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Empires of the Indus
by Alice Albinia
Reviewed by Nigel Collett
The Indus is one of the great rivers of the Earth, running for 1,700 miles from a source near Mount Kailash, Tibet's sacred mountain in whose foothills rise three other of South Asia's major rivers: the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Sutlej. It flows through some of the most contentious areas in the modern world, emerging from Chinese-controlled Tibet and crossing into India at a point where the two Asian giants face off in Ladakh only to run westwards to cross the line of control between Indian and Pakistani occupied Kashmir. Then, for much of its upper reaches, the Indus flows in tribal territory, lands but loosely controlled by the Pakistan Government, independent tribal territory made more dangerous by the current growth there of radical Islam and by the infestation of al-Qa'eda and the Taliban (of both the Afghan and the Pakistani varieties). After emerging from the mountains at Attock, the river's course delineates to its west the Pashtun lands of the North West Frontier and the mountains of tribal Baluchistan before finally emerging into the more peaceful plains of Sindh and entering the Arabian Sea through one of the world's greatest river deltas. Much of modern history has been written and is being written along its course, and Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus, has travelled it all.
Albinia is a writer and journalist who lived for many years in Delhi and who, while there, steeped herself in the history and culture of the subcontinent, a history now being re-written continually on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan divide to reflect the polemics and propaganda of the two countries' struggle. Listening to ritual Indian denigration of Pakistan, she was drawn to travel there to find out the truth for herself, and she was drawn to explore the Indus by the river's lost history in the land to which it gave its name. Source of India's Rigveda, birthplace of one of the Subcontinents's greatest civilizations, the gateway through which successive waves of India's conquerors poured, the Indus valley has become lost to much of Indian consciousness. Albinia seeks to resurrect the story of the river in her travelogue, and succeeds triumphantly.
In the process, she proved herself to be an amazingly courageous woman. Alone, often unescorted, in regions where for much of the time her Hindi is as misunderstood as her English, she manages through sheer dogged determination to penetrate into many areas that are off limits to any outsider (let alone a white single woman) and many areas which are under either military or some form of tribal or paramilitary control. Catching lifts where she has to, she prefers, though, to travel where she can on foot. Only in the most dangerous places does she slip beneath the folds of the Moslem burqa she carries or resort to hiding between male escorts in dusty taxis as she traverses mountain roads crossing the Afghan border or climbing up into the Hindu Kush. There is almost no place into which she doesn't manage to persuade, insinuate or ingratiate herself along her route. She walks between neighbouring villages in Swat and Chitral where the inhabitants are too frightened of each other to accompany her. She sits in Waziri and Afridi teahouses on the Tochi and the Khyber, places where no single woman should be. She traverses areas darkened by the fanatics of the Muslim world, areas from which the faint hearted of the west have been frightened by books such as Bernard-Henri Levy's account of the murder of Daniel Pearl. She lets the refusal of no official, Pakistani, Indian or Chinese, prevent her getting where she wants to go.
She ends her journey walking for days across the plains, rivers, marshes and mountain ranges of the Tibetan plateau, through blizzards of hail and snow, to reach Senge Khabab, the Mouth of the Lion, where the Indus emerges from the ground. Only then, in Tibet, in this journey which much have lasted for more than a year (she does not boast of the length of her journey or its discomforts, though she describes the poverty and hardship of those amongst whom she travels and in whose houses she lives everywhere she goes) does she admit to breaking down in tears at the sheer immensity and sorrow of it all. Her bravery takes your breath away.
