Alice Albinia's "EMPIRES OF THE INDUS"

I have just completed my journey from the Indus Delta to Senge Khabab with one of the most determined and energetic guides in history. The miracle is that this entire journey took just three days. I traveled by boat, jeep, bus, SUV, military transport, and every other means of locomotion available in these areas. I have walked the paths in the woods, hills and mountains that were traversed once by conquerors like Alexander of Macedon, Kanishka, the Kushan Emperor, Mahmud of Ghazni, Babar, the founder of the Great Mughal Empire, and in the footprints of explorers, monks, and historians. All this was made possible by a young girl, not even 30, who came to this area from England, the last in a long line of rulers who coveted this land and waged war to possess it by hook or by crook.

I am referring to Alice Albinia’s “Empires of the Indus”, a completely fascinating book, written in the most engaging manner by the young explorer/writer. Reading the book is like watching a BBC documentary on TV. I am reminded of the brilliant work done by Michael Wood in his documentaries on Alexander and Shakespeare, and more recently in “The Story of India”. The book is much more than a travelogue. It is a work of great scholarship, combining the disciplines of archaeology, social anthropology, historiography, philology, and literary writing. It is the result of painstaking research and dogged determination to travel through perhaps the most dangerous terrain on this earth. That she did it at a time when the entire area is awash with militant activity, inhabited almost entirely by Muslims who find themselves caught in an ideological war with the West; where almost every man and child is adept at the use of firearms; and where a single woman, traveling alone, is to be despised for her transgression; evokes not only admiration for her courage, but also a certain amount of awe. Nowhere in the book does she refer to any unpleasant experience that she must have encountered during her travels, and the impression one gets is of almost “a walk in the park”. It is quite right for her to keep such personal experiences out of the scope of the book as that would have taken the focus away from the real heroine of her tale – the river Indus.

She must have learnt to speak and understand Urdu/Hindi in very quick time, although I am not sure if she has learnt to read the scripts also. The book is a labour of love, and the sincerity of the author is apparent in every page and word. One can also feel her pain at the ecological destruction that the damming of the rivers and the various irrigation projects has done to whole cultures and civilizations that had thrived in this region. The artificially engineered boundaries of sub-continental India, expeditiously done by the British in 1947, divided much more than just its people. The Partition was a cataclysmic event destroying whole communities, and damaging people’s psyches irreparably. The birth of Pakistan, midwifed by the British, has failed in its objective to represent the Muslims of the entire Indian sub-continent even though it became home for less than one-third. Pakistan’s crisis of identity has led it to deny its pre-Islamic past and to rewrite history to suit its narrow sectarian interests.

Where I have an issue with the author is in her perception that the people of India were disconcerted and dismayed at the loss of what she calls the “heartland of Rig Veda” to Pakistan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am an Indian, born in a Kashmiri Pandit family, now living a retired life in the Nilgiris in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and I have never encountered this kind of thinking at any time during my days as a student or later. The tragedy of Partition is not lamented for the loss of territory but for the loss of the idea that was India. But whereas we in India have been trying to forget the past and to plod along with all our deficiencies, our neighbours have kept the wounds open through their stated policy of “thousand cuts”. Therefore, to say that “It was thus an acute disappointment to many Indians when the Indus valley cities were lost to Pakistan at Partition, and the search for equally ancient cities on the banks of the ‘Saraswati’ in India began almost immediately” cannot be substantiated by any data. The Indus valley civilization is still considered as a part of Indian history, even though the excavated settlements and cities may now lie in Pakistan. In India we have not denied our Islamic past and history has not been officially rewritten to exclude the Muslim rulers from its pages. I understand that in Pakistani text books there is no mention of Asoka, and that Akbar is not considered a great emperor because he tried to create a syncretic religion, Din-e-Elahi, that is anathema to Sunni Islam.

