Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The Indian authorities forbade Peissel from visiting the Dard villages on the banks of the Indus, which were closed to foreigners at the time, and thus he was unable to test some of his more extrava gant theories. After he left Ladakh, two villages were opened to outsiders in the late 1980s, and while I am in India permits are issued for the first time in sixty years to the last two, right on the border with Pakistan. The army also opens up an access road from Kargil, so it is with a sense of déjà vu that I find myself driving on another military supply road right up to the border. As the jeep turns down the steep mountain road I see the Dard villages clustered along the slender sheen of water where the Indus flows, and I remember standing beside a soldier on the other side of the Line of Control, straining my eyes to see through the silence of that sad place and into India.

  The Dard settlements in Ladakh, with their fecund fields of barley fringed with marigolds and foxgloves, could not be more different. Like the Kalash, the Dard women wear peraks–long headdresses covered with coins, flowers and beads. Francke likened the fashion to the hoods of cobras: ‘Perhaps,’ he wrote, ‘the Ladakhi women wished to look like Nagis’–the female snake deities of ancient India, Buddhist guardians of lakes and rivers–‘because these water fairies were famous for their beauty.’

  Hunter-gatherer societies apparently lived without social hierarchy; and it is the same with the Dards today. The neighbouring Buddhist villages on the banks of the Indus still practise a caste system, with blacksmiths and musicians treated as outcasts and banished to the settlement’s periphery. The Dards, who are considered unclean by other Ladakhis, live as equals. Even women, whom the Kalash believe to be fundamentally impure, in Dard villages have the same power and status as men.

  Perhaps in retaliation for being treated as morally suspect by Buddhists, it is outsiders whom the Dards till recently considered unclean. Before the villages were opened to the public, juniper branches were burnt to cleanse those who had returned from trading trips to Leh or Skardu. The Dards are not so insistent any more and nobody waves a burning juniper branch in my wake as I climb up along the steep paths towards the new Buddhist monastery at the top of the village of Darchiks. The Dard houses are built very close together, so that their second storeys meet above the path, and in the winter when the villages are snowed in, neighbours visit each other by jumping from roof to roof.

  It is raining hard by the time I reach Dha further east along the Indus, and I have the leaky guestroom in a house called Bangbang to myself. At the top of a hill in the middle of the village, with a fine view right down along the Indus, the family who live here hold the longest local record of polyandrous marriages, according to Rohit Vohra, who studied Dard culture in the late 1980s. The Dards still marry only between themselves, and Vohra observed polyandry, monogamy, polygyny and group marriages ‘where all partners have access to each other’ (two sisters marrying two brothers; a wife shared between father and son). Given how effectively these arrangements obscure biological descent, it is the continuity of the household name rather than genetics which is important–and this is the same all over Ladakh. When a couple have no son they adopt a son-in-law into the house rather than lose the household name by marrying their daughters outside the family.

  Until anthropologists–and tourists–arrived to watch their fertility dances, the Dards were not prudish about celebrating sex. During their song festivals men and women traded insults (‘Your penis is like a dog’s penis / Your vagina is like a bitch’s vagina’) and bargained over the price of sex. But Francke, who first translated these songs into English one hundred years ago, employed the services of a Dard whom he personally converted to Christianity and together they obscured the songs’ orgiastic nature. They called them ‘hymns’, and ambiguous and misleading phrases such as ‘Is this not a pleasure ground’ and ‘Oh Show (love!)’ camouflaged the true meaning of songs which actually meant ‘Did we have sex?’ A song which Francke had rendered Christian with the title ‘Love One Another’ was in truth so sexually explicit that, eighty years later, the Dards refused to explain to Rohit Vohra what it meant.

  If Francke was misleading, Vohra’s efforts to keep his anthropological analysis within the bounds of academic politeness engendered a language of perplexing vagueness. He went as far as hinting that the bawdy dancing culminated in an ‘act’ the ‘extreme degrading nature’ of which ‘reveals to the participants the true nature of things’. Ever since then, Indian and foreign visitors have come here in the hope of witnessing Dard ‘degradation’, and the villagers now refuse to perform their dances in public.

