Loving our tormentors
03 August 2016
This series of articles is inspired by the usage of the phrase “loving [our] tormentors” in an editorial published in newspaper on June 1. Pakistanis today, it is true, simply fail to see an enemy if he wears a long beard and skullcap (or turban) and speaks Arabic. This is true for us since the beginning of the Afghan war in 1980.
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Looking back, however, we find that we have forever been famous for celebrating foreign tormentors. It has gone on so long that this disease is now a part of the collective psyche of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Now, appreciation for post-Hijra outsiders (read Muslims) was kosher for us, whose ancestors converted (and damn the assertions about everyone having arrived from Arabia duly converted), but there is at least one aberration.
Read more »Labels: Alexander, History, Raja Paurava
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Alexander on the Hydaspes
14 July 2013
After taking Taxila and tarrying there some two weeks, Alexander headed for the kingdom of Raja Paurava. The Hydaspes River formed the border between the realms of Raja Ambhi of Taxila and that of Raja Paurava in the Chaj doab – the belt between the Chenab and the Jhelum. The question of the route that Alexander took from Taxila to his crossing point of the Hydaspes and the site of the epic battle with Raja Paurava has long been debated by scholars.
From very ancient times, Punjab was criss-crossed by a web of roads. The most famous and widely used was the Rajapatha or the King’s Road (shahi sarak, as the road has also been known, is a translation of the Sanskrit Rajapatha) that stretched from Patna in the east to Kabul in the west. This was the precursor of the Grand Trunk Road that we so love to attribute to Sher Shah Suri – as if before this great Pakhtun king the road simply did not exist.
Labels: Alexander, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab, Raja Paurava
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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King Paurava the great
28 May 2013
I set out of Lahore early. Northbound on the Grand Trunk Road, I took the slow passage through Gujranwala and Wazirabad, rather than the faster bypasses and stopped at the old ‘Chenab Road Bridge’ as the metal plaque says. A hundred metres upstream was the impressive Alexandra Bridge commissioned in January 1876 to carry the first Metre Gauge railway line across the Chenab. Inaugurated by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), it was named after his royal consort. But some railway man called A. A. Qureshi knew only one similar sounding name and that appended with the title ‘The Great.’ And so it came to pass that this good Qureshi had a sign put up to give out the history of the bridge. The second sentence tells us, without punctuation, that the structure was named ‘after Mr Alexandra the Great the then Chief Engineer of North Western Railway.’
I sent up a happy prayer for Qureshi and for that conscientious officer of the future who will have the peeling sign repainted and ordered in three columns to make it easier to read and possible to photograph so that it may enter the realm of history. The contribution of Pakistani railway engineers to the history of British royalty must never be forgotten. For me it was an appropriate diversion for I was on my way to revisit the field of that epic battle fought on the field outside nondescript Mong in May 326 BCE between Raja Paurava of the Punjabis and Alexander from distant Macedonia. (This is the learned pronunciation. The average man would have referred to the king as Pora, which was rendered Porus on Greek tongues.)
Labels: Alexander, History, Punjab, Raja Paurava
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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Raja Paurava and Alexander
08 March 2013
In the gloom of a stormy night in late May of the year 326 BCE, Alexander of Macedonia secretly crossed the Jhelum River to fight his epic battle against the Punjabi king Paurava (Porus to the Greeks). The battle took place outside Mong village in the district of Mandi Bahauddin where lore celebrates the invader’s victory by either converting him to Islam, though he pre-dates this religion by a thousand years, or making him a hero from the Quran. Paurava is of course vilified for being heathen.
The well-known exchange between the victor and the vanquished concerning how the latter wished to be treated and his response are part of lore that is related as a sign of Alexander’s greatness, not of Paurava’s equanimity in defeat. Paurava simply pales in the presence of Alexander, but history looks at the Punjabi king differently.
Labels: Alexander, Book of Days 2009, Raja Paurava, Tales Less Told
posted by Salman Rashid @ 08:30,
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