Salman Rashid

REDISCOVERING THE GRAND TRUNK ROAD

2023-06-05T08:53:00.003+05:00

Cutting through the burgeoning Mughal Empire in the 1540s, the Bihar-born Pakhtun soldier Farid Khan — better known as Sher Shah Suri — banished emperor Humayun to Persia. He utilised all five years of his reign to create some semblance of order in a land divided by tribal allegiances and equally strong perfidy, only to be pushed back, leaving behind a sorry dynasty that fizzled away in just as many years.

Yet, Suri has stayed long in our collective memories as the builder of the Grand Trunk Road, a legacy bequeathed, in part, to present-day Pakistan.

But was it really so?

It took travel writer Salman Rashid years of research, countless cross-country treks, rides on rickety two- and four-wheelers, frog-jumping the parapets of numerous forts, gingerly stepping down the decaying brick steps of ancient baolies [water reservoirs], conversations with both the simplest of minds and internationally certified authorities and generous dollops of his one-of-a-kind humorous and satirical asides to make short — read: long — work of the well-kept secret that the Grand Trunk Road is. Simply put, it has far more to it than meets the eye.

The road’s Pakistani trajectory begins from the town of Landi Kotal at the rugged edges of the Khyber Pass, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). Shady trees line either side of the ancient route that flows towards Wagah near Lahore, before crossing into India and ending in southernmost Bangladesh. On the way, it has touched many settlements, been ground for historic monuments and peace treaties and branched off at the whims of various invaders and kings.

All that the road has weathered in its centuries of existence — facts and fables, history and folklore, cultural ethos and a landscape painted, in part, by deliberate intent — makes for an amazing conglomerate of knowledge that has been glossed over by crediting its construction to Sher Shah Suri.

Hence, Rashid’s latest travel treatise, From Landi Kotal to Wagah: Cultural Heritage Along the Grand Trunk Road. This absorbing, beautifully produced book is testimony to the fact that the Grand Trunk Road — about which much has already been written — was waiting to be rediscovered and recorded from an angle other writers have failed to highlight.

This angle is essentially that, although Suri probably did build some segments of the road, the numerous landmarks along its Pakistani length prove the presence, passing or settlement of travellers, preachers and warriors from as early as the fourth century.

Rashid writes a zesty story of this extensively traversed highway’s origins, beginning from the fourth century in the time of the Mauryans, to the sixth century when Cyrus, king of the Achaemenid empire, annexed modern-day Pakistan. The author then takes us through the Buddhist, Mughal, Sikh and British eras to bring readers to the status of the road in the present day.

Rashid’s findings draw a line between fact and fiction, verifying historical record and simultaneously debunking myths that have come to be over the years, either in ignorance or purposeful design to benefit contemporary needs and populations.

For instance, he writes of a small fortification in Torkham, KP, that shows all the signs of having been constructed in the early 20th century, most likely by the British. However, his local guide refuses to venture inside because he has grown up believing that it was actually the site of Timur’s gallows, where the Mongol conqueror had had many a dissident hanged.

Hardly anywhere else might we have read of the second-century warrior king Kanishka following a darting rabbit along a swamp, only to meet a local shepherd who told him that Buddha had prophesied that a victorious ruler would raise a stupa in that particular location to house the largest portions of the sage’s earthly remains. Eager to prove himself the ‘one’, Kanishka promptly had a stupa built and planted a peepal tree, marking a site to where every Buddhist pilgrim gravitated for 400 years.

By referencing records such as the Tuzk-i-Babari — also known as Babarnama or History of Babar — and Tuzk-i-Jahangiri [History of Jahangir] as well as a good deal of investigative good sense, Rashid creates a marvellous balance between historical accuracy and folklore. The local populace would even today rely religiously on hearsay — the authors of such yarns might never even have been near any source material — but any attempt to counter them will result in one being “drummed out of town.” Such situations give Rashid’s book a wry humour to which only he can do full justice.

Rashid addresses the Grand Trunk Road — originally called the Rajapatha [Royal Highway] and, in the area that is now Pakistan, the Utra Rajapatha [Northern Royal Highway] — as a living entity that is at times vibrant, at other instances bloodthirsty and, at yet other moments, a detour for specific political, social or religious invasions. Sometimes it is buried in anonymity, yet it continues to be very much part of an important line of communication down centuries of political, religious and social invasions.

The rich, historical story of the grandest highway in the Subcontinent criss-crosses a spread of beautiful geography and landscapes of wondrous culture, heritage, fable and folklore that is much deeper and more intriguing than its kilometres of surface.

We see the crumbling kos minars [milestones], which once numbered in the hundreds along the length of the road, but now only two survive in the Pakistani section. Also surviving in various states of despairing disrepair are the tomb of one Lala Rukh — purportedly either the daughter or granddaughter of Mughal emperor Akbar — and the baradari [garden] of Behram Khan, son of the Pakhtun poet and warrior Khushal Khan Khattak.

On this excellent adventure ride into antiquity, we also read about the Macedonian king Alexander’s trek through what is now Pakistan and stories of princesses who sponsored great architectural projects. In his trademark humorous style, Rashid comments that it seems the British government’s decision to lay a railway track between the tombs of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and his beloved wife Noor Jahan was intended to “accentuate the intellectual difference between the two” because Jahangir was “scarcely worthy” of the lady who “towered” above him.

This makes the opinion of the octogenarian village matriarch, with which Rashid begins his book, all the more poignant: “Roads make all the difference to women. They have little meaning for men who can ride horses that we women can’t.”

Yesterday, today and tomorrow. From Landi Kotal to Wagah is quite the stylistic tapestry of contemporary comment and the mystique of antiquity. And Rashid’s technique of breaking up scholastic historic content with first-person anecdotes adds much flavour to what may, at times, be a somewhat taxing read for those who might pick it up for entertainment purposes only.

From Landi Kotal to Wagah: Cultural Heritage Along the Grand Trunk Road

By Salman Rashid

Sange-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN: 978-9231003875

250pp.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist, translator and creative content/ report writer who has taught in the Lums Lifetime programme. She tweets @daudnyla

Happy Birthday to Me

2022-02-21T12:32:00.003+05:00

I am 2300 years old!

The Fort of Jewels

2022-01-31T13:08:00.005+05:00

I first saw this fabled hilltop fort in 1989. It sits above the village of Mari, some 40 kms north of Mianwali and overlooks to the west, on the far bank of the Indus, the picturesque riverside town of Kukranwali.

The Mianwali district gazetteer of 1915 noted it was known as Maniot, corrupted from Manikot, signifying ‘Fort of Jewels’. This, the gazetteer recorded, was because the ‘Kalabagh diamonds’ were found here. Whatever these diamonds were, no one could tell me then nor on a recent visit.

What did exist on the hilltop was a pair of ruinous Hindu temples. The larger of the two was leaning about 15 degrees out of its true axis and it was a miracle it was still standing. In fact, even the author of the gazetteer had noted its ‘almost tottering’ state.

All those years ago, I had feared that, even if diamond hunters were not to undermine the building, Nature certainly would do the deed. That the building is still there testifies to the building skill of ancient engineers and stone masons.

Closer examination of the site shows that the surviving temples that face the rising sun did not stand alone. They were a part of a complex of several similar buildings. The remains of at least two can be seen immediately below the leaning building, and another to the north. The hill being clayey and porous and susceptible to erosion, it appears that these buildings simply subsided with the ground giving way beneath them.

On the crest of the hill is another similar temple, set on a high stone plinth. It faces west and is in an advanced stage of decay. It has lost its shikhara [steeple], whose debris lies all around the building. Its entrance, choked with thorny mesquite, is impossible to get through. The hilltop around the temples is liberally strewn with pottery shards, evidence that it was inhabited for a considerable period.

In a line across the hill region of Sindh Sagar Doab, between the rivers Jhelum and the Indus, there stretches a string of ancient temples, dating to the time of the Hindu Shahya (8th -11th century CE) rulers of Kashmir. All of these temples date to the latter Hindu Shahya period.

Beyond the Indus, there are two more sites of the same period. One, not very far west of Maniot, had two almost ruined structures in 1985. The other, Bilot, in Dera Ismail Khan district is the most magnificent, with eight beautifully ornate structures enclosed in a massive defensive wall.

In all, beginning with Nandna overlooking the Jhelum floodplain, there are remains at Ketas, but brutally vandalised by ‘conservators’ who knew nothing of what they were doing. Then there is nearby Malot with its stark Greek influence and Sassi da Kallara near Talagang. The latter is unique among the other stone edifices, for being a baked-brick structure. And there are the two at Amb village, one of which — at nearly 40m in height — is the tallest among these structures. Together with Maniot and the sites mentioned on the far side of the Indus, they make seven temple complexes.

The singular characteristic of all these temples is the rather busy ornamentation on their exteriors. It is as if the stone became putty in the hands of the masons. According to Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the well-known architect and historian, most of the motifs — including the trefoil arch of the entrance — derive from earlier Buddhist emblems. There is also a plethora of beautiful rosettes and motifs of the amalaki (Emblika officinalis), a bitter fruit native to the Subcontinent and much used in Ayurvedic medicine.

The writer of the gazetteer says that local Hindus revered these temples as the Samadhi (where Hindu and Sikh ashes are deposited after cremation) of a fakir known either as Naga Arjun or Naga Uddhar. Ancient coins are also said to have been found on the hill, but the writer does not mention if he had them deciphered. Since it had rained a day before my recent visit and because coins are mostly uncovered after a wet period, I scoured the ground, but found nothing.

Going by the template followed in the ornamentation of all these temples, the elevation was replicated in exact miniature on the three sides of the building. Therefore, even where the temple is completely ruinous, as in the case of Nandna, or has lost its steeple, as in Sassi da Kallara and Malot, one can see from the replication what the whole building would have once looked like. At Maniot, the departure from the norm is that the steeples in both surviving temples were stubby, ending in large amalaki toppings.

There seems to have been no scientific investigation at Maniot, but it should be safe to say that this complex was built in about the latter part of the ninth century. That was a hundred years before the Turks began their periodic plundering raids, when this site might have fallen into disuse for some time.

But as Manto said, religion lives in the soul and does not die with all the killing one might gloat over as having destroyed a belief; faith lives on. And here too the ancient religion lived on.

The only change that came over these temples was that, instead of the worship of Shiva and Vishnu, they became sacred to a local fakir who might have lived several hundred years after their walls first resonated to the sounds of recited scripture.

But then 74 years is a long time, time enough for three generations who have never seen a Hindu in Mari to forget what once was. Today, locals only refer to the ancient worship site as ‘place of the kafirs’.

The temple that has been leaning on its side for a long time might yet have some hope. Khurram Shehzad, the deputy commissioner at Mianwali, has asked for a study to be made if the angle can be corrected without damaging the structure. If not that, there might be something to be done to restrict further damage.

If I could have my way, there would be a 200-km trail from Nandna, winding through the Salt Range touching upon all the temples enumerated above. There are stories to tell along the way and architecture to marvel at. Magnificent Bilot, with its collection of temples, would prove a fitting grand finale for the tour.

Also in Dawn

Tomb Recorder

2022-01-12T08:41:00.001+05:00

A nthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro is working in overdrive. Taking time off from his teaching assignment at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, this young and gifted researcher seems to be forever on the move in the wild regions of Pakistan.

His work is genuine, without shortcuts in his fieldwork and research methods, and the result — whether in his frequent newspaper articles or his books — is primary material for the reader interested in anthropological works. Kalhoro reminds one of the tireless and brilliant Adam Nayyar, executive director of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts who, sadly, left us too soon.

Kalhoro’s recent work, Wall Paintings of Sindh: From the 18th to 20th Century, is a treatise on the funerary art of the province. Interestingly, it is only in Sindh that we find on tombs depictions of the interred with their likeness clearly shown. It is as if, even in death, the life of the protagonist, lived well and to the fullest, is worthy of celebration. There are hunting scenes, battle scenes, peeks into domestic life and representations of the many love tales so fancied by any Sindhi.

Of the last, the tales of Sassui-Punnu, Sohni-Mehar (Mahiwal in Punjab), Momal-Rano and Umar-Marvi are the most favoured adornments on 18th century Baloch tombs. This was when the Kalhoros ruled over Sindh, and the Talpurs and other Baloch tribes looked up to them as spiritual masters. The Talpurs rose to high positions in the government and army and could afford to build their decorated tombs during their lifetimes.

Among these depictions, the rarest is a rendering on the tomb of Sobdar Jamali — who served in the army of the Kalhoros — near Shahdadkot of the fishergirl Noori, whose radiant beauty smote the 14th century Samma king Jam Tamachi. In this rare rendition, the lovers are shown in a boat. Since Jam Tamachi ruled from Thatta, the lake would be Keenjhar Jheel, where the lovers lie buried on an island.

Kalhoro notes that there were two other shrines with similar depictions. Sadly, all three tombs collapsed in the devastating monsoon storms of 2010. This rare depiction now only survives in this book. The floods that will pass into future folklore also seriously damaged several other monuments and we are fortunate that this tireless anthropologist has preserved them in this book.

According to Kalhoro, Sindhi art received heavy input from Rajasthani masters during the Kalhoro rule (1701-1784) which is discernible in the Drigh Bala tombs of Dadu. Elsewhere, we see the clear hand of local artists so well acquainted with the style and colour of the attire favoured by Sindhis.

One cannot but marvel at the detail these artists included in their work: for instance, the shepherd who casts his demonic eye on the distraught Sassui — as she wanders the desert after Punnu is kidnapped by his brothers to be taken back to Kech — is shown with a spindle, weaving goat hair into yarn. This is a common enough scene even in contemporary Sindh.

There is a clear evolution of the art from the early 18th century, when human and animal figures and historical events and love tales appeared as a matter of course. In a personal communication, author Kalhoro said this was the Sufi tradition of looking upon this life as a temporary phase. It was the afterlife where the late hero enjoyed everlasting glory, and the depictions in the tomb were a way of celebrating that life.

During the Talpur period (1784-1843), we see a shift to floral designs and depictions of mosques and other holy sites. Now, men are not so much in battle or in the hunting grounds, but seated cross-legged in front of the wooden rehl [book stand], with the holy book upon it.

As if to record a societal change, there are now depictions of women being killed. Kalhoro views this as a record of honour killing. As well as that, we see a robber having murdered a caravaner, levelling his rifle at the others, presumably to rob them. Most interesting is a pair of British soldiers, booted and helmeted, following Sassui as she pursues the caravan taking her Punnu back to Kech. While all these are from the 19th century, after the British takeover, care was taken to not deface earlier art, notes Kalhoro.

