Celebration at Lukpe La
31 December 2014
"If you do not get underway before three in the morning the slog will be extremely difficult for the snow on Sim Gang turns to mush by mid morning." Mark had warned me. But I had found this a most unsavoury proposition, particularly when the night had been so dreadfully cold that even my companions, acclimatised as they were, found it difficult to get started. It was not before the sun had warmed up the camp site that Khushal Khan emerged from the tent to start breakfast.
Mark had been absolutely right. For the first three hours or so the going was good over firm snow then we ran into the mush. This was the snow that had fallen when we were confined to the shepherds' hut south of Skoro La, and it provided a deceptive covering to the crevasses of Sim Gang. I was at the end of the rope with Azizullah leading, and by the time I stepped on these frail snow bridges, most were ready to collapse. Twice I found myself hanging above a dark abyss with a deathly cold breeze wafting up from the unseen depths.
Read more »Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Waters of Empire - Book of Days 2015
29 December 2014
Nature’s greatest gift to the Indian subcontinent is the multitude of perennial rivers. Every spring, they swell with glacial melt brought down from far off snow fields. And even as the first flood begins to ebb, there starts the great surge fed by the annual monsoons.
Our earliest ancestors, having given up their hunter-gatherer way of life and put down agrarian roots, were quick to realize the annual brown flood of high summer fertilized the soil. This knowledge, they put to good use.
Read more »Labels: Book of Days 2015, Waters of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Top Posts 2014
28 December 2014
Bombay Fornicator
Who built the Grand Trunk Road?
The fall of Taxila
Lady Wives
Inventing history
Shiva weeps no more
On My 2362nd Birthday!
Nilofer’s Pakistan and mine
Bomb Blasts
Abbottabad: beauty and buried bounty
Related: Top Posts 2013
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:34,
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Fit for Governor
27 December 2014
Forlorn and abandoned amid mango and citrus orchards, mehal (palace), as the locals call it, sits in an open dusty plain. This is the country of the Hiraj sub-clan of the Sials who left their native Jhang district to the northeast to settle here some two hundred years ago. The name of the village that this small group established to stake out its claim, gives away a sense of insecurity of those long ago times: they called their habitation Chowki Hiraj.
Some twenty kilometres north of Kabirwala (Khanewal district) and a mere kilometre from the Ravi River, the chowki, or defensive post, would have been a need of the time: the Sikhs under Maharaja Ranjit Singh were coming into their own and raiding the land in order to assert their dominance. Not long afterwards, their influence was to reach this area as well. Remnants of that old fortified chowki stand to this day together with its surrounding mud-brick wall. It is today home to the servants of the Hiraj family.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Between Two Burrs on the Map
25 December 2014
Long before the first European ventured into the heart of the Karakorums these barren gorges and the high, wind swept passes connecting them were being traversed by the Indians and Chinese. Most of them were merchants plying their caravans of trade, some were Buddhist pilgrims from China seeking Nirvana by doing obeisance at the many sites in India connected with the great Buddha. And there were roving bands of brigands and freebooters from the states of Hunza and Nagar lying to the north west of Askole and separated from it by a system of glaciers.
These marauders and their ruthless depredatory raids kept the people of Askole in constant dread. In the middle ages when summer ice conditions permitted travel over the Hispar-Biafo glacial system connecting Askole with Nagar, these raids were very frequent with the looters periodically swarming out of the gorge of the Biafo to drive away cattle and slaves over the glaciers to their country.
Read more »Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai People
24 December 2014
Cheeks weathered by the icy wind, a pearly smile and the scarlet of a heavily sequined dress set to advantage against a Deosai sky dulled by storm clouds.
More images in Deosai: Land of the Giant - Book is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Labels: Deosai, Nadeem Khawar, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Perspectives on the Art and Architecture of Sindh
23 December 2014
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The recent work Perspectives on the Art and Architecture of Sindh by anthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro of Quaid e Azam University is in the same league as Zajadacz-Hastenrath’s work. The earlier work traces the evolutionary path of the art of stone carving for funerary decoration in Sindh and southern Balochistan from the 14th century until the mid-19th century. It shows how the art spread from a rather simple form in 14th century Gujarat to Sindh where it blossomed into its exquisite fullness. Kalhoro’s work takes our existing knowledge several steps ahead.
Read more »Labels: Book Review, Books, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:30,
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Circle of goodness
22 December 2014
It is a story of the goodness that sets humans apart from all other beings. It began some 80 years ago and came to fruition in 2009 and, yet, the accrual of benefit from the goodwill of a few good men continues for all comers.
Village Dhedano near Thari Mirwah in Khairpur district, Sindh, today sits amid the last residue of a sand desert slowly giving over to farmland. Once all this was desert even as the Nara Canal flowing 35 kilometres in the east slaked narrow strips of agriculture along its alignment. In Dhedano and other nearby villages, there were many who owned farmland on the Nara; others had familial connections or business interests.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:30,
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World's End
15 December 2014
Northeast of Skardu, on the right bank of a stream that flows with the colour of molten slate lies the small village of Askole. Here the seemingly interminable web of glaciers punctuated by a jumble of great, icy peaks takes over and spreads north and eastward as far away as the deserts of Tartary and the Tibetan plateau. Askole has been referred to as "World's End", for that is what it truly is -- the last village before an endless wilderness.
