Hindus are a far more comfortable target than the Muslims it was sent to fight in Kargil. So the Punjabi officers treat Shias as Kafirs, and lies are peddled to the young recruits, to make killing fellow Muslims bearable. During the journey from Skardu to Hamzigon, my shiny-cheeked escort draws a parallel with army operations in Waziristan: ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the militants killed there by the Pakistan Army were non-Muslim,’ he says. ‘So?’ I ask, amazed. ‘They were Russian, Spanish, Italian,’ he says; ‘internal army reports have confirmed this.’

  ‘How many soldiers are deployed along the Line of Control?’ I ask Colonel Adil now, but he flushes angrily: ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you.’ ‘How much of the border do you patrol?’ ‘We are still in an enemy situation with India,’ he says. ‘It is not good to discuss. Indian Intelligence probably knows everything, but nevertheless.’

  In fact, Kargil was an embarrassment for the Indian Army, because it had not acted on its own intelligence: that Pakistan was preparing to cross the Line of Control. It was embarrassing for Pakistan’s Prime Minister, too, who claims not to have been forewarned of the operation by the Chief of Army Staff–one General Pervez. Afterwards, when the Prime Minister tried to sack Musharraf, he instead staged a coup. By October 1999, the Prime Minister was in prison, and Musharraf was installed as President.

  Sitting in the mess, I tell Colonel Adil that I moved to Delhi soon after the Kargil War had ended. In 1999, India had its own fundamentalist politicians in power, and the rhetoric about Pakistan was morbid and belligerent. During my first week working for an Indian environmental organization, colleagues took me to see a play about Kargil, and I remember, in my innocence, being shocked by the jingoism. Then, on 12 October 1999, I arrived to find the office in commotion: ‘Pakistan has a new military dictator.’ I sat in the high brick building, watching green parrots swooping through the trees below me, and wondered what it must be like to live in the Pakistan of the Indian media: a grimly religious, violently black-hearted nation, apparently the opposite of everything that pluralist India stood for. ‘Nobody liked Pakistan in those days,’ I say to the soldiers on the sofa. ‘I think that’s one of the reasons I wanted to come here.’

  After a dinner of lamb cutlets and ‘pudding’–a set custard: relic of the Raj–I am shown to my room adjacent to the little-frequented mess mosque. Judging by the name on the breast pocket of the jacket which hangs like a reproach from a peg in the dressing-room, I am occupying Colonel Adil’s quarters. There is a pirated copy of Clinton’s autobiography on the shelf, and a book entitled Strategic Military Surprise: Incentives and Opportunities on his bedside table. I fall asleep thinking about warfare–about the Indus valley cities, which seem to have been undefended, without major fortifications or stores of weapons. What a civilization that must have been.

  The next morning, standing on a hill barely a kilometre from the Line of Control, I look down along the vertiginous river valley into India. In 1984, the French explorer Michel Peissel claimed that this place, Dansar, solved the mystery of the legend that Herodotus had recounted, of giant ants which dig up gold along the Indus, for the villagers who live here used to forage for gold-bearing sand from the burrows of marmots. Below me are artillery lines, curved stone walls built in overlapping crescents along the hillside. I wonder what scholars of the future will make of them, the stone circles of our war-torn generation.

  At Marol, a bullet-pocked hamlet used as a staging post for the Kargil War, the villagers point out the marks of Indian shells. For two years, while India bombarded the border with artillery, the villagers of Marol, Ganoks and Dansar (as Gambat Ganoks is now known) lived in a camp in Skardu. An hour’s walk away in India, the villagers of Darchiks and Dha live in sunny hamlets–the warmest in Ladakh–surrounded by fields that yield two crops a year and a superfluity of flowers of every colour. But in Pakistan, the border villagers are impoverished in every way by the new political situation. The ibex they used to hunt have fled because of the firing; they live in fear of the army; their crops frequently fail; there is no electricity (the contractor brought the pylons but not the wire); and they are forced to find work in Skardu as daily-wage labourers. They subsist at the outer edge of Pakistan, 100 kilometres from Skardu, a kilometre from India, without any rights as Pakistanis. (Baltistan is part of the disputed Northern Areas, and thus outside the Constitution: a limbo status useful to the authorities who can build dams and extract resources from the province without allowing Baltis to elect their own politicians to the National Assembly.)