Clearly, patrons had declined with the end of the Talpur dynasty and, with them, the art. Writes Kalhoro: “The painters … were not skilled in executing figural painting in colonial and post-colonial Sindh, but they displayed great skill in geometric and floral designs.”

The funerary art of Sindh is unique for Pakistan. No other province has anything even remotely comparable. And Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro has rendered a priceless service to history by putting on record what is fast eroding. Like all his previous works, this book, too, is essential reading and an important travel companion for any informed laypersons as they explore the hundreds of tombs sprinkled across Sindh.

Gwadar: Song of the Sea Wind

2021-12-27T09:48:00.007+05:00

Rizwana Naqvi

For long, images of the golden, unspoiled beaches of the Makran coast had “captured the imagination of the romantically inclined” as a place where one could “actually be away from the madding crowd.”

Other images, showing hills in “crumpled disorderly piles devoid of every shred of vegetation”, would tempt the wilderness enthusiast. But reaching the coast was not easy and, hence, the place remained unexplored.

However, things are changing fast and Gwadar — on the Makran coastline — is poised to become a bustling seaport and industrial city, mostly because of the much-celebrated China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Ever since Gwadar became easily accessible by road from Karachi, via the Makran Coastal Highway, there has been a regular inflow of tourists to the city, though foreign tourists are still to discover it.

With the growing importance of, and government attention on, Gwadar in mind, Shahzeb Khan Kakar, Director General of the Gwadar Development Authority (GDA), came up with the idea of preparing a document that presents an introduction to Gwadar and its promise of being a city of the 21st century. Well-known travel writer and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Salman Rashid, undertook the task of writing the book.

The book, Gwadar: Song of the Sea Wind, tells the story of not only Gwadar, but the entire coast from Sonmiani all the way to the last outpost Jivani, about 60 kilometres from Gwadar in the east and 115km from the Iranian port of Chabahar in the west.

Rashid chose to follow the route taken by Nearchus, a general in Alexander the Great’s army during his invasion of India. On retreat from India, Nearchus commanded a fleet of ships and war galleys and sailed to the Indian Ocean for the westward journey to Babylon from the Makran coast.

The book uncovers the history as well as the geographical details of the Makran coast in an engaging manner. Readers also learn about the origins of the names of the places when the Greeks travelled through, as Rashid has used the nomenclature of the Greeks, those given locally in the Baloch and Persian languages, and corresponding names with which the places are known today, justifying them by geographical location.

Contrary to popular belief, Makran is a melting pot of ethnicities. People from various origins live here, such as the Baloch, Jats, Africans, Brahuis and Gichkis. Some arrived in the area as traders and seafarers centuries ago, while others fled trouble in their native lands, mostly during the 16th century. We read of the myths and legends related to the Makran coast, especially about the origins of people with blue, green and pale yellow eyes and fair skin and hair, but whether they are descendants of the crew of the Greek ship that sank centuries ago, or of Turkish sailors who availed of the hospitality at Gwadar while fleeing Muscat when threatened by the Portuguese, will always remain a mystery.

In his captivating manner, Rashid tells readers about Astola Island, believed — according to Greek mythology — to have been claimed by the sun god, the myth about the daughter of the sun god and the superstition that anyone who went there was never seen again; hence, it being enchanted. The myth gained weight after an unnamed Greek ship manned by an Egyptian crew disappeared near the island.

The legend continued even in the 19th century, as British engineers laying down telegraph lines had been warned that it was dangerous to land on the enchanted island. The British believed Gwadar to be “suitable as the headquarters for the management of the telegraph” as it was situated midway between Karachi and the Iranian port town of Bander Abbas.

Travelling through, the Greeks discovered Makran to be a place of hardy people, where everyday life was a struggle because of its climate. While other towns were smaller and undeveloped, Pasni and Gwadar were much richer and civilised, with parks full of flowerbeds and trees.

In 1294, Venetian explorer Marco Polo passed through, and noted that the people of Makran were “professed traders” who took their business “by the sea and land in all direction.” Polo noted: “the staple in Makran was no longer fish as it had been at the time of Alexander” — there was a plentiful supply of rice, corn, meat and milk. As trading grew manifold, fishing was relegated to a secondary position, though — as Rashid points out — all this could only have been possible by a substantial increase in maritime trade.

Rashid reminds us that many of the world’s islands were not always islands, but were probably created when the Ice Age ended and floods from the melting ice raised sea levels by up to 30 metres. It is believed that Astola was connected to the mainland until the rising waters cut it off, turning it into an island. Whatever wildlife existed there mostly perished because of food scarcity, except for rats, snakes and lizards. Today, however, its sandy beach provides nesting grounds for many species of birds and the endangered green and hawksbill turtles, as in the British time, and its waters are home to several species of fish and dolphin.

There are reminders of historical events that influenced the region. For instance, how Gwadar’s ownership went from the Khan of Kalat to Oman, from which it was bought back by the Pakistan Government in 1958; or the plundering of Gwadar and Pasni by the Portuguese in the 16th century after they had driven the Turks from Muscat, which the Portuguese laid claim to and where the Turks were gaining a foothold.

The construction of the Makran Coastal Highway is not only opening opportunities for tourists, but also helping local fishing communities; they no longer have to salt and dry their catch and wait for Sri Lankan boats, as they did in the past. Now, refrigerated lorries wait to collect the fish and transport them to Karachi and onward to other parts of the country.

There are interesting descriptions of the architecture of Shahi Bazaar, which gained its character from the abundant use of timber, the graceful two-storeyed houses that memorialise Gwadar’s past affluence and of the gold-mining that continued through the 1990s. The various ancient buildings and the stories behind them are described in a manner that lets readers feel as though they’re travelling with the writer. It is heartening to learn that the GDA has taken note of the crumbling Shahi Bazaar and adjacent residential lanes and has plans to restore and preserve them.

The book is important since, after work done by British explorers and geographers in the 19th century, no such study had been carried out in the area. With Gwadar poised to receive world attention, Song of the Sea Wind is a treatise to be read and cherished. Printed on glossy paper with beautiful photographs, it will serve as a perfect travel companion to those who wish to visit the place.

While the entire Makran coast is a delight for the traveller, explorer, tourist and naturalist, in Rashid’s words, “It is Gwadar, the headquarters of seaboard Makran, that promises to be the gem.” He sees Gwadar not merely as a place of fun and frolic, focused only on tourism, but as a city of port and industry. There are also plans to establish an “Educational City” with all facilities such as a university, vocational training centre, medical college and nursing school.

The future envisaged for Gwadar is of a city drawing businesspeople from across Pakistan and abroad. It is to be a city with glittering malls, brightly lit streets and factories, all powered by electricity generated from wind, sun and coal.

One wishes that the plans for Gwadar’s development soon materialise, as this will not only be development of the region, but of the whole country.

Gwadar: Song of the Sea Wind

By Salman Rashid

Sang-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN: 978-9693533385

144pp.

Mithi: Whispers in the Sand

2021-07-26T10:49:00.005+05:00

Ali Bhutto

Up until the early 1990s, the portion of the Thar Desert that lies within Pakistan was largely devoid of blacktop roads, with the nearest one ending at the desert’s western periphery in Naukot. All travel from this point onwards was done either by camel, vintage Reo trucks from the Second World War — locally referred to as kekrra [crab] — or privately owned jeeps.

Back then, the journey from Naukot to Nagarparkar, which lies at the easternmost edge of Tharparkar district — today, a five-hour drive — would take up to 14 hours, writes Salman Rashid in his new book, Mithi: Whispers in the Sand.

Rashid’s canon of work — especially his articles based on travels across Pakistan — has, over time, garnered something of a cult following and is widely viewed as a reliable source of history on the region. Travel writing on South Asia has historically been dominated by the narrative voice of European colonialists. Rashid, however, provides the perspective of a local, carefully sifting through the accounts of colonial adventurers, highlighting their biases and handicaps and setting the record straight where necessary.

The author first drove across Tharparkar district in 1984, wife and friend in tow. “It was like stepping into a country still in the 19th century,” he recalls. He would, over the course of four decades, keep returning to this remote region — including Mithi, the district’s largest town — and witness it transform. In his research for the book, he refers to the limited material available, including the works of British administrators such as Stanley Napier Raikes (magistrate of “Thurr and Parkur” in 1847), gazetteers, folklore and the “collective inherited memory” of locals, some of whom had received eyewitness accounts of events from their grandparents.

During his numerous visits to the district, the last of which was made in 2017, Rashid conducted a series of interviews with residents. These include a green-eyed Sodha thakur [landlord] whose ancestor brought the Rajput caste to this part of Thar in the 13th century; an affluent trader who has no desire to travel out of the region or enter politics, despite the insistence of many; nomadic jogis who believe that cobras never die natural deaths and can live for thousands of years, eventually shape-shifting into eagles or peacocks; and a retired official of the Wildlife Department, who saved the Indian gazelle from extinction and helped create a wildlife sanctuary in the district. These portraits form a significant portion of the book and provide readers with a nuanced understanding of life in the desert and how it is changing.

Like a detective, Rashid connects the dots, picking up on clues drawn from personal observation and various historical sources. He learns for instance, that the lost city of Pari Nagar, located at Virawah near Nagarparkar, dates back to the fifth century CE and once thrived as an international seaport, at a time when “an inland arm of the sea extended through the Rann [of Kutch] and right up to Virawah.”

The latter geographical detail is confirmed in the work of an anonymous Greek seaman who, having sailed past the Indus Delta in the first century CE, arrived at a gulf that lay west of the Gulf of ‘Cutch’ and wrote about it in a handbook titled Circumnavigation of the Eastern Ocean. Using Google Earth, Rashid sees the dried-up remains of this gulf, which culminates near the ruins of Pari Nagar.

Similarly, Rashid draws the attention of archaeologists to a mysterious site referred to as Singharo. According to Raikes’s Memoir on the Thurr and Parkur Districts of Sind, the fort — already in ruins by the mid-19th century — was built by the Talpurs, but Rashid estimates it to be far older, dating back to the 15th century, and serving as a residence of a Rajput prince. Its intricately carved blocks of white marble and architectural “lavishness” set it apart from the Talpur forts, he observes.

It was on his first visit that Rashid was introduced to the folkloric legend of “Turwutt” — a larger-than-life character who, according to a local of Nagarparkar, used to climb up the Karonjhar Hills daily, “to keep an eye on the world.” After a close reading of Sindh’s history and a biographical paper published in Britain in 1875, Rashid discovers that this is a reference to George Booth Tyrwhitt, a deputy collector of the district in 1857, who learned to speak the Thari language and is revered by locals to this day — much like John Jacob, an East India Company officer and the political superintendent at Jacobabad.

While history would have us believe that there was, throughout Sindh, “a quiet acceptance of imperial presence”, Rashid’s research suggests otherwise. He finds evidence of a Thari uprising against British rule in 1859, led by a celebrated military commander named Rooplo Kohli, and Rajput chief Rana Karan Singh Ranpuri. The former was hanged at Saigam, just outside Nagarparkar, and the latter imprisoned at Kala Pani, or the Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands. Tyrwhitt’s popularity among locals is all the more puzzling in light of these events, especially since he was instrumental in ruthlessly quelling the rebellion.

Today, Tharparkar district is reputed to be one of the safest regions in the country and a place where, according to the locals, theft does not exist. But, as Rashid points out, it wasn’t always like this. Nicholas Withington’s account of his journey across Thar, starting in December 1613, paints a very different picture. As the English merchant approached Nagarparkar from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, he kept receiving news of “the murder by robbers of some hapless peripatetic trader.”

Travelling from Nagarparkar to Thatta, he was robbed numerous times, while the three Indian traders in his party were executed and dumped in “a hurriedly dug hole.” He decided to turn back, but was robbed yet again and this time was also deprived of his clothing.

Withington — who, according to Rashid, was the first European to visit Nagarparkar — notes that the residents of the region between Nagarparkar and Thatta did not pay tax or allegiance to the Mughal court and were answerable solely to local chiefs. Their favourite pastime was to rob travellers and then safely escort these victims out of their territory so that others could rob them.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Baloch marauders used Mithi as a base to conduct raids on Kutch towns, notes Rashid. This practice only came to an end after the British gained control of Thar in the 1850s. “Wily as British administrators were, they knew how to tame the unruly Baloch ... within a couple of decades ... they were given policing and military duties in Thar,” he writes.

Rashid also questions the interpretations of some of the local lore. Referring to Marui’s defiance of Umar, the Soomro king who kidnapped her, he writes: “Marui’s tale has long been sung as a love song. It is very strange that intellectuals failed to look at it as it really is: a story of resistance to the powers that be ... In Thar, and perhaps all of Sindh, it is Marui alone who stands out as an extraordinarily rebellious heroine: a young and defenceless woman who resisted the overtures of an all-powerful monarch and yet regained her freedom.”

He resents the way the government has “pimped up” the historic site of Marui’s well with modern structures and alien conocarpus trees, stripping it of its primal aura. The well is no longer accessible to Thari women, who would come here to fill their pitchers.

The Thar that emerges in the book is one that transcends man-made borders. Prior to Partition, Nagarparkar lay at the centre of all the action, as a way station on two ancient trading routes — one from Gujarat to Shikarpur and the other from Gujarat to Thatta. Up until the earthquake of 2001, Nagarparkar’s bazaar, with its terracotta roofs, resembled “a village in Lombardy.”

Change, however, is inevitable and has its advantages, admits Rashid. Within a few years, the Thar that he saw in 1984 will be no more. Phhoto, who belongs to the jogi cult, the members of which for centuries have wandered from place to place and exhibited serpents for a living, tells him, “Perhaps it is good that our children are turning to education and business. At least their lives will be better.”

The reviewer is a journalist. He tweets @_alibhutto

Mithi: Whispers in the Sand

By Salman Rashid

Sang-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN: 978-9693533248

216pp.

Also in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 25th, 2021

Walton Aerodrome

2021-06-09T10:08:00.006+05:00

I have two abiding memories of the Walton aerodrome. This first is from 1956, or the year after. I would have been four or five. Driving with my uncle, the doctor, in his Austin, just the two of us, we came to an old house where my uncle sat in the living room and chatted with another doctor, a European.