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| Entrance to Askole [Image from the Apricot Road to Yarkan] |
Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A Punjab odyssey
13 December 2014
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Shabnam and I crossed the border on a cold winter morning to a warm reception on the far side of the gates at Wagah. We were not part of any delegation; this was a purely private trip, a follow-up of my March 2008 yatra. The earlier visit, my first ever to India, was an attempt to discover the fate of one part of a family I had never known.
One day about the fourteenth of August, 1947 my grandfather Dr Badaruddin who lived on Railway Road, Jalandhar and his wife, two daughters and father in law together with their servant, his wife and five children were lost to the world. They became part of the one million mostly Punjabi people, Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, who died for the division of India. From living beings, these people suddenly became statistics.
This time around, I hoped to find cases among Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus whose families had migrated from what became Pakistan and whose stories were similar to mine. We found people, we heard their stories, and together we became misty-eyed putting on brave Punjabi faces to show that we did not cry. As I wept privately at night, I am sure others did too. The grief of that event 62 years ago continues to haunt those like Darshan Singh in Jalandhar who was just a child when his family migrated from Klasswala near Pasrur. Others like Mohinder Pratab Sehgal, then just in his teens, who remembered my grandfather and the slaying of the family, still feels the guilt of that terrible time.
Read more »Labels: India, Pakistan, Partition
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Drivers
12 December 2014
This piece appears in the December 2014 issue of Herald
This is especially true if you are either a motorcyclist or a paid or underage driver (whose father is either a powerful politico or a bureaucrat). By the way, underage here means any man less than seventy years old because here men never grow up; they just grow old.
Read more »Labels: Herald, Humour, Life, Society
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Wish I was there
11 December 2014
We eventually did leave Karghalik but rather late in the day and were benighted at a place called Mazar. It was midnight when we arrived and the village was asleep. In the light of the full moon I could see about two dozen lorries parked in an open lot and my guide told me they were all heading for Tibet. The road forked at Mazar; ours went straight down southward and the Tibet road veered off to the east. My guide also said that his company ran tours from Karghalik to Lhasa.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, China, Moola Valley, Trekking
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Discoveries of Empire
10 December 2014
July 1798, the domes and minarets of Cairo rose shimmering amidst the heat waves before the eyes of Napoleon’s army as it marched south along the Nile River. Some ways away, the rock-strewn desert was home to the pyramids. The West was aware of their existence and knew too they were burial sites of kings past.
Now for the first time, these strange edifices came within the purview of scientists as Napoleon had brought along 175 “learned civilians” in his train. They came armed with scientific equipment and every book on Egypt found in France. In the three years they spent in Egypt, the French scientists uncovered a sizeable hoard of ancient artefacts and made replicas. This was just as well: in 1801, British forces defeated the French and expelled them from Egypt. The artefacts fell into British hands and the copies went to France, setting off a great intellectual foment in the two countries and pushing back Egyptian history to the 4th millennium BCE.
Labels: Archeology, Books, Finds of Empire, Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai Landscape
09 December 2014
[Image from Deosai: Land of the Giant - Book is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore]
Odysseus Lahori one year ago: Deosai Truths
Labels: Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Little Tibet
08 December 2014
"Baltistan consists exclusively of rocks, streams and dried apricots" wrote Crowley, the mountaineer-magician. What he somehow missed was the curious juxtaposition of jagged snow peaks towering above the rippled sand dunes that march along the Indus River. The only other spot on the globe where this unusual combination of sand dunes and snow peaks can be found is the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
To mediaeval Tibetans the Indus was the Lion River for they believed it rose in Singhi ka Bab, the Mouth of the Lion, somewhere on the western shores of Lake Mansarowar at the foot of sacred Mount Kailas in Western Tibet. And it truly is a lion of a river as it thunders northwest through Ladakh and Baltistan, roiling, crashing, pounding rock into sand, spewing forth clouds of mist, occasionally claiming the odd human or animal sacrifice as it cuts, ever so imperceptibly, deeper into the chasm it has carved for itself over the eons.
Read more »Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Walking in Waziristan
06 December 2014
At Larimai, we gave up the pick-up truck and walked. Our objective that day was the peak of Pir Ghal (or Ghar), 3515 metres above the sea and well inside the Mahsud heartland. Young Khalid Mahmood, the local tehsildar had organised a guide for me. Bearded Zahir Shah came with a grim set to his mouth, few words for he spoke only his native Pashto and a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder together with a holstered pistol and a wicked-looking knife in the waistband. Zahir Shah had also let the word out about the man visiting from Lahore and some fifteen of his friends tagged along as well. All of them, fine Mahsud lads, loaded down with enough weapons and ammo to start a major war in Waziristan.
