کیا آپ نے کبھی دیوسائی کے بارے میں سنا ہے؟
18 February 2017
آپ پا کستان کے شمال میں واقع فلک بوس پہاڑی چوٹیوں کے بارے میں تو ضرور جانتے ہوں گے۔
کیا آپ نے کبھی دیوسائی کے بارے میں سنا ہے؟
یہ پاکستان کے شمالی علاقے سکردو کے قریب ایک بلند چوٹی پر واقع ایک مقام ہے۔ سفر نامے ویو سائی: ’لینڈ آف جائینمس‘ دیوسائی اور اس میں بسنے والے جائینس کے بارے میں ہے۔
یہ کون سی مخلوق ہے، اور دیوسائی کیسی جگہ ہے، اس بارے میں سنیے سفرنامے کے مصنف سلمان رشید سے بی بی سی اردو کی ماہ پارہ صفدر کی خصوصی گفتگو۔
Labels: Baltistan, BBC, Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Gilgit–Baltistan, Nadeem Khawar, Northern Pakistan, Podcast, Travel Literature, Urdu, Wildlife
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Alafis’ refuge
31 August 2016
Just north of the junction of the two rivers, the small village of Shekhan is where one leaves the Turbat-Mand high road and goes north along the dry bed of the Shorma stream. The country is wild and desolate and possessed of a savage beauty. Views to the north are limited by the bleak, treeless crags of the Kech Bund that nowhere rise higher than 1,166 metres above the sea; to the east and west, the valley is fairly wide and dotted with trees and bushes that grow only in arid conditions.
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posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Communities: With or Againts DNP?
21 April 2014
Culture grows from the earth. The ancient societies of Bolor and Dardistan, cognisant of the dearth of natural resources and agricultural land, practiced polyandry – a single wife for all the brothers. That kept human population in check. The advent of Islam in this area in the 14th century altered everything. Polyandry became taboo. One husband to a woman became the rule and where the man could afford, he was permitted to take up to four wives. Population exploded multiplying the pressure on the good earth. Food requirements increased, forests were felled – both for fuel and to make way for agriculture, more and more land came under the primitive plough and farmed terraces went marching ever higher up the slopes from the villages. On the other hand, increasing livestock forced shepherds to seek summer pastures in areas too remote for their forefathers.
The Settlement Record of 1919 states, for instance, that the villagers of Dhappa and Katicho on the east fringe of Deosai pastured their livestock during the summer months in the valleys leading up to the plateau. The record is unequivocal about them remaining out of the bounds of the plateau itself. Between that time and today, as populations, both human and livestock, expanded, these communities are known to have encroached upon the plateau.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Baltistan Geography
14 April 2014
Baltistan lies in the extreme northeast of Pakistan between the 35th and 36th parallel of latitude north of the equator and the 75th and 77th parallel of longitude. The Sindhu River enters it from Ladakh in the east via Kharmang sub-division and cuts across the country on a north-westerly bearing dividing Baltistan from, first, Kargil in India and then the Deosai Plateau to the south. The swathe cut by the Sindhu in its traversing of Baltistan varies in height from 2750 metres at its entry in the east to just about 1700 metres near Shengus as it exits into Gilgit district.
The two major tributaries of the Sindhu in Baltistan are the Shyok, only marginally less significant than the Sindhu, and the Shigar. While the former drains the elongated Nubra Valley (held by India) leading up to the Karakoram Pass, an ancient crossing place on the Asiatic Divide, the latter drains the Haramosh Range to the north and to the northeast the great mass of K-2 and its satellite mountains. Besides these, a few dozen minor streams also run into the Sindhu all draining the scores of peaks that tower well above the 6000-metre mark. The distinction of being home to the highest peak in Pakistan together with its complement of lesser mountains makes Baltistan foremost in the entire country in terms of average height above sea level.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Back From the Brink
07 April 2014
Bears drew Zakaria and Rahman to Deosai. But Deosai is about a lot more than just bears. The wilderness is home to Himalayan Ibex (Capra ibex sibirica), red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and wolf (Canis lupus) – the most elusive of Deosai denizens – as well. There is indirect evidence of snow leopard (Panthera uncia) while the presence of golden marmots (Marmota caudata) is abundant. The streams are well-stocked with snow carp. Of all these, the bears and the fish are the most under threat.
