The Gupta Empire (A.D. 320–550) restored a semblance of unity over the subcontinent, governing from the Indus in the west to Bengal in the east, and from the Himalayas in the north to the Deccan plateau in the center, albeit most of the south was outside its control, even as the Gupta rulers suffered incursions from Central Asian horsemen driving down from the northwest into Rajasthan and the western Gangetic plain. Moreover, as in the way of the Mauryan, the Gupta was less a unitary state than a weak system of client states united by trade and tribute to the Ganges core. It was from the non-Gupta south that the devotional form of Hinduism spread north to the Ganges. Southern peninsular India, marked heavily by Dravidian languages, as opposed to the Sanskritic languages spoken in the north, was truly a region unto itself, separated from the north by the Deccan plateau and under the maritime influence of the Middle East and Indochina. For more than six centuries following the Gupta decline, which was hastened by the influx of Huns from Central Asia, came a congeries of small states indicating, yet again, that India was not quite China, with the latter’s greater propensity for centralization and political unity. Indeed, the post-Gupta kingdoms, in Stein’s words, were “defined less by administration than by language, sectarian affiliations and temples.”12
From the seventh through sixteenth centuries, writes Fairgrieve, Muslim peoples successively entered India. “The Arabs, as was natural, came first by land along the coast, and by sea coasting along the shores, but they effected nothing permanent; the Turks next,” he goes on, “from a little before A.D. 1000 onward, over the plateau of Iran and through Afghanistan. In little over a century, largely because of disputes between Hindu rulers, the whole northern plain had acknowledged Mohammedan rule.”13 In the south, Baluchistan and Sindh were part of the same “desert girdle” that extended unto Mesopotamia.14 The Indian Subcontinent was indeed grafted to the Greater Middle East. Among the highlights: Iraqi Arabs in the early eighth century occupied parts of Sindh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. The Turkic Mamluk warrior Mahmud of Ghazni, headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, united in his early-eleventh-century empire present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India as far as Delhi, and raided Gujarat to the south on the Arabian Sea. From the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, the so-called Delhi Sultanate featured rule over northern India and parts of the south by the Turkic Tughluq, the Afghan Lodi, and other dynasties from Central Asia.
The choice of Delhi as the capital of India for these invaders was very much a function of geography. As Fairgrieve writes, “Sind and the Indus Valley, including the Punjab … form but the antechamber to India, to which there is a comparatively narrow passage, 150 miles wide, between the Indian desert and the Himalayas. At the exit from this passage stands Delhi.”15 At Delhi’s back was the Islamic world; in front of it the Hindu world. (By this time Buddhism had virtually disappeared from India, the land of its birth, to move eastward and northeastward.) Geography has determined that the subcontinent in the northwest is less a fixed frontier than an interminable series of gradations, beginning in Iran and Afghanistan, and ending in Delhi: again, proof of McNeill’s idea in his grand history of human civilization.
The Mughal Empire was a cultural and political expression of this fact. Few empires have boasted the artistic and religious eclecticism of the Mughals. They ruled India and parts of Central Asia vigorously from the early 1500s to 1720 (after which the empire declined rapidly). Mughal is the Arabic and Persian form of Mongol, which was applied to all foreign Muslims from the north and northwest of India. The Mughal Empire was founded by Zahir-ud-din-Muhammad Babur, a Chaghtai Turk, born in 1483 in the Fergana valley in today’s Uzbekistan, who spent his early adulthood trying to capture Tamarlane’s (Timur’s) old capital of Samarkand. After being decisively defeated by Muhammad Shaybani Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan, Babur and his followers headed south and captured Kabul. It was from Kabul that Babur swept down with his army from the high plateau of Afghanistan into the Punjab. Thus, he was able to begin his conquest of the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal or Timurid Empire, which took form under Akbar the Great, Babur’s grandson, had a nobility composed of Rajputs, Afghans, Arabs, Persians, Uzbeks, and Chaghtai Turks, as well as of Indian Sunnis, Shiites, and Hindus, not to mention other overlapping groups; it was an ethnic and religious world that began in southern Russia to the northwest and by the Mediterranean to the west.16 India was very much a depository of ongoing cultural and political trends in the adjoining Middle East.