Read more »Labels: FATA, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Moving the mountains
05 December 2014
The great mountaineers of the world stand on the summits of the highest places on the planet and win laurels. Their respective countries laud and sing them, shower them with awards, flash them around the world on television and cherish them as national heroes.
Nasser, Hasan Jan and Naeem dance to the accompaniment of Ghulam Hussain’s ‘drum’ and Balti singing
On that long upward grind over five-six days from base camp for a typical 8000-metre peak there struggles with the renown bound mountaineer a lonely figure shoulder to shoulder and in step, never lagging, sometimes leading and always there to lend a hand when needed. Unknown and unsung, this is the High Altitude Porter (HAP) whose labour, always harder than the mountaineer’s for he ferries heavy loads, remains forever unrequited.
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Wilderness of the Giant
03 December 2014
I had met Captain Mukhtar at Mount Balore Hotel where he had been waiting for someone and had got to talking with me. He had said the Deosai was still under snow, but he nevertheless offered to help: he would see what he could do to organise porters in case a horse was available neither at Astore nor at Chillam Chauki, the last habitation before the great wilderness of the plateau. Moreover, he offered accommodation both at Astore and at Chillam Chauki.
Jaglot was in the grip of a minor sandstorm when I arrived. It seemed to belong to some desert, but having incongruously been placed in that nameless land between the Himalaya and Karakorum Mountains, was living an uncertain life clenched within those brown and grey walls. The town itself was hidden away in a grove of trees but the army billets were arrogantly spread out on the sandy shelf bordering the Indus. I was warmly received, fed a lunch of stewed vegetables and put on a truck for Astore. We crossed the Indus on a skimpy looking suspension bridge and were soon in Shaitan Nala -- the Devil's Gorge. Neither the driver nor any of the soldiers could tell me if it got this appellation for its unbearable summer heat or the many rock slides that rake its dusty slopes.
Read more »Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mansura of the Arabs
01 December 2014
The ancient city marked by mounds spreads in an undulating square some kilometre and a half each way. The earth here is deep red with the colour of fired bricks and pottery. The bricks, some of the large pre-Arab size, others smaller, are eaten away by salinity which turns the terracotta brittle to the touch. This is the last remnant of Brahminabad, the heavily fortified city that was, according to Chachnama, the seat of government of middle Sindh.
From Chachnama we know that Brahminabad was an ancient city even at the time of the Arab conquest in 711 CE. One history records that it was established in about 450 BCE by the Achaemenian King Bahman, also known by the royal title of Ardesher Drazdast. This may well be correct as Sindh was a satrapy under the Achaemenians and Bahman did indeed found at least two other towns here. The city was initially called Bahmandabad after its patron but the name was altered over time, possibly due to the influence of the Brahmin class.
Read more »Labels: Archeology, Book of Days 2014, Discoveries of Empire, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Chinar House, Abbottabad
29 November 2014
My friend Omer Salim Khan Tarin, historian and researcher, led me up the timber stairs. Nearly 130 years after the seasoned pine (or could it be teak?) had been cut and shaped for the stairs, it was as robust as on the first day. The landing at the top was littered with some old stuff and the door to the attic converted into a parlour was on the right. I looked in through the broken glass of the door and called out, ‘Miss Fitzhugh?’
Sitting amid spreading grounds, forever in dappled sunlight for the many trees around, 3 Club Road also known as Chinar House in Abbottabad, is a right beautiful English country house with a pitched roof, skylights and gables. Unlike an English house, where it would be an unnecessary adjunct, a veranda runs along the east side. Behind the house, detached from the main building, is a row of followers’ quarters and a high roofed ruinous byre shaded by a handsome old cedar.
Read more »Labels: Heritage, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Madhu Lal Hussain
27 November 2014
On the onset of spring, the canal traversing through Lahore is decorated with multi-coloured boats, fitted with models of architectural wonders of Mughal era. The tradition of celebrating spring in Lahore is centuries old and usually begins with the kite flying festival (this practice has been discarded for past some years because of official ban) and culminates with Mela Chiraghan — festival of lights — that is held in the last week of March to celebrate the Urs of Punjabi sufi poet and saint Shah Hussain, popularly known as Madhu Lal Hussain, at his shrine in Baghanpura.
As basant draws menfolk of Lahore on roof tops and fills the blue skies with colourful kites and still chilly mornings with cries of bu kata; so, Mela Chiraghan has been attracting multitudes from Lahore as well as the interior of Punjab to relive the myth of Madhu Lal Hussain at his shrine.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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'Horse Trading'
26 November 2014
Bashir arrived with Riaz who, he said, was a "brother". This could have meant that he was anything from a cousin thrice removed, to someone who simply lived in the same village. The loads were arranged, some last minute shopping done and we set off just before eleven with Bashir making dark observations about this being no way of running an expedition. From years of being a guide for Westerners, Bashir was almost de-culturised: he did not look upon his work as something to be done with quickly and his clients as useless baggage to be escorted from one point to another. He enjoyed being in the mountains, had a healthy respect for them and felt there was a bond between man and mountain. Riaz, on the other hand, had never been a porter and was a morbid fatalist who began every sentence with, "If tomorrow we live, if death does not overtake us...." considered it madness to be walking to Chilas when we could easily have taken the bus from Mansehra.