As she goes, Albinia recounts the story of the lands through which she passes and the sites which she sees, so that her traveller's tale evolves slowly into a carefully and beautifully stitched patchwork of the river valley's history. Her fascination with the past is evident, and she spends days exploring remote areas, sidetracking, switching back, to find prehistoric rock art in Ladakh, Kashgar and Gilgit, to visit the sites of the Mohenjodaro civilization from Sindh to Hazara. She follows in Alexander the Great's footsteps across the mountains from Afghanistan to find the site of the siege he undertook in remote Pirsar in the Black Mountains, the kala daka on the banks of the Indus, the farthest spot in his conquests. She tracks down what few remains there are of the Buddhist marvels of the empire of Ashoka, of Gandara and the Kushans; sadly, as with their Afghan counterparts at Bumian, she finds the carvings of Swat being steadily dynamited by Muslim iconoclasts. On one of many long detours out of the valley, she travels to Ghazni in Afghanistan to follow the paths of conquest into India taken by the scourging Muslim armies of Sultan Mahmud in the eleventh century CE. She recounts the glories of Babur and Aurungzeb's Mughal empire and its dissolution in the lands of the Indus, then of the coming of the British who conquered its successors, the Baluch Talpur rulers of Sind and the Sikhs of Ranjit Singh's short-lived empire of the Punjab. Albinia records all this with admirable accuracy and balance; hers, too, is a beguiling and gilded pen, and she wields it to draw the reader into the spectacles she sees. With her we hear the sounds of the multitude of tongues and the rhythmic chants of the music in the religious festivals, with her our noses are assailed with the scents of this exotic land.
Two things stand out throughout this account, both of great import. The first is the ravages made by mankind on nature's bounty. The Indus, once a mighty river throughout its length, brimming with wildlife from the mangrove delta lands at its mouth through the forests of the plain to the mountains that give it birth, is now denuded, dammed and polluted for almost its entire length. Its fish are gone, its birds are disappearing, its big game has been hunted to extinction and its blind dolphins, which once freely swam along its length, have almost entirely vanished. Great hydroelectric and irrigation schemes stretch as far back as Senge-Ali in Chinese Tibet with the result that in many areas downstream particularly in Sindh, the river bed is bone dust dry. Great wealth has been extracted from its waters but the river is now everywhere a scene of ecological devastation.
Mirroring this ecological catastrophe is an ethnological devastation caused by modern politics and religious strife. Everywhere that she travels in what was one of the most culturally diverse regions on earth, Albinia finds sad evidence of the demise of ancient cultures, of the suppression of minority races, languages and religions and of the loss of the unique mixtures of cultures and faiths which had for millennia co-existed and intermingled in peaceful fusion. Nor is this something which is confined to the major issues which vex the world's political conscience; Albinia is an expert on India, not China, so that by the time, exhausted bodily and in spirit, she reaches her final destination in Tibet, she has time and energy for only the briefest of descriptions of the destruction of Tibetan society since 1951. Similarly, the major culture clash between Hindu and Muslim in Kashmir does not much engage her attention (though she travels through more of that sorry land on both sides of the line of control that divides it than any other modern writer of whom this reviewer is aware). Albinia's interests and sympathies are everywhere with the peoples she meets who are being submerged by the tides of affairs: the Dards of Kashgar, Baltistan and Ladakh, whose matrilineal and polyandrous society with its worship of a multitude of female gods long predates Buddhism; the pagan Kalash, surrounded by a Muslim sea in Pakistan's tribal territories; the Sheedi descendants of African slaves in Sindh and Baluchistan. She grieves for the current stark divisions between Muslim and Hindu, and celebrates all the signs of religious fusion that she finds, albeit slowly evaporating, as she travels. In the process, she reveals some stunning facts. Who, for instance, would have imagined that Sindh, in the heart of Muslim Pakistan, still possessed, in remote shrines, a fusion of Muslim Sufi faith and Hindu beliefs that brings to mind the religious synchronism of Nepal?
Throughout her journey and the length of this book, Albinia is guided by her own love of humanity and a desire to bring home to us, her readers, the commonality of humankind. She is a writer as devoid of prejudice as she is of the cant of political correctness. It is clear, reading between the lines of her book, that she travelled everywhere relying upon the hospitality, kindness and generosity of the multitude of ordinary people of whatever religion or race among whom she found herself. Had she not been to them the warm, sensitive and toughly sensible human being whom we see in these pages, she would never have accomplished this quest. Her humanity shames away the shadows of the stereotypes which cloud our view of the people of these lands. That, evinced by her epic journey and manifested in this greatly rewarding book, is her real achievement.
