Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [219]
Peshawar’s only grace-notes are the neat and elegant official military cantonment, the beautiful gardens of its schools and colleges, built by the British on Mughal patterns, and the occasional exquisitely shaped minaret, pointing towards a better world than that of Peshawar. Yet by the standards of the rest of the province, Peshawar is wealthy indeed, with banks, luxury stores, an international hotel, even a halal McDonald’s. Now and then, if you look down a straight street, or over some low roofs, you see the outlines of an even poorer, harder world, which both hates and envies Peshawar – the tawny sentinels of the Frontier mountains, graveyard of armies.
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE PLAINS
I thought of those mountains when I attended a service at St John’s Cathedral, the old British garrison church of Peshawar. My fellow congregants were not Pathans, but descendants of low-caste Hindus, converted under the British Raj. The memoirs of the Reverend T. L. Pennel attest to the extreme resistance of the Pathans to any effort to convert them to Christianity. In fact it says a great deal for the spirit of missionaries like Pennel that they made the attempt at all.3
So the noses of the congregation were much flatter than those of the rest of the city’s population, the skins darker, and the bodies shorter. In fact, the whole service made a contrast to the dour face of Pathan public life. After three weeks in the NWFP the sight of the unveiled women in their brightly coloured shelwar kameezes and the occasional sari – though for the most part decorously seated apart from the men – was profoundly refreshing.
Although traditionally an impoverished and despised community, and today an increasingly endangered one, the Christians in Pakistan have done comparatively well in recent years, thanks to strong community co-operation, help from international Christian groups and, perhaps most importantly, commitment to education. Many of the men had pens clipped to their front pockets as a sign that they were employed in some literate profession.
The cheerful beat of the Anglican hymns, transformed almost out of recognition by India and accompanied by drums and cymbals, had a fine martial air, appropriate to a profoundly embattled and endangered community in an increasingly embattled city. A tiny girl with an enormous grin sat on the altar steps, clapping her hands in time to the music. Fans waved to and fro in a vain effort to reduce the sweltering heat, for it was August and we were in the middle of one of Peshawar’s eternal power cuts, so the giant overhead fans were still. Outside, a dozen armed police stood guard against the terrorists who have attacked so many Christian churches (and Shia mosques) in recent years. Reassuring, but, as we have seen again and again, alas, in the face of a really large-scale assault not enough to do much more than die bravely – which the poor devils have done often enough, usually unremarked by the Western media.
It was strange to sit in such heat in a red-brick neo-Gothic church below a fine Victorian hammer-beam roof, listening to a fire and brimstone sermon in Urdu; but much stranger to think of the faces that would have filled the church sixty years before – the white (or rather also brick-red) faces of the British garrison, administrators and the tiny non-official British community. Outside the main entrance, one of the greatest of the British in India is commemorated by a tall cross and an inscription which still has the power to move, because it was erected not by a state or government but by a friend, and for no reason save friendship: To Field Marshal Auchinleck, ‘In affection and admiration to the memory of this great gentleman, great soldier and great man. From his devoted friend General Sher Ali Pataudi, 1984’.
Auchinleck’s comrades