Peshawar: the First City
14 November 2018
Peshawar is not about the clatter of armoury, the tramp of soldiers’ feet and the raging din of battle; it is not of a city on fire and the cries of the dying. Peshawar is about murmured prayer, of the ringing of the temple bell and the call from the minaret, the clang of the jaras – the bell around the camel’s neck in the caravan – and the soft plop of the animals’ feet on unpaved streets, it is of the vendor crying his wares in streets where rows of shops run on either side and which are crowded with buyers and sellers. Peshawar is about long distance travellers, of caravanserais and story-tellers.
It was April 1977, and I was wandering about Namak Mandi in Under Sheher (Inner City) Peshawar. In a narrow street lined with stores and qehvakhanas, it leapt straight out of a story-teller’s repertoire: the caravanserai with its open-to-the-sky courtyard and spacious rooms on all four sides. A timber staircase led to the floor above where smaller rooms were equipped with fireplaces. But in 1977, the fireplaces were cold, the rooms empty and dusty, unused for perhaps a couple of decades and the downstairs rooms served as warehouse for packaged goods.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Peshawar
posted by Salman Rashid @ 15:38,
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Fata in 1980s
03 June 2018
September 1985. I was freewheeling in what was then North-West Frontier Province. One evening I found myself in Bannu in a really ratty dosshouse — the only place to overnight in town. Having dined on mutton karahi (I had then not gone vegetarian), I was downing my second pot of qahwa when this large man plonked himself across me from my tin table.
Railway merits a revamp in the area
In thickly accented Pashtun Urdu he asked me where I was from, and if I had seen Miran Shah. I hadn’t, I said. And the man offered to take me there. With no real plans of going anywhere I agreed. The man got up, righted his black and grey turban and said, “Chalo!”
Read more »Labels: FATA, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Motorcycle Diaries
posted by Salman Rashid @ 12:54,
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Necropolis with a View
01 June 2017
The direct road from Mardan to Swabi in the Northwest Frontier Province [Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa] passes through the heart of Yusufzai country: great stretches of well-worked farmland cut across by the occasional canal or punctuated by a few low hills and populace villages. As one drives eastward to Swabi the craggy ridge of Kharamar (Rearing Snake) hill blocks the view to the north. Twenty-seven kilometres from Mardan, under the highest point of the ridge, lies the village of Adina.
Once it was just a quiet Pakhtun village; then in early 1993 it hit the news. The discovery was a group of ancient graves high above the village under the hooded peak of Kharamar. The man behind this discovery was the tall, hawk-faced Professor Farid Khan, fiftyish yet bursting with youthful energy. The professor has devoted his entire life to archeology and knows everything there is to know about NWFP prehistory. It was therefore entirely my good fortune to be driving to Adina with him.
Labels: Books, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Town with Seven Lives
10 March 2017
Having pushed his way up through Bajaur, Alexander turned downstream as he reached the Punjkora River. Where Punjkora meets the Swat River, he wheeled north to take the fortified town of Ora, which was reportedly getting reinforcements from neighbouring areas. January 326 BCE, would have made for a bleak setting of leafless trees, barren ground and grey skies in the Swat lowlands, rendered the gloomier in the face of imminent invasion.
History records that the siege of Ora “gave Alexander very little trouble”. In fact, he is said to have taken the town at first assault, winning, among other spoils, a number of elephants from its fort.
Read more »Labels: Archaeology, Book of Days 2014, Discoveries of Empire, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Walk the old city of Peshawar
09 January 2017
In the Bazaar Qissa Khwaan (popularly Qissa Khwani), opposite the lane leading into Mohallah Jehangirpura, there stands a pair of marble cupolas. The plaque below commemorates the patriots who laid down their lives on the twenty-third day of April 1930. That was when the freedom movement took off in Peshawar. As the demonstrators reached this point in the bazaar, a heavy police picket opposed them. Then as the sides stood facing each other down, there came from the side of the cantonment an armoured car that drove right into the rioters as Raj authorities would have called them or the patriots as we like to say.
Then all hell broke loose. The authorities opened fire and many died. That was what made it to the history books. What never merited recording was the story of the boy not yet past his tenth year who had come to watch the demonstration. He stood to one side of the surging crowd and when the first volley was fired was as terrified out of his wits as any ten year-old should be. Ducking quickly under the shop-front ledge that extended over the gutter running along the side of the street, he could only get himself partially under cover.