  In addition to the songs about sex, the Dards also sing odes to hunting and ancient pastoralism, songs describing the migration from the west, and cosmological descriptions of the creation of the world from water. When I ask the owner of Bangbang house about these songs he leads me up through the stone streets of the village, past the Buddhist monastery to the old fort, where apple trees now grow wild and darkly together. We climb over the tumbledown walls, picking the tart white and pink fruit as we go, until suddenly the ground gives way and I find myself looking down at the Indus in the ravine far below us. An old couple are sitting together in the shade of an apple tree, he clad in a long sheepskin coat, she in a heavily flowered headdress that nods as she talks. I am pleased when it is the wife who offers to sing, piping up sweetly in a wavering, nonagenarian voice. ‘It is a song in our Brogskad language,’ her husband says afterwards, ‘about flowers.’

  I ask the three old people about the oddly shaped standing stones I have seen in the arid hills above the village, wondering if they are Dard equivalents of the bloody altars and spirit-places in Baltistan. But the old people shrug. I am also curious to know about the many carvings of ibex and humans I have seen on the rocks near the river. Those, says Mr Bangbang, are carved by the Iliproo: ‘Fairies which, if you meet them on the road at night, will give you your heart’s desire, money if you need money, children if you need children.’ He eyes me and raises one eyebrow.

  When Michel Peissel visited Dard villages at Zanskar, a remote river valley that runs north into the Indus, the villagers there told him that their ancestors once followed huge flocks of ibex up to the high pastures in the summer and hunted enough to last them through the winter, which they spent in caves by the frozen river. They also told him that they hunted the ibex by chasing them over cliffs–one of the oldest forms of hunting in the world, from a time before bows and arrows were invented. Even now, they said, after every hunt, the goddess who owned the ibex had to be assuaged with an offering of the animal’s entrails, horns and a carving of the animal on a rock. Thus each hunted animal was commemorated by being drawn into the landscape–a neat explanation for the abundance of ibex carvings all along the northern Indus.

  Most of Ladakh’s Dards have became Buddhists, but ibex reverence, like giant worship, has continued in this land, albeit in a modified form. Ladakhi Buddhists believe that the Buddha was an ibex in one of his past lives, and at a monastery near the Tibetan border there is a sacred ibex-horn bow. On the riverbank below Alchi, the most exuberantly painted of Ladakh’s monasteries, there are graceful ibex carvings overlaid with Buddhist designs. Palaeolithic stone tools were also found here, showing that this place was always an important settlement and river-crossing.

  Of all the thousands of carvings in Ladakh, only a handful have been mentioned in academic publications, and were it not for one Ladakhi, I might never have seen the country’s rich collection of prehistoric petroglyphs. During the past twelve years, in the absence of any interest from the Archaeological Survey of India, the most thorough and dedicated exploration has been undertaken by an amateur pair: Tashi Ldawa Tsangspa, a local man, and S. D. Jamwal, an enthusiastic policeman posted here from Jammu. The policeman has since been transferred. That leaves Tashi, and it is he who shows me the rock carvings he has found all along the Indus from Kargil to Leh and east to the border with Tibet.

  I meet Tashi in Kargil, where he works
as a lecturer, and he takes me to see a new rock-art site that he has just located on the outskirts of this austere and nervous Shia town: a huge polished brown rock covered with prehistoric carvings of ibex and hunters, and the modern graffiti of Urdu-speakers. Tashi points right to the middle of the boulder, and there, as darkly patinated as the surrounding rock, almost invisible, is a handprint.

  I spend much time thinking about handprints over the next month, for we come across them at almost every major rock-art site. On the dark rocks along the banks of the Indus it is always the handprints that are the most richly coloured, and therefore the most ancient, of the carvings we see. The hands are carved in one style–small, narrowing at the wrist, with fingers close together–which bears a strong resemblance to the hands ‘spit-painted’ with ochre pigment by Palaeolithic cave painters in Spain and France. But while I can see that in a cave, blowing paint out of your mouth and around an outstretched hand is easy and practical, it is difficult carving on to rock, and a hand in particular requires patience and skill. The hand was special in many ancient cultures. It was a pagan symbol in pre-Islamic Arabia, and this became the ‘Hand of Fatima’ erected above every Shia shrine and worship-place. Aristotle called the hand the ‘universal organ’ it is our hands, he wrote, which distinguish us from beasts: ‘the hand of all instruments the most variously serviceable, has been given by nature to man, the animal of all animals the most capable of acquiring the most varied handicrafts.’ Perhaps a handprint was a prehistoric signature: a way by which humans signalled their presence to one another in a time before anybody learned to write. Hands are also sexless; they could be male or female.

