The indus saga, p.5
The Indus Saga, page 5
The literate classes of Indus were thus weaned from their own local languages. The medium of instruction being Urdu or English, there has been no need to learn the vernacular. This neglect has been the most marked in the Punjab. Although the Pathans, the Sindhis and the Baloch fared much better, at least four generations of Punjabis could therefore imbibe only a vague knowledge of Abdullah Bhatti (derived almost entirely from an inaccurate but popular film of that name). They have, perhaps, no knowledge whatsoever of such other Punjabi folk and resistance heroes as Sarang, Said, Dilawar, Ahmed Khan Kharal and Bhagat Singh; nor of the deities and beliefs of their predecessor Indus person. Indra and the Vedas, Krishna and the Mahabharata are to be shunned as if they would pollute the minds of the youth; as if Islamic faith is itself vulnerable to such influences with which it has coexisted for centuries and not been overcome. Yet these deities and beliefs, howsoever incredible they may be to the Muslim mind, are facts forming a part of Indus history. In a land beginning only a few miles from the eastern tributaries of the Indus, hundreds of millions of people, most of them peaceable and ordinary, live and continue to believe in these ‘facts’ in the same manner as the Indus people continue to adhere to the truths inherent in their Islamic beliefs.
Excision from one’s own history is a denial of a part of one’s own existence. To refuse to understand the beliefs of others is to refuse to coexist. There are many accounts of the history of the Punjab in the Punjabi language that illustrate the resistance put up by the Khattars, Ghebas, Gakkhars, the Gondals, the Warraich, the Bhattis and the other tribes of the Punjab. But very few school children are aware of the heroism of their own ancestors. Najabat’s moving verses, for instance, describe many a battle that the Muslim invader, Nadir Shah, had to fight in Indus on his way to Delhi.31 They depict the stoic and brave Indus resistance. Yet Najabat’s intense poetry is not a part of the syllabus of any school in Pakistan, not even in the Punjab. Such contemporaneous ballads are the only authentic, though stylized, accounts of the events that they report. Were these literary expressions included in the syllabus of the history of the Indus region (Pakistan), or had ‘Punjabi’ as a language even been a single compulsory subject in the schools in the Punjab itself, no one would accept the myth that Indus has been a region inhabited by a spineless race that was content to welcome invaders and facilitate their passage to Delhi. It is by the calculated smothering of nationalism and by a deliberately-induced alienation from the vernacular languages that all the Indus heroes of the past have been buried.
When an attempt is made to ‘demythologize’ history, other essential questions arise. Is the Indus person a liberal or a fundamentalist? Has Indus resolved the issue of the relationship between the state and the citizen? If so, how? If not, why not? What is the status of woman in Indus society? Answers to these and several other questions can help in discovering the inherent character of the Indus person and the Indus society. These questions and their answers can thus lead to the piecing together of the Indus person. These should, therefore, contribute to the understanding of the real impulse of the Indus region to be independent of India, and the objective basis of the modern-day state of Pakistan.
In attempting to piece together the Indus person, however, it is necessary not merely to define his own attributes. It is also essential to describe how he is different from others. The features and attributes broadly common to all Indus persons, inter se, would make them a distinct nation only if these were also dissimilar to the features and attributes of other people, at least other people with whom they had been interacting. In ‘assembling’ the Indus person of today (the Pakistani) it is necessary, therefore, not merely to show the distinctness of Indus as a geographical region, it is also imperative to address the question how the Indus person is different from the European ruler whose governance he rejected and from the Indian with whom he was not prepared to coexist in one single state encompassing the entire subcontinent.
XII. From Pataliputra to Pakistan
Pataliputra, in ancient times, was a great and prosperous city. It lay along the banks of the Ganges sprawling over no less than nine miles at the site of present-day Patna. Near it, the famed university of Nalanda attracted students and scholars from all parts of the known world. Buddha had taught in this region. From the heart of Pataliputra, the Mauryan king Ashok ruled an empire more vast than that of Aurangzeb. His writ extended to all parts of India and Indus. Ashok’s edicts, etched indelibly for the benefit of posterity upon granite and rock, touch the southern-most tip of India and stand today beyond the Suleman Range in the north in the heart of the Hindu Kush.
