Empires of the Indus: The Story of A River

"This is a wonderful book. It’s an adventure story, apart from anything else. She starts at the mouth of the Indus, and heads to the source. She walks through Waziristan and she ends up in Tibet. But as you say, it’s also a journey through time, with extraordinary tangents and deviations from the river to examine lost civilisations along its banks. It’s an absolutely gripping read, extremely colourful and interesting. She looks a bit more at history than Eric Newby does, and river worship in India today derives originally from the Indus. In early and prehistoric times it was the Indus that was worshipped, and the Ganges is the inheritor of that holy value. In fact, the name Indus comes from the Sanskrit word for a river or a big river. In Hindi the word for the Indus is the Sindhū. And then the word India comes from the Indus. So in a sense, Indians are literally river people. Alice Albinia writes about this quite a lot. She regrets that the Indus has lost its holy status to the Ganges. For example, one of the civilisations she looks at are the Mohanas, who are the Indus boat people. She says that they are identical in their equipment and sails to what is depicted on 5,000 year old seals from the ancient Mohenjo-daro kingdom or civilisation. So there is an extraordinary continuity through time. She also has other fascinating byways that she explores, like the Siddi people who are the descendants of African slaves, and so on. Of course, there’s a lot of environmental stuff in there as well. The Indus, unlike the Ganges, is much more over exploited for irrigation. She virtually wades across the mouth of Indus. That’s just something you couldn’t do in the Ganges, thank goodness, or not so far. Yes, I think it is. It persists to the present and it is so strong, so intense. I think it applies in a way to all of Hinduism, which is an amazingly strong religion in the sense that its habits and practices are very little changed from thousands of years ago. Diana Eck, the Sanskrit scholar from Harvard who has written about Varanasi (Banaras), India’s sacred places, describes this very well. She says, when you go to Varanasi on the Ganges it’s a bit like going to Athens. The difference is that what you see in Varanasi is exactly what you would have seen 2,000 years ago. Of course Varanasi has motor cars, and some of the boats have motors, but then otherwise it’s remarkably unchanged, especially in terms of religious practice and bathing in the river. Yes, although the Muslim Mughal emperors were also entranced by the purity of the water. The Ganges traditionally was regarded as a very pure source of drinking water, even by people who weren’t Hindus. The East India Company used to fill barrels with its water for the homeward trip back to Europe from Calcutta. They were impressed by the fact that the water did not go off, unlike the water that they brought in the other direction, from Europe."

"I chose this because it beautifully tells the story of this legacy of conquest, of the empires and colonialism and all the politics that go along with that. And also we know that the wars of this century are more than anything else going to be about resources, one of which is water. If you look at South Asia you can see that water is a huge part of that conflict. There is all the flooding in Pakistan today. The Indus is a life force for this country. It is the birthplace of what is now Pakistan. And Albinia’s book starts with Pakistan and follows the Indus all the way up to China and talks about not just the British Raj and its role in destroying the Indus delta but also as far back as Alexander the Great and his conquests and why his conquests were so successful. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter During the past two thousand years a series of invaders – Alexander the Great, Afghan sultans, the British Raj – made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance. Oh, no, because I think if one looks at what is happening in Pakistan today with this position of endemic corruption of the state and the incredible incompetence of this country’s leaders, if I decided to get up and go, or we allow other people to tell our stories or raise our issues, or we are made to be silent, there is no future. But what gives me hope is books like these where people are speaking about this legacy of violence and the corruption of the state. So no, I am here to stay."