In the first year of their presence on Deosai (1993) HWF counted a total of nineteen bears on Deosai that has the capacity to carry no fewer than four hundred of them. The checks put in place to pre-empt hunters and trappers showed dividends immediately when the following year the population was up with the birth of two cubs. Over the years the population grew, but very, very slowly indeed until the census of 2003 showed thirty-two bears. In late 2011, their number stood at sixty-five.
Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai National Park Gets Going on Uncertain Feet
31 March 2014
Pursuant to the early recognition by HWF that the project could not succeed without stake-holder communities being on board as well, the year 1995 saw increased interaction between the two. There was one snag, however. Both Zakaria and Rahman, first-class professionals in their respective fields of engineering and dentistry, were not the best of community motivators. A relationship that began with a fair degree of understanding and sympathy soon degenerated to vague distrust of these outsiders who were out to ‘make millions of dollars’ by abrogating the communities’ rights to certain areas of Deosai in favour of some mysterious foreign agenda. Besides the curbing of grazing rights in Deosai, what worried the communities most was the declaration of a complete moratorium on hunting in and around the plateau.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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... and so they stayed
24 March 2014
Among other things, the first year’s survey assigned names to places (that already had Balti or Shina names) as well as the hitherto nameless bears. Deo nau Thuk where wolf scats were spotted became Wolf Peak; the amphitheatre south and east of it, Bowls. As for the bears, a female with young became Aunty; the biggest male was Big Boy of Kala Pani, so named for the area around the southwest corner of Deosai that it frequented. Yet another male exhibiting aggressive behaviour towards nursing mothers became Shaitan (Devil). All these names have stuck fast to this day.
The year 1994 was for consolidating the previous year’s research as well as collecting social and land usage data. The Deosai grassland was being exploited both by the communities on its periphery as well as the far-ranging Gujjars who had spread the name they gave to the plateau across the plains of northern India. Both groups entered the grassland at about the same time as the freeze ended around the middle of June and exited with the setting in of dawn frosts three months later. Local communities kept to those tracts of Deosai that were nearest to their base villages, living there during the brief summer in rude stone and canvas shelters. The nomadic Gujjars, on the other hand, being self-contained with tents went into the heart of the plateau and, depending on the availability of grazing, frequently moved about. As time went by and human and livestock populations multiplied, pressure on Deosai increased in consonance. More and more areas that were unutilised in the past were being trampled by domestic livestock.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Some Came Looking
19 March 2014
By the late 1980s it was vaguely known among the small number of trekkers in Pakistan that Deosai was home to a large population of brown bears. It was early in 1987 when one such person, Vaqar Zakaria, a chemical engineer by profession, heard it on the Islamabad trekkers’ grapevine that another trekker was all set to go to Deosai to see the bears coming out of hibernation. Like Zakaria, Anis ur Rahman was himself an experienced mountain-walker who ran a thriving dentistry practice in town.
Liaison was established. The notion, broadly speaking, was that since the bears break out of hibernation at the beginning of summer, Rahman and Zakaria would get up into the plateau just in time to watch them pour out of their caves and hiding places. As the word was that Deosai virtually crawled with the beasts, and because the common Pakistani had never seen a bear in the wild, much less one breaking out of hibernation, the duo decided to take a two-camera team from Pakistan Television to film the monumental event.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Apricot Kingdom: Baltistan in History and Fable
12 March 2014
Excerpt from Deosai: Land of the Giant
For his voluminous treatise, The Histories, Herodotus came to be known as the Father of History. Born in or about the year 485 BCE in Halicarnassus (today called Bodrum, south of Izmir in western Turkey), he was a great traveller who spent much of his youth exploring and making assiduous observations in the known world of his time. The copious notes of his journeys formed the basis of his nine-volume Histories. As an accomplished storyteller, what he lacked in first-hand information, Herodotus made up from the travellers’ tales that he heard in the inns he frequented. Some of these stories that became part of his work were, naturally, quite far-fetched. Not strange then that a somewhat less charitable title for the Father of Histories is Father of Liars.