The search for settlements along the banks of the Saraswati is but natural. If great civilizations have grown on the banks of great rivers, there is no reason to believe that one could not have evolved on the banks of the Saraswati. There is no cause for reasoning that this search is due to some kind of disappointment at the loss of the Indus Valley cities. In fact they are not lost, as they are the heritage of the world, and it is incumbent upon Pakistan and the rest of the world to ensure that they are preserved and protected. Unfortunately, Pakistan and the Muslim world has been most remiss in their discharge of this responsibility, as evidenced by the destruction of Bamiyan; and the seventh century CE Maitreya Buddha in Swat, Pakistan, that had been photographed by Ms. Albinia herself. It is true that Indians, as a people, do not have a great sense of history, and they do not value antiquities as the people in Europe do. That is the reason why it is the British who have done almost all the archaeological work in the sub-continent, uncovered its glorious past, and even deciphered the ancient scripts and texts. But that is no reason to deride L.K. Advani, the Home Minister of India in the 1990s, for not being aware of the Tibetan name of the river Indus. I am sure that if Gordon Brown is asked to give the Celtic names of the rivers of England he will also be equally embarrassed. The author has clearly demonstrated her prejudices against the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), whom she condemns as a Hindu fundamentalist outfit, almost on par with the Taliban or the Muslim fundamentalist outfits in Pakistan. Having lived in India when the BJP was the dominant member of the ruling alliance at the centre, she has obviously been influenced by some of the members of the “pseudo-secular” brigade whose vote-bank politics has destroyed the secular fabric of this nation and given rise to pressure groups bent upon splitting the country into further fragments that can only be represented by a forest of acronyms like the casteist SC, ST, BC, OBC, BSP etc., and the regional DMK, TDP, PMK, MDMK, AGP, etc. etc. To suggest that the annual cultural function known as “Sindhu Darshan” inaugurated by the BJP is an attempt “to purify the river with the waters of the Brahmaputra and Ganga before it flows into Muslim Pakistan”, is mischievous, to say the least. L. K. Advani is a Sindhi, and I am sure the sight of this mighty river almost at its source must have been an exhilarating and humbling experience. It is natural to find oneself in awe of the might of Creation, and a sense of piety can overwhelm an individual’s consciousness. For a Sindhi, deriving his roots from the soil nurtured by this great river, the experience would be beyond our comprehension. To start a festival in honour of this experience is not necessarily to “compensate for poor geography”, but to recognize the importance of this mighty force of nature in the lives and history of the people of India. It is very disappointing when a work of great scholarship and purpose degenerates into a propaganda vehicle. To write that the Sindhu Darshan is a “mission of the extremist Hindu groups with which Advani is affiliated to reclaim ‘western India’ from Pakistan; and so, in the Home Minsiter’s hands, the Indus – which the rest of India had largely forgotten – became ‘a symbol of nationalism and national integration, evocative of the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers during the Kargil War and the loss of life and land at Partition”, may be fit for a propaganda leaflet, but certainly not for a work aspiring to be a dispassionate, unbiased story of the journey of a river. Michael Wood’s “Story of India” is an excellent example of this dispassionate, unbiased reporting, and perhaps the author could benefit by emulating his style.

The reason for Pakistan’s unabated hostility towards India lies in its quest for balance. This quest led to an overemphasis on the military budget giving the army a privileged, and unduly powerful, political status even when Pakistan was not under direct military rule. Perhaps, like Pakistan, the author too was on a quest for balance. A hostile attitude towards a political party that inflicted the defeat on the Pakistanis in the misguided Kargil War, would go down well with the reading public in that country, thereby boosting the sales of the book.

Whatever may be her reasons, one cannot deny the fact that the book is highly entertaining and informative. The narrative style is natural and not laboured. The language is simple and close to the earth. The writer’s emotional involvement with her subject seeps through the pages and the characters she encounters during her journey are all painted with a humanistic brush. In the final analysis, Empires of the Indus is a highly readable book which could be prescribed as a text book in the syllabuses of Indian and Pakistani schools.