Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  Nevertheless, one morning when I am standing in the sun overlooking the narrow blue cleft of the Indus, in front of an ancient carving that time has almost completely recoloured, the shapes etched into the rock make me think. The drawing is a stiff but confident outline of a person with spiky hair, long arms and fingers, whose feet come together in a boat-shape–a river god, one Pakistani archaeologist has argued. The spikes on its head are like the rays of the sun–perhaps this is how a child might draw a god it has heard about in song or prayer. That afternoon, during a rainstorm, I shelter under an overhanging rock and read of Agni, described in the Rig Veda as having flames protruding from his head: ‘Seven bay mares carry you in the chariot, O sun god with hair of flame, gazing from afar’–Agni who is an integral part of the Vedic rain cycle–‘O Agni full of moisture’–drawing the water out of the rivers and letting it fall as rain.

  It is not impossible that the Rigvedic people, who created such complex verbal images, also drew images on rock. What is probable, is that the prehistoric grave-builders, horse-eating horse riders, rock carvers, stone-circle makers, and Rig Veda singers meandered through the same dramatic landscape of northern Pakistan; and for a moment in history all were bound together, by their deep, primeval regard for this river and its landscape.

  Travelling north along the Indus from Chilas to Gilgit on the Karakoram Highway, there is a point on the road where bus drivers always stop. It is here that the great Indus river, which for a thousand kilometres has been flowing west, is suddenly forced south by the geological mass of the mountains. The vista on the road opens up, and suddenly it is possible to see down along the river and across the hills to Nanga Parbat, the ‘Naked Mountain’. Today the pride of people from the Northern Areas, Nanga Parbat is also another candidate for the Vedic people’s sacred Mount Meru–and here, for me, the circle is complete. This is the easternmost point in the sphere of culture described by Pakistan’s prehistoric grave complex, its valley of stone circles, its riverside carvings.

  In the centuries after the Rig Veda was first sung, a whole culture went east into the easy world of the monsoon-fed Ganges. And in the centuries that followed, the landscape they left behind, with its precipitous streams and enigmatic valleys, became nothing more than a memory, part shameful, part wistful.

  10

  Alluvial Cities

  c. 2600 BCE

  I stood on a mound of Mohenjo-daro…all around me lay the houses and streets of this ancient city…What was the secret of this strength? Where did it come from?’

  Jawaharlal Nehru, 1946

  SUNLIGHT GLINTS OFF acres of salt-encrusted brick. The streets are wide, the houses solid, the wells deep. There are public dustbins, indoor toilets and covered drains. To the west is a citadel, containing grain stores, pillared assembly halls and a public bath; to the east a residential area housing up to 75,000 people. Compared with the chaotic nature of many modern Pakistani cities, this metropolis is tidy and neat. But nobody lives here. Residents have not walked these streets for the past four thousand years. Called Mohenjodaro (‘Mound of the Dead’), this planned, grid-like city is an archaeological relic.

  Scraped free of the overlying layers of earth in 1922, the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization transformed the understanding of Indian history. Colonial Victorians had portrayed the history of the Indus as backward and unedifying, enlightened only by Alexander’s peregrinations. Historians had assumed that India’s oldest civilization was that of the legendary Aryans. But long before the authors of the Rig Veda camped on the banks of the Indus, an entire empire had been built here from the river’s alluvium. Archaeologists now believe that the people of the Indus cities moulded bricks from mud, baked them in kilns, and constructed what were probably the world’s first planned cities. Each of the hundreds of towns and cities along the banks of the river were identical, as if the Indus Valley Civilization was conceptualized, planned and constructed according to one model.

  It was a linear empire which exploited the power of the river to produce enough grain to feed cities, organize urban society, and trade with foreign lands. Among the cities’ debris, archaeologists found small seals depicting wooden ships, a miniature sculpture of a dancing girl, and scented coffins made of cedar and rosewood. The Indus cities were semi-industrialized, manufacturing mass-produced clay pots, stone weights and copper beads. They were trading with Mesopotamia, using the river to irrigate vast cotton-growing projects, and importing semi-precious stones from Afghanistan, conch shells from the Arabian Sea, fish from Lake Manchar and cedarwood from the Himalayas.

