jhelum: City of the Vitasta
02 May 2017
Labels: Books, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Photo Stream, Punjab, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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jhelum: City of the Vitasta
22 November 2016
On the bank of River Jhelum, looking west to the road bridge
Image from jhelum: City of the Vitasta - Book is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
Labels: jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Photo Stream, Travel Photography
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:30,
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History of Jhelum - II
05 March 2014
Shandar Chowk ( 01-03-2014) by Kay2TV
Labels: Alexander, Documentary, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, KAY2TV, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 11:36,
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On KAY2 TV
01 March 2014
Part 2 of the discussion program Shandar Chowk on KAY2 TV today (Saturday, Mar 1, 2014) at 6.30 PM (PST). Discussing will focus on Taxila (also Jhelum, Alexander the Great, Raja Paurva).
Related: Part 1
Labels: Alexander, Documentary, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Taxila, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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History of Jhelum
25 February 2014
Shandaar Chowk ( 22-02-2014) by Kay2TV
Part II on next Saturday (Mar 1, 2014) at 6:30PM on KAY2 TV
Labels: Alexander, Documentary, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, KAY2TV, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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On KAY2
22 February 2014
Will be on air today (Saturday, Feb 22, 2014) at 6.30 PM (PST) discussing Jhelum and parts of the Salt Range [including Jhelum (city and river), Alexander the Great, Raja Paurva and Tilla Jogian) during one hour, two parts, discussion program Shandar Chowk at KAY2 TV. Second part will be aired same time next Saturday (Mar 1, 2014) - image from the show.
Labels: Alexander, Documentary, History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Urdu
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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The Giant’s Tomb revisited
22 September 2013
Book is available at Sang e Meel (042-3722-0100), Lahore
A few of kilometres outside the village of Gharibwal (famous for the cement factory) at the foot of the eastern escarpments of the Salt Range in Jhelum district, there lies, in a lovely grove of tall trees, a cement plastered grave. It is a saint’s tomb, or so they say. In normal circumstances that would have been fine, but this oddity is over 18 metres long. Some people, notable among whom is a local school master, assert that this is the tomb of Ham Alai Salaam, the son of the prophet Noah. And because in those days there were giants on earth, thus the eighteen-metre long grave.
Ask any illiterate bumpkin in the village near the grave and they will swear that every supplication here bears fruit. Surprisingly however, even in neighbouring Gharibwal it is difficult to get directions, for no one seems to know of this marvellous site. Consequently it is no surprise that as little as a dozen kilometres away, the tomb of Ham completely fades out of human knowledge. However, it is clear that someone is taking a lot of interest in this supposed prophet’s tomb, for it has a brand new brick wall surrounding it. Two years ago, when I first visited it, there was only a rough stone wall.
Ask any illiterate bumpkin in the village near the grave and they will swear that every supplication here bears fruit. Surprisingly however, even in neighbouring Gharibwal it is difficult to get directions, for no one seems to know of this marvellous site. Consequently it is no surprise that as little as a dozen kilometres away, the tomb of Ham completely fades out of human knowledge. However, it is clear that someone is taking a lot of interest in this supposed prophet’s tomb, for it has a brand new brick wall surrounding it. Two years ago, when I first visited it, there was only a rough stone wall.
Labels: jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Prisoner on a Bus: Travels Through Pakistan, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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A Tale of three Castles
20 July 2013
On February 17, 1519 Babur, who was later to found the Mughal empire, crossed the Sindhu for the first time with his eyes on the rich and fertile lands of the district of Bhera on the east bank of the Jhelum. Two days later, he dismounted on the bank of the Soan River where Langar Khan of the Salt Range Janjuas brought him a message of peace from his uncle Malik Hast (Asad), the chief of the territory that Babur was camping in. The emissary was well received and on the Mughal’s bidding, he galloped off to fetch the Janjua chieftain who arrived with a gift of a horse in mail. And so friendship between a Janjua of the Soan River valley and a Mughal of Ferghana was forged.