Read more »Labels: History, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, People
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Aornos
07 December 2016
Having defeated the tribes of Bajaur and Lower Dir, Alexander made for the fortified towns of Bazira and Ora. Today, we know these places as Brikot and Udegram in Swat. Hard battles were fought, but the Pakhtuns were routed from both places in succession. I am prepared to face abuse from modern Pakhtuns who believe, erroneously, that they are an invincible race.
The defeated tribes fled, so Alexander learnt in Ora, to the rock of Aornos. Word had already reached Alexander about the impending approach of King Abisares of Kashmir at the head of a large army, to marry up with the Pakhtuns in a bid to defeat the invaders. Fearing that the united force sweeping down the forested slopes east of Ora would be a match hard to suppress, Alexander hurried to destroy the fugitives on Aornos.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Greeks in Pukhtunkhwa
29 September 2016
Upon taking over as the Deputy Commissioner of Bannu in the Northwest Frontier Province [Khyber Pukhtunkhwa], my friend Jehanzeb Khan called me. Here was a city, perhaps the only one in the entire country, said he, whose old quarter was still circled by a wall punctuated with gates. These gates, I was told, were shut every day at sunset until the following morning – just as it would have happened in a past forgotten by most of us. It sounded like a town that had been left alone by the soul-destroying march of time and immediately a vision formed: thick, high town wall behind which rose tower houses of timber lattices and gloriously carved wooden balconies and doors, shuttered windows and rooftop parapets with lotus-shaped corner adornments. All closely packed together to look like the finest of all subcontinental walled cities.
Yet it took me two years to get to Bannu. The town wall is there all right. Some three metres high, it is constructed entirely of the brick that was introduced to us by civil engineers of the Raj and that we still assiduously employ. The gate posts, topped by domes and finials too are constructed of the of the same bricks. But neither the wall nor the gate-houses possess the hoariness that I was expecting. They are, wall and every single gate-house, disappointingly new. Indeed, behind the city wall the old part, that European travellers would have called the ‘native’ part of town, is set out in grids, a layout that we of the subcontinent had forgotten after the downfall of the great cities of Moen jo Daro and Harappa.
Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pukhtun Stonehenge
21 September 2016
Out there on the Salisbury plain in England, they have their stone circle they call Stonehenge. Now stones are stones, but henge is an obscure word. According to my Random House Dictionary it is a ‘circular area enclosed by a bank and ditch and often containing additional features included one or more circles of upright stone or wood pillars ….. used for ritual purposes or for marking astronomical events, as solstices and equinoxes.’
Salisbury in England, incidentally, is not the only place with a stone circle – it is the most spectacular and one that goes back some five thousand years in time. There are other sites on the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe and elsewhere in the world – though I am not certain about the Americas.
Read more »
Labels: Balochistan, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Stonehenge
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Back from the brink
14 January 2016
There is something about Mian Said Ali that makes you like him. It is the gentleness in his ready smile, the humility of his demeanour and the matter-of-fact way he talks of his predicament that makes you warm up to him. There is also something that tells you that Said Ali can weather any storm without giving up.
A native of village Janu on the highroad from Khwazakhela (Swat) to Bisham and only a few kilometres outside the former, he suffered like so many others through the years of militant savagery. Yet he kept his smile.
Said Ali and his two brothers own 17 kanals (two and a bit acres) of agricultural land. Living together as a joint family, the brothers worked their holding together. Because it was spread over undulating ground, the land was terraced and unequally divided between fields for seasonal crops and orchards.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, NGOs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mianwali monuments
10 September 2015
When folks cannot comprehend an ancient monument, they tell you it has always been there, since the time of their grandparents. That is a measure of a very long time for semi-literate people. And when my friend Kashif Noon called to tell me that he had found a pair of Sikh monuments not very far from Mianwali it did not take me long to get there.
We drove out of town on the highroad that connects Mianwali with Rawalpindi via Talagang, the scenic road that skirts the western edge of the blue spread of Nammal Lake and the dark loom of the Sakesar peak. En route we picked up an elderly local who claimed to be a great master of history. At the hamlet of Bun Hafiz Ji, we turned left (south-eastward) on the road that leads up to Sakesar. Just a few kilometres on Kashif pointed out the two domes atop the low stony ridge running alongside the road to the left. They stood starkly grey against a brilliant blue sky.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Chitral and back in a jiffy
10 August 2015
It was the week before the end of the month of fasting when PIA told me there were no seats on the Chitral flight until August 19. I said fine, I’ll take one on the following day. They said, sorry. There had been a mistake and there were actually no seats until September 26.