Ashok’s reign provides some corroboration to those who believe in the ‘oneness’ of the entire subcontinent. But in all the centuries from Pataliputra to Pakistan, the Indus region has maintained a rare individuality and distinctness. The Indus state is thus a primordial and natural state with its roots in prehistory. It is no freak or accident of recent circumstances, nor the product of any ‘divide and rule’ policy of alien rulers. In other words, and regardless of the uncertainties of history and of geopolitical diplomacy and conflict, there always has been and always will be a Pakistan.
1. During these travels, punctuated with adventures, Arjun, one of the five Pandava brothers, won the hand of the fair princess Draupadi in a ’swayamvara.’ To avoid strife among the brothers, however, he is said to have allowed her to become the joint wife of all five! Swayamvara is a ceremony in which a princess is allowed to choose her husband from among the assembled suitors.
2. A. L. Basham: The Wonder That Was India (1959) 39, 408.
3. With 90,000 stanzas perhaps the longest poem ever written. See Basham, ibid., 407, and Romila Thapar: A History of India, vol 1 (Penguin, 1979). For easy access to the essence of the ‘Mahabharata’ as a moral and philosphical tale, see William Buck: Mahabharata (1979).
4. Founder of the Advaita Vedanta , the dominant philosophical outlook of contemporary Hinduism. See Nehru, Discovery, 196.
5. Perhaps the most prominent modern exponent of the Yoga and the Vedanta. See Nehru, ibid., 194, 356.
6. Nehru, ibid., 358.
7. Jean Fairley: The Lion River, The Indus (1993).
8. As in the Nile, the Thames, the Rhine.
9. The term is applied to the three empires that encompassed the entire subcontinent spanning Indus and India. The concept of the universal state based on slavery, with its high-point in the Mauryan empire, had itself sown the seeds of the feudal order many centuries earlier. The two subsequent ‘universal states’ encompassing the entire subcontinent, would, in turn, be the high points, respectively, of feudalism (the Mughal Empire), and of imperial capitalism (the British Empire). See also chapters 5, 13 and 23.
10. Mani Shankar Aiyar: Pakistan Papers (1994). Aiyar does raise some important questions regarding Pakistan’s identity crisis which will be addressed in this book, though without specific reference to his propositions.
11. So much so that Prime Minister Clement Attlee opposed the Pakistan concept for the reason, among others, that it would consist of areas that lie across the tracks of the historical and traditional routes into India. See Ayesha Jalal: The Sole Spokesman (1992) 185.
12. The Indian scholars’ discomfort with Pakistan and their assumption that it remains an aberration continues to impede rational analysis even by the most discerning amongst them. Take, for instance, such blithe phrases adopted by none other than Mani Shankar Aiyar, a perspicacious and discerning diplomat-politician, as: ‘[Pakistan] was a country born almost before it was conceived’, and: ‘In Pakistan’s history and culture, it was impossible to draw the line where India ended and Pakistan began. And in its geography, Pakistan was the most monstrous concoction the world had known, a tragicomic parody on the old adage that “a camel is a horse put together by a committee”.’ Aiyar, Pakistan Papers, 3 and 5. How, incidentally, would Aiyar describe the geography of say, Norway? Or even of India itself?
13. Kosambi seems to be one of the very few Indian historians to recognize the essential divisions, and who seems sympathetic to the sensibilities of other nations when, in an early part (34) of Culture and Civilization (1977) he points out: ‘Hereafter, India is taken as a geographical unit also including Pakistan with a part of Afghanistan and at times of Burma. No political claims or motives should be imputed to this extension.’
14. Central Asia comprises what is essentially known as Mawara-un-Nahar (meaning that which is on the other side of the river). It is thus the valley of Zarafshan, on the other side of the Amu Darya (the Oxus), the river that has for centuries watered the fields of Bukhara and Samarkand. This land has also been called Transoxiana.
