Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The son of a local apple farmer, Mumtaz was shown the carving after months of methodical searching by a shepherd. It is, he says, located high up on a wooded hill in northern Kashmir, incised into a rock face, and thus immoveable, even for India’s Archaeological Department. Pleased by my enthusiasm for his discovery, he offers to take me there himself: ‘You can stay in Sopore with my family,’ he says. ‘When shall we set off?’

  We leave Srinagar the next morning, taking the bus north through carefully tended apple orchards to Sopore, where Mumtaz persuades a friend to drive us on to the village of Bomoi. The friend drops us where the road ends at the edge of the village, and we walk the rest of the way along a dirt track and up into the hills.

  It has rained hard this summer and the earth is heavy and dark. The afternoon light trickles through the leaves of the thin Kashmiri trees, illuminating the wooded slope where women in headscarves are gathering herbs. Moving slowly through the luminescent sheen cast by the trees, it is as if we have swum down below the surface of a light-dappled pond into another, more serene world, far away from jihadis and men with guns. But this is an illusion. ‘This area was a hotbed of Mujahideen,’ one of the villagers says later.

  The women of Bomoi village ignore us but the menfolk appear to have the afternoon off; as we climb, all able-bodied males between the ages of seven and twenty-seven drop what they are doing and follow us steeply up through the trees to the rock face. There must be a crowd of fifty men and boys by the time we get to the stone, all of them wearing the Kashmiri pheren, a full-length woollen shirt-cloak. The boys speak little English, but it is the cricket season now, and from the babble of Kashmiri that surrounds me, entire phrases of BBC commentary emerge fully-formed: ‘Flintoff is coming in to bowl,’ says one twelve-year-old. ‘It’s a bouncer,’ says another. ‘Next time,’ says Mumtaz, ‘we will come during a cricket game, and then nobody will take any notice.’

  The pale-brown rock face looms above our heads and even today is distinct from the rocks around it by being clear of lichen and moss. The carving itself is deeply cut but faded, and the best view is had from the glade of trees below, which leads Mumtaz to speculate that the carving might have been the seat of a priest or priestess. Nothing I have seen in northern Pakistan, or will see along the Indus in Ladakh, is quite like this surreal, dreamlike tableau. It is a busy, even frenzied drawing, a hallucinatory hunting scene. There are human stick-figures wearing masks or armour, running to and fro. Towards the middle are two splayed animals or animal skins. On the left, and down the right-hand side, are circles of varying sizes, each made up of concentric rings. Connecting all these elements are long carved lines.

  Little is known about the lives of Palaeolithic humans, less still about the meaning of their art. Archaeologists and art historians have argued about the cave pictures found in Spain and France–the lithe paintings of bison and deer that inspired Picasso and which have been carbon-dated from 15,000 to 32,000 years old. Masked human figures have been interpreted as shamans or oracles, and broad correlations have been drawn with the hunting rites of tribes elsewhere in the world, in which the skin and bones of the dead animal are laid out on the ground as a means of symbolically regenerating the hunted beast. Both these elements–the masked hunters and the skinned beast–appear to be represented in the Bomoi carving, and advocates of the school of Palaeolithic history which has it that human society all over the world at this time was dominated by magic-led hunting rituals, would undoubtedly read this carving as a depiction of shamanistic rites. But Mumtaz, the villagers and I all have other, competing theories.

  With its rayed discs and human hunting scene, the carving at Bomoi is clearly related to that at Burzahom, and this suggests a local continuity of culture over a period of 20,000 years. Standing under the trees, trying to make out the faded carved lines, I wonder if there is any connection between the Palaeolithic stone-carvers and the Dards, who still hunt ibex and are the earliest known inhabitants of the north-eastern Indus valley–or whether it is absurd to draw correlations between Palaeolithic and modern humans, who, even if they do have a common genetic inheritance and inhabit the same landscape, might not necessarily share the same culture. If there is an answer, it lies in Ladakh. Dard groups still exist north of Sopore along the Kishanganga river, but the most distinctive Dard villagers are those next to the Indus on the Baltistan–Ladakh border, and in the Zanskar valley, a remote Indus tributary in central Ladakh.