Past the clump of red roofed buildings that are the Tourism Corporation's resort we tramped into a broadening valley with fields lush with the vibrant green of young wheat, where women gave up whatever they were doing to shout greetings to Bashir and Riaz. Sometimes there were protracted discussions about how far they were going and when they would return. It defied explanation how both parties could make themselves heard above the roar of the river. Thus it was for the next three and a half hours until we got to Battakundi.
Read more »Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Abbottabad: beauty and buried bounty
24 November 2014
I noticed young Asad Tanoli when he posted an image of his native Sherwan on social media. It was a right picturesque little alpine village and not the image I retained from 1972. Lying about 30 kilometres west of Abbottabad, it was then a hamlet of stone and timber houses with a sprinkling of some mud-plastered ones.
On the phone, Asad spoke of dozens of kots around his village and the remains of a house built by old James Abbott. Now in the vernacular, a kot is a fortress and I had visions of them dotting every hilltop. As for Abbott’s old home, I conjured up an image of something with a touch of the eerie much like the old Murree Brewery ruins near Ghora Gali or Reginald Dyer’s ruined house in faraway Rabat in Balochistan.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Between Two Burrs on the Map - Epilogue
17 November 2014
By six in the evening we had left Golain Valley and were on the jeep that the mad mullah drove as though we were being pursued by all the demons of hell.
"After a journey of three and half months and over a thousand kilometres the slaty waters of the Yarkhun River are not the most appropriate of ends." I said to Thun Khan. He laughed and we got to Chitral without mishap. But there was no air ticket waiting as had been promised -- I was consigned to the sixteen hour bus ride over the winding Lowari Pass to Peshawar.
The driver who had promised to leave at four in the morning was still asleep at five. Nevertheless, fourteen hours and three buses later I was in Peshawar. But just as the rickshaw trundled into the station the night train to Lahore was pulling out. Someone shouted that we could still catch it at the outer station and for the first time I felt thankful to whoever had invented the rickshaw. It is the only mode of transport that can go over and under other vehicles, into the gutters and out again and defy gravity in several different manners as it attempts to get from one place to the other.
It was a muggy dawn with remnants of the monsoon persisting cloyingly in the thick air of Lahore. In the foyer of the railway station I paused to stuff my ice axe and rope into my rucksack. I had unwittingly stopped near a pair of taxi drivers: pot bellied, unkempt, unshaven, scratching their groins and spitting all over the place.
"Hey, is he an Angrez?" I heard one asking the other.
"Don't be silly. Ever seen such a dark Angrez," came the reply.
"But he's got all the stuff that the Angrez carries." This made some sense. The other one came towards me with one hand still on his groin.
"Taxi, Sur. Pearl Continental. Four hundred rupees," he tried. Ye gads, four hundred rupees for four kilometres!
"Hey, is he an Angrez?" I heard one asking the other.
"Don't be silly. Ever seen such a dark Angrez," came the reply.
"But he's got all the stuff that the Angrez carries." This made some sense. The other one came towards me with one hand still on his groin.
"Taxi, Sur. Pearl Continental. Four hundred rupees," he tried. Ye gads, four hundred rupees for four kilometres!
"Oy Angrez, teri bhen di siri!" one of them called after me and they both guffawed.
Hey White Man, your sister's head. As Punjabi invectives go this one is almost innocuous; something that could only have been invented by Lahoris.
Labels: Adventure, Between Two Burrs on the Map Travels in Northern Pakistan, Books, Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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As Abdullah Shah Ghazi looks on
10 November 2014
Perched atop a hill, rearing almost 100 metres above the sea, at Clifton is the much-revered tomb of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the patron saint of Karachi. His powers, even in death, are immense for he saves the city from cyclones. That is what I heard in the 1980s from those who believed in the sainthood of the man.
Before Muhammad bin Qasim took Sindh in 711 CE, the Arabs mounted five unsuccessful attacks, all routed by Dahir’s army. The fifth attack, led by Buzail, was the one instigated by the loss of gifts en route from Serendeb (Sri Lanka) to the Omayyad caliph. This was the only sea-borne assault on Sindh — the rest all having come by way of Kech and Lasbela.
Read more »Labels: Historic Myths, Karachi, People, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Penglish
09 November 2014
This piece appears in the November 2014 issue of Herald
There’s Penglish which is Pakistani English which is, well, something. And then there is Ppenglish – Pakistani Punjabi English. Now, since I don’t speak Pashto, I cannot even say what that other Ppenglish would be. But knowing some Pakhtuns, all I know is that would really be something.
And with this I see smoke coming out of the ears of all those Pakhtuns who read this. Take it easy, chaps. But for goodness sake don’t take yourselves so seriously. That causes constipation.