  Paintings and drawings of humans from the modern era tend to focus on facial features. But to Stone Age humans in Ladakh, it seems that the eyes, nose and mouth were not important subjects. Legs, too, dwindle into insignificance; and there is only occasional emphasis on genitalia. Instead, there are many small, intricate carvings of humans in lines–dancing perhaps–with their outsize hands, like massive boxing gloves, raised in the air. There are no portraits of couples, and the few pictures of individuals are of solitary hunters or giants–also with prominent fingers.

  One afternoon, Tashi and I come across a rocky beach on the banks of the Indus that is so full of carvings it must once have been a meeting-place–sacred, festive or commercial. Near the river is a huge rock overladen with drawings of ibex and dancing humans, and I am crouching on the ground, transcribing them into my notebook, when suddenly Tashi gives a shout: ‘A giant.’ Half buried, and extremely faded, is a figure with spiky hair, arms outstretched to a span of seven feet, an exact replica of many of those found on the banks of the Indus in Pakistan.

  Then, on a table-rock nearby, we find another human outline, six foot long. But this figure does not have the usual spiky hair or outstretched arms and sturdy legs: the arms are tight beside the body and the feet together. ‘It is a dead person,’ I say to Tashi instinctively, ‘the outline of a shroud.’ Some three feet above the head, and blacker than the shroud-line, is a handprint, the fingers pointing towards the river. ‘Do you think this was a funeral site? A cremation ground? A place of execution?’ Buddhists in this region sometimes disposed of dead bodies by throwing them into the river–but perhaps the practice was much older. In the stillness of this place the solitary outline on the rock is eerie, and standing looking down at it, I shiver. For the rest of my time in Ladakh I dream of this image at night, and I am still unsure whether I read or dreamt that in an ancient form of capital punishment transgressors were bound with rope and tipped, alive, into the Indus.

  At Domkhar further east, where the river narrows, there are many ancient carvings including another smaller spiky-haired giant, reinforcing the notion that the ancient Ladakhis were giant-worshippers. Tashi and I sit on the rocks by the river with the village Lambardar (headman) eating roasted barley flour–ngampe, Ladakhis call it; tsampa is how it is known in Tibet–the staple food for people from this mountain land for thousands of years. Barley is the oldest crop known in Kashmir, and was eaten at Burzahom before rice arrived from China. But while there are continuities of diet from Palaeolithic times, both Tashi and the Lambardar agree that they feel no connection to the ancient pictures. ‘The Dards believe the carvings are made by fairies,’ I say. Tashi shakes his head: ‘Most Ladakhis, like me, are descended from invaders who came here from Tibet hundreds of years ago. These carvings were made by the original inhabitants of this land.’

  From the moment we leave Domkhar and head towards Khalatse, the Indus valley metamorphoses: the narrow gorge opens up, the river has the run of the desert plain, and the valley is guarded by the parallel mountain ranges which are Ladakh’s southern and northern borders. The Indus, progressing between these twin stone ridges, is so heavy with silt that it is the same colour as the rock. Human and botanical life gather around the glacial streams that run down into the river but the monasteries stand apart. Perched high on sheer cliff faces or on rocky islands in the river, these severe, whitewashed buildings with their flat roofs and heavy brown lintels cling to the arid stone like the stubborn accretions of nature.

  Though the monasteries trumpet Ladakh’s Buddhism, even at these holiest of sites the culture which it supplanted has not vanished entirely. At a monastery west of Leh, Tashi points to a red-painted building on the edge of the stark white monastery complex. ‘Do you see that?’ he asks. ‘It is in honour of Paldan Lhamo, our protective goddess.’ Paldan Lhamo was one of the ancient native deities of Tibet and Ladakh, a fierce Bon demon only absorbed into the Buddhist pantheon in the eighth century. In Ladakh, she is depicted wearing the flayed skin of her son, carrying a bag of diseases, her waist girdled with decapitated human heads, her mule bridled with snakes. Later, when we visit Matho–passing a field where men and women are singing ‘Good work, kind work’ as they scythe–and climb up to a cave once inhabited by Neolithic humans, Tashi points to a mark in the rock at the cave’s entrance. ‘The villagers say this is the shape of Paldan Lhamo,’ he says, ‘and that the landscape itself has drawn a picture of the goddess into the rock.’

