Kindle Notes & Highlights
Despite this very brief direct contact with the Indus region, Arab authors themselves were perceptive enough to provide one important insight into the distinctness of Indus from India. In their view, there was no doubt about it. They consistently treated the two lands as different. They always, and with a relentless consistency, referred to Indus as ‘al-Sindh’ and to India as ‘al-Hind’.
the fact remains that racially, ethnically, linguistically, and, above all, culturally, the peoples of Pakistan are more closely linked to the peoples of central Asia and Iran than to the peoples of the Arab world.
Kanishk is believed to have been the first to open up that prolific trade-route between China and the Indus: the Silk Route, that was to be made famous later by the travels and accounts of Marco Polo.
The ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols was India’s gift to the world.
To escape the lot of being dragged away in chains and then kept in bondage in a distant and alien land as a slave, Indus men did not merely convert. They also changed their names and gave ‘Muslim’ names to their offspring. The names they chose instead were those of the invaders, names of Arabic and Persian origin, intended to establish their ‘Muslim’ identity. This alone would convince the invading armies that Allah’s law forbade them being taken as slaves.
What gave the central Asians that critical superiority when the Indus and India were, without doubt, the more advanced civilization and economies? The soldier-kings of central Asia had one invincible ally: the horse.
These humid conditions, the soggy earth, and the heat combine to make conditions suitable only for animals, such as the buffalo and the cow, that have cleft hooves. The cleavage in the hoof allows the humidity to escape and for air to circulate. It also provides a stable, balancing base to the animal treading upon slippery, treacherous top-soil during the monsoons. The horse has no cleavage in his hoof.
Mahmud’s strategy was superior. His horsemen were also more spirited and far greater in numbers. Jaypal fought with vigour and valour, but was defeated. So many defenders are said to have been killed in this encounter that to this day the mountain range that saw the battle is called the ‘Hindu Kush’ (the killer of the Hindus).
But there was, for Indus and India, a significant fall-out of the Mongol rampage in central Asia. It drove endless streams of Muslim princes, administrators, generals, poets, and sufi saints from their homelands to the securer plains of Indus and India. This intermingling gave an impetus to philosophy, mathematics, and astrology as well as to the arts. The intermixture of languages and literatures produced a new language: Urdu (literally, the ‘language of the camp’).
That Panipat has so often been the field upon which the fate of the Indian empire has been sealed does not imply that Indus was a mere passive conduit for central Asian invasions. The fact is that Indus had always been considered as the outpost of the central Asian states. It always resisted. It was only when the invader had crossed the Indus region that he could, in the battles at Panipat (or Kurukshetra, or Tarain), have all of India. Contrary to much popularized myths, the Indus region always provided the great defence of the subcontinent. It provided the first and the strongest
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Yet the central Asians, on their part, considered the Indus region as a part of central Asia. The ‘international boundary’ was always deemed to be the Sutlej. Thus, too, the significance of Panipat. Even if Peshawar or Lahore resisted, the central Asian invaders considered the taking of these cities as the reconquest of their own outposts. India was to be won with the conquest of Delhi, the city commanding the Gangetic region. The plains of Panipat were at Delhi’s doorstep. They were the great historical watershed.
One coincidental fact may be noticed in passing. The founding of the Mughal Empire by Babar and of the Sikh religion by Guru Nanak had been contemporaneous. The two had even met and discoursed with each other. The passing away of the last important emperor of Babar’s line and the death of the twelfth and last guru of Nanak’s order, were also contemporaneous.
Taimur, Babar, Nadir Shah, and Abdali thus left several lasting imprints upon the Indus psyche. The belief in the futility of savings and in the advantages of instant consumption seems a permanent cultural imprint and one of the dominant traits of the Indus region.
IK BANDAY DA DIL NA DHA-EEN SOHNA RABB DILAAN WICH REHNDA
BAQOUL-E-DARWIN HAZRAT-E-INSAN THAY BOOZNA HAM KO BAVAR AA GYA EUROPE KAY INSAN DEKH KAR According to Darwin, Man is descended from the ape. We believed him only when we saw the Europeans.