Read more »
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Who was Mian Naseer
06 November 2014
Between the city of Dadu and the Khirthar Mountains in central Sindh, there stretches a great and dusty plain. No canals cross this land and because it lies beyond the reach of the southeast monsoon rain is infrequent and therefore little agriculture. Here the tamarisk and kikar grow and the rough-legged buzzard and barn owl hunt for jird, gerbil and rat by day or night respectively.
Scattered in this barren landscape are some graveyards dating from the early 18th century. The largest of this is the graveyard of Mian Naseer Kalhora locally referred to as Mian Naseer jo Qubbo the Dome of Mian Naseer. This remarkable collection of beautifully painted funerary buildings lies northwest of Dadu city and twenty kilometres west of Kakar village.
Read more »Labels: Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Perch of the Queen
01 November 2014
The Yusufzai plain in Mardan District was once rich with stories of Raja Vara. Inevitably, most ancient ruins in this district abounding with Gandhara sculpture were attributed to this mythical raja. So when archaeologist Alexander Cunningham visited the area in the 1860s in search of sites connected with Alexander’s campaigns, he was told the legend of Raja Vara and his rock climbing queen.
Vara’s ruined castle high up on an elongated hill above Naogram village was remarkable for the large, upright and smooth-sided rock rearing nearly eight metres above the hill’s northern extremity. This, the queen is said to have ascended daily to survey her husband’s territory. And so the complex of ruined buildings was Rani Gut or the Queen’s Rock in Pashto.
Read more »Vara’s ruined castle high up on an elongated hill above Naogram village was remarkable for the large, upright and smooth-sided rock rearing nearly eight metres above the hill’s northern extremity. This, the queen is said to have ascended daily to survey her husband’s territory. And so the complex of ruined buildings was Rani Gut or the Queen’s Rock in Pashto.
Labels: Archeology, Book of Days 2014, Discoveries of Empire, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The wounded poet
30 October 2014
As my guide and I were slogging up the low Ajri Kandao (Pass) that connects Alai and Chor, we came upon a solitary man sitting under a pine tree whittling away on a piece of wood. He had an unkempt beard; a tousle of dark hair spilling from under the rim of his Chitrali cap, his grey kameez was unbuttoned to show a lean chest. My guide Taj Mohammad hailed him; the man looked up abstractedly, shook our hands and returned to his work. He said he was preparing a needle to apply antimony to his eyes.
Other than that, he refused to speak with us.
As we walked away, Taj said this was the poet Wazir Mohammad who went by the nom de plume of Zakhmi Wounded. He had, so said Taj, two cupboards full of books in his home in the village of Rashung and was always found reading or writing. Over the pass on the other side we paused for tea at the solitary inn. The innkeeper was the chatty kind and we lingered until lunch. That was when Wazir Mohammad Zakhmi overtook us.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Where Mehr Gul was routed
22 October 2014
The second half of the 5th century saw the great incursion into the subcontinent by unwashed savages from Central Asia. Unremittingly ruthless, these fair-skinned, fair-haired men were led by their chief Tor Aman. To writers in India they were known as Huna or Turushka; we know them as the White Huns or Ephthalites. Crossing the Oxus River into Afghanistan the Huns devastated the land, their wake littered with virtually thousands of rotting human cadavers. It was rare for the Huns to pass through a habitation and leave any living soul.
Read more »Labels: Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:00,
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Deosai Colors
21 October 2014
Excerpt from Land of the Giant, Deosai National Park, Review Deosai Romance
Book is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Odysseus Lahori one year ago: Cheers!
Labels: Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Channan Pir
18 October 2014
Legend has it that a Muslim saint came to the court of Raja Sandhila, who ruled over this part of Cholistan at some indeterminate time in the past, and asked if there were any Muslims in the country. There were none, he was told. In which case, said this man of god, the king’s pregnant wife was to deliver a son who would be a Muslim and who would eventually convert the whole country to the true faith.
Read more »Labels: Cholistan, Culture, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Time for peace
17 October 2014
It turns out that the night the German mother died, the father from England was on a sortie. The driver stops his taxi, gets out and says to his fare, 'Now we shake hands'. Khalid A aptly ends his letter, 'There is a time for war, but it must be followed by a time for peace.'
The year 1947 was a time for war. Folks who had lived amenably side by side for generations were riven apart and when the land went into labour to deliver a new country, two million people died. My grandparents, two aunts, great-grandfather, the family's servant with his wife and five children became part of this macabre statistic. The place it all happened was Railway Road, Jalandhar.
Read more »Labels: India, Pakistan, Partition
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Degh River
16 October 2014
Long before he became the emperor of India, Jehangir, Prince Salim for all and sundry and Sheikhu for his father Akbar, used to go hunting in forested country some miles west of Lahore. Later, after a pet deer died, he ordered the building of a memorial tower as well as a water tank and pavilion. He also had a fort built nearby and called it either Jehangirpura or Jehangirabad. Today we know it as Sheikhupura after the emperor’s childhood name.
