Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The 1,028 hymns, arranged in ten books or mandalas, are a paean to the mystifying power of Nature. The gods of later Hinduism are consolingly anthropomorphic; but those in the Rig Veda are natural phenomena: Agni (fire), Aditi (dawn), Indra (thunder) and Sindhu (simultaneously the Indus, water, floods, sea and rain).

  What in the Rig Veda is fact? What, in this ‘rich and secret book’, is metaphor? Amidst the swirl of perplexing symbols, one thing stands out clearly: geography. Like a poem-map, the hymns delineate the Indus and its tributaries, from the Yamuna in the east, through the Punjab, to Afghanistan in the west. The river to which all these rivers ‘hasten’–‘like mothers crying to their sons’–is the Sindhu. Sung on the banks of the Indus, the hymns echo with imprecations to the river.

  Sindhu exceeds all the other wandering rivers by her strength…Sparkling, bright, with mighty splendour she carries the waters across the plain–the unconquered Sindhu, the quickest of the quick, like a beautiful mare–a delight to see.

  Max Müller believed that it was the very experience of beholding the river’s creative-destructive power which had engendered humanity’s concept of the divine.

  Sanskrit has many words which are similar to European equivalents: the fire god Agni becomes ignis in Latin, for example. But scholars found the etymology of the rain god Indra perplexing. Some wondered if it had a non-Sanskrit root, others whether it meant ‘giant’, ‘quick’, ‘conqueror’ or ‘man’. Only for Max Müller was its meaning incontrovertible:

  The derivation of the name Indra, a god who is constantly represented as bringing rain, from the same root which yielded ind-u, rain-drop, is beyond the reach of reasonable criticism…there can be no doubt that in the mind of the Vedic poets ind-u and ind-ra were inseparably connected.

  If Indra shares a linguistic root with ind-u, rain, it also shares one with the Indus. The river is the physical manifestation of the storm god’s power. Indra controls the waters, ‘setting them free’ in spring and taming the floods so that humans can cross them. The waters are ‘Indra’s special beverage’.

  Indra’s waters fill the Indus to the brim, fertilizing the land for the Vedic flocks. ‘Ye goddess floods,’ the poets sing, ‘ye mothers, animating all, promise us water rich in fatness and in balm.’ The wealth of the Indus–‘Sindhu with his path of gold’–is a recurring theme. ‘The Sindhu is rich in horses, rich in chariots, rich in clothes, rich in gold ornaments, well-made, rich in food, rich in wool…the auspicious river wears honey-growing flowers.’

  As bemused Sanskrit scholars have long pointed out, the Rig Veda is about the Punjab, principally; its vision also encompasses what is now eastern Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan. Sindh and peninsular India are unknown. There are rare mentions of rivers to the east. The Yamuna (which today runs through Delhi) is invoked a handful of times; the Ganges no more than twice at the most; and the Saraswati, a fabled eastern river that dried up around 1000 BCE, is only praised in later layers of the text. Disconcerting as it is to pious Hindus, the Rig Veda has its heartland in Pakistan.

  From subsequent Sanskrit literature, it is clear that the Rigvedic people gradually migrated east towards the Gangetic plains, where the rivers they worshipped were perhaps less fickle and erratic, less subject to sudden, life-threatening changes of course. Ancient Vedic commentaries such as the Satapatha Brahmana, and the epic, the Mahabharata, esteem north-central India. The medieval Sanskrit plays and poems shift the centre of Sanskrit culture south; and the Ramayana appears to describe the conquest of Sri Lanka. In classical Sanskrit literature, the Ganges–an insignificant river in the Rig Veda–is promoted as the ultimate sin-cleansing goddess, the holiest of holies.

  As Sanskrit moved east and south into India, the Hindu sacred landscape (aryavarta) was reoriented. The old homeland became the new periphery: and an Oedipal hatred of the land they had come from developed. Western India’s mountains and deserts, even the lush Punjab, were thrust beyond the pale, fit only for mlecchas: Sanskrit-illiterate barbarians. In the Mahabharata there are faint memories of a time when the land of the five rivers was sacred. But more often, the Punjab is roundly vilified. ‘How indeed would…the Sindhu-Sauviras know anything of duty,’ one of the characters comments, ‘being born, as they are, in a sinful country, being mlecchas in their practices, and being regardless of duties.’ Where ‘those five rivers flow…which have the Sindhu for their sixth…those regions are without virtue and religion. No one should go hither.’ The men of the five rivers drink alcohol and eat beef with garlic; their women dance naked.

