The Indus Saga
About the book
The Indus region, comprising the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent (now Pakistan), has always had its distinct identity - racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. In the last five thousand years, this region has been a part of India, politically, for only five hundred years. Pakistan, then, is no ‘artificial’ state conjured up by the disaffected Muslim elite of British India.
Aitzaz Ahsan surveys the history of Indus - as he refers to this region - right from the time of the Harappan civilization to the era of the British Raj, concluding with independence and the creation of Pakistan. Ahsan’s message is aimed both at Indians still nostalgic about ‘undivided’ India and their Pakistani compatriots who narrowly tend to define their identity by their ‘un-Indianness’.
About the author
Aitzaz Ahsan comes from a background steeped in politics, being the third generation from his family to serve as an elected member of a legislative assembly. He is a member of the Pakistan People’s Party and has served as the minister of law, justice, interior and education in the federal government between 1988 and 1993. Elected to the senate of Pakistan in 1994, he was, successively, the leader of the House and the leader of the Opposition between the years 1996 and 1999.
After his early education at Aitchison College and the Government College in Lahore, he studied law at Cambridge and was called to the bar at Grays’ Inn in 1967. He is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is also an indefatigable human rights activist and a founder vice-president of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. He has been incarcerated under arbitrary detention laws many times by military and authoritarian regimes. During one such prolonged detention, he wrote The Indus Saga.
ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2015
First published in Pakistan by Oxford University Press in 1996
First published in
India in 2005 by
The Lotus Collection
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Dedicated to my parents
Mohammad Ahsan (Alig.)
and
Rashida Ahsan
from whom, early in my life,
I learnt to worship my soil
and
to love its people
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part One: The Two Regions 2000 BC to AD 1800
Introduction
1 The Priests of Prehistory
2 The Man on Horseback
3 Iron, Krishna and Buddha Destroy the Tribe
4 Porus: An Indus Version
5 Pax Mauryana: The First Universal State
6 The Oxus and the Indus
7 The Romance of Raja Rasalu
8 Feudalization and the First Feudal State
9 An Arab Visitor
10 More Men on Horseback
11 The Second Feudal State
12 Turbulent North, Peaceful South and Panipat
13 The Second Universal State
14 Resistance, Opportunism and Consumerism
15 Bhakti, Nanak and the Sufis
Part Two: The Two Worlds AD 1600 to AD 1897
Introduction
16 The Europe that Came to India
17 The India that Awaited Europe
18 Uneasy Heads on the Peacock Throne
19 Tombs, Ostentation and Land Tenure
20 Sea Power and Military Tactics
21 The Sikhs and the Subsidiary States
22 1857
23 The Third Universal State
Part Three: The Two Nations AD 1757 to AD 1947
Introduction
24 The Character of the Hindu Muslim Divide
25 Sonar Bangla
26 The Plunder
27 The Famine and Settlement
28 The Economic Divide
29 Whither the Muslims?
30 The Sons of the Indus Fight
31 Parting of the Ways
32 Towards Partition
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Had M.J. Akbar not visited Pakistan to witness the Indo-Pak cricket series in 2004, this edition of The Indus Saga would not have been possible. And had Pramod Kapoor not come here a few months later, it would never have been in the reader’s hands today. Both encouraged me and helped take the project forward.
Of course my wife, Bushra, has always been a source of strength and inspiration, and our children, Saman, Ali and Zaynab, have encouraged me to indulge my fancies in pursuits other than my profession of law and my commitment to politics.
Needless to say, I alone remain responsible for all the flaws and faults in the analysis and conclusions contained in the book.
Preface
On 4 June 2005, Lal Krishna Advani visited the mausoleum of the founder of Pakistan in Karachi. In the visitors’ book he inscribed the following words: ‘The Indian freedom struggle describes Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah (as) an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His address to the first constituent assembly of Pakistan in August 1947 is a classic, forceful espousal of a secular state in which every citizen should be free to pursue his own religion. The state shall make no distinction between one and another citizen on the ground of faith. My respectful homage to this great man.’
The inscription raised a storm on both sides of the Indo-Pak divide. On the Pakistani side there was outrage on why the vision of Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam, had been described as secular. On the Indian side extremists took umbrage at why Jinnah, the ‘communalist’ had been referred to as a secularist. Both sides objected to the secular credentials attributed to Barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah. But, oddly, both attributed different meanings to the same word: secular.
On the Pakistani side the word ‘secular’ is a slur. To a large body of Pakistanis a secular state means one that is against religion: a state at war with religion, any religion; a state that prohibits the practice of religion. How could Pakistan, an ‘Islamic’ state, have been conceived as a secular state?