Aside: both the emperor’s names, that is, Sheikhu and Salim are after the saint Sheikh Salim Chishti for whom Akbar had great regard.
Read more »Labels: Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Containeristan
14 October 2014
This piece appears in the October 2014 issue of Herald
It all started years ago when paranoia rode high in Karachi (when has it ever ridden low anywhere in Pakistan since its inception?) that a large number of shipping containers had to be moved to posh Clifton to block one track of the double road in front of a Zardar (Gold Owner) home. We were told the stacked containers were to keep at bay houri-seeking young suicide bombers in explosive-laden jalopies. The bound-for-paradise bombers could blow up all they wished, but all they would be able to do was make scrap of some rotting containers while the gold diggers in the mansion remained safe.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Sialkot reinvented
13 October 2014
As I wended my way through the city towards the cantonment en route to the Well of Puran Bhagat to the north, I reached what was once the hub of civil and military life in Sialkot. From previous visits I remembered Ghanta Ghar (Clock Tower) as something you barely noticed because of the lunatic bedlam all around. Here would be pushcarts, motor and animal drawn vehicles, bikes, encroachments with merchandise from shops spilling onto the pavements and even the streets. Here one could get frustratingly ensnarled in unmanaged traffic that crawled along on streets all but overtaken by all sorts of commerce.
Read more »Labels: Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Tribe of the Cavaliers
11 October 2014
One of the tribes that Alexander encountered as he came in the vicinity of modern day Jalalabad (Afghanistan) was the Asspasioi variously rendered in classical history as Astacani and Aspagani. Shortly after this first encounter, we hear of Assacenus (a misspelling of Astacanus?), the king of the strong fort of Massaga who died during the siege of his castle.
Now, Massaga has thus far defied historians and archaeologists for they have been unable to show us any ruins that answer to this name. But since history places Massaga on Alexander's route between Bajaur and Swat, many experts would place this mysterious redoubt in the Katgala Pass. From the works of Alexander's historians as well as from other Greek writings on this area, it appears that the Asspasioi were fairly wide-spread and extended into Bajaur, Swat and Mardan also. Indeed, it seems that at the time of Alexander's invasion this was the most numerous and powerful tribe in the area.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, History, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Adam Nayyar: a tribute
09 October 2014
In 1983, when Moorhouse was in Islamabad to write his book, Adam was working for Lok Virsa. Their meeting took off on a rather sour note with Adam roundly berating Moorhouse for being an 'unregenerate imperialist' come to Pakistan to 'wallow in nostalgia for the days of the Raj'. I thought that an exaggeration. Now, three decades later, when I know this good man well enough, I know that he would indeed have said that and more.
Read more »Labels: People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Reluctant pride
08 October 2014
We know that the Sindhu River, which we popularly know by its Greek pronunciation of Indus, gave rise to a great civilisation that outshone the much later one of the Nile in Egypt. Here, over the past nine thousand or so years, in its wide valley that nestled in the west under the crags of the Suleman Hills and in the east merged into other valleys of now lost rivers, grew a number of glorious cities. The development of these cities, it was once believed, was influenced by the 'superior' culture of Mesopotamia perhaps by an eastward immigration of population groups.
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| Moen jo Daro |
Labels: Archeology, Balochistan, History, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mother Goddess
04 October 2014
In the year 416 BCE, a young man of Greek descent left his native Cnidus on the mainland of what is now Turkey to take up employment with the Achaemenian king, Artaxerxes (Ardeshir). Ctesias, as the young man was named, was from the family of Hippocrates, known to us as the Father of Medicine, and himself a trained medical practitioner. For the next few decades, he served the Persian King of Kings as an archiater.
Now Ctesias was evidently a rather inquisitive individual. He appears to have been acquainted with The Histories, the magnum opus of Herodotus, published about forty years earlier, and was a trifle miffed by its disregard of Indian history. Ctesias therefore took it upon himself to learn as much of India as was possible. But his duties looking after royal health perhaps did not give him time enough to go wandering off to the Land of the Sindhu River, so he did the next best thing: He quizzed every Indian visitor to the court about their country.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Arab origins
03 October 2014
Every single Muslim in the subcontinent believes s/he is of Arab descent. If not direct Arab descent, then the illustrious ancestor had come from either Iran or Bukhara. Interestingly, the ancestor is always a great general or a saint. Never ever have we heard anyone boasting of an intellectual for a forebear. We hear of the progeny of savage robber kings, but there is no one who claims Abu Rehan Al-Beruni or Ibn Rushd as a distant sire.
Arab origin is the favourite fiction of all subcontinental Muslims. Most claim their ancestor arrived in Sindh with the army under Mohammad bin Qasim (MbQ). But, I have heard of lineages reaching back to Old Testament prophets as well. An elderly Janjua (Rajput), from the Salt Range told me of a forefather named Ar, a son of the Prophet Isaac. Ar, he said, was the ancestor of the races that spoke the Aryan tongue!