  As the reputation of the Indus valley grew ever more dire, many Hindus seized instead on the vanished Saraswati. It was mythologized as the mother of all Rigvedic rivers, and its location was shifted eastwards into the Gangetic heartland: Hindus now believed that it flowed invisibly to the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna (at Allahabad near Varanasi). The Indus, by contrast, became so neglected that in 1922 a Brahmin priest from Sindh had to write a book reminding Hindus of the river’s holiness. Partition, in 1947, sealed centuries of Hindu feeling about the Indus. Now that the river was lost almost completely to Pakistan, the Saraswati acquired a cult following.

  The eastward-shifting geography of ancient Indian literature had encouraged men like Jones to see Sanskrit as an immigrant language to India. This gave rise to the theory of the ‘Aryan invasion’–to which many Indians reacted with understandable fury. Most academics in India now agree that there was indeed some kind of population migration into north-western India during the second millennium BCE. But during the rule of the BJP, right-wing Hindu politicians denied the Aryan invasion in Parliament, and ordered that authoritative accounts by the country’s leading historians–whom they denounced as ‘unpatriotic leftists’–should be excised from classroom textbooks.

  In Pakistan, however, it is different. Here, the idea of an ‘Aryan invasion’ carries no unpatriotic stigma; indeed it is considered natural, in a country where any Muslim with social aspirations can trace their descent from Arab or Persian émigrés, that the ‘noble’ Aryans were immigrants too. Since 2003, a team of Pakistani archaeologists has been excavating ancient graves along the banks of the northern Indus tributaries. According to the results of their most recent researches, the graves are tantalizing traces of what they call ‘the ancient Aryans’ journey’ from Central Asia, south-east into Pakistan. In a sweeping sabre-swipe that cuts India off from its Aryan past, these archaeologists tell me that while the immigrant Aryans colonized the Indus valley, ‘this culture ends here. The Aryans did not cross the river into India.’

  Hitherto, archaeologists have been frustrated by the fact that while the authors of the Rig Veda created a complex world of verbal images, it has been difficult to locate their material remains. Unlike Ashoka, who wrote his name on rocks all over the country, the Aryans were probably pastoralists who shunned the usual recourse of archaeologists–urban settlements and writing. As far as physical artefacts go, like Macavity the Mystery Cat, the Aryans are never there.

  Sanskrit scholars have had to scour the Rig Veda for clues, arguing over the meaning of almost every word. From the mass of entwined metaphors it has been established more or less conclusively that the Aryans’ two most important status symbols were cows and horses. On ceremonial occasions they drank the sacred soma, a mysterious juice pressed from a mountain mushroom, or maybe a leafless pulpy plant like rhubarb. They liked to live near rivers; they used copper; they practised herding and hunting.

  In the 1960s, artefacts were recovered from graves in Dir and Swat (known in the Rig Veda as Suvastu, ‘good dwelling place’) that were carbon-dated to the second millennium BCE, around the time of the Rig Veda’s composition. The grave-people’s main source of meat was cattle; and they had contacts with far-off northern places. There was lapis lazuli from northern Afghanistan, earrings made of gold (probably from the upper Indus) and pottery gracefully painted with horse shapes. There were various forms of burial on the banks of the river, including bodies
buried in a foetal position (as in Central Asia) and cremation (as happened later in India). There were many things, wrote the Italian archaeologist Giorgio Stacul, which suggested ‘a connection with the Vedic literature’.

  The most contentious finds, though, were the bones of Equus caballus. Horses are the quintessence of Rigvedic culture: ‘Surely the child of the waters, urging on his swift horses, will adorn my songs, for he enjoys them.’ There are whole hymns about horses in the Rig Veda; gods are called horses; as in Homer, the horse-drawn chariot is the Rigvedic people’s most important weapon. The significance of the horse in the Rig Veda reflects the dramatic changes it brought to human life after its domestication during the fourth to second millennium BCE in the Ukraine. Horses allowed the people who rode them to cover huge distances, and to rout their enemies.

