Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  When we reach the house, Vikee apologizes: he has no mugarman, he will have to beat the rhythm on the tabletop. We sit down opposite him, and now that we are inside the house, Ani pulls back her burqa. I watch her as Vikee begins to sing. As she listens to the song, her beautiful serious face breaks into a smile, and I smile too, when she translates it for me from Sindhi into Urdu:

  Sheedi Badshah, hum Badshah: Sheedi is King, I am King,

  Where he puts his foot, there is peace.

  Our lips are like the parrot,*

  And we are proud of our nose.

  That evening, Ani and I walk back home together. ‘When you get married,’ I say, ‘they can sing that song at your wedding.’ Ani laughs. I cannot see her face beneath her burqa, but I know that she is pursing her lips and frowning. ‘I am not waiting to get married,’ she says. We walk on in silence, down the lane where the donkeys that haul loads around Hyderabad are brought at night, their backs gashed and bleeding, to be stabled. As we reach the tailor’s shop at the top of her alleyway, she turns to me and says: ‘But you are right about one thing: I will sing that song.’

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder and first Governor General of Pakistan, with his dogs. This snapshot contrasts with the official portraits of Jinnah in austere Islamic dress, as in this political mural from Lahore (below).

  A man offering camel rides on Clifton beach. Although the rich of Karachi live along the sea front, they would never swim here, and instead make the hour-long journey out of the city to private beaches. But the city beach is popular with Karachi’s lower middle classes, who generally live in the north of the city, far from the sea.

  The Indus River has been so heavily dammed that it no longer flows down to the sea. Down-stream of the Kotri Barrage at Hyderabad, southern Pakistan, where the river was once so deep and wide it was known as the ‘Ocean’, villagers can drive their bullock carts across, or wade through the shallow waters.

  The ‘Sheedi’ descendants of the freed African slave Bilal in Hyderabad, Pakistan. Bilal’s grandson Bazmi is sitting in the centre, with his two wives behind him. On Bazmi’s right is his daughter Ani, who helped me translate her grandfather Mussafir’s family history.

  Gulabi, a visitor to the home of some Sheedi activists in Badin, southern Pakistan.

  Worshippers at the shrine of Sachal Sarmast in northern Sindh, Pakistan.

  The men have gathered here to listen to music played at the urs (death-anniversary celebration) of Shah Inayat, a rebellious seventeenth-century Sufi whose quasi socialist and anti-landlord policies so alarmed the local nobility that they appealed to the Mughal empire for assistance in quelling his rebellion and having him beheaded.

  Eighteenth-century tombs of the families who ruled Sindh before it was colonised by the British. These tombs, in the desert near Johi, Sindh, Pakistan, are frescoed with paintings of local life and folklore, as in the painting of Sohni below.

  Sohni, the folk-heroine of Shah Abdul Latif’s eighteenth-century Risalo, crossing the river to meet her lover. This much-loved story was frescoed onto the domed ceiling of a tomb belonging to the Qalandrani Leghari family.

  Mohanas, Indus boat-people, arriving at the shrine of Khwaja Khizr, which stands on an island in the Indus near Sukkur, Sindh, Pakistan.

  A Hindu vision of hell as a river: this marble tableau adorns the Sadhubela temple, on an island in the Indus downstream of the island shrine of Khwaja Khizr.

  This Hindu painting of the Indus river-god, Uderolal or Zindapir, riding on a palla fish, hangs at the entrance to the Zindapir temple in Sukkur.

  Sikhs bathing at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, India.

  Every year Indian Sikhs come to Pakistan on highly controlled pilgrim tours to see the holy places of their faith. This woman is collecting dust from under the carpet at Nankana Sahib, birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, to take home to India as a sacred memorial.

  Until recently the Kochi nomads roamed through Afghanistan and across its borders with their flocks of goats; their women did not wear the burqa. In 2005 the American army heard that the Kochis were possibly sheltering the Taliban. This photograph was taken on a reconnaissance tour with a unit from the US army base in Ghazni province.

  This photograph of Sami-ul-Huq shows him holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and a Qur’an in the other. It hangs in his guesthouse next to the madrassah he runs in Akora Khattak, in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province; many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were said to have been trained here. Sami-ul-Huq is a founding member of MMA, a coalition of religious parties which came to prominence during the Musharraf era.