  Unlike Egypt with its pyramids, or Mesopotamia with its temples, their biggest structures were not symbols of monarchical tyranny or priestly power, but civic buildings such as public baths and grain stores. Discovered at a time when Europe was reeling from the impact of the First World War, this utilitarian city, ‘devoid of any semblance of ornament’, was hailed as a Fabian utopia.

  The significance of finding a pre-Aryan Indian civilization was not lost on the chief archaeologist, John Marshall: ‘before ever the Aryans were heard of,’ he wrote in 1931, ‘the Panjab and Sind…were enjoying an advanced and singularly uniform civilization of their own.’ Nor was it lost on Indian freedom-fighters, who seized on the discovery as a rallying point for national pride. This was no immigrant invaders’ culture; it was of the soil. At a time when the forebears of their colonial masters were still using stone tools, the citizens of the Indus valley were enjoying a life of high urban sophistication. The future Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, made a pilgrimage to the cities, and years later, as he was penning his memoirs in a British colonial jail, he described the impact their discovery had on him: ‘that vision of five thousand years gave me a new perspective, and the burden of the present seemed to grow lighter.’ (It was thus an acute disappointment to some Indians when the Indus valley cities were lost to Pakistan at Partition, and the search for equally ancient cities on the banks of the ‘Saraswati’ in India began almost immediately.)

  Looking back across the river from the militarized northern border between Pakistan and India, towards the apparently peaceful civilization nurtured in the plains, the scale of that achievement seems fraught with irony. This homogenous culture covered an area larger than the contemporaneous civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, stretching from the high Himalayas, to the hills of Afghanistan, right down along the river to the sea. The regularity of the town planning in all of the one thousand settlements, the uniform objects, the identical size of each of the millions of bricks, suggest a river empire with an aesthetic imprint more exacting than Victorian England’s, an ambition as grand as Ashoka’s, and a standardizing urge as dominant as that of modern corporate globalization. Lasting more than five hundred years it survived longer than most major empires. But it is not clear who controlled it. According to some historians, it was a socialist system, ruled neither by one dynastic despot nor, as in Pakistan, by the tyranny of an army, but by a democracy of civic bodies.

  Whoever was in charge, it was the economic relationship between the interlinked cities of the river’s plains and the villages in the mountains which facilitated the cities’ huge construction projects and boat-building. Wood was floated downriver from isolated hill communities–still in the Stone Age–and with this, the cities in the plains built granaries, houses and boats. The transport of wood down the Indus and its tributaries, between the Himalayas and the plains, is the oldest trade that we know of in the region. It anticipated the Silk Road, pre-dated the ships of King Solomon, and facilitated the creation, in the Indus valley, of cultural artefacts which still endure in modern Pakistan.

  But while it was once possible to travel this ancient highway from Kashmir to Karachi, sixty years of fighting have put an end to that. Where once merchants in the upper Indus valley exchanged cedarwood for carnelian beads, gold for cotton cloth, or–as in the case of the villagers on the banks of the Indus in Baltistan–vegetables for Tibetan salt, now the only
things exchanged are shells. Not cowries but explosives.

  The Line of Control is a temporary ceasefire line that was drawn across the Indus valley in 1949 and redrawn in 1972. All along it to the west, into this place of glaciers and lakes, the Pakistan Army has brought battalions and guns; from here, it sends militants across the mountains to wreak havoc in the emerald wedge of land known in Pakistan as ‘India-Occupied Kashmir’. The fighting in the valley of Kashmir has come to be regarded as a battle between India’s secularism and Pakistan’s Islam; but Kashmir is also the source of an important Indus tributary, the Jhelum–and this, perhaps, is the real reason for the never-ending warfare.

  With the cessation of this millennia-old traffic, the citizens of India and Pakistan have suffered the stifling of their mutual history, and the loss of access to lands, languages and faces that were once part of their shared vocabulary. But it is the villagers on the rim of the Indus as it enters Baltistan from India who have fared worst of all, who have indeed barely survived the cleaving of their river in two. Cut off from families and culture over the border, fired upon by Indian shells, unable to tend their fields or travel to nearby towns for supplies, the villagers in north-eastern Pakistan compete with those of the Delta as the saddest in the whole Indus valley.