  All along the river where ancient settlements have been found, the practice of respecting powerful women still prevails. There are many living lhamos–female oracles or healers–in Ladakh. In a small village near Leh, a lhamo has become famous locally for sucking disease out of the ailing. The taxi driver who takes me to meet her recently converted to Islam and believes her to be a fraud: ‘Even though she is my cousin I know that these people are commercially minded,’ he says, and adds: ‘She teases Muslims.’ The Lhamo prescribes Muslim patients the supposedly retrograde therapy of hanging a prayer flag on their local mosque. ‘All mosques in Ladakh were decorated like this once,’ the taxi driver explains, ‘until our educated Muslims told us not to.’

  On Sunday morning there is a long line of patients waiting in the oracle’s garden for her healing session to start–children with flu, a man with a back problem, a lovelorn girl. After an hour, when enough customers have assembled, we are ushered into the Lhamo’s kitchen. She enters the room wearing a Chinese brocade silk poncho and a tall gilt hat, and kneels in front of a small fire. As her pink-tracksuit-clad granddaughter hands her the tools of her trance, she wails, mutters and shrieks in quick succession. One by one, her patients are made to lift up their shirts and expose their bellies to the Lhamo, who swoops upon them, tongue stuck out, and presses her lips to the skin near their navel. She sucks, and if the patients are well behaved they fling back their bodies in horror or shock. Then the Lhamo lifts her head and spits on to a plate of ash. The granddaughter leans against the kitchen stove, filing her nails in boredom.

  ‘Why are there so many female oracles?’ I ask when it is my turn to sit before her, hoping for a reference to Strirajya, or some other age-old northern lore about female power. But the Lhamo looks dismissive. ‘It is all down to chance,’ she explains in the Lhamo Tibetan dialect that has to be translated through the room in a relay of La
dakhi, Hindi and English. ‘Sometimes men become oracles, sometimes women. My spirit,’ she boasts, ‘comes from Amdo in Tibet, where the fourteenth Dalai Lama was born.’

  Later, a Buddhist tells me that the number of oracles in Ladakh increased after the Chinese invaded Tibet because the spirits fled west along the river to escape oppression. And indeed, although at the time the Lhamo’s trance seems unconvincing, later when I reach colonized Tibet I think back wistfully on Ladakh with its oracles and monks, monasteries and mosques, local politicians and societies, magazines and debates. From that vantage point, the Lhamo seems to symbolize freedom.

  The tranquillity of Ladakh dissipates again near the Tibetan border. Here, where the river froths and twists once more through sombre gorges, and it is easy to imagine how the belief in fierce water spirits came about, soldiers have ensconced themselves. Boulder-painting has superseded rock-carving: ‘Paradise Lies in the Shadow of Swords,’ the army has written in pious white letters by the road; ‘Darling I Like You But Not So Fast,’ retorts the Border Roads Authority in lurid yellow. The paint will fade, but there are hundreds of ancient rock carvings also heading for oblivion. Construction is big business and the villagers chop up rocks like cake to sell to builders. Just beyond Gaik–a Palaeolithic site carbon-dated to the fifth millennium BCE–there is a large geometric carving on a rock, a giant oracle’s mask, perhaps. Nearby are many other smaller but equally mysterious mask-shapes. An entire school of history has been forged around similar carvings in Siberia; and if this area was properly studied it might change historians’ view of the past. Instead, the valley echoes to the tap-tap-tap of men with hammers. Soon these unique petroglyphs will be sold to builders as rubble. Where, I wonder, is the Archaeological Survey of India?

  If ancient evidence of the Empire of the Eastern Women is gradually being destroyed, nature offers geological legends in their place. The overhanging rocks along this part of the river almost touch each other across the roaring water, and at each turn the valley reveals a different scene–the shape of a woman, a slope of pebbles compacted together by some unimaginable geological force, the marks where a stream once passed over rock like the wrinkles on a face.