The next afternoon (February 20th), Babur tarried beside ‘densely growing corn’ in the vicinity of Kallar Kahar Lake and promptly fell in love with this ‘charming place with good air’. The lake, he writes in his memoir, fed by run-off from the hills and a spring on its western side, was ‘some six miles round’. On its shores he laid out the foundations of the first ever Mughal garden of the subcontinent: the Bagh-e-Safa. Promising to give out more details concerning this garden further on in the memoirs, Babur somehow forgot to return to the subject. Therefore, and also because no trace of any construction remains, it is not known what civil works, if any, were undertaken. The fruit trees along the southwestern shore of the lake still mark Babur’s Bagh-e-Safa, and a rough stone pedestal with a prepared surface even today goes by the name of ‘Takht-e-Babri’ - the Throne of Babur.
Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab, Rohtas Fort
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Jehangir on the highroad
19 July 2013
Emperor Jehangir’s life was an endless succession of hunting expeditions all over the empire and those yearly trips at the beginning of each summer to escape to Kashmir from the furnace heat of Lahore and the return journey in September. In between were those tedious interludes of ruling the vast empire of India. On one of those trips in mid-April 1607, Jehangir favoured us, by way of his diary, with an account of his passage through present-day Jhelum district.
Having sojourned briefly in Rohtas and then travelled up to Tilla Jogian, he tells us of his journey thence to a place he calls Bhakra which evidently is Bhakrala on the Grand Trunk Road near Sohawa. It is a right light-hearted and delightful account of a king in vernal rapture.
Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Baghanwala: place of gardens
15 July 2013
Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the noted architect and architectural historian, calls Baghanwala ‘a poor man’s Fatehpur Sikri.’ While that fabulous ghost town of Akbar the Great bedazzles with red sandstone buildings splendidly curved as if stone was but puttee in the hands of the masons, the tiny village of Baghanwala too boasts a few houses with lintels and mock pilasters of similar sandstone. Of course, this is not the famous Jodhpur sandstone, but thee somewhat more porous one quarried locally in the Salt Range.
The town itself, placed in tiers upon a hillside, has a pleasing appearance as one approaches it from the east. At closer quarters it is not very different from most Salt Range hill villages with neat flagstoned streets and houses constructed mostly from dressed grey and red sandstone. Brick construction is only now catching up. But it is not the architecture of Baghanwala that drew the attention of kings and adventurers in the past and today that of the tourist and student of history. Great events unfolded right outside this village.
Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab, Wildlife
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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girjhak of yore, jalalpur today
19 June 2013
The village that we now call Jalalpur was where Alexander crossed the Hydaspes River in the dark of night in May 326 BCE to give battle to Raja Paurava on the far side. Greek writers do not let on if, prior to this event, there was a village at this site or not. But in the 16th century, two thousand years after Alexander’s passage, we read in Abul Fazal’s chronicle of Akbar’s reign that there was a locality in the doab between the rivers Jhelum and Sindhu called Girjhak. (There is a village of this name just outside Model Town, Gujranwala.) This, the archaeologist Alexander Cunningham tells us, answers to the same Jalalpur, the latter name harking back to the interest in this area of Emperor Jalal ud Din Mohammad Akbar.
The interest was primarily for the chase and both Akbar and his son Jehangir favoured Girjhak for its chinkara that they call ‘red deer.’ Though Abul Fazal gives no word of the vast bags of game that Akbar and his retinue would have collected at Girjhak, Jehangir brags. In one hunting trip to Girjhak and Baghanwala (referred to in the Tuzk e Jehangiri as Nandna) in March 1607 he killed two hundred and sixty-five animals of which one hundred and fifty-five were taken in Girjhak alone. The bag included antelope, blue bull (nilgai) and wild ass. The last, now extinct in Punjab, was reported as fairly numerous around Pind Dadan Khan, Haranpur and Bhera even as recently as a hundred years ago could certainly have ranged this far northward. There were also mountain sheep and goats, writes Jehangir. The former, the Punjab urial, can still be seen, albeit very rarely, in the hills of Nandna above Baghanwala.
