Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  At the top of the surveyors’ list of solutions to this problem was the introduction of steamboats (following the American model). In 1836, therefore, Wood and Heddle triumphantly sailed into the mouth of the Indus, and ‘had the proud satisfaction of unfurling our country’s flag…from the first steam-boat that ever floated on its celebrated waters’. But Wood also voiced his anxieties: ‘The Indus,’ he wrote bleakly, ‘is a foul and perplexing river.’ In 1838, he criticized the prospectus for a steamboat firm which the East India Company had attached to its Abstract on the Indus, calling it ‘crude’ and ‘erroneous’. It is ‘suited’, he wrote, ‘to the equable streams of the New World, but not applicable to the ever-changing channels of our Indian rivers’. The Indus–low in autumn, flooded in springtime by mountain snowmelt–waxed and waned like no other river these men had ever seen.

  After he had conquered Sindh, Napier pursued the 250-year-old British ambition of trading up and down the Indus, regardless of the setbacks. In his 1846 ‘Memorandum on Sind’, Napier described how ‘the Merchants at Kurrachee now cry out for Steamers up the River’. Attesting that ‘of every seven vessels coming down the river…six are either lost altogether, or the goods destroyed’, he begged the Governor General ‘to make over 4 of the War Steamers on the Indus to the Sinde Government, for mercantile purposes’. But Napier’s frustration merely indicates the attitude of the government in Calcutta–acquisitiveness had by now given way to apathy. Sindh was a poor, provincial backwater, and the image of the Indus–glamorized in Greek histories, the Alexander Romance and Renaissance poetry, talked up in Company despatches and best-selling travelogues–was very different from reality. It took another ten years for Napier’s promised steamboats to arrive. And then, in the 1860s, river navigation was rendered redundant by the railways.

  At first, administrators clung to the notion that the Indus was ‘peculiarly suited to the combined system of railways and steamboats’. By 1861, passengers on the thirty-eight-day trip from Marseilles to Multan (on the upper Sindh–Punjab border) were taking boats from Europe to Karachi, where they caught the train up to Kotri near Hyderabad, and from there took an Indus steamer.

  But the new railway soon proved so fast, efficient and popular that river transport began to look old-fashioned–not to say dangerous. By 1867, Our Paper, a bi-weekly published from Karachi, was referring to steam navigation as ‘the problem which has for the past twenty years been puzzling the ablest naval architects that have ever come into this country’. While the Scinde Railway reported ever-increasing traffic and revenue, the Indus Flotilla reported shipwrecks, and the death of its passengers.

  W. P. Andrew, chairman of both the Indus Steam Flotilla and the Scinde and Punjaub Railways, now petitioned the government to build a line from Sindh to the Punjab: ‘the shallow, shifting, treacherous nature of the river Indus,’ he wrote, ‘makes it inefficient, uncertain, unsafe, costly.’ The government agreed and, in 1878, a line was opened running right the way through Sindh, along the banks of the river–thus ending for ever the ambitions of a succession of Company servants, from Sir Thomas Roe to Sir Charles Napier.

  Men like Burnes had portrayed the Indus as a lucrative windfall, and that it did not immediately make the Company rich was a disappointment to colonial officers. For decades, accountants juggled the books, offsetting Sindh’s deficit with profits from the opium trade in China. Napier had begged the government for money to build the infrastructure–roads, harbours–which Sindh desperately needed. But projects like these were time-consuming, expensive and slow to realize returns. Even the railways–which turned Sindh from a ‘difficult’ province into a ‘regular’ administration–did not make the country wealthy, just easier to manage.

  Back in 1727, Alexander Hamilton had lauded the extreme fertility of the silt-rich Indus valley. In the end, it was irrigation that rescued Britain’s conquest of the Indus from financial disaster.