  ‘How far is it to Leh?’ I ask the villagers, for the notion of travelling to India from here seems simultaneously natural and tragic. ‘Riding or walking it takes nine stages, four or five days,’ they say, and then add hastily: ‘That is what our elders have told us, anyway. We have heard the name “Ladakh” but we have never seen it.’ Until 1947, the villagers would load their fruit and vegetables into boats made of wood and animal skins (known as zakh in Balti) and take them along the river to Olthingthang (or Olding, as the army calls it). There they bartered apricots for supplies brought from Kargil, Leh or Srinagar. Ganoks itself was a ‘halting-place’ on the caravan route between Ladakh and Baltistan, where tax was levied. But now that Olthingthang is on the border, the local trade has vanished. Instead it is a long trek west to Skardu.

  The inhabitants of Ganoks once shared an unusual, Kalash-like culture with the villages on the Indian side of the border. These ‘Dard’, ‘Minaro’ or ‘proto-Aryans’ worshipped mountain fairies, and set themselves apart from their Balti and Ladakhi neighbours with flowery headdresses. As long ago as the seventeenth century, Ali Sher Khan, who ruled Baltistan, forced his people, including those at Ganoks, to convert to Islam. But the gorge along the Indus is so narrow that armies on the march bypassed the villages altogether, and this, more than anything else, kept old customs intact. Until 1947, women from Ganoks married into the Buddhist Dard villages now in India. With Independence, and the Kashmir dispute, came army-built roads. Concomitantly with that, the Buddhism of the Indian villages and the Islam of Ganoks–for centuries thin veneers over the stronger undercurrent of collective memory–hardened into habit. In India the villages have become a tourist industry, but in Pakistan they have faded from view.

  The fighting in Kashmir has severed the river road, and my journey onwards along the Indus is impossible. The only open border to India is in the Punjab, a three-day journey south. It is thus a long loop round: down to Lahore and up through Jammu to Srinagar. But this route does have advantages, for it allows me to trace the connection between the Indus valley cities of Harappa and Manda, and their Neolithic outpost in the Kashmir valley. It was an affiliation which made the ancient cities great; for in their ability to extract resources from a distance, and use the Indus as a vehicle of trade, lay their power.

  Harappa stands on the banks of the same defunct river as Lahore, the Ravi. In the early nineteenth century it was here that Charles Masson found mysterious seals, imprinted with the figures of animals and the symbols of an unknown language. In 1922, these found their match in those being dredged up at Mohenjodaro, and when Harappa was finally excavated, it became apparent that the cities were models of each other. Unfortunately, much of the brick at Harappa had been removed by colonial railway builders during the laying of the line from Multan to Lahore (they saw a pile of old bricks and used them as ballast). A similar thing happened three centuries earlier, when Muslims used the bricks to build a mosque, and a thousand years before that at Mohenjodaro, when Buddhists constructed a brick stupa. Layers of history dissolve into each other around the ruins of these ancient cities.

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p; Harappa, like Mohenjodaro, was inhabited by ‘hydropathic’ citizens who revelled in ‘water luxury’. Built on giant platforms to elevate them above the flood plain, their raised height made it difficult to channel water from the river, and thus numerous deep wells were sunk. At the centre of the city was an enormous public bath lined with red-painted bricks. Almost every household also had an indoor bathroom, with chutes made from terracotta pipes or channels built into the wall to carry the dirty water away. Every street was properly drained and sewage pits were regularly cleaned. (I wonder from which class the sewer cleaners of the Indus Valley Civilization were drawn: the modern-day ‘Bhangis’, or the ancestors of today’s Pirs and Syeds?) Neither Mesopotamia nor Egypt came close to the technical mastery achieved over water by the people of the Indus valley. Not until the Romans developed their spa towns two thousand years later, would any other people rival it.

