Part travelogue, part history, part environmental and cultural cri de coeur, Alice Albinia’s Empires Of The Indus: The Story Of A River is an audacious book, recounting her travels on and near the Indus River, from its mouth near Karachi at the Arabian Sea, 2,000 miles up into the Tibetan Plateau to its headwaters. As she travels upriver, Albinia structures the book so that she travels back in time, through 5,000+ years of human history.
In the English language at least, any 21st (or 20th) century book with a Western protagonist traveling up a foreign river exists in the long imperialist shadow cast by Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, and Empires Of The Indus, despite Albinia’s best efforts, is unable to escape completely from Conrad’s influence.
First and foremost, Albinia is captivated by the majestic scope and trans-civilizational grandeur of the Indus:
“Its merchants traded with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. A Persian emperor mapped it in the sixth century BCE. The Buddha lived beside it during previous incarnations. Greek kings and Afghan sultans waded across it with their armies. The founder of Sikhism was enlightened while bathing in a tributary. and the British invaded it by gunboat, colonized it for one hundred years, and the severed it from India. The Indus was part of Indians’ lives—until 1947.
The very name of India comes from the river. The ancient Sanskrit speakers called the Indus ‘Sindhu’; the Persians changed the name to ‘Hindu’; and the Greeks dropped the ‘h’ altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates—India, Hindu, Indies. From the time that Alexander the Great’s historians wrote about the Indus valley, spinning exotic tales of indomitable Indika, India and its river tantalized the Western imagination.” (pp. xv – xvi)
It’s a history and a scale that dwarfs that of Albinia’s native England.
Albinia begins Empires Of The Indus geographically in Karachi and historically with the creation of Pakistan in 1947. She then travels upriver through Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and China to the river’s source in Tibet, while simultaneously taking the reader back chronologically through 3,500 years of human civilizations along its banks, and ultimately to the Neolithic (Stone Age) Era and beyond, to the river’s origins 50 million years ago.
Albinia is a bold and insightful traveler, guide, storyteller, environmentalist and historian. Here are some of the things I want to remember from Empires Of The Indus and the people and civilizations it spans:
The “Other” Slave Trade: “The people of the lower Indus valley were trading with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago and with Africa since at least the time of Pliny (in the first century CE). The slave trade itself was age-old within Africa; but it was Arabs who…first developed the trade out of the country. —snip— Although the East African slave trade was vicious and brutal, even in the cruel nineteenth century it appears not to have reached the extremes of the Christian-run Atlantic trade from West Africa to the Americas. One reason for this may have been that sellers and buyers were Muslim. —snip— Slaves were not just a silent underclass, as in ancient Greece or the Americas, but often became an elite, with responsibility as soldiers, advisers or generals, and power over free persons.” (p. 55)
Shah Inayat, Sufism & The Death of Land Reform in Sindh: An 18th century Sufi mystic, scholar and preacher, “the hero, then, not only of every anti-feudal protest but also of a thoroughly anti-fundamentalist kind of Sindhi Islam, Shah Inayat has come to embody Sindh’s distinct brand of nationalism—politically socialist and religiously syncretic.” (p. 83)
Guru Nanak, Sikhism & Punjabi Nationalism: At Partition, most Sikhs moved to the Indian side of the border; but Sikh founder, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), had been born near Lahore, and several important Sikh shrines remain in Pakistan, on or near the Indus River. A religious seeker, “traveling cured Nanak of attachment to religious frippery. He had visited all the important pilgrimage places of Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, and rejected them all…. He did not believe in asceticism—his disciples were supposed to participate fully in the world, while leaving time in the early morning and evening for meditation and prayers. He did not believe in reincarnation, avatars or caste…. He criticized the decadent ruling powers.” (p. 115) —snip—
“Guru Nanak made it his mission to give his people something to live for. He rejected the caste-bound Brahmins as ‘butchers’ and the Muslim kings as Satanic exploiters, and centred his sect around Punjabi peasant identity. He wrote all his poetry in Punjabi, and while this has inhibited the spread of Sikhism outside the Punjab, it also defined the community and fostered its sense of nationalism.” (p. 116)
Sultan Mahmud (971-1030) of Ghazni & the Islamic Conquest of India: Over a 30 year period, Sultan Mahmud and his armies 17 times marched down out of the mountains of modern-day Afghanistan and crossed east of the Indus River on wars of jihad and conquest, establishing a permanent (and frequently dominant) Islamic presence across much of the northern part of the subcontinent. “India made Sultan Mahmud’s career. The country was rich. The people were Hindus, so plunder and murder could be legitimized as jihad against the polytheist infidel. Mahmud made a speciality of looting Indian towns with massive temples, and he always (except when his baggage was washed away in the Indus) returned laden with booty.” (p. 135)
Buddha on the Silk Road & Beyond: “…(W)hile it was in eastern India that the Buddha was born, preached and reached Nirvana in the fifth century BCE, it was in the middle Indus valley, three hundred years after his death, that a second Buddhist holy land was established.” (p. 159) For the next millennium, Buddhism thrived along the Silk Road throughout northwestern India, extending to modern-day Afghanistan. “…(I)n northwestern India, along the banks of the Indus, the two (Islam & Buddhism) came into prolonged contact with each other, and it is undeniable that certain features of the older philosophy influenced the way the younger developed locally….. Even the much-maligned Muslim institution of the madrassah may have its roots in the Buddhist monastery. Both are institutions of intense religious learning, sustained by charity; for centuries now in Swat, small cliques of religious-minded men and women have sequestered themselves from the world to devote themselves to prayer, the learning of sacred texts and the accumulation of merit in the next life.” (p. 158) The empire of Buddhism’s greatest (or at least, most powerful) convert, Ashoka (d. 232 BCE), extended over a greater territory than the British Raj, reaching (at its peak in the 3rd century BCE) across all of South Asia except for its southernmost tip.
