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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To the Shrine of the Invisible Saint
25 May 2017
The hills – as gold-brown as sun-dried chaff, or dark grey like fire-scoured lead, rise sharply on either side of the narrow gorge. Rarely is their burnished starkness broken by vegetation; rarely, save during a downpour, does one see a trickle of water on these slopes. Desiccated, harsh and barren, the slopes run down to the pebbly bed of the Bolan River where the water flows in a narrow channel. Rarely does the entire riverbed know the feel of water sluicing over it – and that again only during a downpour.
Long, long before Alexander the Macedonian was born; long before the Aryan hordes swept into the plains of the Sindhu-Ganga river system to give rise to a new religion and a new culture; even before the great tragic hero Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (lower Mesopotamia), disturbed by the demise of his dearest friend, undertook his epic quest for immortality; the Bolan Gorge had resounded to the tramp of marching feet, to the clink of armoury and the jangle of camels’ bells. For this was the highroad leading west from the plains of Sindh where one of the great civilisations of prehistory flourished. The discovery of the ruins at Mehrgarh near Sibi at the lower end of the Pass and the verification that this ancient city had flourished as far back as the eighth millennium BCE testifies that the Bolan route has certainly been used as long as that.
Labels: Balochistan, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Lovelorn Poet
12 May 2017
As we lounged over tea in the little inn below Ajri Kandao, the poet caught up with us again. The haunting, faraway look was still there as he quietly came in and sat to one side of the single room inn. Wordlessly cradling his cup of tea in both hands he started to sip without looking up at anyone. Wazir Mohammed who sports the nom de plume of Sha’ir Wazir Mohammed Zakhmi, had to be coaxed into speaking.
Read more »Labels: Gilgit–Baltistan, Kaghan, Northern Pakistan, People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Bunni Bungla - a rest house and a memory
08 May 2017
Lost too is a lovely old rest house that was about eighty years old when I first knew it back in the early 1970s. Bunni Bungla, as it was called, was the property of the Forest Department, if I remember correctly. It was a bulky looking brick building with a pillared veranda on three sides, one large drawing room and two or three other rooms. It sat, unseen from the main road, on a knoll amid tall grass and trees all but forgotten and scarcely visited.
Labels: Punjab, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘Dust unto Dust’
03 April 2017
In the year 1902 parts of the Shikarpur and Karachi districts of the province of Sindh were carved away to establish the new district of Larkana. Long before that this area was known as Chandka after the well-established Chandio tribe that still lives in great numbers in the western hills of the district. Now the newly established district was to get its new name from the Rajput clan of Larik.
In a paper submitted to the Government of India on 31 December 1847 Hugh James, the Deputy Collector (equivalent to the modern Assistant Commissioner) of Shikarpur, did not hesitate to call Chandka the ‘Garden of Upper Sindh.’ His reason for this appellation was the number of waterways, both natural and man-made, that meandered across the district bringing it great fertility.
Labels: Books, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Mystery on an Ancient Highway
03 February 2017
‘Bamaar’s blow was so violent that it clean struck off Sultan Mohammed’s head, and sent it rolling down the hill,’ said the old man that my friend Abbas Ali had enlisted to show us the purported jailhouse and the palace on the crest of the low eminence of Bamurg Kandao just two kilometres due east of Parachinar town.
The jailhouse was no more than a natural cutting in the limestone hill and the palace was simply the foundation of three or four rooms whose antiquity I could not guess. Whoever had lived here in whichever period of time, enjoyed an indisputably magnificent view along the Zeeran stream, a tributary of the Kurram. Below us lay neatly parcelled squares of cultivation, across the river were the houses of Yusufkhel village and far away to the north the dark line of the Safed Koh range dissolved into storm clouds that sparkled with lightening every now and again. Parachinar was sprinkled in the middle ground to the west; a range of low hills blocked the view to the east. And to the south the Zeeran cut through more farmland.
Labels: Books, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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History’s uncharted Backwater
27 January 2017
A friend working with an international NGO in Lahore showed me some pictures of a ‘stone wall with patterns.’ It was located, he said, in Nag Valley of Balochistan about a hundred kilometres northeast of the town of Punjgur. I was intrigued. I had never seen anything like these walls with chev ron patterns created by an arrangement of shards of stone and large, flat pebbles. And so there I was heading out for the boondocks of Balochistan in the company of two friends from Houbara Foundation International Pakistan.