Read more »Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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jhelum: City of the Vitasta
13 June 2013
The sons of Jhelum tell stories regarding the name of their town and the river that give their district its name. The favourite among these, and also the most widely believed, is that Jhelum was the name of a horse owned by that most celebrated of all classical warrior kings, Alexander of Macedonia. Jhelum was the horse, it is said, that had carried the young king across the world on his enviable career of conquest and glory. According to this legend, the horse’s fortune ran out when it was either killed in battle or died of natural causes on the site where the city of Jhelum now stands. The devastated Alexander immortalised his steed by giving its name to the city where it died.
Then again, local self-assigned intellectuals tell, with great gravity of countenance, that Jhelum is a compound of two Greek words: Jul and Hum. The former meaning ‘water’ and the latter ‘cool.’ That is, the Greeks, given as they were to drinking the water of frigid mountain streams and not finding any in the land of the Sindhu River, were so taken in by the coolness of this river that they gave it a Greek name. Needless to say that these Greeks are said to be none other than Alexander and his great horde. The last, in this list of mindless stories is that the word Jhelum signifies ‘hoof mark’ in Greek and is so called because Alexander’s trusted charger left a mark on the soft ground at this spot.
Labels: jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Deception at Dhamiak
04 June 2013
In the bleak, tortured landscape of the northeastern Potohar Plateau, Dhamiak had remained uncelebrated since the beginning of time. Lying amid a wearisome tangle of narrow and meandering gullies, tinged red by sub-soil salt and thinly covered with scrub, it never had reason for fame or glory. Its only claim to renown was for being a staging post on one branch of the old Rajapatha, or King’s Road, that has been in use from ancient times. While the main royal road, leading west through Punjab went by the Salt Range, this branch followed an alignment only slightly different from the modern Grand Trunk Road.
This branch was the road less travelled; the majority of traffic passing through the heart of the Salt Range. The celebrated Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang writes of his prolonged sojourn at Taxila (631 AD) and a visit to the monasteries of the Salt Range. Thereafter, he tells us of his journey to Kashmir. Though he does not describe his route, it is evident that he would have used this road. Nine hundred years later Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, tells us of having travelled by this ‘sub-montane road’ through the country of the warlike Gakkhars of the Potohar Plateau en route to Lahore in November 1523. Between the time of the Chinese master’s passage through this area and that of Babur’s, a remarkable event took place by this lesser branch of the King’s Road: the assassination of a Turkish king in present day Jhelum district.
Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Lehri Nature Reserve
01 June 2013
Some thirty kilometres northwest of Jhelum and just off the Grand Trunk Road lies a protected parkland spread over 17,000 acres of broken hills, stark rock faces and deep gullies. Naturally covered with phulai (Acacia modesta), sanatha (Dodonea viscosa) and wild olive, this chunk of land belongs to the Lehri and Jindi Reserve Forest. It is today known as Lehri Nature Reserve.
Being an offshoot of the semi-arid Salt Range, Lehri is a fragile eco-system because of scant subsoil water and depends largely on seasonal rains. Consequently, the wildlife that the area harbours has but a precarious foothold. This fact, however, did not stop rapacious and well-connected people to plunder the meagre natural resources of this reserve forest. By the middle 1980s the Lehri-Jindi complex was a moribund eco-system and it was very fortunate that it caught the official eye. With the idea of developing it to resemble the Lake District of northern England, work began on Lehri Nature Reserve in 1986. Some of the several seasonal streams that cut across the forest were dammed to form bodies of water and in times of good rains there are over three dozen ponds of various sizes. Two of these are large enough to be called lakes.