Kabul and Kandahar were a natural extension of this venerable Delhi-based dynasty, yet the strongly Hindu area in southern India around present-day Bangalore—India’s high-technology capital—was much less so. Aurangzeb, the “world-seizer,” under whose rule in the late seventeenth century the Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its expansion, was an old man in his eighties still fighting Maratha insurgents in India’s south and west. He died in 1707 in his camp on the Deccan plateau, unable to subdue them. The Deccan has, in Panikkar’s words, “always formed the great middle rampart of India,” unable to be subdued by the peoples of the Gangetic valley. Moreover, the west-to-east flow of rivers in a subcontinent oriented from north to south has, as Aurangzeb’s experience demonstrates, made it difficult for the north to govern the south until relatively late in history. Put simply: there are relatively few geographical connecting links between northern and southern India.17 In fact, it was this long-running and intractable insurgency in southern India that sapped the cohesion and morale of the northern Mughal elite. Aurangzeb’s preoccupation with the great Maratha warriors—to the exclusion of imperial problems elsewhere—made it easier for the Dutch, French, and British East India companies to gain footholds on the coast, which led eventually to British rule in India.18
To emphasize the point: Aurangzeb’s situation was that of Delhi-based rulers going back hundreds of years, as well as of even older rulers in the subcontinent stretching back to antiquity. That is, the vast region that today encompasses northern India along with Pakistan and much of Afghanistan was commonly under a single polity, even as sovereignty over southern India was in doubt. Thus, for Indian elites, to think of not only Pakistan but Afghanistan, too, as part of India’s home turf is not only natural but historically justified. The tomb of Babur is in Kabul, not in Delhi. This does not mean that India has territorial designs on Afghanistan, but it does mean that New Delhi cares profoundly about who rules Afghanistan, and wishes to ensure that those who do rule there are friendly to India.
The British, unlike previous rulers of India, constituted a sea power much more than a land power. It was from the sea, as evinced by the Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta presidencies that were to become the focal points of their rule, that the British were able to conquer India. Consequently, it was the British who, following more than two millennia of invasions and migrations from the west and northwest, restored to India as a political fact the basic truth of its geography: that it is indeed a subcontinent. A 1901 map of India wonderfully demonstrates this: showing a plethora of British-built rail lines ranging in arterial fashion over the whole of the subcontinent—from the Afghan border to the Palk Strait near Ceylon in the deep south, and from Karachi in present-day Pakistan in the west to Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh in the east. Technology had allowed for the subcontinent’s vast internal space to be finally united under one polity, rather than divided among several, or administered under some weak imperial alliance system.
True, the Mughals (along with, to a lesser extent, the Maratha Confederacy in the early modern era) were the precursors to this achievement, with their ability to ably administer much of the subcontinent. But Mughal rule, as brilliant as it was, had signified yet another Muslim invasion from the northwest, one that to this day is denigrated by Hindu nationalists. Yet Great Britain, the sea power, was a neutral in the historical drama between Hindus and Muslims: a drama whose basis lay in geography; with the bulk of India’s Muslims living both in the northwest, from where
invasions had nearly always come, and in East Bengal—the agriculturally rich, eastern terminus of the Gangetic plain, where Islam spread with a thirteenth-century Turkic-Mongol invasion and the clearing of the forest.19
The British may have united the Indian Subcontinent with modern bureaucracy and a rail system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by the hastened, tumultuous manner of their leaving in 1947, they helped redivide it in a way that was both more profound and more formalized than any previous imperial sundering. For in the past, the places where, for example, the Indo-Greeks met the Gupta Empire, or where the Mughal Empire met the Maratha Confederacy, did not signify—as such borders do today—barbed wire and minefields and different passports and war-by-media, which all belong to a later phase of technology. The divide now is a hardened legal and partly civilizational one, and became thus less because of geography than because of the decisions of men.