Back in September 2010, I needed to fly to Chitral 10 days after eid. I was told I could not until six weeks later. I knew this was a lie: it was the end of summer, there were no tourists headed to Chitral and there was no way planes could be flying full. I requested my friend Khalid Shameem Wynne’s help. I got the in and out seat ‘on the Ministry of Defence quota’ and flew.
Read more »Labels: Chitral, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Internally Displaced Persons
08 July 2015
Church World Service-Pakistan/Afghanistan is a humanitarian organisation that I have been working with for more than a decade and a half. I have written extensively on their relief and rehabilitation project in places like Swat and Thar. Recently I was called to do a short report on their work with Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Kohat.
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| Boys who attend the Health Education sessions at a Mobile Health Unit |
I spent two days in Kohat talking to men and women from places as diverse as Orakzai, Tirah and Parachinar and in a word: it was a heart-wrenching experience. These people, whose exact number is unknown, were displaced from their homes over the past ten years or so. Since they left home in small numbers (unlike the deluge following the North Waziristan operation), there were no camps waiting to rehabilitate them.
Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, NGOs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Pilgrimage to Ilam
24 June 2015
My friend Feica, the cartoonist, climbed it in 1987 and had since recounted his experience many times; with each narration adding vigour to my own formless dream of climbing it one day. Hiuen Tsiang, the celebrated Chinese Buddhist pilgrim also visited it – but that was in AD 630, and he came here because Mount Ilam was sacred to Buddhism. My own dream to see sacred Ilam was born several years ago when I read the Chinese pilgrim’s Records of the Western Regions, a book not only intriguing for its exactness of information but also delightful for the charming and naive piety of the writer and the sense of wonder with which he meets the world as it comes to him. My visit, therefore, had spiritual connotations: it was a pilgrimage of sorts.
Hiuen Tsiang wrote: ‘To the south of the town of Mungali 400 li or so we come to Mount Hilo. The water flowing through the valley here turns to west, and then flowing again eastward remounts (to the source). Various fruits and flowers skirt the banks of the stream and face the sides of the mountains. There are high crags and deeps caverns, and placid steams winding through the valleys: sometimes we heard the sounds of people’s voices, and sometimes the reverberations of musical notes. There are, moreover, square stones here like long narrow bedsteads, perfected as if by the hand of men; they stretch in continuous lines from the mountain side down the valley.’ Ever since my first reading of the of the book in the early 80s my imagination had been caught by the stone bedsteads. The stream flowing upward to its source, I knew, was wild fancy.
Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Upper Swat Canal, Defying Mountains
02 June 2015
The Yusufzai Plain stretches from the Mahaban Mountains in the north to the line of the Grand Trunk Road, passing through Nowshera and from the Indus in the east just west of Mardan. Of all the districts of the North West Frontier, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, this is agriculturally the richest and most prosperous.
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| The weir |
Labels: Book of Days 2015, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Swat, Waters of Empire
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A gutsy crusader
20 May 2015
A lesser woman in remote Seejbun in Swat’s Matta sub-division would have given up. In fact, she would have been born resigned to the usual fate of domestic confinement and a long, inconsequential life. That, so she was always told, was Pakhtun culture. Part of this baggage was also to be wedded as soon as she attained puberty. That was the way for the young women in Seejbun.
But Gul Khandana was born different. After she finished primary school in the only girls’ school miles away from her village, the pressure from uncles and older cousins was for her to be restricted to the home. Fortunately, she had a brother younger than her and unable to exert pressure. She also enjoyed her father’s support and was thus able to join the local boys’ high school to complete her middle level education at age 17. Still a long way to being educated, Gul resolved to become a teacher.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, People, Swat, TNS
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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People of Northern Areas
30 January 2015
But then, I suppose, we could not blame a common journalist who read nothing and only watched Zee TV in the press club lobby for not knowing better. Domestic tourism to Peshawar and Swat is dead, but in its heyday I have seen yahoos from Lahore and sundry other places addressing every male they met north of Jhelum as Khan sahib. In Peshawar and Swat they just went over board with the Khan sahib without knowing that a red-blooded Khan does not approve of this mode of address even for himself.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Northern Pakistan, People
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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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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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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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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