Labels: Ecology, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 09:24,
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Monument of Wasted Labour
22 May 2013
Babur, a most remarkable man, founder of the Mughal dynasty of India, poet, diarist and soldier extraordinary, passed through Jhelum. Thus the various references to Jhelum in his diary show us. On the occasion of taking Bhera he tells of his departure from Kallar Kahar (Chakwal district) on 21 February 1519. Babur and his army crossed the river that same evening very likely by the ferry of Ahmadabad, a few kilometres downstream of Pind Dadan Khan. Having flown his banners on Bhera, Babur spent a few restful days there. Among other things, he tells us of his galas on longboats on the Jhelum River. As the waves of the river gently rocked the boat, much strong spirit (arak) and a confection of opium (ma'jun) was consumed to the accompaniment of the lute.
But the Mughal empire was not yet to be. Babur withdrew to Afghanistan and returned again in November 1523. The part of his diary dealing with this expedition being missing, it can only be conjectured that he crossed either at Jhelum or at a ferry below the town. Two years later, in December 1525, the day before Christmas, Babur was ferried across the 'Behat water at a ford below Jhelum [town].' This time his route is known. It lay through the country of the Gakkhars, down by that branch of the Rajapatha that our G. T.
Read more »Labels: History, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab, Rohtas Fort
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Hill of the Jogis
20 May 2013
On a clear evening the setting sun, as seen from the Jhelum bridge or Rohtas fort, appears to be going behind the purple loom of a solitary hill. On the fringe of the Salt Range highlands and detached from it by several kilometres, this is Tilla Jogian - Hill of the Jogis. Rising one thousand metres above the sea, richly wooded with wild olive, phulai (Acacia modesta), a species of wild pistachio, some sumbal (Bombax malabaricum) and, on the very peak, a few chir (Pinus longifolia), Tilla Jogian has long been hallowed ground.
According to Alexander Cunningham, the 19th century British archaeologist, the hill was dedicated to the sun god Balnath and therefore known as Tilla Balnath. Over time, it came to be known as Tilla Goraknath so named, according to Cunningham, after another form of Shiva. He also noted that the latter name was of a fairly recent origin. It was perhaps following Cunningham that the Glossary of Tribes, Castes and Clans of Ibbetson, Maclagan and Rose tells us that Goraknath lived in the 15th century of this era. Inferential evidence shows otherwise, however.
Labels: Books, jhelum: City of the Vitasta, Punjab
posted by Salman Rashid @ 00:00,
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Jhelum: City of the Vitasta
14 February 2013
Nyla Daud
From being a rather small town district headquarter at the time of partition, to developing into a densely populated, sprawling micro polis-like freak of the original, Jhelum, the city, as well as the areas around it have had few tales to tell; barring of course the many and, at times, rather far-fetched theories of how the place really got its name. The last factor has been instrumental in intriguing travel writer Salman Rashid to the extent that he was won over by District Nazim Farrukh Altaf Chaudry to write a book on Jhelum district. An extension of a multimedia venture in which a 30-minute documentary forms one part, Rashid’s book, Jhelum: The City of The Vitasta is as much a keeper of lore associated with the area, as it is a reincarnation of the historical and socio cultural significance of the district, which, in current times is known for little else but the fact that it is the training ground for some of the most able-bodied men recruited into the Pakistan Army.
Aesthetically dressed up with some very fine visuals, contemporary Jhelum appears to have a very photogenic frame for Rahsid’s latest addition to his growing list of travel books. It also moves considerably up the literary scale, because it is based on exhaustive research to sift the chaff from the grain: in this case, fact from fiction, since there has been no dearth of “historians” assiduously applying themselves to the task of inventing history. Apparently, sometime between the first European historian did his research about the area and that of Rashid’s, Jhelum had become the name of Alexander’s horse.
Labels: Book Review, Books, jhelum: City of the Vitasta
posted by Salman Rashid @ 10:59,
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