  After the Company conquered the Punjab in 1849, the British began work on an Indus valley canal system. The Kalhoras, Talpurs and Sikhs had been competent canal builders but the British planned to improve the existing seasonal canals, while also installing perennial irrigation to bring arid areas under cultivation. This was a new area of technical expertise. Over-irrigation from canals in northern India had caused waterlogging and salination, rendering the land agriculturally unfit, so the British knew of the potential dangers. The building of dams–mandatory if large amounts of water were to be saved for year-round use–were known to cause a host of structural and siltation-related troubles. But in 1878, famine broke out in north India, and so the government hurried through the Punjab irrigation proposals. Creating fields out of scrubland had many advantages on paper. It increased agricultural production to feed the growing population; and it dealt–by eviction–with the untaxable nomads and bandits who used the desert for low-intensity grazing or refuge from the law.

  By 1901, four of the five rivers of the Punjab had been ‘canalized’ or dammed. Grain poured out of the Punjab, feeding hungry mouths in India, and transmitting new taxes to London. The Punjab became a ‘model province’ in British India: productive and peaceful.

  But Sindh was more difficult to manage. The river, receiving the combined force of the Punjabi and Afghan tributaries, was liable to flooding. With no large canal-irrigation projects yet in place, massive amounts of river water were thus flowing ‘improvidently’ downstream without being used. As the Report of the Indian Irrigation Commission stated regretfully in 1903, ‘60 per cent of the surface water will still run to waste in the sea.’ The British, now eager to supply Lancashire’s cotton mills with raw material, began to examine how to irrigate Sindh’s rainless deserts.

  Some Cassandra-like Sindhis looked in alarm upon both the irrigation projects under way upstream in the Punjab, and those planned for Sindh. (If the level of water went down, they feared, navigation would be harmed; the impact on fishing and agriculture was not even considered.) But British officials dismissed these concerns, believing that there was more than enough water to go round. A site was chosen for Sindh’s first barrage, at Sukkur in the north of the province, and after some delay, work began. By 1932, the barrage was complete.

  The Sukkur barrage changed Sindhi society for ever. Huge areas of wasteland were turned into fertile agricultural regions, almost overnight. Grain and cotton exports, in turn, helped make Karachi into a world-class port. Landowners and administrators lavished praise upon this, the biggest irrigation project in the world. The British, when they left India in 1947, crowed that they had transformed Sindh from a desert into a surplus province. Only the farmers of the Delta looked upon Sukkur askance.

  By enabling the storage of huge amounts of river water, and viewing each drop that went out to sea as ‘wastage’, what the engineers had ignored was the need for plenty of fresh water downstream in the Delta, in order to maintain a healthy balance with the salt water from the sea, and thus to safeguard the unique ecosystem of the mangroves, shrimp beds, fish and farmers.

  The Delta lands, it is said today, were once ‘the richest’ in all Pakistan’. But the British did not see it like this. Alexander Burnes had spent three frustrating months waiting in the Delta, and he depicted it harshly, as a barren, unpeopled land. The image stuck. Almost a century later, the influential Sindh Gazetteer noted the idiosyncrasies of the Delta’s cultivation methods, and the fact that rice (but only rice) grew abundantly. With its frequently flooded paddies, shifting settlements and semi-nomadic farmers, the ‘unhealthy’ Delta did not fit the picture of a viable or desirable agricultural model. For the British, who wished to transport grain quickly into northern India, it made better economic sense to develop Punjab and upper Sindh than to defend the strange agrarian culture of the mangroves. Where Britain led, with its infrastructure-heavy, intensive irrigation projects, Pakistan followed.

  The need to build more dams on the Indus was brought home forcibly to Pakistan on 1 April 1948–exactly eight months after Independence, and
the morning after the Arbitral Tribunal closed. (This was the body convened to adjudicate on Partition disputes.) On that morning, India blocked off the canals that led from its land into Pakistan. It was the start of the sowing season, a whole harvest depended on this water, and India could not have chosen a more devastating way of demonstrating its superior strength and bargaining power.

