Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [179]
The Indus (in Sanskrit, Sindhu) gives its name to Sindh, to India and also to the oldest civilization in Sindh, and one of the oldest on earth: the Indus Valley civilization, which existed in various forms between around 3300 and 1300 BCE. That civilization was destroyed, presumably by Aryan invaders from Central Asia, around 3,000 years ago, and no visible link exists between it and the Sindh of today.
However, it is rather depressing, when visiting the excavated ruins of the city of Mohenjo Daro in upper Sindh, to note that its clay bricks were better made and better laid than those of most Sindhi towns and villages of the present, though both are made from the same mud. Samina Altaf remarks that Mohenjo Daro’s water supply also seems to have been better than those of many Pakistani cities today.2
Equally depressing is the fact that waterlogging because of rice cultivation in the surrounding fields and neglect by the Pakistani government means that by far the greater part of Mohenjo Daro, and all its earliest levels, are now lost for ever, melted back into the mud from which they came. In fact, Mohenjo Daro is apt to arouse bitter musings on cycles of historical decline in anyone with a reverence for the past and its exploration.
A traveller of 1842 described the homes of ordinary rural Sindhis:
All the houses here are built of clay; they are scarcely twenty feet high, have flat roofs, from which a kind of ventilator sometimes rises, and air holes supply the place of windows. Long continued rain would destroy these huts and sweep away whole villages.3
Just as nothing much about the dwellings of ordinary people had changed in the thousands of years of human habitation in Sindh prior to this description, so nothing much seems to have changed in the 168 years since. This is one reason why the floods of 2010 were not as destructive as appeared at first sight. To put it bluntly: mud huts are easy to rebuild.
The ruins of Mohenjo Daro are topped by the much later stupa of a Buddhist monastery, representing the religion which for 1,000 years or so partially displaced the Hindu system created by the Aryans. Muslim rule began in the region with the conquests of Mohammed bin Qasim, an Arab general, after 710 CE, though it was not until some 500 years later that the bulk of the Hindu population was converted to Islam. Though the original conquest was extremely violent, the subsequent conversion was largely peaceful, and was above all the work of the ‘Sufi’ saints described in Chapter 4, whose worship still predominates in interior Sindh. Around 20 per cent remained Hindu until the partition of India in 1947, and Sindh still contains by far the largest number of Hindus in Pakistan.
Sindh was the original gateway of Islam into the Indian subcontinent, spreading by sea from Arabia. In subsequent centuries, however, the importance of the sea links to Arabia faded, and the main Muslim route of invasion, migration and trade came to be from Iran and Central Asia through Afghanistan to Punjab and on to the plains of the Ganges. Cut off by the deserts of Balochistan to the west and the Thar to the east, and by the swamps of the Rann of Kutch to the south-east, Sindh developed in partial isolation from the main currents of Muslim life in the subcontinent. This isolation has strongly marked Sindhi culture down to the present.
From the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, Sindh was incorporated in the Mughal empire, though actual control by the central government was very loose. With the decline of the Mughals in the early eighteenth century, power was progressively seized by their local governors, the Kalhoras. In the later eighteenth century, the Kalhoras transferred their allegiance first to Nadir Shah of Iran, then to the Durrani dynasty of Afghanistan. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Kalhoras were themselves displaced by a new dynasty, that of the Talpurs, who ruled until the British conquest of 1843. The glory of the Talpurs is still recalled by the magnificent tiled and painted palaces