--
Nigel Collett is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.
by Alice Albinia
Reviewed by Nigel Collett
The Indus is one of the great rivers of the Earth, running for 1,700 miles from a source near Mount Kailash, Tibet's sacred mountain in whose foothills rise three other of South Asia's major rivers: the Brahmaputra, the Ganges and the Sutlej. It flows through some of the most contentious areas in the modern world, emerging from Chinese-controlled Tibet and crossing into India at a point where the two Asian giants face off in Ladakh only to run westwards to cross the line of control between Indian and Pakistani occupied Kashmir. Then, for much of its upper reaches, the Indus flows in tribal territory, lands but loosely controlled by the Pakistan Government, independent tribal territory made more dangerous by the current growth there of radical Islam and by the infestation of al-Qa'eda and the Taliban (of both the Afghan and the Pakistani varieties). After emerging from the mountains at Attock, the river's course delineates to its west the Pashtun lands of the North West Frontier and the mountains of tribal Baluchistan before finally emerging into the more peaceful plains of Sindh and entering the Arabian Sea through one of the world's greatest river deltas. Much of modern history has been written and is being written along its course, and Alice Albinia, author of Empires of the Indus, has travelled it all.
Albinia is a writer and journalist who lived for many years in Delhi and who, while there, steeped herself in the history and culture of the subcontinent, a history now being re-written continually on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan divide to reflect the polemics and propaganda of the two countries' struggle. Listening to ritual Indian denigration of Pakistan, she was drawn to travel there to find out the truth for herself, and she was drawn to explore the Indus by the river's lost history in the land to which it gave its name. Source of India's Rigveda, birthplace of one of the Subcontinents's greatest civilizations, the gateway through which successive waves of India's conquerors poured, the Indus valley has become lost to much of Indian consciousness. Albinia seeks to resurrect the story of the river in her travelogue, and succeeds triumphantly.
In the process, she proved herself to be an amazingly courageous woman. Alone, often unescorted, in regions where for much of the time her Hindi is as misunderstood as her English, she manages through sheer dogged determination to penetrate into many areas that are off limits to any outsider (let alone a white single woman) and many areas which are under either military or some form of tribal or paramilitary control. Catching lifts where she has to, she prefers, though, to travel where she can on foot. Only in the most dangerous places does she slip beneath the folds of the Moslem burqa she carries or resort to hiding between male escorts in dusty taxis as she traverses mountain roads crossing the Afghan border or climbing up into the Hindu Kush. There is almost no place into which she doesn't manage to persuade, insinuate or ingratiate herself along her route. She walks between neighbouring villages in Swat and Chitral where the inhabitants are too frightened of each other to accompany her. She sits in Waziri and Afridi teahouses on the Tochi and the Khyber, places where no single woman should be. She traverses areas darkened by the fanatics of the Muslim world, areas from which the faint hearted of the west have been frightened by books such as Bernard-Henri Levy's account of the murder of Daniel Pearl. She lets the refusal of no official, Pakistani, Indian or Chinese, prevent her getting where she wants to go.
She ends her journey walking for days across the plains, rivers, marshes and mountain ranges of the Tibetan plateau, through blizzards of hail and snow, to reach Senge Khabab, the Mouth of the Lion, where the Indus emerges from the ground. Only then, in Tibet, in this journey which much have lasted for more than a year (she does not boast of the length of her journey or its discomforts, though she describes the poverty and hardship of those amongst whom she travels and in whose houses she lives everywhere she goes) does she admit to breaking down in tears at the sheer immensity and sorrow of it all. Her bravery takes your breath away.