Besides a servant or two, there was no one else in the house and I, wearying of things I did not understand, wandered off into the large garden outside. Through a gap in the hedge, I saw several planes parked by a steel wall. Today I know that would have been the wall of an aircraft hangar.

I poked about the clearly junked planes before clambering into the open door of one. Up the inclined aisle, I walked past dancing cobwebs, between tattered seats with more metal than upholstery, into the cockpit. I took one seat, grabbed the steering wheel and, producing sounds of engines, flew the giant machine into the blue welkin above. As the craft flew, I stood by the side window to watch the landscape unfold way beneath me.

I do not recall how long I flew over a very interesting world of rivers and forests before my uncle startled me. ‘Good job. You’ve flown long. Let’s go home now!’

The next time I saw Walton aerodrome was perhaps three or four years later, when I came with my mother to receive a cousin of mine, for this was the first international airport of Lahore. In 1962, they shifted the airport to a place in the cantonment, which for some inexplicable reason was marked ‘Fish Tanks’ on an old map of the area. Walton, again, became as it had started out in the beginning: a flying club.

In the 1960s, I would cycle to Walton to watch bright orange gliders, hauled by an antiquated military vehicle with the lettering ‘Dodge Power Wagon’ on its bonnet cover. Once airborne, the pilot released the steel rope and flew free. Sometimes I would wonder if the pilots felt the same thrill I had experienced many years earlier, flying the aircraft which I now know was a DC-3 Dakota. Though the flying club has no gliders now, those who once took to the air in engine-less aircraft to acquire glider pilot licenses number a hundred and eighteen.

Rewind to the year 1930, when a group of aviators donated their personal holdings in this part of Lahore to establish the Punjab Flying Club. These gentlemen were Dr Gokal Chand Narang, Dr J.B. Sproull (a European resident of Lahore), Roop Chand and Sardar Bahadur Sir Sunder Singh Mijithia. On a grass strip, they began flying operations that year. By 1937, when the institution was renamed the Northern Indian Flying Club, it was spread over 156 acres of land. (Aside: over the years, much of this land was occupied by powerful agencies and turned into housing and offices. Today, the club holds less than a fifth of what it once owned.)

Come World War II and the flying club doubled as a military strip as well. Not long after, with Pakistan on the world map, the Quaid-i-Azam landed at Walton. The hangar today designated as the Ultralight Sports Flying Club (USFC) was used as a VIP lounge for the founder of Pakistan. Others of his followers also graced this building, according it premium position in Pakistan’s built heritage.

Post-independence, the Lahore Flying Club became the paramount aviator training institution of the country and, today, some 80 percent of the pilots flying for Pakistani airlines have passed through its doors on their way to the skies. Not only that, until 1952, 80 cadets of the Royal Pakistan Air Force, as it was then known, got their initial flying training here.

From the Walton runway flew Orient Airways, Pak Air and Crescent Air Transport, which were eventually to be merged into one that we today know as Pakistan International Airlines. In more ways than one, the Walton aerodrome, or the Lahore Flying Club if you please, has made much history in Pakistan.

With a respectable number of privately owned aircraft and trainee pilots, the club was just about breaking even — this because it receives no government funding. Trainee pilots pay a certain amount per hour to fly, and the club needs to have 200 hours of flying to generate enough funds to pay its staff. As for the salaries, they are nothing less than a joke. A trained aircraft mechanic earns 18,000 rupees per month, and the chief instructor makes just over 100,000 rupees! For most of these persons, keeping the club flying is a labour of love.

Duped by a glib land grabber, the government has agreed to shift the flying club in order to turn this beautiful open space with trees into concrete. For beginners, they have prohibited flying from Walton. No flying means no funds — that should effectively asphyxiate the institution. There are airy-fairy plans to shift the club to Muridke, outside Lahore. In the meanwhile, there is talk of forcing the club to remove its aircraft, spare parts and equipment to Faisalabad where, without a hangar and storage facilities, all will be at the mercy of the elements. All this equipment is worth several hundred million rupees.

The schemes to shift to Faisalabad or Muridke are, at best, hare-brained. Consider: the mechanics with their meagre salary will hardly be able to maintain the daily commute out and back. Some of these men are second-generation employees, who will certainly become jobless. If anything, the government owes them the gratitude to let them continue in their profession.

Consider those great men from landed families only 100 years ago who donated their personal holdings to create what eventually became the Lahore Flying Club. And loathe now those who began as clerks and coolies and made big money by sucking up to powerful men who now wish to destroy a legacy for a few more rupees in their already bloated bank accounts. Old money and new simply have no comparison.

We who recite Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s name as if it comes from scripture will not hesitate to tear down a building where he had rested his tired body after a journey from Delhi to Lahore. We almost did the same with Faletti’s Hotel and the room where Jinnah had stayed while attending court in Lahore back in the 1920s. But then pressure from those who care for this once-beautiful city prevented the destruction of that historic hotel.

Can we once again do the same to save a priceless piece of our heritage that we do not own? This is what we have rightfully borrowed from generations of the future and to whom we have to pass it on.

Postscript: Dr Sproull, a dentist, is listed as the second secretary of the flying club, serving from 1941 to 1948. Could it have been this gentleman that my doctor uncle had gone to see some years later, taking me along so that I could give myself the ride of my life?

Also in Dawn

Rehman Sahib

2021-04-17T10:55:00.005+05:00

I first met Ibne Abdur Rehman, Rehman sahib to everyone who knew him, in January 1989. It could have been sometime later, but that really is of no consequence. As an avid newspaper reader, I was acquainted with his work both as journalist and as human rights crusader as well as his activism in the dark days of the longest martial law of our sorry history. It was not without a degree of awe that I entered his office at Pakistan Times and introduced myself.

With Rehman sahib and Mahboob Ali, the only woodcut artist in Pakistan

Only months earlier, I had foolishly invested everything we had in those infamous ‘investment companies’ and lost my last rupee within three months. Incidentally, the company I invested with was Alliance, owned and run by a bunch of bearded mullahs of the Tablighi Jamat. So much for these spurious claims to lay down lives for the honour of prophet hood! Shabnam and I were completely impoverished in the name of religion as practiced in Pakistan and we had borrowed from friends in Karachi to move back to Lahore.

I needed to write somewhere and Pakistan Times was the only paper in Lahore I could write for. (I did not much care for two other papers then coming out of the city.) My introduction was met with instant recognition which was a bit of a surprise because I had only been writing since 1983 and did not expect to be known to someone of Rehman sahib’s stature. Now I know true greatness of the soul does not keep one from looking at lower stations of life. I asked if I could write for him and he at once asked for Aziz Siddiqui sahib to join us. Here I, a pygmy, was in the company of two intellectual giants of the gentlest demeanour imaginable.

Before sending me off with Siddiqui sahib, Rehman sahib said I should see him before leaving. In his office, Siddiqui sahib introduced me to a person whose name should best be left unsaid and told him I would be writing for his page. Sending the man off, Siddiqui sahib said, I was to always see him and no one else. I was to give my work to him and not directly to the page in charge. I was only to recognise Siddiqui sahib’s reservations after a few weeks. But that is another story that tells how perspicacious Siddiqui sahib was about my personality and the professional capacity of his underling.

Back in Rehman sahib’s office, I was offered an honorarium that, given our circumstance, seemed reasonable and I started writing for Pakistan Times. I was told to see him for payments at the beginning of the month. Those were pre-computer days (I got my first machine in 1991) and every week I would see Siddiqui sahib with my typescript hard copy. At the beginning of the next month I went in for my dues. Rehman sahib took out his wallet, counted out the money and said he had drawn my dues to make things simpler. This was the payment mode for the three or so months I wrote for Pakistan Times.

Then The Frontier Post began publication from Lahore and Beena Sarwar made me an offer that was too good to be true. I went to see Rehman sahib to tell him what I was being offered and if I had his permission to take it.

‘Bhai, iss main poochnay kee kya baat hai!’ – What’s there to ask, he exclaimed. With unstinting encouragement he told me to do as well as I had done while with him. A couple of years later while still at the Post, friend Sarwat Ali and I were talking of the time we both wrote for PT. Sarwat said the paper still owed him several thousand rupees because they had no money to pay freelance contributors.

Surprised I told him I was always paid in the first week of the new month. I also told Sarwat how Rehman sahib so kindly drew my dues so that I did not have to run around after the cheque. What Sarwat said next was a shock to me: Rehman sahib had been paying me out of his own purse!

That Shabnam and I were penniless when we moved back from Karachi was a fact known only to my childhood friend Parvaiz Saleh and army friend Moneir Aslam and no one else. There was no way Rehman sahib could have heard of our pecuniary position because neither Moneir nor Parvaiz were on Rehman sahib’s circuit. I remember remarking to Sarwat about it and he said that was Rehman sahib and he just knew. To this day I have not been able to figure out how he could have known and I never asked because I knew I would embarrass him. For that same consideration I never mentioned this act of insightful understanding and compassion either in writing or verbally to anyone.

Time rolled on as we struggled to get back on our feet. Some months later I went to see Rehman sahib and to his asking how I was doing I responded with the stock phrase that people normally use. I had never said ‘guzr rahi hai’ ever before because it was so redolent of defeat and I don’t recall what frame of mind I was in to utter this abject phrase. I got a right proper dressing down. ‘Guzr rahi hai?’ Rehman sahib almost exploded. Here I was not yet forty and so defeated by life. There followed a short talk the gist of which was to never give up the good fight. I left his office, my soul uplifted and prepared to take head on whatever life threw at me.

Thereafter I often met Rehman sahib and what I began to like most was the clarity of his thought. You asked a question and the response was utterly unequivocal. It was as crystal clear as his writing. His responses were meant to clarify, never to confound. It was as if Rehman sahib had been forewarned and had prepared for whatever I wanted to discuss. It was nothing of the sort. This was just a very great mind at work ready to give.

It took us a few years and we were back on track when Shabnam had some business with Rehman sahib. We climbed up to his top floor office in the Human Right Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) building. Seeing us he immediately turned away from whatever he was doing and with his patent impish smile asked after both of us. After Shabnam’s business was done, we chatted about things and I jokingly commented on how grumpy I was getting. The year would have been 1996 or thereabouts.

Since Mr Wilson of Dennis the Menace fame is a favourite character – and who could have played it better than Walter Matthau as in the first movie – I said, ‘When I grow old I am going to be as grouchy as Mr Wilson.’

Rehman sahib did not approve of that growing old phrase. ‘What is the matter with you? I am in my sixties and I don’t think of old age and here you are more than twenty years my junior dreaming of it!’

Another pep talk followed. The essence of what Rehman sahib said was to die young as late as possible; to keep the spirit alive and to value and cherish life. Death was not even to be thought about.

Rehman sahib became the haven to turn to when it blew hard and he was the anchor to tether one’s boat to when it got rough.

It was impossible to escape his scintillating sense of humour. At some function where tea or a meal followed, as we were heading for the food table, Rehman sahib, his face alight with that same mischievous smile waved his hand in the direction of the crowd milling around the table trying to get ahead of each other, and said, ‘Khana barpa hai!’ It sounded exactly as he had meant it to sound: the battle was afoot.

That was not his only one-liner. It is unfortunate that virtually thousands of his brilliant one-liners are now either lost or preserved in a few minds that were around him.

When Asma Jahangir suddenly passed away, I was at the funeral where I spotted Rehman sahib. In the years of my association with him, I had come to know how close he was to that wonderful feisty human rights defender that Asma was. I went across to him. We shook hands and before I could say anything, my face contorted as I tried to control my emotions. Rehman sahib squeezed my hand and nodded. Nothing needed to be said. For a brief while he and I sat down either on a bench or some chairs laid out without speaking. Then he was swamped by others and I excused myself.

For some time now I had been thinking of photographing my senior friends and a few months ago I went to the HRCP offices with my camera. Rehman sahib was not there. I called his son Asha’ar to ask and he said, he was a bit irregular at work and that I could always come around to do the photography at home. But I was engaged in a project and the mission kept getting put off. And then it was too late.

I was in the outback of Sadiqabad (Rahim Yar Khan) where cell phone signals were erratic. One evening I got a truncated text message from Shabnam about someone being ‘no more’. I had waited too long to photograph the man I had come to know in 1989 and learnt to love and respect for what he was. Now his smile will live only in my memory.

Returning from the south I went to see Asha’ar. I had thought it unnecessary to call beforehand. Because Asha’ar was down with a fever, his wife (who I had never met) came out to ask. I told her I was away and could not attend the funeral. All she had to say how great a loss it had been and I broke down. I don’t know what she would have thought of my abrupt turn about as I came out of the house. She might have considered me a horribly uncouth person to leave so suddenly, but I did not want her to see.

In the car, I wept.

Happy Birthday to Me

2021-02-22T00:00:00.001+05:00

I am 2300 years old!

From Landi Kotal to Wagah

2021-02-12T14:53:00.016+05:00

The Unesco and the government of Pakistan launched a new joint publication titled “From Landi Kotal to Wagah: Cultural Heritage Along the Grand Trunk Road” on February 10 at the Pakistan National Council of Arts.

The result of a collaboration of more than two years, the coffee table book explores the built and intangible heritage along the Grand Trunk Road (GT Road) in Pakistan, combining a thoroughly researched narrative with a wealth of photos that illustrate the diverse and rich panorama of this 2500-year-old historical trade road. Over the centuries, the road has been extensively travelled by traders, pilgrims and great civilizations like the Greeks, Turks and Mughals who left their marks, perpetuating the mythical status of this legendary road.

The aim of the book is to foster tourism, promote awareness and ultimately protect the little known historic sites (largely non-Muslim) along the GT Road that spans over 2400km from Bangladesh to Afghanistan. The development and publication of the book was supported by the Embassy of Switzerland, the European Union and the World Bank. The author is Salman Rashid, a preeminent travel writer and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The book is richly illustrated with photographs taken by Asad Zaidi. It is distributed in a co-publishing arrangement with Sang-e-Meel Publishers.

At the book launch, Patricia McPhillips (country representative and director, Unesco) welcomed the guests and thanked all partners for their support and contribution. She stated: ‘Through this book, the Unesco hoped to highlight the vast potential cultural development in various parts of Pakistan, and the pressing need to preserve and protect heritage sites, to further our shared cause of encouraging cultural pluralism and social cohesion.”