15. Time magazine’s James Walsh in a recent cover article described this syndrome thus: ‘A country founded in 1947 as a haven for British India’s Muslims still identifies itself basically as the un-India - or, perhaps, the un-Hindustan.’ Time: 17 April 1995.
16. This theory goes to the point where the official Pakistan television network relays, even in its daily domestic transmission, news in Arabic which very few Pakistanis can understand. It is reflected in what the young civil servant stated in his formal address of welcome at the award distribution ceremony, in April 1995, at the prestigious Civil Services’ Academy in Lahore after two years training and education at the institution: ‘We trace our origin to, and draw our inspiration from the Brahminabad settlement, made by Muhammad bin Qasim, which amalgamated the Islamic ideal and indigenous need. Twelve centuries look upon us from across the Arabian Sea and stand to judge us.’ I was present on the occasion and obtained a copy of the unpublished speech from the learned speaker.
17. See S. Akhtar Imam’s article entitled ‘Cultural Relations Between Sind and Arabia’, in Sind Through the Centuries (1981) 223.
18. See Thapar: A History of India, vol I , 107, and also chapter 7, section III below. Even when the Portuguese discoverer, Vasco da Gama, sailed to India in 1498, he took advantage of these mid-ocean winds to cross the Indian Ocean from Mombasa to Calicut, in southern India, although he was guided also by the recently invented mariner’s compass. See Joseph E. Schwartzberg: A Historical Atlas of South Asia (1992) 49.
19. See chapter 9 below.
20. The News (Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi: every Friday between 13 August 1993 and 24 December 1993).
21. Kosambi, Culture and Civilization.
22. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, in one of his major speeches as a parliamentarian, described Bhagat Singh and his comrades as political prisoners, and passionately defended their rights. See chapter 31, Section IV.
23. M. Mujeeb: The Indian Muslims, 24.
24. K. K.Aziz: The Pakistani Historian (1993) xi.
25. K. K. Aziz: The Murder of History (1993).
26. Literally ‘The Great Leader’, used by Pakistanis for the founder of the state, Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah. See chapters 29-32 below.
27. In fact, until William Moorcroft, the Veterinary Surgeon to the Bengal Army and Inspector of Military Studs himself surveyed the sources of the two great tributaries in 1811, it was generally believed that both had a common source in the Tibetan lake Manasarowar. See Michael Edwardes: Playing the Great Game (1975).
28. Some countries, like Pakistan, are passing through one such slow transition from the feudal to the capitalist order today.
29. See, in particular, chapter 9, section III below.
30. Aiyar, Pakistan Papers, 8.
31. See chapter 14, section III.
1
The Priests of Prehistory
I. Burnt brick
Before the advent of the Aryans, (perhaps the first and earliest series of mass migrations into Indus and northern India, spanning several centuries), Indus had already flowered into a highly developed civilized system, spread over half a million square miles, and had then died, burying its glory under massive mounds of sand. The excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa bear ample testimony to the mature refinement of that society.1 The use of cotton for textiles, the commodious houses, the provision of ample public conveniences like public baths and an excellent drainage system, indicate that these people were, in many ways, far ahead of their contemporary civilizations in Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Cultural maturity and refinement is to be found in the models of rams, dogs and other animals as also in the supple modelling of the statuettes found in these places.
The fact that the cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa had definite trade links with their western contemporaries is significant to the present discourse. The Indus Valley manufactures reached the markets of the Tigris (Dajla) and the Euphrates (Farat). The urban civilization had a rich merchant class, and these trade links were fully exploited and busily pursued, resulting in a fair exchange of cultural and material influence. While manufactures were exported, imports included such diverse items as Sumerian devices in art and Mesopotamian (Iraqi) toiletries. These were then copied by the Indus artisans. The discovery of the Indus seals and other artefacts in Iraqi excavations indicates that there must have been busy settlements of Indus traders in Mesopotamian cities even in those prehistoric times.2
The trade route followed the Indus to the sea and then went along the coast of the Persian Gulf to Mesopotamia. Although all shipping was coastal, the method of navigation employed was quite ingenious. If the ship lost sight of land, the sailors let a crow fly and then followed it as it took the shortest route to the nearest coast.3
The existence of a city implies the existence of a class structure in society. Urban civilizations of antiquity were built upon the support of a hinterland of agriculture, producing a sufficient surplus to support the urban elite. Some people are engaged in the process of the production of the food surplus which a more organized minority expropriates and then founds urban settlements with a comparatively greater number of civic amenities. The Indus cities spell the development of a class based society and the rule of the urban elite over the agrarian hinterland.