Some ten kilometres to the east of the little village of Kirichi (about seventy kilometres east of Punjgur), the walls lie hard by a dirt road. (The coordinates for this site are: N 27º - 18.373’, E 65º - 03.330’). This is the favoured smugglers’ route between Punjgur and Besima (near Kalat in the east) because of an absence of anti-smuggling road blocks. The stone walls make up eight enclosures measuring no more than ten to twelve metres square and all contain Muslim burials. The graves are aligned on the prescription north-south axis and each enclosure has a clearly marked mehrab in the west. In all, the graves in the various enclosures and those outside would number about two hundred.
Labels: Balochistan, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
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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Gateway of the Breeze
12 August 2015
The taxi drove me the winding road up Koh e Batil, the massive sheer-sided hammerhead of Gwadar to see the 16th century Portuguese water tanks. The tanks turned out to be a disappointment being no more than a largish clay-choked, bone dry depression fringed by a few date trees. But the views from the vantage of the peak were priceless: the shimmering blue-grey Arabian Sea to the south, the town of Gwadar sprinkled far below on the narrow isthmus to the north with the graceful arcs of the east and west bays of Gwadar on either side of the habitation. Both bays were dotted with dozens of fishermen’s boats. Far away, beyond west bay, the curiously shaped hills of Pishukan scraped the welkin just like the skyline of some modern city. From my vantage, the idyll spread out below seemed part of a Mediterranean resort.
Here on the Makran seaboard, they have always been fishermen. Alexander’s chroniclers tell us of the Ichthyophagi – the Fish Eaters. The Greeks lament the absence of any other food but fish and tell us that even the Fish Eaters’ cattle ate only fish which gave its flesh a fishy taste. This tradition of a fishing culture giving its name to the land evidently goes farther back into history. The Shahnama of Firdausi, the great Persian poet, relates that Makran was part of the Persian empire during the Heroic Age (about 600 BCE) when Kai Kaus and Kai Khusro ruled that country. Even to the classical Persians this was the land of the Mahi Khoran (Fish Eaters again). No surprise then that the Makranis’ pronunciation of the name of their land ‘Mukkoran,’ is a clear throwback on the ancient Persian name.
Labels: Balochistan, Makran, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Palace of Fairies
07 March 2015
Sea Monsters and the Sun God is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Among other Mughal buildings mentioned by S. M. Latif in his book on Lahore written a hundred years ago, there is one called Pari Mahal: ‘The Pari Mahal, or the “palace of fairies” is situated in the Shah Almi Gate quarters. It was founded by Nawab Ilmud Din, surnamed Wazir Khan, Minister of Shah Jehan, and was his private residence. He also held court here. It was furnished with magnificent halls, gardens, baths and other elegant buildings; but the three governors of Lahore, and, after them, Ranjit Singh, stripped it of its costly materials. The shops attached to the haveli, together with certain other buildings, still exist and are substantial works of architectural beauty.’
Latif does not say anymore and the ‘three governors,’ one can assume, were those who ruled over the city immediately following Wazir Khan. But the fact that the building was called Pari Mahal and that it was his ‘private residence’ implies explicitly enough that Wazir Khan housed his wife (or wives and concubines – the last if he kept them) in it. So when friend and fellow writer Sarwat Ali read out this passage to me, I resolved to see this 17th century building that had missed my notice thus far. Even before I set out for Shah Almi, I harboured little hope of re-discovering a grand Mughal relic. I knew there would be no more than a crumbling ruin rendered ungainly, almost ugly, by the growth upon it of cement concrete excrescences – as is the wont in our country.
Read more »Labels: Lahore, Punjab, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
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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The Saint who lives
07 July 2014
We took the short walk from the shanty bazaar. The shrine was scarcely impressive: an ill-looking cubicle with a large brass bell hanging on the door jamb. The devotees, mainly women, clanged the bell as one would upon entering a Hindu temple and went in. Inside, since the man had not died only disappeared from the sight of mortals, was a pile of copies of the Koran instead of the usual grave. Outside, by the entrance, was the tree with assorted rags and tiny cloth pouches filled with the first shaving of newborn babies. A child begotten as a result of supplication at this shrine, it was said, had to return here to be shaved and the hair left as an offering. What with most Baloch men having beards and sometimes even long hair, I couldn’t help thinking that this shrine may well have been started by some long-forgotten out-of-work barber whose descendents now must be right thankful to him.