Welcoming the publication of the book, Bénédict de Cerjat (ambassador of Switzerland) highlighted the rich and impressive cultural heritage of Pakistan. He emphasized that the Grand Trunk Road is one of Asia’s oldest and longest major roads, which has linked Central Asia to the Indian subcontinent, facilitated trade for centuries and is still used for transportation. He commended the Unesco for its valuable initiative and encouraged the guests to follow the author’s journey and discover the many fascinating places along the historical road.

In her speech, Androulla Kaminara (ambassador of the European Union to Pakistan) emphasized: “Over the centuries, along the Grand Trunk Road not only goods but cultures, ideas, religions and languages were exchanged, leaving a permanent trace on the societies along the road today. This rich heritage is an important manifestation of cultural diversity that needs to be protected and promoted, especially for its key role in attracting tourism and boosting economic growth which are priorities of the government of Pakistan.”

The author of the book, Salman Rashid, spoke about the many years he has spent traveling along the GT Road, and the fascinating history and culture he has experienced in his travels, which can now be shared with readers through this book.

The chief guest, Shafqat Mahmood, federal minister for National Heritage and Culture Division, appreciated the role this book will play in fostering tourism, while also preserving the history and heritage of Pakistan for the generations to come.

All partners emphasized that this unique book serves to encourage the people and government of Pakistan to protect and preserve the heritage which forms an integral part of the history of the land that is now Pakistan.

Also here, here, here, here and here

From Landi Kotal to Wagah: Cultural Heritage Along the Grand Trunk Road

2021-02-02T14:53:00.021+05:00

This is the story of one of the grandest highroads in the subcontinent richly steeped in legend and history. From the rugged contours of the Khyber Pass it bears the reader through a wondrous land of culture, heritage and a remarkably beautiful geography. From the middle of the sixth century BCE when Cyrus, the greatest king of the Achaemenian empire, annexed modern day Pakistan right down to the present times, the road has been extensively travelled. If there were invaders and plunderers on this grand highway, there were also pious pilgrims and common traders. Sprinkled along the length of the road like milestones to an ancient past are signs of those who traversed it. The Greeks, Mauryans. Scythians, Parthians, Sassanians and Turks all left their mark with a distinctive Mughal and British overlay. This book is a celebration of the Grand Trunk Road and those who left their mark on the history of Pakistan.

From the Foreword:

From Landi Kotal to Wagah: Cultural Heritage Along the Grand Trunk Road portrays the history and diversity of cultural and religious heritage along the Grand Trunk Road in Pakistan with an acute eye. Salman Rashid, the pre-eminent Pakistani travel writer and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, takes us on a fascinating journey along the Grand Trunk Road, describing the architectural marvels built over millennia and their history, highlighting the diverse cultural, religious and architectural expressions that have helped shape the identity of the people of Pakistan.

The book, unique in its kind, serves to encourage the people and the government of Pakistan to protect and preserve the heritage which marks the ancient landscape of Pakistan. We are confident that From Landi Kotal to Wagah will encourage the tourists to explore the country in depth.

Title: From Landi Kotal to Wagah

Author: Salman Rashid

Subject: History, Travel

ISBN: 9231003879

Year: 2020

Language: English

Number of Pages: 249

Clock here to order

PIR CHHATAL’S MYSTICAL FISH

2021-01-24T11:50:00.002+05:00

The Moola River of Balochistan is the only one in the 400 kilometre-long Kirthar Mountains that cuts clear across the range from the west to the east. Rising in the Central Brahui hills just southeast of Kalat, it flows in a southerly direction, irrigating the wide valley known after it as Moola. Halfway down its course, the river swings north and widens until it shears the rocky Kirthar barrier to reach Gandava.

The point where it enters the lowlands is evocatively known as Naulung — Nine Fords. Interestingly, among the highland Baloch, it is also known as Punjmunh — Five Mouths. Both titles signify the width of the river as it debouches from the rocky confines of the hills. For several thousand years, this was the most convenient passage between the Indus Valley and the Kalat uplands, the only one that could take ox-drawn wheeled transport with ease.

In the year 325 BCE, having revamped the defences of the fort of Pattala (Hyderabad), Alexander retired 10,000 veterans and packed them back to Macedonia and Greece, under the ageing general Krateros. Already loaded with substantial treasures from their Indian campaign, and now further weighed down with generous gratuities, they happily marched along the eastern wall of the Kirthars and up through the Moola gorge en route to Persia.

Just five kilometres north of where the Europeans trekked into the Moola gorge, there was a right lovely little sylvan spot which they missed. It is not known how it was called in those long ago days. But in 1831, a very remarkable deserter of the British East India Company army passed this way in the reverse direction. Coming from Kalat, he was headed for Jhal Magsi, to meet with Nawab Ahmad Khan, chief of the Magsi tribe. James Lewis, travelling under the assumed name of Charles Masson and pretending to be an American, noticed something. “About a mile north of us was a conspicuous gumbaz, or domed building, the ziarat of Pir Chatta [sic], which is the usual halting-place for parties crossing the [mountains] between Kalat and Kachi [sic].”

Masson was in a hurry to reach Jhal Magsi and did not pause to explore the shrine or ask of its story. Nor did he check out the copious and clear spring of water bursting out of a rock outcrop to fill a circular pond. Back in 2003, on my first trip to this remote corner of Balochistan, I had found the pond teeming with mahashir fish, nearly 60 cm long. They were so tame, they came and milled around where I stood.

The keeper of the shrine said they were habituated to humans because visitors fed them. He also said that, since the fish were the saint’s pets, no one ever ate them. He added that if caught, cooked and feasted upon, the fish emerged from the sphincter the next day, alive and flopping. On a recent visit, the keeper Mithal swore an angrez had eaten the fish and suffered that most embarrassing occurrence the morning after.

I asked him where the saint had come from and he raised a finger heavenward. “Only Allah knows!” All he could say was that Chhatal Shah Noorani was a granter of wishes. Hindus and Muslims alike came here and their hearts’ desires were fulfilled. The yarn hasn’t changed since 2003.

What has changed is the scenario. Back then, the place was deserted and blissfully peaceful. This time I found a bunch of fat, paunchy men splashing about in the shallow pool. Naturally, the fish had been terrified away. The men were requested to kindly leave the pool and, within minutes, several mahashir emerged from the narrow cleft of the spring. Most of them had, however, moved lower down the stream, where earlier I had seen only smaller fish.

On the earlier visit, I had pestered the elderly keeper, whose name I never asked, about wanting to take a couple of fish for dinner, because I did not believe in the story of them remaining alive in my stomach. After much teasing, the man at last said why would I want to do such an evil deed. Why, if I just looked at the fish, I would surely appreciate how beautiful they look as they cavort in the water. And sure enough, in the dappled light filtering out of the thick overhead trees, the fish glinted in so many different colours.

“If we did not have the story, there would be no fish. People would have eaten the last one of them,” said the man.

Then I realised some very sagacious person had invented the story, making this site the oldest conservation programme in what is now Pakistan. Talking to the men who had been splashing about in the pool, I saw they actually believed the story of the fish coming out alive from the body. I teased them about trying to see if it worked. They refused and said, if I had the courage, I should take one and face the consequence. This miracle was not the saint’s doing, said one of the men. It was the work of God. He did this favour for His chosen person.

I walked up the small knoll to the tomb of Chhatal Shah that Masson had found under a dome. But sometime between the army deserter’s time and ours, the dome had collapsed. In 2003, I had found an ugly, roofless wart of four walls girding the elaborately draped and turbaned grave. The walls, a modern construction, are crude in the extreme, and still there.

Mithal the keeper said he had never heard of a dome. It had always been like this since his grandfather’s time. I suggested the collapse could have been because of a now forgotten earthquake, perhaps the one of the mid-1860s, whose severity and the destruction caused by it were part of Gandava lore until some decades ago. For the sake of discussion, I even mentioned the one that laid Kalat and Quetta low on the last day of May 1935. But if the old building had been lost as recently as that, there would have been some vestige of debris. Mithal shrugged.

I ribbed Mithal about the fish legend, only to see if he too appreciated their beauty. At length, he said they were such a lovely sight in the water. He used the word ‘nazara’ [vision], adding how could anyone imagine eating them. “Visitors feed these beautiful creatures of God and if they are gone what will they feed?”

While nothing had changed in the 17 years between my earlier visit and this, I was disappointed to repeatedly hear the word ‘picnic spot’ with reference to Chhatal Shah. In these years, the place seems to have been discovered by the likes of those I had found in the pool. There are now steps leading down to the water and a tin shed and benches to complete the ‘picnic spot’. The natural outcome of such spots is trash.

In 2003, Chhatal Shah Noorani was pristine. Now all sorts of refuse tarnishes its beauty.

Every time I return to a spot after decades, I am only disappointed. I see historical sites vandalised, natural places corrupted with garbage, and mostly, I find ugly accretions of modern sheds to house ‘pilgrims’. I have never been failed in such disappointment. Sadly, the peaceful and unknown Chhatal Shah Noorani has been discovered, and gone the same way.

Also here

Tareekh Ke Musafir

2021-01-24T11:41:00.004+05:00

The genre of Urdu travel writing in Pakistan is dead, brutally butchered by a narcissistic writer whose travel fiction — written more like the post-summer vacation essays of a class four student — has destroyed the genre. Over the past four decades, his countless books, produced as travel literature, were more about the writer than about the place. The result is that most readers of Urdu now believe that what they have so avidly consumed is travel writing.

Now, travel writing is not just a narration of a journey — though there have been some fabulous and substantial books of this sort, too. It is a presentation of history, culture, geography, sociology, even a little bit of geology and, sometimes, anthropology. In Urdu, this was just not done. The trend of spurious writing spawned several copycat works, none of which made an impression on the reader.

Abubaker Sheikh stands apart from the run-of-the-mill travel writer in Pakistan. Tareekh Ke Musafir [Travellers of History] — the book under review — is his second work and, in keeping with its title, it is truly a journey through history.

Sheikh’s first book, Nagri Nagri Phira Musafir [The Traveller], was a grieving for Sindh, especially for the Indus delta region that has suffered immensely because of sea intrusion, resulting from a cutting-off of water downstream of Kotri.

This new book is a departure. While there are a few chapters on the death of the delta, the rest is a tour de force through history that almost leaves the reader breathless. Sheikh unveils such obscure, but colourful, characters as Lutfullah Thug, who lived in the first half of the 19th century and wrote of his life in English. Or, we learn of the intrigues and deceptions of the Tarkhan rulers of Sindh in the 16th century and how they called blight upon the once fabulous and rich city of Thatta.

The attack on Thatta could have been an outright invitation to the piratical Portuguese, then established at Goa, to partake of the treasures of Sindh for siding with the Tarkhans against the Kokaltash of Rohri. On the other hand, it was just the nature of those colonisers to loot and plunder.

The tour through history is not restricted to Sindh, however. Sheikh travels far and evokes Buddhist life in the monastery of Mohra Muradu in Taxila. With equal ease, he follows Dara Shikoh — the hapless heir apparent of the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan — from the battle of Samugarh, through the vicissitudes of his fortune on the run from his brother, Aurangzeb, and brings us to Sindh. The device of following a historical figure to places is used to wonderful advantage by our writer. This is especially true as he follows the British explorer Richard Burton from Karachi into upper Sindh.

Tareekh Ke Musafir is remarkable because of its vast geographical range, which matches the intellectual spread of Abubaker Sheikh. His reading is vast and he paints a canvas matching it. As always, his writing is poetic without being hyperbolic, with the capacity to evoke scenes and the reader’s emotion and empathy. Like the best of writers, he gets into his thoughts with ease, which get the mind of the reader also going: “The most positive and at the same time the most dangerous thing in this land is the process of thinking. This is what differentiates between good and evil. But when expediency crosses all bounds, the line between the two disappears.”

However, the issue closest to Sheikh’s heart is the rapidly deteriorating environment. His lament on what we are bequeathing to the coming generations continues in this book with the same feeling as in the one before. He tells the reader that, to prevent the sea intruding in the once very fertile delta of the Indus, and to promote regeneration of the dying mangrove forests, 27 million acre feet of water need to pass down the delta into the sea. However, the delta does not even receive one-third of this requirement.

From nearly 400,000 hectares a century ago, mangroves today cover barely 70,000 hectares because of the reduced flow. This has resulted in a drastic decline in the crustacean population, because shrimps and prawns spawn amid mangrove roots. Simultaneously, sea intrusion is destroying livelihoods by flooding fertile farmland and reducing once affluent farmers to poverty. Our writer bemoans how the growth of agriculture and affluence among upper riparian landowners is depriving delta dwellers and fishermen of their livelihood.

From a pure environmental writer, Sheikh has nicely transformed into a teller of historical tales. If the archaeologist talks of bricks and pottery shards, it is writers such as Sheikh who populate ruined sites with human beings. His writing carries the reader along and, with just a little imagination, one can actually see and feel like the author.

History needs to be written not in the stultifying manner that we read in our classrooms, but has to be made alive with real characters while connecting them with real places. That is what the ancient Greek writers did. And this is what Abubaker Sheikh is doing for readers of Urdu.

Tareekh Ke Musafir

By Abubaker Sheikh

Sang-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN: 978-9693532593

214pp.

Also here

The Rock Art of Karachi

2021-01-24T09:30:00.001+05:00

In February 1987, trekking up to the source of the Hub River in Balochistan, I had my first exposure to ancient rock art. Etched on a rock, in a wild and desolate area north of the village of Goth Badal Khan, was a hunting scene.

Dismissing those drawings of men, animals and geometric symbols as the work of modern youngsters, I took no further notice of them. Such was my understanding of our local petroglyphs, even when I erroneously considered myself an informed layperson.

Those etchings on stone were in the vicinity of what the locals call a gabr band — or wall of the fire-worshippers. Scores of these walls of dressed stones are scattered around in the mountainous areas northward of Balochistan and Sindh from the 26th parallel latitude.

Sometime later, I read the work of German anthropologist Karl Jettmar on the petroglyphs of Gilgit and Hunza. Though I saw several artistic similarities in the drawings, I yet could not relate the two. Little did I understand also that the rock art of Sindh and Balochistan was way older than that seen in Gilgit-Baltistan.

In 1996, trekking in the Khenji River valley of Sindh, I was shown some petroglyphs about 10 meters above the valley floor. From a geologist I later learned that the drawings would be from the early Neolithic period — or about 10,000 years old. Then it dawned upon me that every bit of rock art I had so disdainfully been dismissing as the mischief of modern youngsters was a message from our ancestors thousands of years ago. Thereafter, I began to look at every scratch on hillsides with awe, and even a bit of reverence.

