Where the Indus is Young

by Dervla Murphy

  I was relieved that our young friend had not forced the issue, as he must have been tempted to do. This incident was a symptom of how bad relations are between down-country regiments and the locals. There is as little in common between these northern mountain peoples and the Pakistanis as there was between the East and West Pakistanis.

  Apart from the kitchen, this hotel has only one room, and I now see that we are to have the pleasure of the proprietor’s company all night. Half an hour ago our four fellow-guests put down their charpoys, which had been leaning against the wall, and lay two on each wrapped in their own blankets. They, too, have hacking coughs; and one of them, whose charpoy stands six inches from mine, is snoring like a defective bath-pipe. Normally I detest sharing a bedroom but in these parts one somehow doesn’t mind. Probably this is because each person wraps himself up so thoroughly that he is effectively isolated within his own private cocoon, from which he is unlikely even to peep before dawn.

  My own bedding-down ritual is quite complicated. First I spread my astronaut’s blanket on the charpoy (or bed or floor). Then I unroll my silk-lined, Japanese high-altitude sleeping-bag and insert it into my bulkier, quilted sleeping-bag, before spreading both on the blanket. Then I remove my long, very heavy, lined Parka jacket, which I have been wearing all day, and spread that over the flea-bags, before folding the top half of the astronaut’s blanket over the lot. Finally I remove my boots, but not my woollen socks, and put on my husky bootees; these match my husky jacket and pants, which are never removed. (By now I have quite forgotten which sweaters and slacks I am wearing beneath them.) Then I gently wriggle into bed, with book and torch, taking great care not to dislocate the various layers of the structure. Having zipped up one fleabag and buttoned the other only a small ventilation hole remains open and the temperature can – and does – drop to 40º below freezing without my noticing.

  5

  Urban Life in Baltistan

  The misery of the Baltis has often been described. But one was even more struck by it seeing them in winter, going about numb with cold, barely covered by their wretched home-spun shawls, and certainly undernourished. For three months of the year they live almost entirely on fresh fruit, for the other nine on dried – the famous apricots of Baltistan.

  FILLIPO DE FILLIPI (1913)

  Hark to the hurried question of Despair: ‘Where is my child?’ – an echo answers, ‘Where?’

  BYRON The Bride of Abydos

  Skardu – 12 January

  Were all capitals like this, I might not have such an aversion to urban life. Yet we are seeing a Skardu that has been much ‘developed’ over the past few years.

  The Skardu Valley is some 7,500 feet above sea-level, twenty miles long from north-west to south-east and two to five miles wide. Through it the Indus has carved a bed fifty to seventy feet deep and in places the stream is 500 feet wide. Below its confluence with the Shigar it divides into several branches, creating many sandy islets. The encircling mountains rise abruptly from the valley floor to heights of 18,000 feet, and this morning all these craggy, glistening peaks gradually became visible as the dispersing clouds eddied vaguely around their shoulders, leaving the summits free.

  We approached Skardu over a fissured plain criss-crossed with frozen irrigation channels and planted with fruit-trees. From afar we could see a long line of low wooden buildings on a ledge dominated by the strange Rock of Skardu – ‘like a ship out of the water turned upside down,’ to quote Rachel. But it would have to be a very big ship, for the Rock is more than two miles long and 1,300 feet high. On its far side the Shigar joins the Indus, which from most parts of the town is invisible and, at this season, inaudible.

  We took a short cut away from the jeep-track and climbed steeply into the Old Bazaar, where people stared at us as though we had stepped out of a spacecraft. This is Skardu’s main bazaar but in midwinter many traders hibernate; half the little stalls were closed and the rest carried very meagre stocks. Abbas Kazmi’s name is known to everyone here, so despite a predictable dearth of English-speakers and a certain surliness in the atmosphere – possibly owing to this being the start of Muharram – it was easy to find him. But even Hallam’s surefootedness was tested on the thick ice and packed snow of the town’s often-used paths.