  Baltistan was once known as ‘apricot Tibet’ or ‘Little Tibet’. As in the adjacent Indian provinces of Kargil and Ladakh, the people here speak a dialect of Tibetan; and though they are Shia Muslims, not Buddhists, their culture, like their language, is affiliated with the lands to the east. In a dry upland like Baltistan, the fields yield only one annual crop, and before 1947, farmers would spend three or four months of the year on trading trips east along the river to Leh, north to Kashgar in China, or down through the Deosai plains to the valley of Kashmir. Even after 1947, villagers could still move with their herds discreetly across the de facto border. Only after the 1971 war, when the army occupied Baltistan, did walking the ancient pathways become more difficult.

  I want to visit the very place where the river–which for hundreds of kilometres and thousands of years has been Indian–becomes Pakistani; but it is now a transit zone beyond civilization. The capital of Baltistan is Skardu, a riverside town whose sand-swept fort juts grandly into the Indus. From Skardu to the border with India, Baltistan is off-limits to foreigners and local civilians. To go there, I will have to ask permission from the army.

  Normally such a mission fills me with misgiving, but by the time I reach Skardu, I am ill, and thus I lose all inhibitions. From a small public call office on Skardu’s main street, I ring Army Headquarters in Rawalpindi and ask to be taken to the border. The army, at least, does not suspect me of being a spy: I am told to report to Brigade Headquarters next morning at nine o’clock.

  The Brigade Major looks me up and down. I am wearing another florid shalwar kameez and am almost sick when he offers me one of the greasy snacks disguised with mayonnaise that come regularly from the canteen in place of a proper lunch. ‘This is most unusual,’ he says. ‘We never take civilians, or women, to the Line of Control.’ He allows this information to sink in, and then he says: ‘Can you wear something muted, something…green?’ It takes me a moment to realize what he is talking about. Will the Indians mistake me for a rare bird and shoot me? ‘You will be under enemy surveillance,’ he says in a reprimanding tone; and I remember this remark when, weeks later in India, I drive from Srinagar to Kargil and see a sign by the road: CAUTION: YOU ARE UNDER ENEMY SURVEILLANCE. Like the water in the Indus, even the military language is the same on both sides of the border.

  The Major, however, is exaggerating: not about the lack of women in military messes, but about the danger of being hit by Indian rockets. The ceasefire was declared in November 2003, and the farmers have almost all returned to their shell-shocked villages.

  Our departure is delayed by four, five, then six days because of floods upstream. The Indus has risen and destroyed a bridge near the border, and the roads are impassable. On the seventh day we are delayed by our jeep, which breaks down outside Skardu. I stand on the banks of the Indus, looking up at the mountains all around us. The river from here to the border is grey-brown, thick with silt, and it draws the mountains right to its very edge. The cliffs are by turns sharp with serrations, or smooth with heaped sand, as if some gigantic burrowing creature has kicked up the landscape during the night. Around every stream, villages cling to the rock, fields painstakingly terraced, the greenery a tiny fringe of lace between the dull grey rock and glinting river. As we drive eastwards, a smudge of apricot trees denotes settlements in the distance, the only relief in a valley grey and brown with water and light.

  During the day that it takes to reach the border, the chubby junior officer with innocent shiny cheeks who has been delegated to look after me, talks about his life. Engaged to be married, he is being sent to Siachen once he has returned me to Skardu. The tone in which he utters that name betrays his dread. All the soldiers hate it: the glacier where nothing else lives, the high altitude, the inhuman living conditions. They shave their heads before they go, then slam on their caps and do not remove them until they get back to Skardu, such is the danger of frostbite. In Baltistan, Siachen is known cynically as the army’s Kuwait: ‘the soldiers are paid double, they get very rich,’ a jealous resident of Skardu tells me. But the shiny-cheeked officer protests at the unfairness of this statement: ‘We spend all our extra pay just on rations to make life bearable,’ he says.