On the Indian side, no one who considered the Muslims as a separate ‘nation’ could have been described as secular. Nor could a state conceived by such a one be considered a secular state. To be secular, a state had itself to be neutral among faiths and have none of its own.
Jinnah was misunderstood on both sides of the border. So, for once, was Advani. But that was only natural because over the last six decades neither side has really understood, or even truly tried to understand, the other. Leaders, intelligence agencies, military establishments and even the media on both sides have spent long years demonizing each other. Even the film industry came on board with mega blockbusters devoted to proving the neighbour as a sworn and treacherous enemy.
And each side had ample
self-created justification to demonize the other.
Two generations of Pakistanis have been told that their very identity was their ‘un-Indianness’: banish this thought from the mind and Pakistan will collapse. Moreover, the Pakistani is Muslim and the Indian is Hindu. Period. That alone was the rationale of the partition of the subcontinent. But even if valid, being ‘un-Indian’ is a manifestly incomplete answer to any question about identity. It only purports to state what the Pakistani is not. It does not address the issue as to what indeed he is. And incomplete answers always raise fresh questions. The Pakistani does not necessarily have to be an Indian, but he has to be somebody. Who is that somebody? Moreover the smug answer ascribing a singular role in the Partition to the differences between Hindus and Muslims fails to deal with the fact that the number of Muslims in India is greater than the population of Pakistan.
The extremists in the Sangh Parivar who unsuccessfully pushed Advani to resign as the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party are equally off the mark about the Indo-Pak divide. But they are not alone. Even the official reaction of the Congress party, was one of surprise and disappointment at Advani’s attributing secular credentials to Jinnah. In India, the opinion has almost unanimously been that Jinnah was a ‘communalist’ and hence cannot be described as secular. Moreover Jinnah cannot be forgiven the sacrilege of having divided the revered and indivisible Akhand Bharat. And if the Partition is justified on the basis of a distinct regional identity and not by religion alone, then other regions of India might also use that argument to achieve their separatist aims. The indivisibility of India had to be raised to the level of a romantic idea and the creation of Pakistan shown as an unnatural aberration.
The romance of the subcontinent’s indivisible unity is, however, neither new nor exclusive to the Sangh Parivar. It was the very brief that Congress had pursued in the period that led up to the Partition. And it had been most competently articulated by none other than India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nehru was one of that rare breed of political leaders who did not depend only upon the spoken word. And his writings are by no means insubstantial. Nehru could take an overview of the broad movements of world history. Glimpses of World History, which consists of a series of letters he wrote to his daughter Indira from his prison cell, gives us an idea of the breadth of his vision. In it he has analysed, with competence and learning, such diverse subjects as the Greek city-states, the village republics of ancient India, the rise of the European cities, the discovery of the sea routes, the Malaysian empires of Madjapahit and Malacca, autocracy in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, Ireland’s fight for a republic and the Great Depression. In many more ways than Gandhi, Nehru was India’s ideologue.
Nehru’s magnum opus, however, remains The Discovery of India. In the introduction to the book, Nehru wrote of his travels, ‘from the Khyber Pass in the far north-west to Kanya Kumari or Cape Comorin in the distant south.’ Where ever he went, Nehru found that ‘though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was the tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us. The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me: it was an emotional experience, which overpowered me. The essential unity had been so powerful that no political division, no disaster or catastrophe, had been able to overcome it.’
Six decades on, there is hardly an Indian, even the most accommodating and rational, who does not privately resent the partition in 1947. Even the most congenial Indian, Hindu and Muslim, will say with love and affection, ‘how much better it might have been if ...’ The hardliners continue to nurse the injury caused to their pride by the Partition. The paranoids in Pakistan have always found in this sentiment an Indian desire to undo it all. And they have thus relentlessly nurtured and disseminated a ‘fragility syndrome’ through the press and media.
The abiding paranoia this fragility syndrome has resulted in is implicit in the recent observation by none other than Pakistan’s former ambassador to India and its erstwhile foreign secretary, Humayun Khan, that, ‘the most powerful elements in Pakistan ... still believe that India’s primary aim is the undoing of Pakistan.’1 In an interview, senior Pakistani analyst M.B. Naqvi said, ‘Notwithstanding the fact that India is a democracy, the guiding spirit behind Indian nationalism has always remained aggressive, bordering on militancy.’2 And how the injury to their pride still rankles is evident from the intensity of the reaction of extremists in India to what Advani wrote in the visitors’ book at the mausoleum of the founder of Pakistan. Thus the continuing race to develop weapons of mass destruction and efficient delivery systems. Pokhran and Prithvi find their responses in Chagai and Ghori. Mutual destruction is assuredly within the competence of the two great nations of South Asia supporting the largest body of people below the poverty line in the world.