  Abbas Kazmi’s rambling bungalow was built by his father in 1949 when the family left Srinagar. From the edge of a steep bluff it overlooks the new cantonment area, a new mosque and the Chasma Bazaar, beyond which the eastern end of the Rock half hides the mouth of the Shigar valley. Behind the house is a secluded garden where Hallam was fed while we were being entertained in a large bed-sitter, furnished only with a charpoy, a small table and a goat-hair carpet on the floor near the stove.

  When we arrived Abbas Kazmi happened to be entertaining Kalbay Abbas, the friend in whose house we are now installed. Kalbay does not in fact own it but is renting it from a local farmer named Sadiq Ali, and it is vacant merely because he found it intolerably primitive during winter. Some weeks ago he moved out to the Rest House but he is retaining this hovel for use next summer. A tall, handsome, assured young man, he has a quick brain and a nice sense of humour. His family came originally from Shigar but has now settled in Pindi; Kalbay works in his father’s engineering contractor business, spending much of his time in Baltistan. A past pupil of the Irish nuns at Murree, he speaks English more fluently and colloquially than anyone else we have met since leaving Islamabad and I found it a great relief to be able to talk to another adult at my normal pace in my normal idiom.

  For lunch we had unleavened wheat-flour bread and curried spinach, our first green vegetable (or indeed vegetable of any hue) for over three weeks. Spinach grows abundantly here during summer and is dried for winter use. Then came cups of salted butter tea, poured from an antique engraved silver pot, eighteen inches high, into which two red-hot wood embers had been dropped just before the brew was served. When Rachel’s expression unwittingly betrayed her opinion of this concoction a pot of ‘normal’ was at once prepared for the bungo – a delightful word, meaning girl-child.

  After lunch Abbas Kazmi took Rachel to our new home, at the southern edge of Skardu, by a short cut impassable to horses, while Kalbay Abbas guided Hallam and me. The track was so difficult that I could scarcely spare a glance for my surroundings: I only know they were snow-covered, and that this ‘capital’ seems to be a collection of scattered groups of farmhouses rather than a town.

  Where we rejoined the jeep track a long, level expanse of snow lay on our left, at the foot of a boulder-strewn hill, behind a Connemara-type wall. On our right half a dozen dwellings stood at right angles to the track and then we came to a new bazaar stall, not yet in use. Beyond this, an eight-foot wall ran beside the track for fifty yards, with a rickety wooden door up two steps halfway down its length. Kalbay Abbas gestured towards the door. ‘Home sweet home,’ he explained. ‘You needn’t say it’s OK if it isn’t.’

  Hallam had to be unloaded on the track; as usual he made a formal protest about the steps but then went up and through the narrow door most meekly. Just inside one turns left for the latrine – a roofless, three-sided stone cubicle with a hole in the ground – and right for the ‘hall-door’. Off the dark hallway are an unfurnished kitchen and a living-room-cum-bedroom with two tape charpoys and two huge wooden chests belonging to Kalbay Abbas. These have now been converted into our table, although their raised edges and lack of height make them less than ideal for my main purpose. This room is about ten feet by twelve, with an untended mud floor which sends up clouds of dust however gently one walks. A low ceiling of mulberry beams and planks supports a flat mud roof covered in brushwood to break the weight of the snow. A large hole has been left in the middle of the ceiling for a stove-pipe and two panes of the glazed window are missing. The mud walls were once thinly white-washed but now are filthy and defaced. There is a large empty wall-cupboard and when we arrived a niche near the window was also empty but for an Everyman edition of Charlotte Yonge�
�s The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest. Eng. Lit. gets around … This niche makes an ideal bookshelf and when I had given Miss Yonge some company (but would she approve of Simone de Beauvoir?) I felt that I had marked out our own bit of Skardu territory.

  As we were debating where to stable Hallam, our landlord Sadiq Ali arrived and suggested the kitchen. So I coaxed our ghora in, tethered him to a rafter and here we all are, very cosy and snug, our oil-stove boiling a kettle for chai, the window blocked with an old exercise book lent by Rachel and the chimney-hole also papered over. Outside the window is a snow-filled orchard of apricot saplings and beyond that a mighty display of mountains, less than two miles away. I fetch water from a stream near our neighbours’ houses: it is unfrozen at only one point, where housewives repeatedly break the ice. We shall continue to use candles. In theory Skardu is electrified but in practice the current flows only rarely and weakly despite – or because of – the many wires that drape the town. These run from tree to tree like tropical creepers, at just the level to strangle or otherwise dispose of unwary riders. Indisputably this is an endearing capital.