  4

  River Saints

  1718–1752

  ‘Every wave is filled with rubies, water perfumed with musk, From the river waft airs of ambergis.’

  Shah Abdul Latif (1689–1752)

  ALL ALONG THE riverbank in Sindh, in the desert and on hilltops, next to springs and by lakes, there are shrines of Sufi saints. Countless holy men have wandered along the river in the past eleven hundred years; 125,000 alone are said to be buried in the yellow sandstone necropolis at Thatta; and villages, fairs and pilgrim communities congregate thirstily around their tombs. Sufism is the mystic vein that runs through Islam: Sufis themselves preach the oneness of humanity, and the shrines of saints are indeed the one area of Sindhi social life where all faiths, politics and ethnicities–Sheedis and soldiers, Communists and Hindus, peasants and dictators–are welcome. But given this choice, the saint revered by Iqbal Sheedi, his friend Fida, and thousands of other Sindhis, is the icon of radical social reform, Sufi Shah Inayat. It is Shah Inayat who in the early eighteenth century founded an agrarian commune in Jhok, staging a rebellion against the landowning system with the slogan Jo kheray so khai–‘those who sow should eat’.

  Shah Inayat’s stand against the aristocracy is remembered tearfully in Sindh today as a movement before its time. In order to initiate me into what they consider the best of Sindhi culture, Iqbal, Fida and I drive to Shah Inayat’s urs, the death-anniversary celebration held every year at his tomb, with Mashkoor, a cheerful poet of limited means and a boundless ardour for Sindhi music and history. As we bump over the dusty road to Jhok, a village in that indeterminate hinterland between the Indus and the desert, Mashkoor tells me that Shah Inayat’s movement was a precursor of the French Revolution: ‘He was the world’s first socialist. Before the French and before Marx. But because of the nature of Sindh at the time, his message didn’t spread. That is our tragedy.’

  This notion is repeated the same evening by a member of Shah Inayat’s family, Sufi Huzoor Bux, a man whose bare village home (or rather, male guesthouse) has become a pilgrimage place for Sindhis disgruntled with the state, with the army, with the Punjabis, and with the pirs, the holy men. We join a group of men sitting in a circle around Sufi Huzoor Bux in the dark (this small village has no more than a passing acquaintance with the national grid). ‘If only the world had listened to Sindh and come to our help, we could have changed society,’ says Sufi Huzoor Bux. ‘Shah Inayat was a big socialist Sufi but his message has been manipulated according to other people’s interests.’ Shah Inayat was a political thinker, he says. Not like those fraudulent Sufi leaders who sell black threads to poor peasants.

  Sufi Huzoor Bux has been banned from attending the urs or even entering the shrine by his cousin, the Sajjada Nasheen, or Guardian of the Shrine. The ostensible reason is the disrespect implied by Sufi Huzoor’s claim that the family are not Syeds, but of non-Arabic, tribal Baluch lineage. The criticism goes beyond the charge of pretentiousness, however. The Sajjada is a landlord. As on other Sindhi farms, his 300 haris–landless labourers–are forced to give him half the crop they have grown, in rent. The landowner buys the other half off them at non-negotiable prices (generally below the market rate). If the money they make from the crop does not cover their living expenses, they borrow money off the landowner on extortionate terms and go into debt. For illiterate laboure
rs, it is a perilous system. There are currently approximately 1.7 million haris in southern Sindh alone, most of them in ‘debt bondage’. Whole families are enslaved to landlords, and the debt is passed down through the generations, growing as it goes. It is exactly this system that Shah Inayat protested against. It was exactly this protest which lost him his head.

  At first, Shah Inayat’s stand was only of local concern. After he invited peasants in to farm his land for free–thus establishing what one Sindhi historian calls ‘the first commune of the subcontinent’–the neighbouring Syeds, growing jealous of his popularity with their serfs, appealed to the Mughal governor of Thatta for help. Local pirs, who had lost murids (devotees) to Jhok, added their voice to the call for Shah Inayat to be dealt with, and an attack was sanctioned. Initially, the dispute seemed to go Shah Inayat’s way. His peasants defended Jhok, the attackers retreated, and when Shah Inayat complained to Delhi that several of his dervishes had been killed, the Mughal court ordered that land should be given by the killers in compensation. So the commune grew larger, and yet more peasants arrived at Jhok, eager for remission from the grim cycle of their landlord-owned lives.