The fog of ignorance began to clear when I first read a paper by the young anthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro. It was on funerary art on a tomb in upper Sindh. There followed a flurry of other works and, pretty soon, Kalhoro had clarified so much of the confusion in my mind after years of wandering about the wild places of Sindh, seeing things and not knowing what they meant.

After three earlier, very informative books, on funerary art in Sindh, hero and sati [marker to commemorate graves] stones in Tharparkar and petroglyphs across Sindh, Kalhoro — now an acclaimed anthropologist — has turned his attention to rock art around Karachi. This latest work is titled The Rock Art of Karachi.

It is surprising that, within a couple of hours’ drive from the heart of the metropolis, there are a couple of dozen sites where Neolithic hunters and shepherds kept busy artistic schedules. Even more surprising, we learn from the book that the several thousand year-old tradition of etching images on rocks is still very much in vogue.

In his earlier book, Symbols in Stone: The Rock Art of Sindh, Kalhoro has shown how the vocabulary has changed with time. If scenes of the hunt were a supplication to the gods for an abundance of food and the Wheel of Life was a prayer for prosperity in days gone by, modern artists were partial to tractors, airplanes, buses and cargo trucks. The Sindhi axe, too, finds favour in modern times.

The current book is more of an inventory of rock art sites around Karachi, with short snatches of technical detail. For example, Kalhoro notices signs used 5,000 years ago, by inhabitants of Indus Valley cities, that come down to our times through petroglyphs etched in stone a millennium or more after Mohenjo Daro [Mound of the Dead] was ravaged by periodic flooding and drought. Many of these symbols, he tells us, are still used to brand cattle. The mere thought of this continuity of culture stretching across the millenniums makes one’s flesh crawl.

In the cave of Lascaux in France, artists — having rendered their work — made stencils of their hands which, to my mind, was their way of signing their masterpieces. Similarly, in Sindh Kalhoro shows us a fascination with not just handprints, but the shod and unshod foot as well. An informant told him that this symbolised the artist’s association with his work.

What is even more fascinating is the rendering of a large feline’s paw prints. Mostly in ones or twos, they are also found to make a track over a few metres not far from a similar track of shod human feet. These mysterious sets of prints are seen at Lahut Tar in Mol Valley — a scenic spot with a pond of clear water that is fast becoming a picnic spot.

In the early Middle Ages, Sindh was known as ‘Buddhiya’ — the Land of Buddha. And rightly so, because the larger part of the population was Buddhist. Inevitably, monks and fakirs travelling across the country performed worshipful acts of etching images of stupas on stone. In Sindh is one remarkable variety of tiered stupas on square bases with variously shaped domes above which streamers fly. Even more surprising is the etching of a two-humped Bactrian camel that was never seen in Sindh. This particular image could only have been created by a devotee from far-off Central Asia.

In this inventory, Kalhoro includes a number of Chaukandi-style graveyards, all of them unknown to the general public. Some of them are in a ruinous state, vandalised by art thieves who removed the carved slabs from the tombs. The archaeologist also notes the work of treasure hunters, who have dug up some priceless pieces in obviously fruitless hunts for wealth.

The alarming thing that our writer notices is how housing estates are encroaching upon these invaluable sites of Sindhi heritage. If this invasion is not halted, or if the rock art sites are not declared protected today, tomorrow will be too late. The bulldozers levelling the ground for housing will not care that the blade is destroying the work of an artist from the fifth millennium BCE.

As one reads through, the feeling one gets is that this really is Kalhoro’s cri de coeur: to save the ancient artworks before they are destroyed by greedy land developers and mindless collectors and vandals. He suggests protection first of all, and then turning the sites into art parks. It is a valid suggestion that one cannot argue against.

It is unfortunate that works such as The Rock Art of Karachi increasingly cause anxiety among educated and culturally conscious individuals. The underlined message in these books is always the threat of destruction faced by these irreplaceable cultural pieces. One can only hope that the present work will prod authorities concerned into preserving what we still have. If not, Sindh’s progeny will only know of what once was from the pages of Kalhoro’s books.

The Rock Art of Karachi

By Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro

Directorate of Antiquities and Archaeology - Culture, Tourism, Antiquities and Archives Department, Government of Sindh, Karachi

ISBN: 978-9698100520 194pp.

Also here

Major Munir Ahmad

2021-01-06T11:19:00.009+05:00

My first battery commander was Maj (later Lt Col) Bashir Ahmed. A Dhariwal Jat, tall and impressive, he was a fine, professional soldier. I learned much from him in the few months I spent in his command. Thereafter I, as a lieutenant, commanded the battery until early in 1974, word was received that Maj Munir Ahmed had been posted to the regiment.

Since my battery was the only one without a commander he was coming my way. As things go, reputations precede and the word I received was of a very stern disciplinarian who brooked not the slightest shade of misdemeanour. He was, in a word, a true terror.

My adjutant Captain Khalid Jamil was delighted. Every time we met he would grin wide and tell me how I was going to be screwed. I have to admit I was not the most liked person by either my adjutant or the commanding officer. For the adjutant there were ample reasons for his dislike for me.

Kharian in the early 1970s was much of a forest. Right in front of the 6 Armoured Division Artillery Mess we had this spreading wooded area alive with jackals, porcupines and wild boar. In winter, the jackals would wander out to the mess and our quarters for food and there begin their long, lugubrious howling. It was very disturbing for most. I, however, learned to mimic the jackal almost exactly.

Every night after the club, I would set up a howling right by the back window of Khalid Jamil’s room. He would come to the window and try to shoo the unseen jackal away. But to no avail. Then one day I heard him tell the subedar major to draw his pistol and twelve rounds so that he can shoot the jackal that daily disturbed his sleep. That was the last time this jackal serenaded at his window.

Then, since he lived in the room directly below me, I would every late night set up a marching drill in my room halting with a proper ‘Check-One-Two’. Or I would drag my bed, drop things and generally make a racket to wake up the dead. A couple of times Jamil called me to the adjutant’s office and gave me a dressing down about the noise. My response was that since he was a teetotaller it was impossible for him to understand how an inebriated person can stumble into things turning them over.

His glee therefore was unbounded when word of the posting of Maj Munir and his reputation reached the unit. To be frank, I was concerned that my goose would soon be cooked.

Major Munir, a Sargodha native, was rail thin with narrow hips and wide shoulders and not an inch of fat on his body. He was good-looking and with the sternest set of the jaw I had ever seen in my life. Our first interaction was very business-like. Coming from field artillery, he had not yet done the conversion course to ack-ack (now Air Defence) but he had taught himself enough, he made it clear, I would not be able to pull any professional wool over his eyes. I had to be on my toes, 24/7 if I was to serve under him, or he would not think twice about placing me on adverse report, he said. All through the twenty minutes of the briefing not once did so much as a shadow of a smile broke his severity.

The first battery durbar Maj Munir held was a nightmare. Short of calling us names, he gave us hell. For fully thirty minutes, too. The upshot was that the battery having been without a real commander was in a shambles in every way and we had to shape up immediately. Any laxity, lack of discipline and punctuality meant demotion for NCOs and adverse reports for JCOs. After the durbar, several NCOs came to me almost terrified out of their wits. Eighteen months of my command had accustomed them to an easy going style, now this was unusual and frightening.

Khalid Jamil lost no time telling him what a nuisance I was. About a week after his arrival, Maj Munir gave me a stern, ‘Oye, tum adjutant ko raat ko sonay nahi detay! Kamray kay ooper shor sharaba kartay ho?’ (You don’t let the adjutant sleep at night with all that noise upstairs?) That was all. No threat for me to mend my ways or else.

I had nothing to say to that. But I stopped the racket.

Now, whenever I entered his office, I found Maj Munir reading up on the gunnery pamphlets and I knew we had a professional leading us. Shortly before he left for his conversion course, we prepared to go out on deployment and he surprised me with his competence. But as soon as we hit our area, Maj Munir disappeared. I deployed the battery, established communications, set up the command post and called him on the radio to report readiness.

As his jeep stopped short of the command post, I stepped out, saluted and gave him the ‘All correct’ report. He had been with us about six weeks and that was the first time I saw Maj Munir Ahmed smile, ‘Well done!’ was all he said. In the command post he got the grid references of all twelve guns and then drove around the perimeter to check if the layout was as shown on my map. He came back to give me my second well done. It was known that a Command Post Officer (earlier known as Battery Captain) would fudge rather than do the painstaking actual layout.

Three months went by and the adjutant was surprised no shit had hit the fan in our battery. He commented a number of times on my ‘cowardice’ in the face of a strict disciplinarian. His favourite was to taunt me with the Punjabi phrase about my torn arse. I never told him I was having a ball of a time with Maj Munir because all he wanted was competence, efficiency and punctuality.

One time I had to march in two senior NCOs. I don’t recollect what the issue was. But in his office, the three of us stood to attention while Maj Munir gave the men the rocket. It was summertime and when he dismissed us, we left six little puddles on the floor. This was from the sweat that had streamed down our arms.

Soon it was time for him to leave for Karachi for the conversion course. Shortly after his return, we went on another exercise and once again, I noticed that Maj Munir was not the kind of commander who would breathe down the neck of a junior for as soon as I moved the convoy, he disappeared. It had been raining and the area I had selected from the map to conceal the battery before we moved into deployment was, unbeknownst to me, water-logged.

The inevitable happened. Five of our twelve guns bogged down before I could stop the rest. It was a right snafu. I had to request the recovery vehicle from regimental headquarters to haul out the equipment. The adjutant was thrilled: now I was sure to get the rocket he so desired for me. Since the request was on radio, it was certain to have been heard by Maj Munir. But there was no intervention from him. No questions were asked.

Maj Munir arrived when I reported by radio that the battery was in action. I was awaiting the rocket and he surprised me by very mildly asking how we managed to get the guns out in just under an hour. Over the course of the next three days, my battery moved thrice. Maj Munir would be there to give the orders and that was all.

After every redeployment he and I would have this long radio exchange regarding the deployment in Griddle Code (a WW 2 British cypher system) which was heard on the regimental radio net. At lunch on the last day of the exercise, my commanding officer (who I have to admit was a real bastard) grudgingly admitted that the exchange between Maj Munir and me was the best voice procedure he had heard in a long time.

Not long afterwards, my battery commander fractured his leg in a road accident and was hospitalised in CMH, Kharian. I visited him every day to keep him in picture. He remained away for, I think, about five months. When he came back, we ran the 12 miles together in the quarterly Battle Efficiency Test.

Not long after that Maj Munir went off to Quetta for his Command and Staff course. I worked myself to ever worse relationships with my seniors and eventually was posted out of my parent regiment with an adverse report. By September 1978, I was out of the army.

I do not exactly remember the year (could have been 1987 or ‘88) when I was freewheeling around Peshawar where I met an officer from my parent unit. He told me of the new Air Defence Brigade stationed there and that the commander was Brigadier Munir Ahmed. It is as easy to see genuine pleasure as it is difficult to feign it. And it was genuine pleasure on Brig Munir’s face when I stepped into his office. He knew I was out of the army and was full of questions about what I was doing with my life. Done with that, we both returned to our stint together in Kharian and for the first time I told him how Capt Khalid Jamil had thought I would be done for under him. He had a hearty laugh.

As I was leaving, I had to tell him that he was the finest battery commander I had served under. After him I had known three more. Not one of them could hold a light to Brig Munir Ahmed.

PS: During one of our deployment exercises as I was setting up the command post, the adjutant Capt Khalid Jamil kept calling on the radio asking for my deployment data. We had been on ground barely ten minutes and he was expecting me to have everything worked out. Our call sign was 53 and he being headquarters, the calls went something like this:

‘Hello, 53. Send data. Over’

‘53, wait. Out.’

Five minutes later he would call again. On the third call I snapped, ‘53, men are working here, not machines. Out!’ Fida Hussain, my signal NCO from a village near Daultala (Rawalpindi), a right smart cookie, burst out laughing. ‘Theek keeta nay, sir.’ (You’ve done the right thing.)

Within seconds, the field telephone rang. It was the CO, the very one who was a bastard. He burned the earpiece off the telephone. We were speaking on the divisional artillery radio net, he bawled, and all four regiments as well as headquarters had heard my ‘rubbish’. He ranted on and on and on. Silently, I held the receiver away from my ear to keep the flesh from catching fire.

When Maj Munir came to the command post, he said nothing about my radio exchange with the adjutant. I think he approved.

Tell them a story: Salman Rashid charts his journey with travel filmmaking

2020-12-07T10:15:00.005+05:00

By Shayan Naveed

Salman Rashid is a historian and the only Pakistani to have seen the North Face of K-2. He also has the unique privilege of calling himself the late VS Naipaul’s friend. Today, he sits adjacent to me in a cacophonic coffee shop in Lahore, sipping overpriced coffee. He strains his ear to make sense of what I ask him but gives up, shaking his head as we drag our chairs outside, away from the clutter.

“Restaurants here are set up in a way where you can’t even converse,” he says.

Our coffees start to look like muddied water.

***

Salman Rashid started writing about travel and history in 1983, when ‘nobody else was doing it’. He is part of the Royal Geographical Society and distinguishes himself as one of the few authorities on Alexander the Great’s Indian expedition.

In conversation with The Correspondent, he delves into travel documentaries and writing in Pakistan, why they have historically failed in the country and how important prior research and knowledge are to the entire process.

The Correspondent: When did you start writing about travel? What do you think of Pakistan’s travel writers?

Salman Rashid: I started writing in 1983, when nobody else was doing it. Even now, except maybe for leisure, nobody does it professionally. I can’t think of too many travel writers or documentary makers in Pakistan. FS Aijazuddin is one of the few writers who knows what he’s doing. There’s a lot of research that goes into his work. I can’t say that for too many Pakistani writers.

The Correspondent: You hosted a travel documentary series on PTV in the 1990’s. How did network producers then react to such a concept? Did you manage to sustain an audience?

Salman Rashid: In 1998 I hosted the travel show ’Nagri Nagri Ghoom Musafir’ on PTV. People would come up to me to tell me how much they loved the series. They were especially drawn to the episode I did on Rohtas. I realized this was because I was telling a story and not just narrating historical facts. Storytelling in history is very important.

When I pitched my idea for a travel documentary series on Skardu’s Deosai to PTV in the 90’s, the producer was stunned.