In short, from the historical perspective of India, Pakistan constitutes much more than even a nuclear-armed adversary, a state sponsor of terrorism, and a large, conventional army breathing down its neck on the border. Pakistan, lying to India’s northwest, where the mountains meet the plain, is the very geographical and national embodiment of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history. Pakistan looms to the northwest of India, just as the great Muslim invasion forces of yore once did. “Pakistan,” writes George Friedman, the founder of Stratfor, a global intelligence firm, “is the modern-day remnant of Muslim rule over medieval India,” even as Pakistan’s southwest is the subcontinental region first occupied by Arab Muslims invading from Iran and southern Afghanistan.20
To be sure, Indian decision makers are not anti-Muslim. India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan itself. India has had three Muslim presidents. But India is a secular democracy by virtue of the fact that it has sought to escape from the politics of religion in order to heal the Hindu-Muslim divide in a predominantly Hindu state. Pakistan, as an Islamic republic, to say nothing of its radical elements, is in some ways an affront to the very liberal fundamentals on which India is based.
The fact that India’s fear of Pakistan—and vice versa—is existential should not surprise anyone. Of course, India could defeat Pakistan in a conventional war. But in a nuclear exchange, or a war by terrorism, Pakistan could achieve a parity of sorts with India. And it goes beyond that: since it isn’t only Pakistan that encompasses, after a fashion, the threat of another Mughal onslaught without the Mughals’ redeeming cosmopolitanism; it is Afghanistan, too. For as we know, the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan is largely a mirage, both today and in history. The crags and canyons of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (officially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. Even at the official Khyber border post, tens of thousands of ethnic Pushtuns pass through weekly without showing identity papers, while hundreds of jingle trucks pass daily uninspected. The lack of procedures attests not only to the same tribes on both sides of the frontier, but to the tenuous nature of the Afghan and Pakistani states themselves, the ultimate cause of which is their lack of geographical coherence as the heart of Indo-Islamic and Indo-Persianate continuums through which it is nearly impossible to draw lines. The Achaemenid, Kushan, Indo-Greek, Ghaznavid, Mughal, and other empires all took in both Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of their dominions, which either threatened India or also included portions of it. Then there is the Central Asian Timur (Tamerlane) and the Turkmen Nader Shah the Great, who in 1398 and in 1739 respectively both vanquished Delhi from imperial bases in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
This is a rich history that few in the West know of, while sections of the Indian elite know it in their bones. When Indians look at their maps of the subcontinent they see Afghanistan and Pakistan in the northwest, just as they see Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh in the northeast, as all part of India’s immediate sphere of influence, with Iran, the Persian Gulf, the former Soviet Central Asian republics, and Burma as critical shadow zones. Not to view these places as such, is, from the vantage point of New Delhi, to ignore the lessons of history and geography.
As this record of imperial to-ing and fro-ing over the course of millennia shows, Afghanistan and the war there is not just another security issue for India to deal with. Only in the Western view is Afghanistan part of Central Asia; to Indians it is part of their subcontinent.21 Afghanistan’s geography makes it central not only as a principal invasion route into India, for terrorists in our day as for armies in days past, but as a strategically vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s primary enemy.
While India’s geographic logic is not perfect, Pakistan, right-angled to the course of invasions past, has, in the opinion of many, no geographic logic at all, and Afghanistan far too little. Pakistan can be viewed as an artificial puzzle piece of a territory, straddling the frontier between the Iranian-Afghan plateau and the lowlands of the subcontinent, encompassing the western half of the Punjab, but not the eastern half, crazily uniting the Karakoram in the north (some of the highest mountains in the world) with the Makran Desert almost a thousand miles away to the south by the Arabian Sea.22 Whereas the Indus should be a border of sorts, the Pakistani state sits on both of its banks. Pakistan is the home of four major ethnic groups, each harboring hostility to the others and each anchored to a specific region: Punjab to the northeast, Sindh to the southeast, Baluchistan to the southwest, and the Pushtun-dominated North-West Frontier. Islam was supposed to have provided the unifying glue for the state but it has signally failed in this regard: even as Islamic groups in Pakistan have become more radical, Baluch and Sindhis continue to see Pakistan as a foreign entity overlorded by the Punjabis, with the Pushtuns in the northwest drawn more into the Taliban-infected politics of the Afghan-Pakistani border area. Without the Punjabi-dominated army, Pakistan might cease to exist—reduced to a rump of an Islamic Greater Punjab, with semi-anarchic Baluchistan and Sindh drawn closer into the orbit of India.