  If the provenance and politics of the Indus valley people remain a mystery, much can be learned about them from their art, if art it was. There are small terracotta figurines of animals such as bulls, ibex and rhinoceros, and models of men and women. Pictures were engraved on tiny square and cylindrical clay and stone seals. These suggest a culture that valued, even worshipped, powerful women. One seal shows a naked woman fending off attack by two wild beasts. Another depicts a horned female huntress with a tail, attacking a tiger with her hands. Numerous clay figurines of full-breasted women in black fan-shaped headdresses and very short skirts were discovered–icon of a mother goddess, or perhaps a child’s doll. The most pleasing representation of womanhood, though, is the eleven-centimetre-high bronze sculpture of a dancing girl. She is naked but for some arm bangles and a cowrie-shell necklace; her hand sits lightly on her hip, her feet seem to beat time, and her face is an inscrutable study in self-assured poise.

  The dancing girl’s facial features are similar to those of the small bust of a bearded man found at Mohenjodaro. Both have full lips and a rounded nose–evidence, say some, that the Indus people were direct descendants of migrants out of Africa 80,000 years ago. Perhaps, as some historians have long argued, the Indus people were subsequently displaced from the valley by immigrant Aryans, thus becoming the non-Sanskrit-speaking ‘Dravidians’ of south India. ‘Meluhha’, the word that Mesopotamians used for people from the Indus valley, may be related to mleccha, the term that the Sanskrit-speakers used for anybody who could not speak their language–such as those in south India. But until the Indus valley script is deciphered, this theory remains just that–tempting but unsubstantiated.

  If only we knew what the Indus valley seals meant, they might provide a clue to the city-dwellers’ anonymity. But of all the provocative relics retrieved from the ruins, the script has remained a mystery. A century later, there have been some ingenious but unconvincing attempts to decode them. A scholar from Tamil Nadu in south India has argued that the script is related to his own Dravidian mother tongue. North Indian Hindu ‘historians’, wishing to prove that the horse-riding Aryans were indigenous to India, gratuitously adapted a seal of a bull to make it look like a horse (there is no evidence of horses in the Indus Valley Civilization). In Pakistan, one historian has compared the symbols with marks made by Muslim masons and even modern washer-people. In Hyderabad, I meet a translator who claims that the language is related to Sindhi–and to my delight, he writes my name in Indus valley script.

  Given the lack of clear evidence, many theories have sprung up about the Indus people’s provenance, beliefs and social organization. But if it is true that the Indus cities are a lost paradise, where even the workers lived in tidy, well-planned houses with good drainage and free access to sweet-water wells, then the contrast with modernity is shameful. In the countryside around Harappa, feudal lords live in whitewashed mansions, a constant rebuke to the straw huts of their workers. I stay in a village where the landowner has one well for his garden, and another for all three hundred sharecroppers. Then again, who fired all the bricks, and channelled the water, five thousand years ago? Did the Indus cities keep slaves, whose presence in the archaeological record has simply disappeared? At the kiln next to the archaeological site at Harappa I watch labourers loading raw grey bricks into the kilns and hauling pink ones from the ashes. Today, this is one of the worst-paid jobs in Pakistan; a quick route to indentured labour. I wonder if it was any different then.

  From the excavation site at Harappa it is a short walk down across a field of green spring maize, to the village of Harappa Basti where the modern potters live. There are mounds of broken pots here, walls of them, hills of them. The cities of the Indus valley used waste from kilns as damp-proof layers in most of their buildings. Centuries later, the Vedic texts describe ‘ruined places where one might collect potsherds for ritual purposes’. Perhaps it was the ruins of Harappa that the priests were describing.

  Harappa Basti is a poor village: everything from wheel-turned pots to blacksmithery to joinery, is done by hand, for there is no electricity. In a street particularly notable for the mass production of clay jars to be sold for a pittance in Lahore, is a man who makes a living reproducing artefacts from the Indus Valley Civilization. Muhammad Nawaz has little clay replicas of female figurines with their breasts stuck on like currants. There are striped clay tigers, elephants, and birds that whistle when you blow across them. Using his everyday wheel and kiln he can reproduce exact copies of Harappan pots–suggesting that the technology has not changed for five thousand years. Here in Harappa Basti, one could almost imagine that Harappa and Mohenjodaro never died; they just submerged themselves beneath the tides of oncoming cultures.