Read more »Labels: Punjab, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Menhirs, Stone Circles and Graves
23 June 2014
There is, it was reported, a series of menhirs (free-standing upright stones) and stone circles in the vicinity of Fort Munro, the hill in Dera Ghazi Khan trying so hard – and failing – to hit it off as a summer resort for southern Punjab. And so it was that my friend Khurram Khosa and I drove over the divide between Punjab and Balochistan at Fort Munro. We were on an ancient highway that has carried murderers, ascetics, traders and adventurers back and forth. Beyond the village of Rakni (busy bazaar and a police station with over a dozen brand-new smuggled cars waiting to rust to pieces) we drove on to Bawata.
Outside Bawata, to the south of the road hard by the Balochistan Levies checkpoint, were the menhir and stone circles – entirely unknown outside the area. To my untrained eye the stone circles looked like foundations of corrals and so far as I was concerned could be from two hundred to two thousand years old. The largest of these circles even had a time frame: an angular mehrab to the west told us that even if this was a prehistoric circle, something similar to Stonehenge, it had been appropriated at some point and turned into a mosque. Nearby there were several other sets of upright stone slabs that appeared to be the foundations of small rooms. Khurram said so far as he knew the Department of Archaeology had never investigated these puzzling stone relics.
Read more »Labels: Balochistan, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Stonehenge
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘Not a soul was left living!’
02 June 2014
The deep-throated double hoot of the Indian Eagle Owl rising from the ruin they call the mari (mansion) rode the gusting wind across the undulating peelu-covered terrain to me on the roof of the derelict mosque. Other than that haunting call and the sigh of the north wind it was silent as it has been for over two hundred years. From my perch on the roof of the mosque I could see the full extent of the ruins of Dhonra Hingora sprawling over perhaps a hundred acres: two mosques, a domed mausoleum, remains of houses, the four corner columns of the mari, and massive brickwork that appears to be the remains of a bridge. And everywhere amid these ruins, shards and shards of glazed and unglazed pottery badly eroded by the saline soil.
Lying outside the small village of Tando Fazal, twenty-five kilometres southeast of Hyderabad on the road to Sheikh Bhirkio, Dhonra Hingora, or the ‘Ruins of Tando Fazal’ as the sign of the Department of Archaeology calls them, commemorate the lost majesty of a once thriving centre of trade and commerce. Legend recalls a holy man who lived here and took time out from his ecclesiastical duties to prepare and drink vast libations of bhung. Indeed so given was he to this narcotic drink that he always had several pitchers brimming with it, ready to be imbibed.
Lying outside the small village of Tando Fazal, twenty-five kilometres southeast of Hyderabad on the road to Sheikh Bhirkio, Dhonra Hingora, or the ‘Ruins of Tando Fazal’ as the sign of the Department of Archaeology calls them, commemorate the lost majesty of a once thriving centre of trade and commerce. Legend recalls a holy man who lived here and took time out from his ecclesiastical duties to prepare and drink vast libations of bhung. Indeed so given was he to this narcotic drink that he always had several pitchers brimming with it, ready to be imbibed.
Labels: History, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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History’s forgotten Page
19 May 2014
It was the middle of the 5th century CE. And it was a time of despair for the lands now called Afghanistan, Pukhtunkhwa and Punjab. The bleak, windswept steppes of Central Asia, fertile only with destructive storms of savages, had unleashed yet another howling monster: the White Huns. From the same stock that had set Attila on Europe only decades before, these savages under a man called Tor Aman (Toramana of English texts) had destroyed all that was sacred in the land of the Pukhtuns. With smouldering ruins of once great cities and rotting carcasses of man and beast littering their wake, these barbarians were poised to cross the Sindhu.
Cross this great river they did. Taxila and her monasteries were sacked, the populace was put to the sword, only the lucky ones escaped with their lives to hide away in unknown mountain fastnesses and God’s earth trembled as the Huns moved on deeper into the Land of Five Rivers. By around 510 CE Tor Aman was dead, only to be replaced by his even more barbarous son Mehr Gul (Mihiragula). Soon it was that the Huns’ reputation preceded them. Kings and chieftains deluded that surrender to the Huns would spare their lives laid down their arms without a struggle and were ruthlessly put to death. Their armies and subjects were either drowned in the rivers or distributed amongst the savage soldiery. None were spared. Armies that chose to resist, simply folded against the superior mobility and tactics of the Huns.