  The incident did not go unnoticed in North America, where the new World Bank was based. In 1951, David Lilienthal, former head of the Atomic Commission, toured India and Pakistan, and in August he wrote up his researches in a magazine article, in which he identified the Indus water controversy as one of the most serious issues facing the independent countries. More contentiously, he linked it to the nascent Kashmir dispute. Arguing that the copious amounts of river water that flowed out to sea simply had to be diverted and distributed properly, Lilienthal suggested building dams all along the river. On 20 August 1951, Eugene R. Black, President of the World Bank, wrote to the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan, enclosing a copy of Lilienthal’s article and offering the Bank’s ‘good offices’ for the development of Indus infrastructure ‘along the lines suggested by Mr Lilienthal’.

  As a confidential British Foreign Office memo written on 1 November 1951 revealed, Mr Lilienthal had ‘recently become a partner in Lazards’–an international financial advisory and asset management firm–and thus his ‘main interest at present’ is ‘that there should be a lot of money in it’. Despite the baseness of these profiteering motives, the British read and commented on all the Bank’s correspondence, and so the plan was hatched for the division of the Indus basin–a ‘riparian Iron Curtain’.

  Pakistan, in its turn, began building the Kotri barrage, just north of Thatta. This dam, like those that followed, was supposed to solve the country’s problems. But while it indeed facilitated the mass production of cash crops, Kotri also began the trend of the next sixty years: growing debt to Western banks, experts and construction firms. Pakistan is not alone in its mania for large hydraulic structures as the answer to its food and water shortages. Nor is it alone in discovering that over-irrigation leads to salination of agricultural land upstream, and the rapid death of river deltas. Following the construction of the Kotri barrage in 1958, the Delta shrank from 3,500 to 250 square kilometres. With barely any water flowing south to the sea, salt water was sucked into the mangroves. The fields of red rice turned to white salt encrustations, and the farmers had no choice but to turn to fishing.

  ‘The farmers here voted against the Sukkur barrage,’ Baboo says as we stand together in the graveyard of Soki Bunder. The old men at Kharochan agree: ‘After Sukkur opened, farmers became fishermen,’ says the doctor. ‘And with Kotri, then all the rice fields went saline. After that there was Tarbela [the biggest dam of all, just north of the Punjab]. But nobody would listen to us that the Delta needs more water.’

  As Baboo’s boat chugs slowly north from Kharochan, dolphins arc through the water–not the famous blind river dolphins of upper Sindh but ocean mammals that have wandered into this salty river from the Arabian Sea. We sail as far as we can in Baboo’s feeble boat but there comes a point when this once large and magnificent river is too shallow and perilous for a fisherman to risk his vessel. Towards evening, the propeller snags on something once again, and snaps. As day turns to night, we float back down the river to a place where Baboo had seen a village. As Ali Nawaz walks inland to ask for accommodation, we sit in the silent boat, rocking gently backwards and forwards under the stars, listening to the river’s murmurings. It is impossible now to make the journey that generations of fishermen, merchants and foreigners–including the Alexanders Macedon, Hamilton and Burnes–once made along the Indus.

  I spend that night in another forlorn Delta village, and early the next morning, begin a slow journey north along the riverbank by taxi, stopping whenever possible to walk down and check the level of the river. A ration of water is allowed downstream from Kotri during the spring and summer sowing seasons, and also during times of high flooding upstream, but now that it is autumn, all that is left are a few pools of standing water: stagnant and undrinkable. At Sondoo, a small village near Thatta, the riverbed blows pale white sand into my eyes, and the grey strip of water is just a few feet deep. I watch as a bullock cart, and then a line of camels, cross the river, and finally I too take off my shoes and paddle across the mighty Indus.

  Further north, just below the Kotri barrage, the local authorities use the glorious Indus as a conduit for sewage. There is no flow below the dam (contravening the technical specifications and compromising the dam’s structure, according to the engineer who fifty years ago helped design it). The fisher men whose families have fished here for centuries show me their catch: fish so exhausted by swimming in sewage, they lie weakly in the water, barely moving. ‘We danced for joy when the government let down water last summer during the floods,’ Fatima, a fisherwoman who has lived here all her life, tells me. ‘Then the river once again dried up. We have sent this water in bottles to the Senators in Islamabad, and said to them: “Would you drink this?”’

