Quiet flows the Indus

Empires of the Indus: The story of a river
Alice Albinia
John Murray
388 pages
Rs550

In the dull old Doordarshan days, one song that made our black and white TV sets come alive was the vivacious, Bangladeshi singer, Runa Laila’s rendition of Duma dum mast Qalandar. Unknowingly, in Empires of the Indus, Alice Albinia traces the origin of that popular song while writing about the saints and songsters who drew inspiration from the eponymous river. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a maverick 13th-century saint, was one of them. Albinia relates how even today, in Qalandar’s shrine in Sind, Pakistan, women dance in a frenzied, uninhibited manner, expending pent-up energy till they collapse, exhausted. Clearly, it is a song that transcends artificially-created, political animosities. Just like the Indus which nurtures people from three warring states.

Fascinated, Albinia undertakes a journey along the river, starting at its shrinking delta, near Karachi, (the delta, alas, no longer has sweet water flowing into it because of large dams built on its upper stretches as per the recommendations of World Bank experts with vested interests), and travelling upstream right up to its source in Tibet; covering, in the process, more than 5000 years of rich cultural heritage, germinating from the Indus’ life-sustaining force. What emerges from her amazing expedition is an absorbing account of a terrain that includes not just Pakistan, Kashmir and Tibet but even the lands from where marauding invaders like Mahmud of Ghazni and Alexander swooped down, greedy for the wealth that lay along its banks. Minute details of how people lived through millennia of cross-pollination make this a compelling read.

While Sindhis in India will find much to identify with the early chapters that focus on Sind, with references to Latif’s Risalo (collection of poems), Jhule Lal (the god of water) and palla fish, Sikhs will enjoy reading about the founder of their religion, Guru Nanak, who was born in Talwandi, now called Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. Visiting Nankana Sahib four and a half centuries after his birth, Albinia finds six different gurdwaras commemorating significant moments of his unusual childhood. Ironically, there are no Sikhs in the Pakistan army (though its roots lie in Sikh martial tradition). “There are still Pakistanis for whom the power of the Indus and the power of Islam coexist,” Albinia discovers when she witnesses a woman collecting water from the river to cure her sick child, after immersing the Koran in the Indus. The basis of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, was of course also written around the Indus.

Sadly, all traces of Buddhism, which spread till Afghanistan largely through emperor Ashoka’s stone edicts and by traders and monks along the Silk Route, seem obliterated today. (Albinia was fortunate to see a Maitreya Buddha before it was destroyed in 2007, by the Taliban.)     

Speaking fluent Urdu, blending in with local customs, sometimes dressed in florid salwar-kameezes, sometimes in white, shuttlecock-like burqas, the doughty British writer gets privy to much that is under wraps — war zones, Al-Qaeda-infested towns, hujras where older men take younger boyfriends. Her book can be read as a colourful travelogue or history brought alive. From the well-baked bricks of Mohenjodaro to the squalor of modern-day Karachi, from the proud Aryans to the impoverished boatmen of the murky Indus delta — Albinia’s canvas is vast and enriched with astounding details.

But the concluding chapter is a disappointing anti-climax. After braving all the odds of weather, terrain, religious fanaticism and military might, when Albinia finally reaches the source of the pre-historic river, she is not sure if it is indeed the source. The guide book she refers to clearly shows the Indus running through the Tibetan town of Senge Khabab (Tibetan name for the source), but what she finds here instead of water are a blue boot, a tyre and Chinese instant-noodle packets. “They cut the river two months ago,” a kind Tibetan policeman explains to her. And to her utmost dismay, she comes across a massive, concrete, Chinese-built dam, rising from the riverbed, corroborating what he says. Not prepared to give up, Albinia continues to trek through the mountains, with an alcoholic as a guide, until she comes upon what she resignedly accepts as the real source: ‘the lion’s mouth’, where water bubbles up from the mossy earth.

Instead of jubilation, Albinia is overcome with sadness as she realises that the river, which had been flowing for millions of years before humans even saw it, was “slipping away through our fingers, dammed to disappearance”. Starting at an unimpressive source and ending in a trickle, how long will it take before it is entirely spent because of mankind’s folly, she wonders, tears streaming down her cheeks. Tragically, the story of the Indus could well be the fate of many other rivers that nature has been kind enough to bestow on the subcontinent.

Alpana Chowdhury is an author and freelance journalist