Journey
Overland corridors
Before the monsoon crossing was worked out and long after it, the subcontinent's traffic moved along two trunk lines and through four gaps in its mountains. The Uttarapatha ran east to west across the Gangetic plain, the Dakshinapatha south into the Deccan, and nearly everything else entered through the passes.
Stops (13)
- Khyber Pass · the north-western gate
The corridor through the Hindu Kush foothills by which armies, monks, coins, horses and languages entered and left. The Achaemenids, Alexander, the Kushans, Mahmud, the Mongols, Babur, Nader Shah and Abdali all used it, and so did the Gandharan sculptors and the Buddhist canon going north. It is thirty miles long and at its narrowest about three metres wide, which is the whole reason it matters.
- Bolan Pass · the Kachi gate
The other north-western pass, opening from Quetta onto the Kachi plain and Mehrgarh. It is the older of the two in archaeological terms: the domesticated wheat, barley, cattle and cotton at Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium BCE arrived by this route, not the Khyber. The pass is also the modern rail and road line from Quetta down to the Indus plain, on the same alignment.
- Balkh · the Bactrian hinge
Balkh, the Bactra of the Greeks and the Bakhtar of Persian writers, sat where the routes from Iran, the Oxus steppe and India met. Buddhism moved north through it, the Kushans ruled from either side of it, and Ibn Battuta found it still in ruins a century after the Mongols.
- Kābul · the Kabul staging post
The valley between Balkh and the Khyber, and the place armies wintered before descending. Babur held it for twenty-two years before he took India and asked to be buried there; the Durranis ruled India's north-west from it; and the Koh-i-Noor passed through it three times in eighty years. Babur asked to be buried in its gardens, and he was.
- Takshashilā / Taxila · the Gandharan terminus
Where the passes deliver traffic into the subcontinent. Taxila's cities and monasteries carry Achaemenid, Greek, Scythian, Parthian and Kushan layers on top of each other, an Ashokan edict in Aramaic, and the coinage of every power that came through — a stratigraphy of the corridor itself. Ashoka, the Indo-Greeks, the Sakas, the Parthians and the Kushans all minted or inscribed here in turn.
- Sagala / Sialkot · Sagala
Sialkot, identified in a long tradition with the Sagala of the Milindapanha, where the Indo-Greek king Menander is made to debate the monk Nagasena. Whether or not the dialogue happened, the town sits on the road between the Indus crossings and the Punjab doabs, which is why a Greek king was there at all.
- Rohtas Fort · 1541–48
Rohtas, a vast fort with twelve gates in the Salt Range, built by Sher Shah to hold the Punjab against Humayun's return and the Gakhar clans who supported him. It commands the road between the Indus crossings and Lahore, and it was never seriously attacked, which was the point. It has twelve gates and a four-kilometre circuit, and was never seriously attacked.
- Sasaram · 1545
Sher Shah's tomb stands on a plinth in an artificial lake at the Bihar end of his road, where he came from. The sarai network, the surveyed revenue and the silver rupiya were all his, and the Mughal administration Akbar is credited with is largely this system running at greater scale.
- Aror / Brahmanabad · the Sindh corridor
Aror and Brahmanabad, on old courses of the Indus, were the urban centres of Sindh when the Arab armies arrived in 711 and the river still ran past them. They mark the route by which Sindh connected upriver to Multan and the Punjab and downriver to the sea. The Arab conquest of Sindh in 711 followed the same line inland from the coast.
- Uttarapatha–Dakshinapatha junction · the crossroads
Ujjain is where the Uttarapatha from the Ganges plain met the Dakshinapatha going south into the Deccan, and the road west to the Gujarat ports. It was rich before it was holy: the Mahakala temple, the observatory and the Kalidasa associations all sit on a customs town. It was also the prime meridian of Indian astronomy, fixed there because the road and the observations met.
- Paithan (Paithani) · the Dakshinapatha terminus
Paithan, the Pratishthana of the Satavahanas, stood at the southern end of the Dakshinapatha where it reached the Godavari. Its Paithani saris are still woven with the same gold-and-silk border technique, so the terminus of an ancient trunk road is also a living weaving town. The Satavahanas ruled from it and the Periplus names its cotton, so the road, the dynasty and the cloth are one economy.
- Kannauj · the Ganges pivot
Kannauj controlled the middle Ganges and was fought over by the Pratiharas, the Palas and the Rashtrakutas for two centuries precisely because whoever held it held the Uttarapatha's centre. Xuanzang described Harsha's capital here; by the eighteenth century it was a small town making perfume. Its decline is the clearest case in India of a city that was nothing but its position on a route.
- Nathu La & the Chumbi corridor · the Tibet road
The Nathu La and the Chumbi valley carried the wool, salt, borax and brick-tea trade between Bengal and Lhasa, and the route by which Buddhist texts and teachers moved north after the Gangetic monasteries fell. It was the busiest Himalayan pass into the twentieth century and was closed from 1962 to 2006.