  ‘What is the point?’ I ask. ‘Why are you doing it?’ He looks shaken, and hesitates before answering: ‘To serve my country.’

  As we drive, I am surprised to discover that many of the village names are different from those on the map I was carrying (a CIA survey from 1953, itself based on the 1945 Survey of India, and long since declassified). Over in India, the Ladakhi settlements along the Indus are still called by the names they were known by one hundred years ago. But here in Pakistan, almost every name has been superseded. Parkootta has become Mehdiabad; Gidiaksdo is now Gidiakhad. Where is Bothicho, Phulbrok or Kazburthang? Which sonorous Tibetan titles have the new Urdu names Madhupur and Mayadur replaced? There is still more confusion on the border itself. There, a village which the army calls by three different names–Vadsha, Vachra, Vadhra–is Chathatang on my map. The army says it is deserted, but the villagers who live just across the Indus from it, disagree: they tell me that thirty families live there, cut off from the world by a military cordon. I suggest to my shiny-cheeked escort that we pay it a visit. ‘Impossible,’ he says.

  We are to stay that night at Hamzigon, the last military mess before India. The smart officers are watching an Indian film about Ashoka when we arrive, and as they have waited for us before eating, we sit awkwardly in their reception room as bikinied Indians dance distractingly on the huge TV screen and I cast about for subjects that it is safe to mention. Normally in such situations I would talk about Alexander the Great but perhaps because we are so near the border, I tell them instead that I used to live in India. ‘I worked in Delhi,’ I say, and then point to the television, where a dhoti-clad Kareena Kapoor is singing her love for Ashoka from a boat at Marble Rocks, a famous tourist spot in Madhya Pradesh: ‘I went there once,’ I say nostalgically, and enthuse about Calcutta (Kolkata), Rajasthan and Kerala: ‘But I haven’t yet visited Kashmir,’ I say into the sudden silence, and add, ‘There was the threat of terrorism and…’ The only movement in the room is that of Kareena Kapoor’s bosom on television. At last Colonel Adil, who has staring eyes and shiny boots, speaks from the line of khaki-clad soldiers on the sofa. ‘Terrorism is an incorrect propaganda term,’ he says, and his voice grows shrill as he adds, ‘What is happening in India-Occupied Kashmir is a freedom fight.’

  Something about the sight of all that khaki loosens my tongue, and having blundered once, I blunder on, and broach the subject of Kargil. This small ‘war-like situation’ occurred in 1999, after Pakistan invaded Indian territory unprovoked. Surprisingly, the officers
in the mess are frank. ‘It was badly planned,’ they say, ‘General Pervez was ill-advised.’ But what did Musharraf hope to gain from his invasion? Indian officers argued that Musharraf aimed to cut off India’s access to Ladakh, its distant northern border, as a bargaining tool to claim land from India elsewhere in India-Occupied Kashmir, and with it the Jhelum and Chenab tributaries. ‘Positions are easy to defend once you have the high ground,’ a Sikh officer in Kargil tells me later. ‘Pakistan was very nearly successful. The hills here are treacherous.’

  At first, in May 1999, after India belatedly discovered that its neighbour had crossed the Line of Control, Pakistan denied that the infiltrators were military. (Ever since their first foray into the valley of Kashmir in 1947, the army has been labelling the incursions of its own soldiers ‘militant activity’.) In 1999, the army once again called the soldiers ‘Mujahideen’, but in Skardu, I meet a man who was employed during the war to cross the border and collect these dead ‘martyrs’. ‘That’s when we Baltis knew there was a war going on,’ he says: ‘when we saw the bodies of our relatives.’ Even after India captured some of the ‘Mujahideen’, and proved that they were army soldiers, Pakistan continued to insist that the men were not ‘regular army recruits’. This was semi-true: most of those sent to die in Kargil were soldiers local to the disputed Northern Areas, and thus not part of a standard regiment. Forbidden to wear uniforms, disguised instead in tracksuits as militants, the soldiers were ill-equipped for war.