How did the civilization come about in the first place? What provided the impetus to its growth? What material advance facilitated the development of fairly large and prosperous urban centres in the Indus region? What technological advantage did these people have over their predecessors? There can only be speculation. In a flat, alluvial plain, lacking in supplies of stone, the invention of the burnt brick may have been the crucial technological step. It must certainly have made flood control more efficient in a region in which seasonal floods, more than any other factor, would otherwise have impeded the establishment of large settlements maturing into cities, on or close to river-banks.
A peculiar circumstance of the Mohenjodaro brick is its size. At 7 x 14 x 28 cm, it is almost the same size and proportion as the standard brick of today. It is evident that the Indus person had discovered quite early the advantage of this particular size. It fitted in the span of a man’s palm, enabling him to hold a brick in one hand and a tool in the other.4 Since the size of the human hand appears to have changed only slightly in the intervening millenia, the size of the brick has remained almost constant.
II. Priests or kings
The decline of the Indus civilization is attributed to many factors. Among these are counted the change of the courses of the rivers Indus and Ravi, the alteration of the monsoons, the breaking up of trade ties with the civilizations of western Asia on account of the incursions of the barbarian tribes. It is also likely that a serious internal crisis, such as the expansion of slavery beyond the economically optimum, or the increasing exploitation of the rural communities by the highly developed and well-administered Indus cities impoverished their agrarian base. Invading races may have overrun these cities, destroying their economies and decimating their population. Or natural calamities such as earthquakes, salination of the soil or the encroachment of the Rajasthan desert took their toll.5 There are other areas of speculation with respect to the specific, overwhelming and merciless challenges that the civilization was unable to confront.
Irrespective of the exact nature of the challenge and the intensity of its onslaught, the amount of damage an extraneous challenge can do to a civilization is also dependent upon the inner capacity of that civilization to withstand or repulse it. If it has itself become rotten to the core, it is not able to resist the threat. This inherent cancer is itself the primary cause of the decline of a civilization. Extraneous events only contribute to the process as catalysts that trigger off the chain reaction of circumstances that end in its demise. A dead tree will be felled by the gentlest breeze that could have done no harm to a healthy one. The real task, therefore, is to determine the inner ailment of the Indus civilization. Therein may lie the key to its decline and demise. And this more essential cause can perhaps be deduced from a set of facts that are generally accepted.
First, until their discovery in 1925, there was no discernible evidence of the Indus cities. They had flourished and vanished without successors or trace. There was a clear gap of at least five hundred to six hundred years between the disappearance of the Indus cities and the rise of another network of smaller Indus cities in this area some 3,000 years ago.6
Second, despite some dispersal of small settlements, there do not appear to have been very many pre-eminent cities. Perhaps there were only two, Harappa and Mohenjodaro,7 in a vast and endless river basin.8 The absence of a large network of cities indicates that there was an almost lethargic indifference to growth.
Third, there is no evidence in the Indus cities of any central palace or fortress, though Harappa does seem to have been mildly fortified.9 Nor do the ruins include any colossal monument to the glory of a king in the manner in which the pyramids stand testimony to the power and authority of the pharoahs. There were, however, a large number of equally resplendent villas, indicating the existence of a large and rich ruling class of merchants. The absence of a central palace and the opulent lifestyle of the merchants indicates the low level of taxation, and also the absence of any significant coercive potential of any single central authority. All these facts indicate the absence of a dynastic monarchy.