  It is the same everywhere in Sindh: peasants, farmers and fisherfolk protesting about water shortages; almost daily, in some small town or village, an anti-dam march. In the once-illustrious city of Thatta, on the banks of the once ‘commodious’ River Indus, I attend a water rally. A thin old man stands up, thrusts his hands into the air, and sings a song in Sindhi:

  Musharraf you big cheat,

  Shame on you a hundred times,

  Pakistan has bowed before America,

  And you are trying to rape our river.

  But the army-run government, far away in northern Punjab, does not listen to farmers from the Delta. Money lies in the cotton fields of Punjab and northern Sindh–and the power to control the country resides in a centralized irrigation policy dictated one hundred years ago by imperial engineers.

  3

  Ethiopia’s First Fruit

  1793

  ‘The state of my Sheedi brothers in Sindh pierces my heart like thorns.’

  Muhammad Siddiq ‘Mussafir’, Ghulami ain Azadi Ja Ibratnak Nazara (Eye-opening Accounts of Slavery and Freedom), 1952

  IT IS DECEMBER, the rumbustious Muslim marriage season is in full parade, and one night soon after I arrive in Thatta, I find myself in a van, heading east from the Indus along small country roads to attend a village wedding. The warm desert land through which we drive is dark and quiet, the stars are sharp in the sky, and the full moon bathes the fields in a cold white light–which is just as well, for the van’s headlights are broken. The other three women in the car, clad in black burqas, sing shyly: Sindhi folksongs about passionate lovers and misbegotten trysts.

  The sexes are segregated at the wedding, and by the time we arrive, the women are singing inside the house. But I am led to the yard in front, where the men are dancing in a circle by the light of a bonfire. By now I have been to many Pakistani weddings–overlong processions of overdressed guests carrying overladen plates. Nothing, therefore, has prepared me for this. The men are dancing around a chest-high wooden drum, their bare feet thumping the ground as the drummer’s hands move faster and faster. ‘Ya Ali!’ they cry, in praise of the first Shia leader. The light from the bonfire flickers across their flowing white robes, dark skin and tightly curled hair. I feel as if I have strayed across an East African rite. And indeed, that is exactly what this is.

  These are the Sheedis, descendants of slaves taken from Africa to Sindh by Muslim traders. ‘They are dancing the leva,’ says Iqbal, the Sheedi friend with whom I have come here tonight. ‘Our ancestors brought the leva with them from Zanzibar.’ The leva has been danced by Sheedis in an unbroken cultural tradition ever since the first slaves landed on these shores in the seventh or eighth century. They call their distinctive, four-footed drum the maseendo, or mugarman, and it too is a relic of their African inheritance.

  That night, as the mood grows wilder, the men scatter red-hot coals on th
e ground, and step across them. ‘Did Sheedis convert to Islam after arriving in Pakistan?’ I ask Iqbal’s uncle, who is watching nearby, now too old to join in. ‘But we are the original Muslims,’ he says, and relates the story of how, thirteen centuries ago in Arabia, the Prophet Muhammad’s first male convert was Bilal, a tall Ethiopian slave with a sonorous voice. ‘And our Prophet honoured Bilal,’ Iqbal’s uncle says, ‘by asking him to call the faithful to Islam’s first prayer.’

  Bilal is a famous figure in Islamic art: often represented standing on the sacred black stone cube of the Ka’ba in Mecca and cupping his hands to his mouth (in those idyllic days before loudspeakers). And so, watching this forceful, joyous dancing, I wonder at the irony that despite Bilal’s role in Islam’s early history, Sheedis should be ignored by their co-religionists, regarded by other Pakistani Muslims as jahil (ignorant) and jungli (wild) on account of their African genes. Little has been written on their history and culture by Pakistan’s intelligentsia. During the past sixty years there have been some famous Sheedi musicians, footballers and boxers; but no politicians, landlords, generals or clerics–the traditional holders of power in Pakistani society. Instead, the majority of Pakistan’s one million or so Sheedis still live in the small towns and villages to which their ancestors were brought as slaves, and the majority still work as labourers.