The Indus River is a bundle of contradictions and disappointments: the origin of the name 'India' and yet in Pakistan, one of the classical rivers of fabled fecundity and yet now dammed to near-death, the source of one of the world's most splendid early civilizations and yet flowing through what are some of its most dangerous and economically backward places. The title of this book and its jacket design in friendly pastel colors, both bringing to mind exotic travelogue mingled with exotic culture, belie the real story that Alice Albinia is telling, that of the disappointments and tragedies wrought by history, and of the humanity caught up in its flow.
The premise of this book is a daring one, and despite the easy flow of the narrative, the actual journey that the author herself took must have demonstrated her resourcefulness and courage. She travels from the delta of the Indus, now brackish and more an inlet than a river mouth, up its course until its source in the high mountains of Tibet, and so accumulates a roster of some of the most notorious places in the world: Pakistan, the Pakistan-India border, Afghanistan, Tibet. Concomitant with her trip to the source of the Indus is the historical story told in reverse, from the traumatic Partition of India and Pakistan, to the spread of Islam in the subcontinent, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the geological origins of the river itself.
As a woman she has access to the women of the households that hosted her, and as a foreigner she could also speak freely with the men, and it is this view of the home life of the people along her route that give this book some of its most poignant moments. There is also the peculiar disorientation when snippets of interculturality turn up unexpectedly; climbing up a hill in rural Kashmir to see a Neolithic rockface carving, a crowd of boys follows her and her guide to see what they are up to:
"The boys speak little English, but it is the cricket season now, and from the babble of Kashmiri that surrounds me, entire phrases of BBC commentary emerge fully formed: 'Flintoff is coming in to bowl,' says one twelve-year-old. 'It's a bouncer,' says another.'..."
Another repeating motif on the book is how easily history can become effaced. She visits a Sheedi community in Sindh, Pakistan, descendants of African slaves and immigrants to India from centuries before its colonial era. The Sheedi, despite being slaves, had held positions of responsibility under the Mughal rulers, but with the coming of European colonialism had lost that social position; the British imperial administrators regarded them with prejudice, even as they claimed to be emancipating the slaves. In the 1950s, a Sheedi writer named Mussafir wrote an account of Sheedi enslavement and persecution, informed also by his readings on abolition in America, and worked towards social emancipation of his community by education. Yet today his works are poorly known, even in Sindh, the Sheedi community still experiences discrimination in mainstream Pakistani life, and even Mussafir's legacy has been obscured. Most of his writings have been lost - his son's library was largely destroyed by a cyclone - and few copies remain even of his treatise on slavery, published only in Sindhi. Elsewhere, in the highland Yasin valley, Neolithic stone circles are being carved up for building material or looted for treasure. In the desert near Johi, 18th century tombs decorated with vivid murals are falling apart from neglect.
It is fitting, then, that the site of one of humanity's earliest experiments with irrigation and city-building should today illustrate so starkly the failings of that endeavor. Read this book, not just as travelogue and history, but also as a comment on the human condition itself.
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