Founded in 1947 by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a London-Bombay intellectual, the son of a merchant from Gujarat, Pakistan was built on an ideological premise: that of a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent. And it was true, the majority of the subcontinent’s Muslims lived in West and East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971), yet many tens of millions of Muslims remained in India proper, so that Pakistan’s geographical contradictions rendered its ideology supremely imperfect. Indeed, millions of Muslims and Hindus became refugees upon Pakistan’s creation. The fact is that the subcontinent’s history of invasions and migrations makes for a plenteous ethnic, religious, and sectarian mix. For example, India is the birthplace of several religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians have lived in India for hundreds and thousands of years. The philosophy of the Indian state accepts this reality and celebrates it; the philosophy of the Pakistani state is far less inclusive. That is partly why India is stable and Pakistan is not.
But geography in this case is subject to different interpretations. From another perspective, Pakistan makes impressive geographic sense as a civilizational intermediary and conduit of trade routes connecting the subcontinent with Central Asia, the heart of the Indo-Islamic world; because André Wink’s concept of the Indo-Muslim Al-Hind is hard to define in terms of modern borders, one may ask, why is Pakistan any more artificial than India? After all, Lahore in Pakistan was as much a mother lode of Mughal rule as Delhi in India. The real geographic heart of the northern subcontinental plain is the Punjab, and that is split between the two countries, making neither whole from any historical or geographical view. Just as northern India grows out of the demographic core of the Ganges, Pakistan, it could be argued, grows out of that other vital demographic core, the Indus and its tributaries. In this telling, the Indus, rather than a divider, is
a uniter.23 This point is best expressed in Aitzaz Ahsan’s The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan. A member of the late Benazir Bhutto’s Sindh-based Pakistan People’s Party, Ahsan asserts that the “critical dividing line” throughout history within the subcontinent is the “Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient”: running southwest from Gurdaspur in eastern Punjab to Kathiawar in Gujarat on the Arabian Sea, a line that approximates the present India-Pakistan border.24
But here is the conundrum. During the relatively brief periods in history when the areas of India and Pakistan were united—the Mauryan, Mughal, and British—there was no issue about who dominated the trade routes into Central Asia (Afghanistan and beyond). During the rest of history, there was also no problem, because whereas empires like the Kushana, Ghaznavid, and Delhi Sultanate did not control the eastern Ganges, they did control both the Indus and the western Ganges, so that Delhi and Lahore were under the rule of one polity, even as Central Asia was also under their control—so, again, no conflict. Today’s political geography is historically unique, however: an Indus valley state and a powerful Gangetic state both fighting for control of an independent Central Asian near-abroad.
Because the Indus and its tributaries, with Punjab at the heart, is the demographic core of the Indus-to-Oxus region, encompassing today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, it is not inappropriate from a historical or geographical sense that, for example, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), dominated by Punjabis, has a strong hand in the terrorist and smuggling operations of the Haqqani Network, which, in turn, operates throughout Indus-to-Oxus. ISI is most interested in controlling the south and east of Afghanistan; that would leave the area north of the Hindu Kush to affect a merger of sorts with the Oxus and trans-Oxus region of southern Uzbekistan and southern Tajikistan—a revival of ancient Bactria. Truly, the early-twenty-first-century map could look like an ancient one.
The Revenge of Geography Page 26