As she goes, Albinia recounts the story of the lands through which she passes and the sites which she sees, so that her traveller's tale evolves slowly into a carefully and beautifully stitched patchwork of the river valley's history. Her fascination with the past is evident, and she spends days exploring remote areas, sidetracking, switching back, to find prehistoric rock art in Ladakh, Kashgar and Gilgit, to visit the sites of the Mohenjodaro civilization from Sindh to Hazara. She follows in Alexander the Great's footsteps across the mountains from Afghanistan to find the site of the siege he undertook in remote Pirsar in the Black Mountains, the kala daka on the banks of the Indus, the farthest spot in his conquests. She tracks down what few remains there are of the Buddhist marvels of the empire of Ashoka, of Gandara and the Kushans; sadly, as with their Afghan counterparts at Bumian, she finds the carvings of Swat being steadily dynamited by Muslim iconoclasts. On one of many long detours out of the valley, she travels to Ghazni in Afghanistan to follow the paths of conquest into India taken by the scourging Muslim armies of Sultan Mahmud in the eleventh century CE. She recounts the glories of Babur and Aurungzeb's Mughal empire and its dissolution in the lands of the Indus, then of the coming of the British who conquered its successors, the Baluch Talpur rulers of Sind and the Sikhs of Ranjit Singh's short-lived empire of the Punjab. Albinia records all this with admirable accuracy and balance; hers, too, is a beguiling and gilded pen, and she wields it to draw the reader into the spectacles she sees. With her we hear the sounds of the multitude of tongues and the rhythmic chants of the music in the religious festivals, with her our noses are assailed with the scents of this exotic land.
Two things stand out throughout this account, both of great import. The first is the ravages made by mankind on nature's bounty. The Indus, once a mighty river throughout its length, brimming with wildlife from the mangrove delta lands at its mouth through the forests of the plain to the mountains that give it birth, is now denuded, dammed and polluted for almost its entire length. Its fish are gone, its birds are disappearing, its big game has been hunted to extinction and its blind dolphins, which once freely swam along its length, have almost entirely vanished. Great hydroelectric and irrigation schemes stretch as far back as Senge-Ali in Chinese Tibet with the result that in many areas downstream particularly in Sindh, the river bed is bone dust dry. Great wealth has been extracted from its waters but the river is now everywhere a scene of ecological devastation.
Mirroring this ecological catastrophe is an ethnological devastation caused by modern politics and religious strife. Everywhere that she travels in what was one of the most culturally diverse regions on earth, Albinia finds sad evidence of the demise of ancient cultures, of the suppression of minority races, languages and religions and of the loss of the unique mixtures of cultures and faiths which had for millennia co-existed and intermingled in peaceful fusion. Nor is this something which is confined to the major issues which vex the world's political conscience; Albinia is an expert on India, not China, so that by the time, exhausted bodily and in spirit, she reaches her final destination in Tibet, she has time and energy for only the briefest of descriptions of the destruction of Tibetan society since 1951. Similarly, the major culture clash between Hindu and Muslim in Kashmir does not much engage her attention (though she travels through more of that sorry land on both sides of the line of control that divides it than any other modern writer of whom this reviewer is aware). Albinia's interests and sympathies are everywhere with the peoples she meets who are being submerged by the tides of affairs: the Dards of Kashgar, Baltistan and Ladakh, whose matrilineal and polyandrous society with its worship of a multitude of female gods long predates Buddhism; the pagan Kalash, surrounded by a Muslim sea in Pakistan's tribal territories; the Sheedi descendants of African slaves in Sindh and Baluchistan. She grieves for the current stark divisions between Muslim and Hindu, and celebrates all the signs of religious fusion that she finds, albeit slowly evaporating, as she travels. In the process, she reveals some stunning facts. Who, for instance, would have imagined that Sindh, in the heart of Muslim Pakistan, still possessed, in remote shrines, a fusion of Muslim Sufi faith and Hindu beliefs that brings to mind the religious synchronism of Nepal?
Throughout her journey and the length of this book, Albinia is guided by her own love of humanity and a desire to bring home to us, her readers, the commonality of humankind. She is a writer as devoid of prejudice as she is of the cant of political correctness. It is clear, reading between the lines of her book, that she travelled everywhere relying upon the hospitality, kindness and generosity of the multitude of ordinary people of whatever religion or race among whom she found herself. Had she not been to them the warm, sensitive and toughly sensible human being whom we see in these pages, she would never have accomplished this quest. Her humanity shames away the shadows of the stereotypes which cloud our view of the people of these lands. That, evinced by her epic journey and manifested in this greatly rewarding book, is her real achievement.
--
Nigel Collett is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.
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