  The mod con I miss most is newsprint – as a household aid, rather than as an intellectual stimulant. Newspapers are neither demanded nor supplied here and only when without them does one realise how varied are their domestic uses. An equally conspicuous but more convenient lack is insect life. In summer this room must vibrate under the tread of its flea and bed-bug population, but mercifully all such creatures have been atrophied by the intense nocturnal cold and will reappear only towards the end of March.

  * * *

  In Skardu one remembers that Baltistan has a history, something easily forgotten while wandering through the isolation of the Indus Gorge. There it is hard to relate this land to the rest of the world, either in the past or the present but approaching Skardu the traveller notices if he looks hard enough – it blends very well with its surroundings – a fortress which vividly recalls distant wars. At the eastern end of the Rock, some 300 feet above the valley floor, a natural shelf supports this unexpected building, described by de Fillipi as ‘so imposing as to be out of all proportion to the wretched little town at its feet which it was intended to defend’. It was designed by Ali Sher Khan, a famous king of Skardu who between 1590 and 1610 conquered Ladak, forcing the king to marry his daughter, and also Khapalu, in the Shyok Valley. From that date until 1947 the histories of Baltistan and Ladak are interwoven. During the post-Partition troubles, and the 1966 conflict, the people of Skardu continued to take refuge in their fortress, disregarding the fact that not even Ali Sher Khan’s cunning could outwit Indian Air Force bombers. But luckily those bombers devoted all their attention to putting the airstrip out of action.

  Balti is a language without a script, nor do the people have many reliable oral traditions about their own past. In Thowar our Head Constable friend assured me that ‘before the conversion to Islam, 1200 years ago [sic], all Baltis were Hindus or Sikhs’. There is a hazy racial recollection of the language once having had a script and presumably this dates from Buddhist times. Then the Tibetan script would have been used, at least by the lamas and probably by all educated lay-folk.

  The first known mention of Baltistan occurs in the Chinese annals, which refer to a Chinese military expedition aiding Ladak against Tibet in AD 747. Ladak and Baltistan are called Big and Little Poliu. At about this time Baltistan is believed to have come under Tibetan rule and cultural influence; and so far as we know the Baltis remained subject to the Tibetans until their conversion to Islam in the early fifteenth century. Fosco Maraini is interesting on the linguistic link: ‘Balti as spoken today is an archaic form of Tibetan, the words being still pronounced as, in Tibet itself, they are nowadays only written. Rice, for instance, is in Balti bras, and in the Tibetan script it is written as bras. But … today Lhasa knows rice as dren! … Hundreds of such examples come to mind. Balti grammar and syntax too reveal archaic features.’

  The next specific mention of Baltistan in the history books records the marvellous travels of Sultan Said, a Mongol Khan of Kashgar, who achieved the almost impossible by taking an army of 5,000 men across the 19,000-foot Karakoram Pass in the spring of 1531. For over two years the Sultan and his merry men roamed through Ladak and Baltistan, living on what they could pillage. Then Sultan Said died, while his son Iskander was attempting the conquest of Lhasa. During this attempt the Kashgar army was reduced, by altitude, cold and hunger, to twenty-seven men.

  Research can do little to illumine Baltistan’s past because those few records which once existed were destroyed comparatively recently. When the Sikhs took Skardu in 1840 they burned an ancient chronicle of the Makhpons, or Buddhist kings, and Vigne mentions hearing of the destruction of another famous manuscript during the burning of Skardu castle in the reign of Zufar Khan.

  The Englishman G. T. Vigne spent long periods in Skardu during the 1830s and wrote the first description of the valley. His host, Ahmet Shah, was a direct descendant of Ali Sher Khan and the last independent Raja of Skardu. At one time each Balti oasis had its own hereditary chief whose family usually intermarried with that of the Raja of Skardu and who normally allied himself with his overlord against a common enemy, though on domestic issues he might oppose the Skardu line. Most such dynasties were of non-Balti extraction, being the descendants of soldiers of fortune or conquerors’ right-hand-men. Many came from Hunza or Nagar, where the people are much more enterprising and less docile than the Baltis, who seem never to have produced a leader of their own.