  The local gentry in nearby Thatta, used to seeing the peasants in penury, were outraged by the social revolution being fomented in this remote and insignificant village. A poet with aristocratic sympathies wrote a verse complaining of the comfortable life lived by the lower orders, which ended with a call to arms: ‘Sindh will have no rest as long as the enemy sits in Jhok.’ Then in 1716, a new Mughal governor was appointed in Thatta, and the nobles seized their chance. They convinced him that the faqirs of Jhok would overrun the Mughal empire–and the governor took their concerns seriously. He alerted the governors of Bukkur, Sehwan and Multan, the three other important trading towns along the Indus, to the possibility of Sindh-wide rebellion, and wrote to Delhi, asking for troops. An army assembled.

  The soldiers besieged the Jhok commune for two months. The nobles wrote letters to each other in excitable Persian boasting of how ‘with cannonballs and gunpowder the stones of the citadel of the evildoer will fly through the air like the cotton-flakes of the cotton-carder and the lightning sword will put fire into the harvest of his life’. But to the army’s surprise, the faqirs were resilient, and so, finding it difficult to prise Shah Inayat out of his stronghold, the army finally tendered peace and invited him to talk terms. His safety was guaranteed by a local noble, Yar Muhammad Kalhora, on a copy of the Qur’an. But it was a trick. Shah Inayat was seized, tried, and executed on the seventeenth day of the Islamic month of Safar, 1130 AH (7 January 1718). His head was sent to Delhi.

  This is all that can be gleaned from the sparse contemporary material on Shah Inayat–three letters written by his Kalhora and Mughal enemies, one favourable history composed in Persian by the poet Qani forty-four years after the event, and two virulently hostile histories. But if the archives are meagre, oral history is rich in poignant stories of this lost utopia. ‘25,000 faqirs died,’ says Sufi Huzoor, ‘the army that surrounded Jhok was like ants.’ The siege lasted ‘six months’ the Mughal army burned the commune’s records after Shah Inayat was beheaded; and as the saint’s decapitated head travelled to Delhi, it recited a long poem, Besar Nama (Book of the Headless).

  Apart from the death-defying Besar Nama, Shah Inayat left no other mystical poetry, and no statement of his philosophy. But every Sufi has a silsila–literally, the ‘thread’ that affiliates them with a particular Sufi school or master. Shah Inayat, unconventionally, had two silsilas; and there are other indications, too, that he was not entirely conformist in his religious thinking.

  According to Qani, the poet from Thatta, Shah Inayat left Sindh when he was still a young man, to travel through India in search of a religious guide. He went to the Deccan, and then to Delhi, where he found a teacher who was so impressed with his Sindhi pupil that he followed him back to Thatta. There, pious local theologians–who had been campaigning to banish ‘pagan’ practices from Sindhi Islam, and in particular to outlaw the Sufi dance parties at Makli–branded them both heretics. The usual reason given is that Shah Inayat’s teacher had prostrated himself in respect before his pupil–humans should only prostrate themselves before God. But as we sit listening to Sufi Huzoor Bux speak of the Jhok commune, Mashkoor whispers to me through the dark: ‘Shah Inayat was also a follower of Sarmad.’

  This intriguing report links Shah Inayat to the most unorthodox Sufi tradition in India. Sarmad was a Persian-Jewish merchant, who had journeyed during the early seventeenth century to Thatta on business. There he fell in love with a beautiful Hindu boy, Aabay Chand. Thatta was in its heyday as the cosmopolitan riverside centre of Sindh’s cloth trade, and according to Fray Sebastien Manrique (a fretful Portuguese friar who visited in 1641), ‘So great indeed is the depravity in this sink of iniquity that…catamites dressed and adorned like women parade the streets, soliciting others as abandoned as themselves.’ Sarmad and Aabay Chand travelled on to Delhi, where, if their homosexuality (and Aabay Chand’s Persian translation of the Pentateuch) went unremarked, Sarmad’s nudity did not. But it was his insistence on uttering only the first phrase of the Muslim creed, ‘There is no God’, which brought down on his head the clerics’ wrath. When they pressed him to finish the sentence with the crucial words, ‘but God’, Sarmad declined, saying, ‘I am fully absorbed with the negative connotations: how can I tell a lie?’