  As Mumtaz and I are examining the stone, the children crowd round us. Bemused by the strange woman who has marched straight through their village to look at some ancient scratches on a rock, one of them says drolly in English: ‘Very big rock. Very solid rock.’ ‘Very important rock,’ says Mumtaz; and he asks the boys in Kashmiri: ‘Well, what do you think it shows?’ There is some conferring. ‘They are saying,’ translates Mumtaz, ‘that it was carved by an Englishman one hundred years ago.’ Mumtaz points to the top circle: ‘That is the sun [aftab]. That is the moon [zoon]. And that,’ he indicates the circle on the left with rays sticking out like legs, ‘that is a samovar. A teapot.’

  I laugh, but with my usual bias to things aquatic I have developed a different theory. Through the trees, the landscape below glints with water, reflecting the colours of the valley’s fecundity. ‘What is the lake in the distance?’ I ask Mumtaz. ‘Wular lake,’ he says. ‘So,’ I say, ‘the concentric circles are pools of rippling water. The rays coming out of them are their tributaries. The three large circles represent lakes, and the smaller circles are ponds. This is Wular,’ I point to the top circle, ‘and that is the Dal lake,’ my finger moves to the middle circle. ‘No, that would be Manasabal,’ says Mumtaz; ‘the bottom one is Dal perhaps.’ ‘And this’–my finger traces the long curved line that bisects the picture horizontally from side to side–‘is the Jhelum river.’ ‘Ingenious,’ Mumtaz says, ‘but I think it is more likely that these three circles are the rising sun.’ ‘Last ball of the over,’ says a boy behind me.

  Months later, when I am back in England, Mumtaz writes to tell me that soon after I passed through Sopore, the archo-astronomy team from Mumbai visited the carving with him and proposed an even more ambitious theory. ‘The circles are a comet moving through the sky,’ Mumtaz writes, ‘and simultaneously the lakes that were formed in Kashmir after the comets crashed into the earth.’ The research is still at an early stage but the archo-astronomers are trying to establish whether the Wular, Manasabal and Dal lakes were indeed formed by meteor impact; and they are searching the astronomical record for meteor showers from Palaeolithic times. They are sure that the carving was drawn by humans who hunted and foraged their food from the surrounding hillsides, much as the women are doing now.

  On the other side of the rock face from the carving is a small cave where it is thought that Palaeolithic humans may have camped. From there, Mumtaz, his three village friends and I walk down through the trees and along the spine of the hill. Only the children are following us now. We jump over an almost invisible stream and walk up towards a Neolithic burial mound where the villagers have found stone mace-heads, axes and sling balls–and where Mumtaz once looked up from excavating to see five wolves staring at him with big yellow eyes. From the brow of the hill I turn and see the children standing below us, ranged in a forlorn line along the stream we have just crossed. ‘Why have they stopped?’ I ask. ‘They won’t follow us beyond the village boundary,’ Mumtaz says.

  At dusk we reach the adjacent village. There, houses are being rebuilt following the Kashmir earthquake–using old-style timber rather than concrete, for modern building techniques have proved fickle in this tectonically unstable land. As we move along the edges of the flooded fields, the village men talk of Kashmir, unburdening themselves of their disappointed life histories. They speak bitterly of the Pakistani Mujahideen: ‘Nowadays we are not so deceived by their false promises of freedom,’ one man says. Nor does the Indian state offer much hope; nobody in India, they say, wants to employ a Kashmiri
Muslim. The only advantage that Kashmiris have is the law which forbids Indians from buying land in the valley: ‘So even poor people here have a house and farmland.’

  They press us to stay the night in the village but Mumtaz refuses. Back in Sopore, his mother is cooking our supper.

  That night, I discuss the rest of my journey with Mumtaz. From here I will travel east, following traces of Palaeolithic culture into Ladakh, the high altitude desert bisected horizontally by the Indus. Mumtaz, who knows so much about Kashmiri history, has never been to neighbouring Ladakh. The Indo-Pakistani dispute has its own internal reverberations within India, and Ladakhis, who are predominantly Buddhist, no longer trust their Muslim neighbours. So the next morning I bid Mumtaz farewell, and with my pockets full of apples from his orchard, travel on into Ladakh alone.

