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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