  De Fillipi succinctly describes the final destruction of Balti independence, if one can call it that.

  In a succession of campaigns between 1834 and 1840 Zorowar Singh and his Sikh army had conquered Ladak for his liege lord Gulab Singh, first Maharajah of Kashmir; a pretext for attacking Baltistan was not hard to find. It was furnished by the quarrel between Ahmed Shah and his first-born son Mohammed Shah, whom he had cut off from the succession. Zorowar Singh espoused the cause of the deposed heir, and invaded Baltistan towards the end of 1840 with an army of 15,000 men. Some of the Ladakis fought on his side, others who had remained faithful to the old régime joined Ahmed Shah. But the climate itself was the best ally of the king of Skardu; the Indus, too, was unfordable, and its bridges broken; altogether the expedition came near to ending in disaster. An early winter found the Sikh army still on the right bank; hunger and cold soon made their position critical. Many of them lost hands or feet through frost-bite. A column of men sent up towards Shigar from Khapalu in the Shayok valley fell into an ambush, and of 5,000 men it is said that only 400 survived. But at last the army succeeded in crossing the Indus on the ice. They surprised and routed the Baltis defenders. Ahmed Shah took refuge in the fortress of Skardu, but was soon obliged to surrender. His son Mohammed was set upon his father’s throne; but of course the little country lost its independence for ever. Ahmed Shah and his favourite second son, at the head of a contingent of Balti soldiers, had to follow Zorowar Singh when he set out to conquer Tibet – an expedition which ended disastrously with the slaughter of the leader and the destruction of his army. Ahmed with his son was captured by the Tibetans and ended his days at Lhasa, where he was treated with respect and kindness. With the accession of Gulab Singh as Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, Skardu became the official capital of Baltistan, which, with Ladak, was added to the new kingdom (1846).

  His ruler’s identity might seem of little consequence to the ordinary Balti, but in fact the cruel avarice of the Dogras made itself felt even in these impoverished valleys. Moreover, the Dogras were Hindus and altogether out of sympathy with their Muslim subjects. They are still hated and their barbarities and injustices are repeated from father to son. During this period the Baltis were strictly forbidden to kill cattle and though not many of them could ever afford to do so they bitterly resented this imposition of Hindu taboos. The British influence helped only a little to curb Dogra tyranny. Baltistan and Ladak were both administered by a high Kashmiri functionary,
the Wazir-i-Wazarat. (And usually ’e waz, too.) Under him were two Tahsildars, one stationed at Kargil and the other at Skardu. The British government was represented in the two districts by an English official stationed at Leh and subordinate to the Resident of Kashmir. But in such a region one Englishman could do little to defend the Baltis from numerous petty Dogra officials who knew that their superiors cared nothing for the rights of inarticulate peasants. When the Dogra Maharajah of Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union in 1947 the entire Muslim population of these Northern Areas revolted spontaneously and insisted on being considered part of Pakistan. They won their point and by international convention Baltistan is now regarded as Pakistani territory.

  Skardu – 13 January

  Today we went to the Post Office with three instalments of diary for registration but on entering the building my nerve failed me and I took them home again. I have dealt with some bizarre POs in my time, but Skardu’s has an air of not believing in itself which is demoralising because so logical. The last mail came in ten days ago and the next may go out in two or three or five weeks’ time, so naturally there is an aura of unreality about the place. One moronic young clerk – perhaps merely stupefied by boredom – squatted in a corner wrapped in a red-brown blanket and morosely cracking walnuts. He looked just like a squirrel. I couldn’t send off my postcards, which I would have entrusted to the System as a test case, because there were no stamps available, pending the arrival of the next plane at some remote future date. This institution was established by the British and seems physically unchanged, in every particular, since its opening a century ago. But now the reliable Mail Runners have been largely superseded by capricious aeroplanes so it has given up the struggle to be efficient.