  Cut off from India for six to eight months of the year, Ladakh was opened up comparatively recently to the army (1962), and to tourism (1974), only after it acquired strategic importance for India on account of two international border disputes: one with China to the north and the other with Pakistan to the west. How completely it exists at one remove from the Indian mainstream was illustrated clearly when L. K. Advani, India’s right-wing Hindu Home Minister, visited Ladakh in the late 1990s. ‘What is the river here?’ he asked his hosts, who told him that it was the Senge Tsampo–using the local Tibetan name for the river; the Sindhu, they added, using the Sanskrit appellation. ‘The what?’ Advani asked; then somebody explained: the Indus. Back in Delhi, perhaps to compensate for his poor geography, Advani founded the ‘Sindhu Darshan’, an annual Hindu pilgrimage to Buddhist Ladakh in order to purify the river with the waters of the Brahmaputra and Ganga before it flows into Muslim Pakistan. It is a mission of the extremist Hindu groups with which Advani is affiliated to reclaim ‘western India’ from Pakistan; and so, in the Home Minister’s hands, the Indus–which the rest of India had largely forgotten–became ‘a symbol of nationalism and national integration’, evocative of the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers during the Kargil War and the loss of life and land at Partition.

  If Ladakh’s prehistory has been bowdlerized by politicians, it has also been neglected by historians. Numerous scholars have written about Kashmir since Kalhana first put his thoughts down on paper; but the ancient history of Ladakh has been very little studied. During the past sixty years since Independence, the Archaeological Survey of India has made only cursory examinations of Ladakh’s Neolithic and Palaeolithic settlements, and there has never been a comprehensive survey by a trained archaeologist of the thousands of prehistoric rock carvings all along the river. Thus historians are still unsure when humans first arrived in Ladakh, where they came from, and how they relate to the two distinct groups that survive here–the Dards and the Tibetans.

  Twenty years ago, one isolated clue was published in an academic journal: a rock carving of a giant made on the banks of a small Indus tributary near Kargil, that district of western Ladakh inhabited by Shias. The new giant was similar to the fifty or so carvings found on the banks of the Indus at Chilas in Pakistan–a large human figure with outstretched arms and a small round head. But intriguingly, it also had both a long penis and a child upside down in the womb–not an easy topic to discuss with polite, purdah-observing Muslims. However, the article did not specify the carving’s location, so I draw an edited version of it in my notebook and set off for Kargil.

  The route traverses the Zoji-La pass, and here the landscape changes just as dramatically as it did at the other end of the Kashmir valley, from verdant fields and trees to dry twisting valleys of folded rock. I remember the folk tale about the fury of a spurned goddess that is told by the people of Ladakh to explain their country’s dryness. The Tibetan goddess Du-zhi Lhamo discovered that her husband was planning to leave her behind in Kashmir while he travelled to Ladakh, because, he complained, she smelt Kashmiri. Angered at this insult she turned her back on Ladakh, causing it to ‘dry up, and Kashmir to become fertile’. Perhaps because of its aridity, the people of this land have always been thrifty, self-sufficient (and polyandrous). Given the limited possibilities of agriculture at such a high altitude, every household in Ladakh spends the summer drying the one annual crop of vegetable leaves and roots to last through the long hard winter.

  The bus drops me on the empty Leh road and I walk down the path into the river valley, where, in the small village at the bottom, I show the men sitting outside the teashop the drawing I have made. But they shake their heads. Never seen anything like it, they say, and we have roamed the hills here all our lives. They call the shopkeeper, then a village elder. They too shake their heads. Somebody hands me a cup of tea in compensation.

  At two o’clock the school closes, and the Headmaster, a male secondary school teacher and Fatima, a primary school teacher, come over and join me. The Headmaster is a broad-minded man who tells me that his family only converted to Islam from Buddhism ‘a generation ago.’ ‘Much of our culture is Buddhist still,’ he says. He is intrigued by the carving, though he too has never seen it.