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Bounty of the Kushans
01 October 2014
Following Alexander Cunningham’s survey of 1848 and the resultant identification of a Buddhist site above the village of Jamal Garhi near Mardan, another military officer-turned-archaeologist came around in 1852 to make a cursory excavation. Though his work was inconclusive, he uncovered an array of damaged sculptures of very fine workmanship. Word was the site was periodically robbed of its reliquary, someone even removing 12 camel-loads of sculpture only a decade earlier.
The site was then mapped and most of the debris cleared to reveal a beautiful monastery constructed in large diaper masonry of stone quarried from the surrounding hills. The site, an elongated hill, offered sufficient space for the main stupa, a number of votive stupas and the various buildings of the monastery to be spread out instead of being packed close together as we see in Takht Bahi or most other Taxila monasteries.
Read more »Labels: Archeology, Book of Days 2014, Discoveries of Empire, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Medieval Rohri
30 September 2014
Sometime last year Nadeem emailed from England a photograph. He wanted to know what it was. I wrote back to tell him this was on the banks of the Sindhu River in the fair city of Rohri a group of graves known as Sut Bhen – Seven Sisters. Nadeem wrote back to say he had to see this group of remarkable graves for himself. I also told him that of all the cities in Pakistan, it is Rohri and Rohri alone that still preserved its medieval air.
Two years earlier we had travelled together in Afghanistan and fetched up in Herat. Both having read Robert Byron’s beautiful, beautiful 1920s travel book The Road to Oxiana, our minds were flooded with images of that city. We were not disappointed and we absolutely agreed with Byron when he said Herat was the only city in Asia without an inferiority complex. If I am not wrong, while walking the wide avenues of that magical city or exploring the crumbling hulk of the old fort or the grand mosque so lovingly being restored, I had said to Nadeem that we in the Land of the Sindhu River too had a city to match Herat. It was Rohri. And if Herat is the city to die for, Rohri is even more so.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Endless Journeys
28 September 2014
I gave up train travel in the year 2008. That was when Pakistan Railway was at its worst. Before that, trains were my favoured mode of transport. Then between December and March I was obligated to do two train journeys: the one from Jacobabad to Lahore and the other from Rohri to Karachi. On both occasions the trains were late by two hours. And now I was once again forced to travel from Lahore to Nawabshah. Forced because PIA has closed down the Lahore-Nawabshah-Hyderabad sector.
I arrived on the platform twenty minutes before departure (which is 5:00 PM) only to find my fears were true: there was no train ready to depart. Now, Karachi Express, the train I was taking, originates in Lahore and should have been at the platform at least half an hour prior. I sat down in the shade and soon had the company of two railwaymen in mufti. From their talk I gauged they were either Traffic Inspectors or Ticket Examiners.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pir Ghar
25 September 2014
They call the peak Pir Ghar — the Saint’s Mountain — sometimes also pronounced Preghal for the shrine on its 3,515 metre-high, pine-clad peak is said to have been visited by the blessed Prophet Ismail. Since the prophet’s own birth was miraculous, his parents being of very advanced age when he was conceived, the peak is visited by couples seeking children.
I climbed the hill in June 2003, in the company of a two dozen-strong group of playful Mehsud youngsters armed to the teeth with weapons of all kinds. Led by the bearded and quiet Zahir Shah, none of them spoke anything but the local dialect of Pushto. They sang, whistled tunefully and joked, urging me on as we trekked up. Having flagged, at one point I was trailing behind my guides when I heard someone call out in Urdu.
Read more »Labels: Society, Telling a Story
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The fish of Pir Chattal
24 September 2014
The Mula Pass has long been used as a quicker connection between the Sindhu valley and the Kalat upland. It was through here that Alexander's general Krateros led his ten thousand-strong contingent of retired veterans back through Persia to Macedonia. That much is recorded in history. But for years before and after, it was a conduit for trade and travel for untold numbers who like most of us passed through this world into oblivion never leaving a trace of their epic journeys.
The legend according to Wali Mohammad was that the fish were sacred to Pir Chattal and thus under his protection. Anyone eating them suffered a painful and embarrassing punishment on the day after as the fish emerged squirming out of the eater's sphincter. Who Pir Chattal was is not told and there are no further legends concerning him. But one thing is certain, this saint whoever he or she was, has been around for a good bit of time.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Naked philosophers of Taxila
22 September 2014
To these philosophers he sent Onesicritos, the sailor from the island of Cos, so that he may learn of the philosophy of the Punjabi sages. It was a scorching hot midmorning in early May as Onesicritos and his entourage of guards and interpreters made their way out of Taxila city, past the university (where the museum now stands) and across the azure, winding line of the Tamrah rivulet. Where wheat fields gave way to meadow and forest, where the pipal and the banyan grew tall and thick, these savants lived subsisting on the produce of the forest and drinking only water.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, History, Punjab, Taxila
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Early explorations in the Karakoram-Himalayan
18 September 2014
This article was published in The News on Sunday in January 2006 was written as if by a reporter in the year 1906. The reporter’s beat was exploration work being done by Europeans, mainly the British, in India and Chinese Turkestan. It notes the major expeditions in the works for the year 1906 with some reference to recently finished work.