  If it is still impossible to say whether or not the Indus valley language has continuities with those in south Asia today, it is easy to observe non-linguistic parallels: in the wreck of these cities, the antiquity of Pakistani life is visible. The sculpture of the bearded man found at Mohenjodaro wears a shawl engraved with a trefoil pattern and encrusted with traces of red pigment–a garment similar to the red and indigo ajrak, a hand-printed cotton scarf worn by every Sindhi peasant. The boats plied by the Mohana boat-people of Sukkur, and the bullock carts driven by Pakistani villagers, are almost identical to those carved on Indus valley seals or moulded into terracotta toys. A version of the Sindhi borrindo, a hollow clay ball with holes that the musician blows across, was found at Harappa. Even Islamabad, Pakistan’s planned capital, echoes Mohenjodaro’s ordered grid formation.

  When I first went to Mohenjodaro–where the saline soil is destroying the bricks and threatening the ancient remains–I was prepared to see this non-Islamic culture as an anomaly in Pakistan. Replicas of the famous dancing girl statue are rarely to be found in the houses of the elite (the dancing girl, dressed only in bangles, does not do purdah). The lack of interest in the ancient history of this land seemed symptomatic of a larger malaise: a disregard for the simple pleasures of the desi, the local–cloth, pottery, art–that cuts across the classes in Pakistan.

  But when I reached Mohenjodaro, I changed my mind. My guide was a muezzin, the man who called the prayer in the local mosque. ‘Double-storey,’ he kept saying proudly as we walked round the excavated city. ‘Look. Double-storey house.’ He lived in a one-storey hut behind the museum. Walking through those wide streets, past houses, wells and baths, it was impossible not to feel the puzzlement and awe that archaeologists must have felt when these cities were suddenly uncovered in the 1920s, and that the muezzin was expressing now. The afternoon was casting long shadows over the third millennium BCE brickwork as he led me finally to the front of the complex where there was a line of modern clay water pots and a small brick mosque. I watched as he took off his shoes, performed his ablutions, and walked inside to call the prayer. It seemed a harmonious juxtaposition: the simple twentieth-century brick mosque (without even a loudspeaker) and the ruins of the cosmopolitan brick city that once traded cotton across the seas.

  Like all subsequent civilizations on the river, the people of Mohenjodaro and Harappa became rich b
y developing the technology of flood defence–burnt brick–which allowed them to exploit the alluvium that the river brought down from the mountains. By 7000 BCE farmers in the Indus valley had adapted the technology of agriculture, which arrived from the Middle East in the form of wheat and barley, to domesticate their own wild plants, sesame and aubergine. In Sindh, there is a legend that the date trees which grow here germinated from the seeds that Muhammad Bin Qasim’s soldiers spat out as they marched upriver in 711 CE. In fact, the date, Phoenix dactylifera, is one of the earliest Indus valley crops, cultivated here since before 5000 BCE. Acacia and neem trees are depicted on Indus valley seals, as is the peepul tree (Ficus religiosa), an object of worship today in India.

  The Indus people also domesticated the cotton plant, and it is this that made them prosperous: the export of cloth downriver and across the Arabian Sea to Mesopotamia and possibly to Egypt. The Egyptian pharaohs, Sindhis say, wore Indus cotton. Centuries later, the Babylonian word for cloth was sindhu, and in Greek it was sindo-n–as today, cotton was the Indus valley’s most important export.

  A crucial adjunct to Mohenjodaro’s prosperity was boat-building. The cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa were built in the wake of a ‘transport revolution’. Once they had mastered the technology, and learned how to use the river to export surplus goods, everything else followed. Maybe, as some in Pakistan maintain, Mohenjodaro ought to be known as Mohana-daro–the city of the boat-people. From the time of the Indus cities, until the advent of trains in the nineteenth century, the river was the spinal cord of all local trade, connecting towns and villages, resources and people that otherwise would never have met.

  The extraordinary reach of the Indus valley cotton trade has been proved beyond doubt by the seals found in contemporary Mesopotamian sites. Villages inhabited by the ‘Meluhha’ were located near Mesopotamian cities. What the Meluhha took home to the Indus valley in exchange is less clear. Bitumen, perhaps, to line the great bath; possibly copper. Another theory is that they imported wheat.