  Heretics were two a paisa in India, but Sarmad attracted the devotion of the Emperor’s son, and this led to his death. Dara Shikoh, heir apparent of the ruling emperor Shah Jahan, had a deep interest in syncretic Islamic-Hindu traditions, and even had the sacred Hindu Upanishads translated to satisfy his curiosity. Aurangzeb, his younger brother, considering Dara Shikoh to be both a heretic and the impediment to his own imperial glory, had him assassinated in 1659 after a dramatic river-battle on the Indus, and Sarmad was executed soon afterwards for blasphemy. After his death, Sarmad was referred to reverently as the ‘Mansoor of India’–a reference to Mansoor Al-Hallaj, a Sufi saint who wandered along the Indus in 905, and was executed in 922 on his return to Baghdad because his sermons were too esoteric.

  Shah Inayat was only seven years old when Sarmad was killed. Nevertheless, during his visit to Delhi twenty years later, he met Sarmad’s disciples and visited his grave. From Sarmad, says Mashkoor, Shah Inayat learned to disregard human laws, laugh at fasts and prayers, and avow in the face of clerical protest that ‘Hindu-Muslim ek hi hain’ (Hindu and Muslim are one). There is little actual evidence that Shah Inayat thought any of these things, but the fact that these iconic images of him live on in Sindh is enough. Shah Inayat’s status as the ultimate rebel endures.

  The hero, then, not only of every anti-feudal protest but also of a thoroughly anti-fundamentalist kind of Sindhi Islam, Shah Inayat has come to embody Sindh’s distinct brand of nationalism–politically socialist and religiously syncretic. G. M. Syed, the late father of Sindhi nationalism, dedicated a book to Shah Inayat: ‘He sacrificed everything which he possessed and waged a war against religious prejudices.’ But Sindh, too, deserves an accolade. In all India, Sindh has the longest history of continuous Muslim-Hindu interaction, and it is significant that the Sufi trio who lost their heads on account of their non-conformity–Al-Hallaj, Sarmad and Shah Inayat–all spent some time here.

  Shah Inayat may be dear to the hearts of Sindhi socialists, but the immediate effect of his execution three hundred years ago was the rise of the local family which led him to his death–the Kalhoras. Having shown their strength in quashing the uprising, they soon augmented their hold on Sindh and became its overlords. With Shah Inayat died Sindh’s hope of land reform.

  Land distribution under the Mughals was based on the mansabdari honours system–land was leased to the nobles and reverted to the state on the incumbent’s death. The Kalhoras, by contrast, rewarded the loyalty of pirs and Syeds by granting them land outright. The result was a feudal system that was augmented by the Talpurs, a
nd set in stone legally by the British (who needed their collaborators in the countryside to be powerful). Partition increased the economic power of the landowners because many of the Hindu moneylenders to whom they were indebted fled for their lives to India. ‘Feudalism’ is a highly contested term in modern India and Pakistan, but the form of landownership that exists in Sindh today, whatever name it goes by, keeps the peasantry illiterate, poverty-stricken and hopeless. The landlords, who are also the politicians, dictate rural voting via a network of agents. A rural agent explains it to me quite openly: ‘In exchange for access to the politician, which is vital for me in securing my children and relatives local government jobs, I make sure the villagers vote the way I say.’ ‘If they don’t?’ I ask. ‘If they don’t, we send in the ghoondas [thugs].’ The haris suffered in Shah Inayat’s day, but modern democracy has disenfranchised them once again.

  The Kalhoras who inaugurated this system are nevertheless lauded as patriots by the state, for during their half-century of rule they freed Sindh from the shackles of the declining Mughal empire, improved agriculture by digging canals, and promoted the arts at court. Persian poetry thrived under the Kalhoras. (When they were finally usurped, in 1782, it was their former disciples–the Talpurs–who defeated them, naturally.)

  After talking with Sufi Huzoor, we walk up the dirt road to the shrine, past the noisy, colourful stalls selling mango juice, elaborate hairpieces for women, bangles and milk-sweets. It is a different world inside the gates. Most Sufi shrines are relaxed places but here there is a cultish air of order. We step between neat flowerbeds and surrender our possessions to rigorous, security-concerned attendants. During the public concert held in the presence of the Sajjada Nasheen, men and women are seated apart (the men getting the flower garden in front of the stage, the women making do with loudspeakers in a muddy paddock).