‘What are you talking about? A 30 minute episode? That can’t be. It can’t exceed 5-10 minutes. What is there in Deosai anyway that is worth 30 minutes? Just take a long shot of the water and that’s that.

I left after a while. I didn’t even go back to collect my pay cheque. How much of difference would it have made anyway? I was to get paid Rs.800.

This was around the same time BBC had come out with a 3 part series on Ancient Egypt. The storytelling was unbelievable. They told stories through graffiti, through hieroglyphs. They identified its meaning, dissected it on the spot. Imagine that. And then compare it with what we were doing.

Salman Rashid up on the Deosai Plateau, Skardu. Source: odysseuslahori.blogspot.com

The Correspondent: You say storytelling is crucial to history. Where did you learn storytelling and do you think travel related writing and documentaries have suffered here because there’s no such concept to them?

Salman Rashid: I learned storytelling from Obaidullah Baig. He was my guide and mentor. I would say he was Pakistan’s premium, the best storyteller. Storytelling in both travel writing and documentaries is dead here now. All we have is a relaying of historic facts. Nobody’s interested in that. This is why people here aren’t drawn to it. You have to tell them a story.

I was watching a local travel show the other day where the host points to a monument, looks to the camera and asks ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘No? Well that’s a coincidence because neither do I.’

It’s almost comical now.

Why can’t we do a travel show like Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days? Yes, it is essentially about travel but it will tell you a great deal about geography and culture. The problem here is that nobody reads.

The Correspondent: How hard is it for travel filmmakers and writers in Pakistan? Are they financially compensated for the amount of effort that goes into their field? Do they have adequate creative autonomy?

Salman Rashid: Every big TV network had approached me to work for them as a travel historian. They expected me to work for free because they believed getting me on television would be enough and that this alone was my one true dream. The ones doing it for free weren’t true historians. They just wanted a little fame on television. Nothing more. That is what their shows reflected too.

It wasn’t until Muneeza Hashmi was the general manager of PTV in 1998 that I reconnected with my initial travel series.

‘What do you want?’ Muneeza would ask me.

‘Just don’t give me any man to work with. Except for a cameraman,’ I said.

Finally ‘Nagri Nagri Ghoom Musafir’ aired on PTV in the late 1990’s. I now had enough creative freedom to execute my long awaited project. We still weren’t getting paid enough though. I earned Rs. 4000 per episode. It was still more than 800 but the effort I was putting in was immense.

Source: WWF/Fatima Arif

***

Pakistan is stuck in the endless paradox of wanting achievement but blocking any avenue that guarantees it. It is ironic that in a country where history and culture are the main contingents of national pride, writers and documentarians that work to showcase it are enormously shunned. In conditions like these, it is hardly surprising that the art of travel related writing and film continues to suffer.

Shayan Naveed: The author has majored in Political Science and Media. She is a Film and History enthusiast who hopes to be a war reporter. Currently, she writes about socio-political issues. She can be reached at shayannaveed@thecorrespondent.pk

Also here

Peshawar Copperware

2020-12-04T00:00:00.002+05:00

‘Only they who understand the intricacies of misgari will appreciate the hard work that goes into producing a copperware item and will be willing to pay its price commensurate with the work that went into its making.’ Khwaja Safar Ali says referring to a copper plate he has in his home.

Constructed from twenty different sheets of copper heated to glowing redness to be stitched together, weighing some ten kilograms and engraved and chased with intricate patterns, the plate took four months of painstaking work. But today the buyer who would be aware of the value of the work is hard to come by. And so Safar Ali has not been offered the asking price of Rs 200,000. He produced it knowing well enough that it may be months before he might find a buyer for it. This piece was a labour of love for Ali. It epitomises his pride in the craft kept by his family through several generations.

Times were once very different, however. According to the 1931 Gazetteer for Peshawar district utensils of copper of ‘various shapes and sizes are made in the city in considerable quantity.’ The ornamentation of these wares was ‘simple and bold’. We are also told that Muslims were the only users of copperware and that this product was exported in large numbers from Peshawar.

With such a notable industry, it should be no surprise that the old quarter of Peshawar city is home to Bazaar Misgaran (from the Persian misgar for copper worker). In the last quarter of the 20th century, this street was crowded with stores vending copperware. Here elderly bearded gentlemen sipped sweet green tea with tourists as they haggled over prices amid beautifully worked copperware spilling out onto the pavement. Today Bazaar Misgaran is a misnomer for it has but two stores dealing with copperware. Both hang on by just a thread.

In a store established in 1860, Safar Ali began helping his father six decades ago when he was but six years old. Because a misgar is master of not just engraving and embossing, he learned how the sheets of copper were heated and soldered together so as to appear seamless. He learned too how the mass of metal was then shaped on the matrix by mallet to become a ewer, bowl, tray or teapot. Last of all comes mastery over the wielding of the stylus and the mallet.

Those were days when dower traditionally consisting of all kitchenware and cutlery from the largest cooking cauldron to the smallest teaspoon was entirely crafted copper. Ali, his late brother and their father were then busy men as they worked the small forge or shaped the sheets to meet a seemingly endless demand. The small, thin sound of mallets beating on copper sheeting coupled with the tinny ring of hammer on stylus resounded through the street for this family was not alone at it: the entire bazaar was choc-a-bloc with copper workers.

As well as the domestic demand, there was continuous traffic of tourists both foreign and domestic who lapped up copper products. About the middle of the 1990s, tourist traffic into Peshawar died out. Of a sudden there was a significant decrease in the outflow of Peshawar’s copper work. Following the events of September 2001 in distant America, with no foreigner to be seen in Peshawar, sale of copperware simply came to an end. The small forge in the back of the shop that was fired on a daily basis went cold. Now there was just enough work for it to be used once or twice a month.

In 2007, Safar Ali, then working alone since the death of his brother some years earlier, shut down the Bazaar Misgaran store. For the first time in its one hundred and forty-seven years of existence the store could not pay its keep. In all these years, the store had played host to personalities such as Queen Elizabeth and US vice president Nelson Rockefeller, besides a host of other dignitaries.

The Lok Virsa museum in Islamabad and its periodic exhibitions and festivals became Ali’s outlet. All that he produces ends up on the temporary stalls set up in the museum’s premises. A sign of changing times was that though the master copper craftsman of Peshawar taught his sons the art he had learned from his father, they did not pursue it. They preferred other lines of work instead.

In a desperate bid to put Peshawar on the world tourist map again, the revamped Tourism Corporation Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has offered succour to the endangered crafts of the province – among them copper work. Established in the two century-old residence of General Paolo Avitabile, governor of Peshawar under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the academy houses workshops of over a dozen different artisans. With a stipend of Rs 10,000 per month, Ali is here entrusted with two apprentices.

The instruction is slow because of the virtually non-existent market, but the two students are shaping up well. Ali points out that a good learner of copper work is one who can abide by the tedious sharpening of the stylus after every five square centimetres of surface has worked it to bluntness. That they learn, might keep the art alive after him, but Ali fears that without sales, his two pupils like his sons may not practice the craft.

‘Copper craftsmanship is like stagnating water nowadays. There is no outlet for it,’ says Khwaja Safar Ali. Without outward movement of products there is every chance that his students will be obliged to look for alternative means in order to keep body and soul together.

So Long, Excalibur

2020-12-02T09:13:00.007+05:00

Legend has it that Alexander, having crossed the river, fought his epic battle against Raja Paurava and made peace with the Punjabi king, paused to inspect the state of his army’s weaponry. Finding most of it much the worse for wear and in urgent need of repair, he sought the nearest armourer. Such an establishment, he was informed, was at Wazirabad. Thence his quartermaster went and had the armament refurbished.

But that is only legend. When Alexander entered this part of the country there was no township worthy of notice on the site of modern Wazirabad. Also, we must remember that in his train Alexander had a full complement of armourers, as well as other artisans. However, what seems likely is that when Wazirabad was founded in the 1640s by Emperor Shah Jehan’s courtier, Wazir Khan, families of cutlers and armourers may have been established in the new township to cater to the requirements of the army in camp.

The armourers appear to have done well for just two centuries later, we hear of their great prowess. Greatly appreciative of a set of cuirasses received as a gift from King Louis Philippe of France, Maharaja Ranjit Singh ordered for the armour to be replicated for use by his own army. The craftsmen deemed up to the task worked in Wazirabad. The copies they produced were so perfect as to earn the most lavish admiration of the Maharaja.

Not long afterwards the Gazetteer of the Gujranwala District (1884) tells us travellers passing through Wazirabad were offered ‘many-bladed pocket knives bristling with hooks, screw-drivers, and other contrivances more calculated to display the ingenuity of the maker than to serve the convenience of the purchaser.’ This trade, it is recorded, had been established ‘for a long time’. Among the manufacture of Wazirabad the Gazetteer enumerates guns, pistols, swords, razors and spears.

The reputation of Wazirabad as a cutlery making centre has not dwindled with the passing of years. Today there are dozens of establishments where men in clothes stained by iron dust work the forge or pore over grinding wheels to sharpen and polish scissors and knives of varied descriptions. These small hovels, ill-lit and cluttered, produce low and medium quality wares for the local market. On the other end is a firm of New Stainless Industries. Behind its unpretentious exterior in Arif Shaheed Road, there is enough weaponry to start a small-scale mediaeval war.

Owned by a family of Chadda Rajputs, this house was established in the waning days of Sikh rule by a sire of the current crop of young managers. Family tradition relates that their business has always been arms and armament manufacture and it may well be that the cuirass so admired by the Maharaja may have been produced by their ancestors. What is certain is that they have been producing cutlery and arms for the local market for nearly two centuries.

After 1857 the family was engaged by the British Indian army to supply what is locally known as the suway wala chaku – a multi-purpose pocket knife. Being a part of the soldiers’ kit, it was required in large numbers and kept the establishment busy for almost a century. The Chadda forge also hand produced gun barrels in the period between the two World Wars. As well as that, the Sikh kirpan was a major production; this establishment also supplied bayonets to the British Indian army during World War II.

After Partition, the market shrank and for twenty years, the Chadda business floundered. Casting about the German market in the late 1960s, the family received a tentative order for a knife with a thirty centimetre (12”) blade and stag horn hilt. Replicating the piece was no problem, but stag horn being unavailable, camel bone was used instead. Such was the ingenuity of working the camel bone to imitate stag horn that the buyer approved of the sample and placed an order for the supply of three hundred pieces. The Chaddas’ New Stainless Industry has never looked back since.

Several generations of experience as sword and knife manufacturers now came into play. Using the German dagger as a model, a set of six knives was designed. While the chassis was the same as the original, there were minor artistic innovations and the Germans excitedly placed an enlarged order for the new models as well. This was the early 1970s and the company was then working with just twenty-five men, producing everything by hand.

By the mid-1970s, the Chaddas had come a long way from supplying the suway wala chaku to the British Indian Army. Their market had now expanded from Germany to USA and with it their workforce to two hundred. Yet the company found it difficult to meet the burgeoning demand. Seeing that their suppliers were keen workers, the German and American buyers purchased the requisite machinery and shipped it out to Wazirabad. This was no free gift, however: the buyers were to deduct ten percent from each invoice to pay for the machinery.

Today the company’s major buyers are in USA, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and Australia with USA leading the market. Their line comprises over six hundred different swords, daggers, hunting and pocket knives – of this number a little over one hundred are swords of various kinds.

Many of the swords and daggers are the staple for fantasy films coming out of Hollywood. Others are replicas of weapons used by famous historical personages. Today these are collectors’ items that adorn innumerable walls in Western homes. So far as knives and daggers go, there being fewer restrictions on the carrying of such weapons in Western countries, they have are essential for hunters and outdoorsmen.

Back in the 1880s, the Gazetteer had noted that while the forging skills of the cutlers of Wazirabad were exceptional, they were offset by the poor quality steel in use as well as the imperfect polish and finish. New Stainless Industry has come a long way for they now use the finest quality steel with modern finishing techniques. If anything can be indicative of quality, it is that rather than have the manufacturer’s logo, foreign buyers ask for their own brand names to be appliquéd upon the finished product.

Clove Necklaces

2020-11-30T00:00:00.002+05:00

The swashbuckling Alexander Burnes, soldier, explorer and philandering spy for the British East India Company, sailed up the Indus from Thatta in 1836. In the vicinity of Dera Ismail Khan, he reported upon the adornment of local women. Among other items he noticed some of them wearing necklaces of cloves. Strangely, he did not make any further inquiries regarding this somewhat odd piece of bodily decoration.

At that time the clove necklace appears to have been a prized and everyday item of feminine adornment along the Indus from the vicinity of Rajanpur (south of Dera Ghazi Khan) all the way to Kalabagh and westward as far as Kohat and Bannu. In the course of time, Dera Ismail Khan may have lost this tradition, but it lives on from Rajanpur through Dera Ghazi Khan to the two cities of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. All along, the artisans of this peculiar craft are strictly women.

Though Baloch women living along the Indus in the districts of Rajanpur and Dera Ghazi Khan are the most avid practitioners of this art in Pakistan, it is not restricted to our country alone. We find examples of clove necklaces among the Palestinians and, closer to home, among the nomadic Kuchis of Afghanistan. However, there is little similarity of design among the three cultures.

The belief among the makers of clove necklaces of the Indus was that the spice wards off the evil eye and sometimes also illness. There being none other more in need of keeping away the evil eye than a new bride, this piece became a standard and essential part of bridal attire. It is said that in those far off days, the clove necklace was preferred above its gold counterpart. The reason, they say, was that while gold only glittered, the cloves in addition gave off a pleasing fragrance. And so, to this day, the clove necklace preserves the bride from envious eyes with its magical power and fragrance.

The original design as practiced by matrons in remote valleys of the Suleman Mountains west of the Indus consisted only of cloves strung together sans any other material. There could be four, five or seven strands making a single item with colourful tassels at the end to break the monotony of brown. But over the years, shiny beads have been added to the clove string and have become the preferred design.

The cloves are softened by dousing in water for several hours. With a strong needle and brightly coloured cotton thread they are strung transversely through the stem with an arrangement of four or six brightly coloured beads alternating between the cloves. Every maker has her own notion of the way each strand must look. While the simplest can be a straight single strand, the more elaborate ones alternate from single to double and back to single through the length of the whole strand.

Though it is rare nowadays to see the clove necklace worn in everyday life, for the bride it is still an absolute essential; it being the standard among rich and poor alike. While the rich are weighed down by gold jewellery in addition to the clove, the spirit of the less fortunate, so they say, is buoyed only by the luxurious fragrance of the spice.