Yet the two are destined co-exist. Neither can be relocated to some other part of the globe. The Pakistani may not be an Indian, but neither is he an Arab, a Persian or a Central Asian. The commonality of religion with the Arabs, Persians and Central Asians is obvious, but commonality of religion makes the Pakistani neither Arab nor Persian nor Central Asian. On the reverse side of the same coin his so-called ‘un-Indianness’ cannot make anyone oblivious to the several aspects in which the Indians and Pakistanis share a common history, culture, language and racial stock. Nor must the Indian continue to deny the distinct and separate personality that Indus (Pakistan) has had over millennia, even during the period preceding the advent of Islam in South Asia. This distinct identity is primordial. That the communal divide was superimposed on it may, or may not, have been propitious for the pre-Partition Muslim League, but Indus would always have remained distinct and different from India regardless.
The Indian may continue to deny the distinctness and the Pakistani may continue to repudiate the commonality, but both — distinctness and commonality — are facts. What has to be understood is that the Indo-Pak divide straddles this distinctness and commonality and that we must cherish both. Our distinctiveness should reassure us of our separate and unique identities, each venerating the other. And the commonality ought to provide a mutuality of interest and the basis for peaceful co-existence and co-operation.
That our distinctness and commonality have, in the past several decades, facilitated neither confidence nor co-existence is a measure of the insecurity syndrome of the Pakistani and of the injured pride of the Indian. This has only enabled hostile and fanatical obscurantism to occupy the space that should be taken by reason, friendship and co-operation.
That is why some questions remain: is the centripetal pull of India an inexorable force that could again pull the Indus region (Pakistan) to itself? Or does the Indus region have a primordial existence outside India? Does it not have an identity of its own? It may not be possible to put to rest every controversy and contention that these questions raise but one must try to purge the demons of paranoia and bigotry by addressing them dispassionately.
Nehru wrote The Discovery of India in the Ahmednagar Fort prison. I began my journey to discover Pakistan in the New Central Jail, Multan. This journey continued in later years, in the Sahiwal, Faisalabad and Mianwali jails. As I journeyed into the distant past, it dawned upon me that ‘Pakistan’ had existed for almost five and a half of the last six thousand years. Indus had seldom been a part of India. This gave me a newfound vision of myself as a part of an old and continuous tradition. When my mother had carried me in her arms to my first brief imprisonment in 1946, she had indeed been struggling for something that had always been mine. When my father and grandfather3 had courted arrest long before I had ever done so, they, too, had been in quest of my own inheritance.
* * *
The Indus Saga was originally written during the several prison terms that I served during General Zia’s Martial Law. Contemplation and reading in solitude over long periods made m
e search within my own self. It also enabled me to look without, at my country. In jail I had all the time to reflect and ponder. I tried to take a fresh look at myself and at my people and our neighbours. I took myself to the edge to observe them and to study their history, my history and our inheritance.
In this respect Professor Carl Ernst perhaps most aptly understood my intent. Reviewing a series of articles in which I first spelt out my thesis of primordial distinctiveness and commonality, he described my writing as a vision that unfolded to me ‘of myself as a part of a magnificent continuum, something destined as an inheritance.’4 I dare add: a magnificent inheritance.
Yes, the history of the Indus region and of its peoples was all too magnificent to me. In the confines of a small prison cell, this historical saga appeared before me on a vast and heroic scale, on a canvass spanning ceaseless time and infinite space. The hooves of a million galloping horses reverberated in my ears as they raised the dust of Indus to the farthest limits of outer space; the swords of Indus battalions rose in defence and flashed before my eyes; mighty and turbulent rivers surged and shrank marking the unending cycle of immoderate seasons; dry and burning desert winds swept across the endless plains every summer to be quenched only by the relentless and thunderous monsoon clouds; cold and freezing winter nights made survival all but impossible except for the most hardy and robust forms of life. The cycle continued unabated; the invaders never relented; the resistance never tired; the extreme seasons continued; the Indus person remained tough and indefatigable: he was a survivor.
But he was a survivor in more ways than one. Surviving is therefore not the only facet of his character that I focus upon in this book. There are countless colourful and gripping episodes in the history of India and Indus, which tell much more. Countless instances of triumph, defeat, heroism, grit, courage, cowardice, expediency, guile and craft provide the backdrop for a drama that unfolds on a stage as boundless and expansive, as vast and variegated as the subcontinent itself. Many larger than life characters performing here have, at all times, displayed an unremitting commitment to higher ideals and devoted their lives to them. Princes and peasants, sufis and rebels, statesmen and poets, fighting, resisting, leading or composing poetry imbued with nationalistic pride — all have added to the colour and richness of the tapestry that makes for Indian and Indus history.