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| Aurel Stein |
So far as archaeological exploration in Central Asia is concerned, 1906 promises to be remarkable year. This year promises wonderful discoveries and quantum additions to our knowledge on the history of this area as two of great names of Central Asiatic exploration head out into the region once again.
We have Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer, already famous for his epoch-making work in trans-Himalayan regions. He is the man we have to thank for, among several others, the discovery of the source of the mighty Brahamaputra River. Unable to reach Lhasa in two earlier attempts, he prepares to try yet again to enter the Forbidden City in 1906. His earlier attempts were thwarted by Tibetan xenophobia and suspicion of everyone who is either not Tibetan or Buddhist.
Read more »Labels: Himalayas, Hindu Kush, History, Karakoram, Travel Literature, Travel Writer, Travel Writing, Trekking
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Ali Mardan Khan
17 September 2014
Hard by the railway workshops in Mughalpura Lahore, there sits a domed building. Kanhaya Lal, writing in the late 19th century, termed it the highest building in the city this side of the Badshahi Mosque. This is the tomb of Ali Mardan Khan, purportedly the great builder of Shalimar Gardens and a great canal-digger to boot.
Today, Ali Mardan’s tomb, like any other burial is a shrine where people come to pray for sons and wealth and where their prayers are answered too. The watchman posted by the Department of Archaeology quietly collects — and pockets — the donations of simpletons who believe in demigods. But Ali Mardan was neither. He was not an architect or an engineer; neither was he a man of lofty, unimpeachable character. He was a fraudster in the finest tradition of many a modern mandarin.
Read more »Labels: History, Lahore, People, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Myth of the Silk Road
13 September 2014
That being settled, it has to be said that the point of the piece in question was lost on these persons. The point I was making was that no silk ever came from China to India by the road through Hunza and Gilgit. The fact is that when the Karakoram Highway was first opened in the early 1980s, it was not, I repeat, NOT billed as the Silk Road. The ‘Silk Road’ Hotel in Guilmit (pluse a co8ple more elsewhere along the road) came later as well as the bus service of the same name that does not cross the border into China.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Historic Myths, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Silk Road
12 September 2014
Until the Karakoram Highway — connecting Abbottabad with Kashgar via Gilgit and Hunza — came near completion in the mid-1980s, no one knew that the Silk Road ran through Pakistan. With the great highroad ready and with lorries plying its nearly seven hundred kilometre-length, suddenly someone upped and told us that this was the fabled Silk Road. And we, the Great Unwashed of this land, gobbled it up hook, line and stinker (pun intended).
We, or our bureaucracy, have spent sixty-four very diligent years creating a huge body of lies, lies and lies that now passes for history. (No wonder with such industry occupying us, nothing else of any consequence ever got done in this sorry land.) The Karakoram Highway being known as the Silk Road is another one of those many nuggets of official mendacity.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, Silk Road
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Cricket
10 September 2014
This piece appears in the September 2014 issue of Herald
Two of them carry the thhapa, that short club that women used to beat the dirt out of their laundry. But that was before they invented washing machines. And since with this invention the thhapa became redundant, it was put to other use by ne’er to well loafers: they took to flogging balls with it. Cricket was invented and life was never the same again.
Read more »Labels: Cricket, Herald, Humour, Society
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai: land of the Giant
09 September 2014
More images in Deosai: Land of the Giant - available at at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Odysseus Lahori one year ago: Seat of the Gods
Labels: Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Into the heart of the Suleman Mountains
08 September 2014
Sea Monsters and the Sun God is available at at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Now Raheal is a rare breed of civil servant, a man of the old school. He reads (something that so few of us do anymore) and takes genuine interest in his work as an officer of the District Management Group. Within only a few weeks as Political Agent Dera Ghazi Khan, he had already travelled to some of the remotest posts in his jurisdiction and earned the distinction of being the first PA there since the last white officer had packed his bags in 1947. And he had gleaned yarns that he spun in Lahore with such enthusiasm that he left no likelihood of my turning down his invitation to visit. In any case, this was Baloch country, and having travelled very little here, I was not foregoing my chance to do so.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Books, Punjab, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Railway engineering
05 September 2014
One of the most fantastic railway journeys in Pakistan once used to be north from Sibi, through the Nari River gorge, over the cool heights of Harnai, Nakus and Shareg to the wild west town of Khost. The Nari Gorge is the country of the proud Marri and Bugti peoples of Balochistan. Somewhere near Harnai, the line enters Pashtun lands all the way to Quetta.
And Khost! Oh, what another world it still belongs to. My last outing there was in February 2011, and nothing seemed to have changed since my first visit in 1986. Except, the train no longer ran. Early in 2007, some misguided Baloch had blown up three bridges in the Nari Gorge putting an end to the train service up to Khost. This was mischievous because who, but the Baloch themselves, would have gained from bringing tourists to visit this, the greatest railway engineering feat in Pakistan.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Pakistan Railways, Railway
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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