From hearsay modern craftswomen know that the clove necklace was valued as highly as one crafted from gold. Among the less privileged, this was the main piece of bridal adornment and was considered as precious as its metal counterpart. Now, clove is a native of Indonesia which was naturalised to the subcontinent about two centuries ago. Long years ago when the clove was imported from those far off islands, it was an expensive spice that flavoured the food and drink of the very rich. To use it as part of bodily ornamentation was a statement of one’s own means. It was doubly so when the not so privileged could afford to do so.

But rather than make the gauche statement concerning one’s capacity to purchase an exotic and expensive spice to wear on the body, the myth of the clove’s supernatural powers was devised. And of course there was always the pleasant and everlasting fragrance to clothe its magical powers in.

Under the stark brown loom of the Suleman Mountains, northwest of Rajanpur, Zainab Bibi of village Miranpur is a maker of clove necklaces. Speaking from behind her hijab, she says she can complete a seven-strand piece in three days if she alternates this work with household chores. If she keeps at it, which is rare, she can do it in a day and half to sell it for Rs 400. She is aware that the store keeper in Fazilpur town makes a neat profit of about Rs 150 which is somewhat over her net profit from the three days of labour.

Though the work is hard and the monetary gleanings from it meagre, Zainab will not give off this – her only – professional skill. Weddings will never go out of vogue nor too the envious hurtful eye and brides will always wear the traditional clove piece, she says. The demand for her craft will thus never die and as she had learned the art from her mother, she has passed it on to her eldest daughter.

She admits that demand is not what it used to be in her mother’s time. In those days four decades ago, steady orders from stockists in Rajanpur and Dera Ghazi Khan kept the elder woman busy. But the passage of time alters cultural preferences and the rich are slowly moving away from the traditional. Now mostly rural folks indulge themselves in the custom to keep her working.

Zainab Bibi has one fear, however: if rural folks, following the example of the urban rich as sometimes happens, abandon the clove necklace, the art will die. Until then the fragrance of the clove will uplift the soul of the wedding party.

Hookah Makers of Lalian

2020-11-28T00:00:00.006+05:00

About a millennium ago, somewhere in the balmy climes of Gujarat a man given to the pleasures of intoxication came upon a brilliant idea. From snorting burning opium or marijuana directly and losing much of it from the burner, he devised a means of drawing the vapour by pipe to filter it through water. That was the essence, but surely it would have taken a period of experimentation before the first hookah was crafted from the empty shell of the coconut.

Filled with water, the shell was fitted with two pipes. One topped with a pottery cone to hold the narcotic on embers; the other was the inhaler. The bottom end of the former dipped into the water in the shell in order to filter out harmful elements of the intoxicant – or so it was thought.

Compared to inhalation of the intoxicating vapour directly from a heated pot, this apparatus made for minimal wastage of the precious exudation and quickly caught on. From here the hookah spread through Persia into the Levant where it came to be known as narghile, a corruption of narikela, Hindi for coconut.

When tobacco hit India about the middle of the 16th century, the well-established hookah was at hand to become the medium to smoke what was then billed as an aphrodisiac and health giving leaf. By this time the coconut shell contraption had already graduated to finer material and we see a few examples of rather well-made hookahs in Mughal art.

The word hookah comes from the Punjabi word for container referring to the water pot at the bottom upon which the contraption stands. The poor man’s device is a kiln-fired hookah and a pottery chillim (bowl) to burn the tobacco (or intoxicant) connected with cane pipe and an inhaler. Gentry, on the other hand, indulges itself with finely worked devices with metal hookah and elaborately embroidered pipes made either of shaped cane or, as nowadays, rubber.

In Pakistan the name of Lalian village (Chiniot district) has long been noted for manufacture of ornate hookahs. The now fading industry is a virtual assembly line with eight different artisans involved in the manufacture of single complete piece. This is not counting the potter providing the terra cotta chillim and hookah.

From six millimetre thick sheets of buffalo leather, a worker crafts the bowl (kupi) to hold the water when fitted into the metal hookah. The hookah itself is constructed from sheets of copper and brass. Once the metalworker has welded metal and alloy together with copper floral pieces in three intervening panels, the shell passes into the hands of the engraver.

With a fine lancet and a wooden striker, the engraver connects the copper flowers with curvilinear petioles and leaves. Some of these of fanciful form and shape exist only in the engraver’s mind and not in the natural world. The remaining empty spaces are filled in with tiny cuneiform indentations. The shell is then fitted with the leather kupi and a revolving base.

Meanwhile, the pipe (narri) maker, having given the cane the typical curving shape over fire, wraps it with old cotton cloth giving its ends the conical shape (mukkoo) which fits into the hookah at one end and the other over which the chillim sits. With its mukkoos bound with colourful plastic string, the least expensive pipe is ready for sale.

For the more discerning hookah smoker, there is a next class of narri covered in imitation leather nicked with ovate forms to give a pleasing appearance. A yet higher level of refinement moves a step above to real leather: as many as fifteen thin strips of goat leather are intricately braided together covering the entire length of the cloth-covered pipe.

The fancy hookah with the worked metal body can either be fitted with the braided leather narri or with a yet more elaborate piece. Richly worked with coloured plastic string in either white-green or white-red combinations, the finished pipe gleams with diamond shapes.

The metal hookah with the finest embroidered narri preferred by the old school of village gentlemen who always have it ready in their baithak (men’s sitting room) for visitors now costs Rs 10,500. It takes twelve days to make and brings a net profit of a mere thousand rupees. But this class of hookah smoker is fading away and with him the sizeable profit to be gleaned. Three decades ago the hookah makers of Lalian worked overtime to keep a ready stock of this fine piece in retailers’ stores. Today, the sale is so slow that they cannot afford to spend time on it and then wait days, sometimes even weeks, for it to sell. Instead, they concentrate on the less expensive items that move faster. They now construct the finer variety only against orders paid for in advance.

Mohammad Sanaullah who keeps shop in Lalian and supplies to neighbouring villages sees the hookah business lasting no more than another decade, perhaps less. The cigarette industry will be its undoing, he observes grimly. As the old school of the pastoral gentleman who prided himself for the refinement of the hookah served in his sitting room passes away, the younger generation of tobacco smoker prefers cigarettes.

The twenty odd hookah making establishments in Lalian are there, says Sanaullah, because unemployed men have to do something to make a living – even if it is a sparse living making hookahs. As little as two decades ago there were twice as many and business was three or four times as fast. Today, the bulk of his business comes from the peasant untouched by the campaign on the malignance of tobacco. And he uses the least expensive item with the pottery hookah.

Sanaullah believes this class will never fade away. His business will roll along, albeit with decreasing returns. Only the fancy hookah with the ornate pipe that had once made Lalian famous may not be any more.

Hunza Musical Instruments

2020-11-25T00:00:00.004+05:00

Every year when the flow in the Hunza River rises with the summer thaw, Qudratullah Baig prowls its banks below his native village of Nasirabad in Hunza. He seeks timber washed down from orchards and forests higher up the valley. In his mid fifties, he can tell the difference between mulberry, the preferred timber, and apricot or almond – all hardwoods good for the stringed musical instruments he crafts in his living room.

A naturally gifted singer and musician, Qudratullah taught himself to play the chharda (local version of the rubab) at an early age. Unable to afford the purchase of his own, he played borrowed instruments until the day at a family function where he was asked to perform. Thinking the chharda was being gifted him, he was devastated when, at the end of his performance, it was taken away. He resolved never again to play another man’s musical instrument.

Acquiring a piece of apricot timber he asked about for it to be turned into a chharda, but in the late 1960s, there were few artisans interested in the work. The reason for this neglect was unknown to Qudratullah at that time.

Traditionally musical instruments were made by professional musicians belonging to the Dom caste. Once much sought after for birth and wedding celebrations, their importance ebbed in the changing social-cultural milieu of the 20th century. Traditionally at the lower end of the caste system, they were all but marginalised by the second half of the last century. Indeed, by the early 1970s many Dom families had given up their profession, some even moving away to escape the by now derogatory label.

Inevitably, there arose a dearth of makers of musical instruments in Hunza when young Qudratullah needed his chharda made. With tools pinched from his carpenter brother’s workshop, he worked on his piece for more than a month. ‘When I put in the strings and strummed it for the first time, the sound was better than I had heard on some other pieces,’ he says.

For the next decade or so while his peers played their childish games, he spent his after school hours working on other instruments to build up his own collection. A two decade stint with the army enforced a hiatus in this activity. But since his release, Qudratullah has applied himself to perfecting his one-man home-based production unit.

Meanwhile, the late 1980s saw a revival of interest in traditional music among educated Hunza youngsters who were essentially not from the Dom caste. This was a time when local musical instruments were hard to come by, those that remained were in possession of the few families that still followed their age old practice of professional musicians. In order to overcome the shortage of instruments, the youngsters set about improvising with modern adaptations: stainless steel cooking pot for the body of a stringed instrument, synthetic leather instead of real for percussion pieces.

In the mid 1990s, a Karimabad (Hunza) based NGO brought about a revival of many of the disappearing crafts of the area. Though it had support and technical input from educated local musicians, now hard to come by instruments, failed to make the deserved come back. The reason was disinterest among traditional craftsmen. Nevertheless, a few artisans began working on power-driven lathes to create instruments once entirely hand-crafted. Those who play them, assert these instruments lack the finesse of traditional pieces and that their sound lacks quality.

A little lower down the valley from Karimabad, Qudratullah, now back from the army, was once again at work with his simple adze, rasps and knives. Painstakingly seeking out the right timber, he brings it home to work it with saw and rasp, giving it the desired shape centimetre by centimetre. His thickly calloused palms and fingers show that the hardwood is not easy to work with the primitive tools. Qudratullah says the process of hollowing the timber by hand to produce the sound box is particularly arduous. This is mainly because of the precision of the body’s internal measurements that produce correct resonance.

Celebrated as the master craftsman, Qudratullah creates everything from the local version of the Peshawari rubab to the Chitrali sitar to the zhighini (local violin) and the chharda he had once so ached to own. He says he has also produced the surnai (clarinet) in his time. This last he no longer makes for he now finds it hard to work the hand operated drill with the necessary precision. Though an electric machine would help produce the surnai in large enough quantities to satisfy a commercial demand, he knows it cannot be done because of the indifferent power supply in his village.

Clients who play his instruments acknowledge Qudratullah as the master craftsman. The only competition he had is now fading in the ninth decade of his life, too feeble to work and pass on his craft to an apprentice should there be one. Qudratullah still has a couple of decades of work left in him. But while he continues to work long hours in his living room, he has only been able to pass on his skill to a nephew. There are no other takers.

And why should there be? The typical chharda takes ten days each of ten to twelve working hours to be created from a log of timber. It sells for a mere Rs 10,000 which is not even the price of the blisters he gets on his hands carving its sound box. Perish the notion that it will feed him and his family. For him it is now purely a labour of love; of passion for music. With his rare smile he admits he sometimes does a hatchet job speedily producing a substandard piece for an undiscerning customer. But that is rare.

As Qudratullah Baig enters the evening of his time, he is uncertain if his nephew will continue the practice after he is gone. That will only be dictated by the youngster’s interest in the art: if he wishes to make good music, he will perforce have to create his own instruments. If not, the skill will go unused and atrophy. Then the people of Hunza will play their music on imported instruments forever altering its tenor.

Toil of the Loom

2020-11-23T00:00:00.010+05:00

‘There are many qualities of wool in Sind [sic], black, brown and white. A good deal of it, especially of the black, is worked locally into blankets and saddle-bags.’ Thus notes a British civil servant in the year 1906. He goes on to observe that in Tharparkar this wool is put to good use producing ‘blankets’, locally termed khatha. Similar to the kambli of the Deccan, this white-coloured product is, we are told, ‘finer in texture, the wool of which it is made being superior.’

Produced on narrow width handlooms and used more as cold weather attire than as bedding, these are, properly, shawls. Woven in two feet width, two panels in length measuring nine feet each are sewn together to create a single piece. Intricately woven in brightly coloured patterns along the border, the shawls are masterpieces of craftsmanship of the finest order. Unlike some shawls woven with cotton warp, the khatha is still, weft and warp, entirely sheep wool.

Rewind a century, the white wool was treated with locally produced vegetable dyes to create the intensely vibrant geometric patterns. Today, synthetic colours are obtained from the wholesale markets of Hyderabad and Karachi. The timeless designs, always angular geometric forms completely devoid of curvilinear or floral shapes, come from a common vocabulary we find in temple and funerary decorative schemes in Sindh and Gujarat that have not changed in a millennium.

The length of the shawl has however altered, decreasing to eight feet. In 1906, the typical white khatha could be had for a mere two rupees and was in great demand. In the mid-1990s, it cost Rs. 800 apiece. In the retail market of Mithi town today, the finest quality khatha, which now comes in either white or black, weighing 1,200 grams will set the buyer the poorer by Rs. 4,500. A middling quality weighing 200 grams less will go for about Rs. 2,500 while the lightest at 500 grams will be some Rs. 1,200.

This is a price set not by the craftsfolk producing this work of beauty. Rather, it is established by the middleman who keeps shop in Mithi town and also supplies the market in Hyderabad. Inevitably, this is grossly undervalued price so far as the artisan is concerned, leaving the fat profit to be gleaned by the middleman. Equally inevitably, it has determined a compromise on quality.

Traditionally, khatha craftsman worked in a family unit. The wool procured from local livestock was cleaned and carded by older men. While some yarn was produced on a manual spindle by patriarchs, much of it came off the spinning wheel worked by women. Preparation of dyes as well as the dyeing process was also women’s work.

In those bygone days of manual work, a khatha typically weighing 1,200 grams would take about three weeks from procurement of unprocessed wool to the time the finished product was ready to sell. Today it takes five days, for now it is made of wool processed and dyed in the factories of Karachi. To the uninitiated, the modern product may seem very fine but those who know the real thing can tell the difference at first glance.

The shift in use of material was determined by the imperative of cutting down on production time because the cabal of retailers pays the artisan no more than Rs. 3,000 for the finest quality khatha. The artisan, belonging invariably to the marginalised Meghwar caste, weighs lightly against the more influential bania and has no say in pricing. At the current price of raw materials and cost of living, the original shawl, processed in some three weeks’ time, can simply not be worth the effort and time. So the compromise on material as well as the three qualities of produce.