Alexander the Great (356 – 323 BCE) Reaches his Limits: One of history’s great propagandists (and one of its great generals), Alexander did not come “within a step” of conquering India. “In fact Plutarch’s story was a willful exaggeration of Alexander’s prowess…. The string of cities called Alexandria which he had founded in eastern Persia and western India were washed away in the region’s many rivers or repossessed by the locals…. So imperceptible was Alexander’s impression upon India that none of the residents thought his visit worth recording in such literature as survives.” (p. 177)
Instead, it was Alexander’s mythic status as a romantic, conquering hero that, oddly, “provided a heroic model for medieval Christian kings and knights…(while) Muslims also began to eulogize Alexander as a hero…. And thus even now in northern Pakistan—in the very place where Alexander forded the Indus, worshipped it as a god, and killed the hill tribes—modern-day Pashtuns still claim him as their forebear.” (p. 215)
Aryans, The Rig Veda & the Kalash (1,200 BCE): The further up the Indus Albinia travels, the more mountainous and rural the geography becomes, and the more speculative the history becomes, if for no other reason than the sheer lack of written evidence. As one example, the people who composed (orally) the Rig Veda, Hinduism’s most ancient and inscrutable religious texts, most likely lived for hundreds or thousands of years in what is now Khyber-Pahktunkhwa Province (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) of Pakistan. Most of them moved (as did the Rig Veda) as early as 3,000 years ago into what is now north-central India; though some of their descendants may remain as the Kalash, a Dardic indigenous people who’ve maintained their own distinct, polytheistic culture ever since. In the historically and culturally fraught debate over Aryans and their origins, there’s a body of evidence that suggest they originate somewhere in this wild, beautiful, mountainous region. Albinia concludes “…what is probable, is that the prehistoric grave-builders, horse-eating horse riders, rock carvers, stone-circle makers, and Rig Veda singers meandered through the same dramatic landscape of northern Pakistan; and for a moment in history all were bound together, by their deep, primeval regard for this river and its landscape.” (p. 242)
Alluvial Cities (2,600 BCE): Over a millennium earlier, what archaeologists call the Indus Valley Civilization—a remarkably egalitarian and centralized society—prospered along the river in “…what were probably the world’s first planned cities. Each of the hundreds of towns and cities along the banks of the river were identical, as if the Indus Valley Civilization was conceptualized, planned and constructed according to one model.
It was a linear empire which exploited the power of the river to produce enough grain to feed cities, organize urban society, and trade with foreign lands. Among the cities’ debris, archaeologists found small seals depicting wooden ships, a miniature sculpture of a dancing girl, and scented coffins made of cedar and rosewood. The Indus cities were semi-industrialized, manufacturing mass-produced clay pots, stone weights and copper beads. They were trading with Mesopotamia, using the river to irrigate vast cotton-growing projects, and importing semi-precious stones from Afghanistan, conch shells from the Arabian Sea, fish from Lake Manchar and cedarwood from the Himalayas.
Unlike Egypt with its pyramids, or Mesopotamia with its temples, their biggest structures were not symbols of monarchical tyranny or priestly power, but civic buildings such as public baths and grain stores.” (p. 243-44)
Huntress Of The Lithic (Stone Age): “The very far north of India, from Kashmir to Ladakh, has been renowned since antiquity for the freedom of its women. The ancient Sanskrit-speakers called this area ‘Strirajya‘: Government by Women.” (p. 261)
Until the mid-20th century fraternal polyandry was legal in Ladakh and Tibet, and it’s still practiced today. “The reason is partly cultural, and partly to do with economic prudence: polyandry keeps the birth rate down, avoids inheritance issues and lessens the pressure on scarce resources. In contrast to the situation among Hindu and Muslim families in India and Pakistan, where properties are subdivided among the new children of each generation, in polyandrous families brothers share a wife, so population does not increase and landholdings remain entire. With multiple fathers contributing to the well-being of their joint children, women also benefit. In marked contrast to other places in the Indus valley, the women of Ladakh are said to be ‘powerful’ and ‘uninhibited’ with a ‘strong position’ in society.” (p. 264) Stone carvings in the region dating back as much as 20,000 years similarly show powerful female figures, tantalizing evidence of the possible persistence of a cohesive culture that has endured through millennia of civilizations and conquests.
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