  With every cup of tea my conviction has deepened that the carving must have been destroyed by anti-nudists. But just then a labourer comes by from the neighbouring village. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘there’s something like that just over the stream. I remember it from my childhood.’

  The teachers and I climb into the Headmaster’s car and we drive the short distance to the neighbouring village. When we get to the rock face we find to our relief that nobody knows about the carving simply because a screen of willow trees was planted in the past ten years, and this has obscured it from sight. In the time since it was first cut into the rock thousands of years ago, the earth has given way below, and the carving now stands on a cliff face twenty feet high. From the ground I can see only parts of the carving through the fluttering willow leaves.

  The three teachers stand at the bottom of the cliff as I climb up the screed and out along the narrow ledge. If I fall I will break both legs. Already I can see the giant’s outstretched arms and long thin fingers. As I edge closer, I can see the penis and the upside-down baby in the womb. Level with my legs are cruder carvings of hunters and ibex; and where my navel touches rock are elaborately drawn animals and a bird probably added many centuries later. But I cannot see the giant’s face through the branches: and my knees are shaking with fear. The Headmaster shouts that somebody has brought a ladder, and so I climb slowly down.

  There are two ladders. One is put up against the cliff. It reaches to the base of the carving and the Headmaster climbs up it and pulls back the branches. The other is propped against the tree, and as Fatima shrieks at me to be careful I clamber up and crawl out along a branch from which I can bounce up and down and examine the carving bit by bit through the leaves. The rock face is a warm pink, and as at Bomoi, the engraved lines have coloured more darkly than the uncarved areas. I had guessed from the drawing that the genitalia and womb were added later; but up close there is no discernible difference in the texture of the lines hammered into the rock. Perhaps this giant really was intended from the beginning as a deity of both sexes.

  Dancing up and down in the willow tree, trying to glimpse the giant’s penis-womb, I think of the much more recent giant carving at Mulbekh, twenty kilometres up the valley from here. This nine-metre-high Maitreya Buddha, the cord of whose tunic dangles between his legs like a massive member, was carved into a ‘phallus-shaped rock’ (as the Kargil Government literature puts it) in the eighth century. Standing face to face with the male-female giant I wonder if it was this that inspired the Mulbekh stonemason. Moreover there is something feminine about the tilt of the Mulbekh Buddha’s hips–the union of male and female is a Tantric notion–and I can understand how, when British archaeologists began exploring Ladakh, they mistook some of the more sensuous Buddha statues for depictions of women.

  When the first Buddhist missionaries came into this land in the first century CE, they often appropriated the worship-places and deities of the
local people. Both megalithic standing stones and ancient rock carvings were inscribed with images of stupas to make them Buddhist. Giants, clearly a central part of the cosmology of the indigenous people of this land, also informed Buddhist legends. The Tibetan theory of the Origin of the World is that the earth was cut out of the dismembered body of a giant; and the Ladakhi national epic, drawn from pre-Buddhist stories, describes the slaying of a giant. Not all these giants, it seems, were male.

  Today, the Dards who live beside the Indus in Ladakh still worship goddesses and tell stories of a blissful antiquity when humans and deities lived together–until men tried to rape the goddesses, after which the humans were banished. Michel Peissel, a French explorer interested in the continuity of Stone Age beliefs into the modern age, noted in 1984 that although the original Dard deities were women–goddesses of springs and water, of hunting, fertility and fortune–they had recently been superseded by Babalachen (Father Big God), presumably under the influence of Buddhist, Christian or Muslim missionaries. Peissel’s theory, however, was that the original matriarchal religion had gradually been superseded by a ‘men’s liberation movement in rebellion against the rule of women in Neolithic times’. Dard culture, he suggested, far from being a last remnant of the vanished feminist paradise that the ancient Sanskrit-speakers, Chinese travellers and Kashmiris had heard tell of, was for some men nothing more than a dystopia. Dard women are important members of society but Peissel caricatured them as ‘ferocious…loud-mouthed and aggressive’ husband-beaters; ‘true witches, in fact’. The freedom of women in Uttarakuru often shocked male commentators and it seems that Peissel was no exception.