  To the annoyance of those who allege that the Aryans were indigenous to India, traces of the horse have not yet been found there in the pre-Rigvedic archaeological record. The presence of horse bones in the Dir and Swat graves signalled to excited archaeologists that horse-riding Proto-Sanskrit speakers entered north-west Pakistan during the second millennium BCE. The use to which the horses had been put even suggested Rigvedic ritual. Images of horses were buried as grave-goods with humans; there were horse burials, and some of the horse bones had ‘marks of butchery’ upon them. This is reminiscent of the Rig Veda’s royal horse sacrifice, the asvamedha, which culminated in a horse being butchered, parboiled and roasted–a mouth-watering feast that would warm the heart of any Gaul:

  The racehorse has come to the slaughter, with his heart turned to the gods…Those who see that the racehorse is cooked, say, ‘It smells good!’

  In 2003, the oldest graves in the region were discovered in Chitral and Gilgit, the two far north-western provinces of Pakistan, which border Afghanistan and are within spitting distance of Tajikistan. For the Pakistani archaeologists, this discovery vindicated their Aryan invasion hypothesis: the oldest graves are furthest north, they say, because these people entered the area from the north-west. Although no horse graves have yet been excavated, archaeologists have so far unearthed a ‘heavily rusted’ iron stirrup, and a long iron mace or spearhead–carried, they speculate, by a people who fought battles on horseback. ‘They came through the Baroghil and Darkot passes directly into Chitral and Gilgit,’ I am told by Muhammad Zahir, a young archaeologist from Peshawar, who led the excavations. Could this be the journey that the Rig Veda appears to hint at? Indra, it is written, has carried the tribes across ‘many rivers’ and ‘through narrow passages’.

  The Chitral graves have also reopened the debate over the origins of the Kalash people–one ancient graveyard was found in the Kalash village of Rumbur, and another on the site of a medieval Kalash fort. This, the archaeologists say, suggests that the Kalash are the long-lost Aryans, still living where their ancestors had three millennia before. There is a tempting neatness to this theory. But it is with some trepidation that I pack a copy of the Rig Veda, and set off into northern Pakistan to meet–as one nineteenth-century colonial commentator dubbed the Kalash–these ‘pure Aryans of the high type.’

  By the time I reach the Kalash villages, I have read enough archaeological reports and amateur nineteenth-century ethnography, seen enough pictures and heard enough rumours, to know that north-west Pakistan is a tapestry of prehistoric remains. But nothing has prepared me for the beauty I encounter in those lonely valleys–for the carvings of hunters; for the megalithic stone circles; above all for the extravagant landscape of these ancient people’s lost peregrinations. Standing amidst walnut trees, rushing streams and jagged cliffs, it is easy to see how this land could have inspired poetic devotion:

  By his great power he turned the Sindhu towards the north: with his thunderbolt he ground to pieces the wagon of the dawn, scattering the tardy enemy with his swift forces: in the exhilaration of the Soma, Indra has done these deeds.

  For the people who still live on the banks of the raging Indus tributaries, the river has lost none of its fearful power since Rigvedic priests first tried to assuage it with their hymns. On my first day in the Kalash mountain village of Bumboret, a boy is swept to his death. That afternoon, I walk out to the graveyard under the holly-oaks on the edge of the village. The ground is littered with wooden boxes carved with solar discs–Kalash coffins, just as Alexander saw them two thousand years ago. Few Kalash are entombed above ground like this any more, partly because of the fear of grave-robbers. All over Chitral and Gilgit, the illegal trade in antiques encourages the pillaging of everything from Kalash coffins, to stone circles, to three-thousand-year-old ‘Aryan’ graves.

  Kalash burial practices are also dying out as a result of proselytization by Muslim missionaries, whose alluring promise of five-star accommodation in heaven (jannat) maintains a steady conversion rate. Neither the Kalash themselves (nor the Christians nor the Hindus) can offer such an unqualified assurance of paradise as the Muslims do. (Later, during a bus ride along the Indus to Skardu, I discover just how marvellous this heaven is when two gaunt madrassah students insist on replacing the Bollywood music on the stereo with a religious sermon in Urdu: ‘There will be one hundred million different kinds of fruit in heaven,’ says the preacher, before getting on to the houris. The other passengers listen, silent and observant.)

  Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders. Neither Muslim, Hindu nor Buddhist, the Kalash religion is syncretic, involving a pantheon of gods, sacred goats, and a reverence for river sources and mountaintops. The Kalash have no holy book, and hence absorb influences idiosyncratically and seemingly at random. In the nineteenth century, the neighbouring Afghan Kafirs, who had a similar culture to the Kalash, boasted that they had killed the sons of Ali (the grandsons of the Prophet). In the twenty-first century the Kalash are more diplomatic: they have begun calling their creator god ‘Khodai’, after the Persian word Khuda used for God by Muslims and some Hindus all over the subcontinent.

  Such is the pressure from Islam in Bumboret, few young Kalash seem proud of their pantheon, or even to know of its existence. There is incredulity when I say that I have read about a Kalash female household deity. Gul, one of the first Kalash girls to have gone to college in Chitral, looks confused. ‘Yes, we have more than one god,’ she says; but protests break out from her mother and brother; and two young Muslim men, her former schoolmates, raise their voices: ‘If it is true that the Kalash have a female god in their houses then there will be fighting between us.’

  Every Kalash family has a vineyard from which they ferment wine–the sacred Aryan soma, say enthusiasts of the Aryan-Kalash hypothesis–a Dionysiac cocktail, said ancient, and latterly modern, Greeks. On my first day in Bumboret, an old Kalash lady invites me in to sample her home brew: sour white wine fermented in a goatskin, followed by mulberry tara, all before ten in the morning. As we knock back shots of tara, my sense of our kinship expands in step with my inebriation, for all women are by definition unclean according to Kalash tradition. In the hour before the tara headache strikes, I savour the miscellaneous company we women keep–cows, chickens, and the mouths of rivers are also deemed dirty–and wonder if it is in spite of, or because of, their quintessential impurity that Kalash women enjoy a freedom which should be the envy of their Muslim compatriots. Villagers hold night-time dance parties, everybody drinks, and the unveiled women–who on an ordinary day wear a clutch of plaits in their hair, beaded-headdress hats, and hundreds of saffron-coloured necklaces–choose their own husbands.

  But the ‘free and easy’ Kalash ladies have gained notoriety elsewhere in Pakistan, and in the summer, the villages are beset by sex-starved Punjabi tourists keen to ogle ladies without headscarves. This is the second major reason for Kalash conversions. ‘It was the sight of her dancing with other men that made me do it,’ a recent convert called Fazlur tells me as we sit under a mulberry tree eating the slender white fruit: ‘I took a course in Islam in Karachi, and when I came bac
k, I made my wife say the kalma by the river. Now she never leaves the bottom of the garden.’ ‘Have you given up sharab [alcohol]?’ I ask. Fazlur’s Kalash friends snigger. Drinking is part of Chitrali culture–no Muslim in this land can live without their mulberry tara. ‘But I have a place in heaven guaranteed,’ Fazlur says.

  In Rumbur village on the other side of the hill, the Kalash appear more at ease with their unusual way of life. The land is communally owned; there is no class or caste. There is a small hydroelectric dam, and everywhere I walk in the hills around the village, I step across small, carefully constructed canals bringing water to every villager’s fields. Compared with the situation in other parts of Pakistan, it is an ecological paradise.

  Lying here and there on the ground in the Rumbur graveyard, are wooden gandao–effigies of dead horsemen, mounted on one, sometimes two, large steeds. If gandao were still made today, they would presumably show the Kalash astride motorbikes, jumping on buses, or turning the ignition of a jeep. Horses are no longer an important part of Kalash daily life, and the same is true all over Chitral, where jeeps and highways have rendered equine transport redundant. It is the end of a long tradition, for in ancient India, this part of the country was always famous for its horses. Kalash mythology maintains that the ‘horse was created first of all animals’ the Kalash sun god Balimain rides a mount, and wooden sculptures of Balimain’s horse still guard the sacred worship-place on a hillside high above the village. Until the nineteenth century, horse reverence stretched at least as far east as Chilas on the banks of the Indus, where the local people kept a ‘rude sculpture’ of their god Taiban’s horse. In 1895, when George Robertson visited the neighbouring Kafirs in Afghanistan, he was told that thunder was the noise of their god Indr playing polo, and that horse sacrifices took place next to the river.