Though his wanderings took him to Egypt and Libya in Africa; across a great part of the Levant and the eastern parts of Europe; they did not bring him to the subcontinent. What he writes of our part of the world therefore is hearsay. Among that body of fact and fiction about the subcontinent Herodotus mentions, among other things, an Indian city called Caspatyrus in the country of Pactyica. Now, Caspatyrus is variously believed to mean either Kashmir or Peshawar (or even Kabul), but the clue lies in the name of the country – Pactyica: the name is unmistakably preserved today in the names of the provinces of Paktia and Paktika in eastern Afghanistan and in the tribal name Pakhtun. It is more likely; therefore, that Caspatyrus was on the site of or near modern-day Peshawar.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Land of the Giant
16 December 2013
Excerpt from Deosai: Land of the Giant
Wide open stretches of undulating grassland separated one from the other by elongated ridges with rounded summits, vast patches of wild flowers in beds of mauve, yellow, pink and blue. Moors with luxurious grasses rising above the knee and dotted with tarns, some over four metres deep, with crystal-clear water where snow carp glide lazily, reflect fleecy grey-white thunderheads in an azure backdrop. Snow loiters in the corries even in late July; nowhere, as far as the eye roves, can a tree be seen: only flowers, sedge and sallow. Nor too does any sign of human habitation break the ever-changing and unsullied monotony of the panorama.
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| Deo nau Thuk – Peak of the Giant |
Cutting across this fantasy of a landscape is a number of fast-flowing streams, frigid and clear as clear can be that teem with the sluggish snow carp. To render this dreamscape consummate, nature rimmed it with even higher crags many of which remain snow-bound throughout the year. While the plateau itself averages at 4000 metres above the sea, some of the surrounding peaks rise to 5500 metres. Snaking across it are several footpaths used by locals and trekkers and one unpaved jeep road. The latter connects Skardu in the northeast with Astore west of the plateau making Deosai a common part of the ancient lands of Bolor and Balti.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai Truths
09 December 2013
Try finding Deosai on an early map of the Himalayan region. It should lie somewhere above Kashmir and east of Astor. The one I consulted was dated 30 March 1846. It had been published by the East India Company, based on information provided by G. T. Vigne, Captain C.Wade, Lieut. J. Anderson, H.M. Durand, and W. Moorcroft [1]. The map shows a largely blank space, and above it the inscription: ‘Elevated plains of Deosih, Deotsuh, or Gherrutsuh, about 12,000 feet, with peaks of Granite & Gnessis. Barren and mountaineous.’ Barely discernible, south of the confluence of River Indus and a river flowing from Shigur, is marked a village identified as ‘Gamba Iskardo’ (the forerunner to today’s Skardu.)
Such was the desolation at Deosai that travelers using the map were warned that the road westwards to Burzil would take ‘6 days on foot’ because there was ‘no horse road’.
Read more »Labels: Baltistan, Book Review, Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deosai Romance
24 November 2013
A travel book can be defined as one that its author would never think of as a travel book — to him, it is history or anthropology, memoir or even camouflage fiction. Yet the first thing any traveller learns is that every rule is made to be broken — if you stick to the guidebook, or the itinerary, you’ll come home wondering if you ever left.
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In the great spirit of travel, therefore, and of venturing where only daredevils would dare to tread, Salman Rashid is much less traveller than writer.
The travel book must teach you something, ideally by highly unorthodox means. Heinrich Herrer, for example, stumbled into a Tibet that almost no foreigner had ever seen, and so every detail of his Seven Years in Tibet is new to us. P.J. O’Rourke does so much research on his Holidays in Hell — and delivers it so saltily — that every bit of information is like a crunchy piece of popcorn.
In the same vein, I would never call the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky a travel writer — and that’s why his book on Venice, Watermark, is a classic.
Labels: Baltistan, Book Review, Books, Deosai, Deosai: Land of the Giant, Nadeem Khawar, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:10,
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