Labels: History, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Chup Sha! Hari Singh raghle!
28 March 2014
Gujranwala was then the domain of a man called Hari Singh Nalwa, a native of the town. A Rajput by caste and follower of the great Guru Nanak by creed, he was the ablest general that the Punjabi Maharaja could boast of. It was this man who had taken Punjabi arms across the Sindhu River and into the Pukhtun heartland. Such had been his terror that for nearly a hundred and fifty years after his death Pukhtun mothers were to restrain recalcitrant children with a whispered, ‘Chup Sha! Hari Singh raghle!’ (Be quite! Hari Singh comes!).
Read more »Labels: People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sikhs
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Return to Ari Pir
19 February 2014
I first saw this magical place in February 1987 when a friend and I trekked from the mouth of Hub River to its source. Here, one hundred and forty kilometres due north of Karachi in the district of Lasbela (Balochistan), the Saruna River breaks out of its confining rocky gorge and spreads out to form a deep tarn just before it runs into the Hub. On the one-inch map that we were using at that time the place was marked ‘Ari Pir’ giving us the impression that it was a village of sorts.
But all it had was a grave (or two) on a rocky eminence and a solitary shack all but lost in the wide-open landscape that typifies the Khirthar Range of Sindh and Balochistan. The shack was the local inn where pilgrims could rest on their way from the shrine of Shahbaz Qalander at Sehwan, several days’ journey (by foot) to the northeast, to that of Shah Noorani in the Lahut Valley a day’s march to the southwest. Since the festival at Lahut follows a couple of weeks after the Sehwan celebrations and because the followers of the one are also devoted to the other, there is a great once-a-year traffic of bhung-quaffing pilgrims along this route. There is, besides, the incidental traffic of occasional malangs back and forth as well. The inn serves them all. Otherwise it’s very quiet.
Labels: Balochistan, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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‘No one believes the Professor’
05 February 2014
Here, I thought, was a man that needed to be discovered. And so recently one morning around ten I arrived at his second floor flat in Lahore’s Riwaz Gardens flat. In response to my knock, he opened the door a mere chink and said he was busy in his worship and would appreciate if I could come back after an hour. I returned at the appointed hour to be shown into a cluttered, unswept room with a charpoy (woven with synthetic tape) without bedding, a couple of chairs, a table and a settee all piled with books, old newspapers, unwashed items of clothing, old film posters and assorted stuff. A leaking blue plastic water cooler lay in a puddle on the floor – Professor Marks’ only modern convenience that was any good.
Read more »Labels: People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Sakhia
06 November 2013
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I returned to Thar on a brief visit in 1995 but despite my wish, failed to get as far as Gori. Indeed in these past years I had often thought of Sakhia. What would a live wire like him be doing in the backwaters of the Thar Desert? Wouldn’t he have moved on to a job in Hyderabad or Karachi? Or even to the Gulf? Would he have added to his two years of schooling? I even imagined young Sakhia, with his intelligent, active mind to be a sahib. Of course there was also the dreadful thought of him having got on the wrong side of the law. And so it was in quest of this remarkable person that I asked our convoy of three jeeps and twenty odd people to pause a while in the village of Gori.
Labels: People, Sea Monsters and the Sun God, Sindh, Thar
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Last Train to Thal
01 November 2013
The last train from Kohat to Thal ran sometime in June 1991, so the Station Master at Kohat informed me. Then the section was closed. For a while afterwards, the staff remained at their stations; slowly they were re-assigned. The first to go were the Station Masters from the several stations strung out between the two termini. Gradually went the others, until only a very small nucleus of gang men remained – ostensibly to look after the abandoned one hundred-kilometre Narrow Gauge line. And ostensible was all the looking after there ever was.
Even before 1991 the Kohat-Thal line had shown every sign of impending demise. Back in early 1987 when I was doing my series called The Little Railway Bazaar pompously named after one of the good travel books of the 20th century, I had arrived in Kohat to ride the once-a-week train. The coolies around the station said that the Thal line being closed I would be better advised to ride the bus which was not only a sight more comfortable but faster too. My Pakistan Railways timetable said the service was still in operation, so not trusting the red-shirted coolies I sought the Station Master.
Read more »Labels: Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa, Pakistan Railways, Railway, Sea Monsters and the Sun God
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