As things stand, the artisan earns a net profit of just Rs. 1,600 for five days of labour to create his best quality and as little as Rs. 150 for his lightest product. A khatha weaver, spending eight to ten hours at his loom seven days a week, typically earns between Rs. 7,000 and 8,000 a month. Unsurprisingly, the number of weavers is declining. And there are no apprentices learning the craft.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, incipient non-government organisations in Thar as well as an influx of tourists brought about a boom in the khatha makers business. That was when buyers regularly visited weavers at work to see and purchase. This continued until a few years ago when increased travel restrictions made it difficult for Pakistani tourists and impossible for foreigners to travel freely in Thar. Coupled with that, alternating droughts and floods resulted in low agricultural produce reducing the purchase power of local buyers.

Naino Ram Meghwar of village Sinyar Nangar, some 20 kilometres south of Islamkot, descends from a long line of weavers. Yet he says he would gladly give up khatha weaving if only he knew another skill. At 38 years of age, he is the last khatha maker of the family for he is not teaching his sons the toil of the loom. Who would want to learn a craft that cannot fill the belly, he asks ruefully?

If rains are good and there is livestock, guar beans and millets to sell, he has buyers and business is brisk between November and January. Otherwise he is obliged to sell his product to the bania in Mithi who supplies him the yarn on credit to keep his business going.

He is no longer making the authentic woollen khatha, says Naino Ram. But he still has the skill and can produce one for a buyer willing to pay the price. He is not alone. Across the rolling grey sand dunes of Tharparkar, there are scores of weavers who despite possessing the skill no longer produce the real item but pass off mere replicas. When Naino Ram’s generation of Meghwar weavers is no more, the khatha, without which no Sindhi gentleman would once be seen in winter, will have vanished forever.

Turn of the Wheel

2020-11-20T00:00:00.003+05:00

Lockwood Kipling knew of Dera Ismail Khan’s famous lac turnery in the 1880s. He was amazed by the ‘microscopic fineness’ of the ‘maze of fernlike scrolls’ and praised the choice of colours that went into the work. ‘The work may be considered the most tasteful and refined of all lac turnery in the Punjab, as there is an entire absence of crude and glaring colours, with a definite system of ornamentation,’ he wrote.

In Kipling’s time, the timber used was mainly shisham. Among the several households practicing the art at the time, the scroll work was done mainly by women. Men only worked the hand lathe or jundri, which gives its name to the craft, to machine the timber into shape and apply successive coats of colour. But for the past several decades the craft is handled entirely by men. At that time, a good deal of this work ended up being exported to Britain. Even today, its greatest patrons are foreigners based in Islamabad with a small number of local supporters. And shisham has been replaced by tamarisk as the main timber.

Faheem Awan, 59, who claims to be the foremost master and last keeper of the art of jundri, is a son of the late award-winning Ustad Mohammed Ashraf. Quitting school after fourth grade, Awan sat at his father’s knee to learn the skill of turning crude blocks of wood into bowls, plates, candle stands and legs for charpais and stools.

When Awan wasn’t turning the manual lathe to create the various forms, he watched his father apply the usual three layers of coloured lacquer as the piece spun on the hand lathe. A base of yellow to ‘seal the pores of the timber’, then red or white, depending on the planned scheme of the finished piece, followed by black as top coat. Though colours can vary in line with buyers’ demands, only three layers are applied. Anymore, explains the master, and the surface becomes uneven and susceptible to pitting.

Having started his apprenticeship at age 10, Awan took up the steel stylus or qalm to etch out paisleys borrowed from his father’s design vocabulary. Nothing, he asserts, was maintained on paper. Every form and shape, every bit of tracery came out of the master’s head and was assimilated by the apprentice by observation.

The work entails almost superhuman intensity. The tracery is virtually microscopic calling for not just a very sharp eye but an impossibly steady hand. Pressure on each movement of the stylus determines which of the three different colours of lacquer laid in as many layers is to be revealed: greater pressure will bring out the first layer, that is, yellow that forms the base. Gentler pressure will show either red or white. The tiniest incorrect stroke ruins the creation as the coloured lacquer, applied on the turning wheel, cannot be filled by hand.

Some nine or ten generations ago a certain Ustad Karam Ali was well-known in the court of Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan for his accomplishment as ivory and lacquer craftsman, says Faheem. During the great upheaval of 1857, his descendants, who were until then living in Delhi, fled the chaos to Dera Ismail Khan on the banks of the Indus. In a way they were coming home for as Awans it was from the vicinity of this country that Faheem’s ancestors had first migrated to Delhi at an indeterminate time in the past, bringing their art along.

Time was when some 20 young apprentices besides Awan learnt the art from Ustad Ashraf. These young men received a stipend of Rs. 30 a month each from the Small Industries Corporation. A complete set of lacquer work tools then cost about Rs. 3,000. Since none of the apprentices had the wherewithal to buy the equipment, none practiced the craft. As well as that, the very slow market was a major discouragement to taking up the practice. Today, there is no stipend to lure fresh apprentices. And Awan’s is the last household practicing the lacquer work that once brought renown to Dera Ismail Khan.

In Ustad Ashraf’s glory days, Elizabeth II and the Shah of Iran were presented with Dera lacquer creations. There was no count of high ranking diplomats whose homes were adorned with this fine art. And there were ordinary travellers, local and foreign, who made their way to Dera Ismail Khan from across the country to buy pieces. But this side of the watershed of September 11, 2001, business dried up. No longer was Awan invited to the International Clubs of Lahore and Islamabad. No longer did wandering tourists end up at his workshop. Simultaneously, the fancy pirah, a low stool with a back, and charpai frames once essential as bridal gifts in this part of the country went out of fashion.

Of his 11 children, Awan was training only one of his daughters in 2003 as the sons were in other lines of work in order to earn a living. The man knew then that the work had reached its end.

But a remarkable turnaround occurred in the following year when an article in an English language monthly suddenly brought Awan and his work into notice among foreign diplomats. A small trickle of buyers began to visit and business perked up.

Currently, Awan has three apprentices: his eldest son redeemed from automobile spare parts salesmanship and two daughters. With an outlet in the premises of Lok Virsa Museum at Islamabad manned by another son, sales are fairly brisk. Awan is fortunate to have also caught the attention of the local bureaucracy which laps up a large part of his output.

But the concern remains: what are the odds that this centuries-old art will survive with just one family practicing it? Though it would dilute his earnings, Awan would like to see the number of lacquer work artisans increase. If that does not happen there is every likelihood that ‘the most tasteful and refined of all lac turnery in the Punjab’, as observed by Kipling, will disappear forever.

Stewards of the Ring

2020-11-18T10:02:00.002+05:00

The art of crafting rings from the horns of wild goat became popular because it was soon seen that such a ring worn on leprosy-stricken fingers cured the dreaded disease. There may be no scientific confirmation of this but many believe in the therapeutic quality of these unique rings. Others wear them for their striking and vibrant colours.

Islamuddin of Chitral town claims his father was the creator of the first-ever such ring. Except the claim is contestable on the grounds that the art of fashioning rings from horns is known to have been practiced in Chitral from a time much before that time. What is true, though, is that these delightfully colourful rings are made only in Chitral. Nowhere else across the district or swathe of Gilgit-Baltistan are they to be found.

By Islamuddin’s account, his father stumbled upon the craft while experimenting with different mediums such as wood and stone. Once he perfected the handling of horn, he passed on the skill to two of his sons. With their father dead, Islamuddin and an older brother continue to be its only practitioners to this day.

The best raw material comes from the horns of the markhor (Capra falconeri cashmiriensis) with that of the Himalayan ibex (Capra ibex sibirica) being a close second. In bygone days when hunting was permitted, local hunters provided a ready supply of raw material for the ring makers of Chitral. With fewer and fewer markhors and ibex and resulting restrictions on hunting, horns of all kinds of wild ungulates are hard to come by. Procurement is rather a struggle now with supply trickling in from all over the northern mountains from as far away as the remote corners of Baltistan and Shimshal.

Sawed into easy-to-handle pieces measuring 40x40x20 millimetres, the horns are soaked in water for a full year, says Islamuddin. Though the duration may be an exaggeration, the soaking softens the hard keratin making it easier to work. The water-steeped nodule is then drilled through with a hole as big as the girth of a finger. Held fast on a wooden rod tapering to thickness in the middle in order to take rings of varying size, the nodule is sawed around the edges to a rough octagonal shape.

Changing to a paring knife, the octagon is shaved into a circle and later rendered to perfect circular smoothness with a fine rasp and sandpaper until it becomes a rather wide ring. Sliced with a very fine blade, there emerge two rings from this single piece. A series of holes is now drilled around the circumference of each ring.

Pieces of coloured lac, heated on fire, are drawn out into fine strands and threaded through the holes. The ends of the strands, heated again, are tamped into little lumps. With a precision knife, tiny flower-shaped incisions are cut on the cooled and hardened lac. These incisions are filled with lac of varying colours. With precisely measured strokes of the fine rasp, the artisan grinds off excess lac to leave behind tiny multicoloured floral designs.

Once again on the tapered wooden rod, the ring is polished to smoothness with fine sandpaper. Finally, a brisk rubbing with rapeseed oil gives it a nice sheen.

At 38 years of age, Islamuddin has no apprentice. Childless despite two marriages, he says he has no one for the art to be passed on to. His brother, on the other hand, has trained two youngsters. But this is an art that needs utmost precision and few young men care to create the refinement that Islamuddin and his brother strive for. Ring making, says Islamuddin, is too tedious for youngsters of the high-speed modern world.

That said, there are takers for his great variety of designs among men, women and children. Even as he works in his cubby hole of a workshop, men wander in and sales are transacted. Ranging in price from Rs. 1,000 to five times as much, his rings are a popular item of adornment among both genders and a must for bridal couples.

Besides the local market, the rings sell in stores in Gilgit and Peshawar. Islamuddin also claims to have a large market in Germany, Korea and Japan. When the district enjoyed reasonable tourist influx, summers were a busy time. Nowadays, only the occasional mountaineer comes in to make bulk purchases. But despite a virtual blackout of tourists in the country these days his wares continue to trickle out of the country.

Islamuddin believes he still has many years to go before he retires. But after him? He shrugs. His brother may leave behind a trained apprentice or two. But the way things are it is unlikely others will follow suit.

Carved in Stone

2020-11-16T14:00:00.008+05:00

Archaeological research shows that soapstone cookware was in use around 3000 BCE. In fact, it may well be traced back much farther, leading us to contend that the first meal ever cooked by our primitive ancestors came off a soapstone crock. Easy to work, the soft stone comprising nearly 80 percent magnesium takes a long time to heat. Once done, it conserves the heat keeping its contents warm for a considerable duration. Those who use it believe it lends a subtle but distinct flavour to the food.

Discoveries in Indus Valley cities of Pakistan show baked soapstone beads in use 5,000 years ago. Though we find no crockery from the same material at the time, there is every likelihood it was in use. What we do know for certain is that from Chitral in the west to Baltistan in the east, communities in the mountain country were using soapstone pottery when the first European explorers ventured into our northern mountains. As little as 40 years ago, soapstone cooking utensils were still to be found in many homes. Today, these pieces, long disused, sit dust-laden in museums.

Thoqmus, northeast of Khaplu in Baltistan, sits under a great knot of high peaks and glaciers within earshot of the cannons going off on Siachen. Here, in one of the narrow alleys bordered by stone structures, Ghulam Haider sits in the street leaning against the wall of his home as he chips away with a simple hammer-like tool at what seems to be the making of a lid for the kwat or cooking pot lying next to him.

At 65, he has worked soapstone into crockery for half a century. It was at his father’s knee that he and his elder brother learned this fine art. That was a time when the roads into Baltistan were just barely passable, permitting only jeeps and pack animals and industrial produce of the low country could only reach Baltistan in tiny quantities. Consequently, down country metalware was hard to come by. Until then, Haider and his brother assisting their father found a ready market for all the kitchenware they could produce. It was a good life as hard work brought in reasonable income.

They were not alone, says Haider. Only three decades ago, there were 35 other soapstone artisans in Thoqmus, all equally busy. Thoqmus was then just one of many villages where this industry thrived to feed a demand across the length and breadth of Baltistan.

Every morning, Haider or his brother climbed a hill just outside the village, an hour out and an hour back, to quarry a lode of soapstone. The path was precipitous and unsuitable for pack animals and the brothers had to man haul the loads. Though there were other veins, this particular one was famous for the very fine quality stone with the right mix of talc, making it soft enough to be worked easily with hand tools. Cutting the blocks into manageable sized ones, the young men carted home loads of up to 30 kilograms each. The trips have gradually dwindled to once a week, says Haider, who now hauls back only 20 kilograms of stone.

Road improvement in the early 1960s ushered in lorries laden with all sorts of cargo into Baltistan. Soon the markets were flooded with cheap aluminium kitchenware at a fraction of the price of soapstone crockery. Demand for the ancient craft collapsed of a sudden. Now it was only the traditionalist in a family who preferred stoneware.

With expertise only in this ancient craft, Haider diversified. While he produced crockery on demand, he began to dabble with animal forms. The Himalayan ibex was his prized product, followed by a somewhat poorer image of the blue sheep. His first statues put on display by the road passing through the village were quickly picked up by army officers travelling to or from Siachen. If the crockery business dried out, Haider knew which way to turn his talent.

Today, he gets regular orders from passing officers and military suppliers and contractors. The larger animal figures take up to a month or more to produce but can fetch him Rs 20,000. Meanwhile, with the flow of Aga Khan Foundation employees coming into the area, Haider has found a small market for his traditional crockery as well. Nevertheless, with profound sadness in his voice, he says things could have been better if only this backwater of Baltistan had some tourist traffic.

If that were ever to occur, he would get an electric-powered lathe to work the harder variety of soapstone with considerably greater output. But the slackness of turnover as well as paucity of funds prevents him from getting the lathe for he is uncertain of the length of time it will take for him to simply recover his investment.

According to Haider, he and his brother worked among elderly men some three decades ago. Today, none of them is alive. And Haider and his brother, 10 years his senior, are the last practitioners of the ancient craft. None of the brothers’ children are interested in learning the art and prefer instead to work outside Baltistan. And now, in the evening of his life, Haider knows that after him the art will be a thing of the past.

With stoic resolve, Haider says he has no difficulties. God has been kind to him and will likely be calling him back soon. But only when he has completed the work he has in hand will he go in peace. And with him the craft too will die. ‘So be it,’ he says without emotion.