Journey

Sindh — the Indus and its saints

Stops (14)

1. Kot Diji · c. 3300 BCE

   An Early Harappan fortified town on the east bank of the Indus, one of the earliest defended settlements in Sindh. Kot Diji's citadel wall, pottery style and pre-urban script signs date its beginning to around 3300 BCE, more than half a millennium before Mohenjo-daro. The Kot Dijian phase is the technical culture immediately before the Mature Harappan, and Kot Diji itself sat within sight of the later mature-Harappan mound at Mohenjo-daro.

2. Mohenjo-daro · c. 2500 BCE

   The classical Harappan city — the Great Bath, the granary, standardised burnt-brick housing on a grid without an identifiable palace or temple. Mohenjo-daro is Sindhi for "mound of the dead"; John Marshall's 1922 excavation of it and Harappa together established the existence of a Bronze Age civilisation nobody had known was there. The city drained itself through baked-brick sewers and its script remains undeciphered after a century of attempts.

3. Chanhudaro · c. 2300 BCE

   A Harappan bead-making town, the empire's downstream craft centre. Chanhudaro produced the Indus carnelian beads, stone weights and copper implements that circulated across the trade network — beads made here have been found at Ur, Kish and Susa in Mesopotamia. Ernest Mackay's 1935-36 excavations recovered inkstones and weight sets that show the settlement functioned as a specialised industrial suburb of the Harappan economy rather than a full city.

4. Amri · c. 3600–1800 BCE

   Pre-Harappan and Harappan levels stacked at the same site — one of Sindh's earliest excavated mounds, with a distinctive painted pottery tradition that gave its name to the "Amri phase". N.G. Majumdar dug here in 1929 and identified the sequence that connects the Baluchistan uplands cultures to the lower Indus urban civilisation. Amri sits on the west bank of the Indus, below the Kirthar range that shelters Ranikot Fort further south.

5. Aror / Brahmanabad · 7th–8th c. CE

   Medieval Sindh's capital, seat of the Rai and Chach dynasties, taken by Muhammad bin Qasim of the Umayyad Caliphate in 711. Aror was the political anchor of the Sindhi Buddhist and early Brahmanical state that Chach usurped from the Rai in the 630s; the Chach Nāma, a thirteenth-century Persian translation of an Arabic account, records the conquest. Later floods shifted the Indus and left Aror inland; nearby Rohri and Sukkur inherited its role.

6. Sehwan Sharīf · 13th c.

   Shahbaz Qalandar's dhamāl-drenched shrine — the Sindhi Sufi centre, and the loudest urs in the country. Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar was a thirteenth-century Qalandari Sufi from Marwand in Persian Azerbaijan; his tomb sits at Sehwan on a Buddhist and Shaiva sacred site older than his own tradition. The mast qalandar drum-and-song performances at the shrine survived the 2017 suicide bombing and continue nightly. Amir Khusrau's verses celebrating Shahbāz Qalandar remain the standard qawwāli repertoire.

7. Ranikot Fort · 16th c.

   The "Great Wall of Sindh" — a thirty-two-kilometre-circumference stone fort in the Kirthar range, one of the largest ancient fortifications in the world. Ranikot's builders and date are disputed: attributed variously to the Talpurs of Sindh in the eighteenth century, the Mughals, the Arabs, and even the Persians. The walls follow the natural hills and enclose an interior of springs and monsoon streams that could sustain a besieged garrison indefinitely.

8. Bhit Shah · 18th c.

   Shāh Abdul Latīf Bhitāī's shrine on the mound at Bhit, where the poet spent his last decade and where his Shāh-jo-Risālo — the great cycle of thirty Sindhi Sur poems — was written down. The seven queens of the Sur Sassui, Sur Mārui and Sur Sohnī cycles are the Sindhi Sufi tradition's central female archetypes. Bhit Shah's annual urs draws Sindhi singers who perform the Suri sung to a set of traditional ragas nightly at the shrine.

9. Makli Necropolis, Thatta · 14th–18th c.

   Half a million tombs of the Samma, Arghun, Tarkhan and Mughal periods on a single ridge above Thatta. The Makli necropolis is the largest cemetery in the world, ten kilometres long. The Jam Nizamuddin tomb of 1509 is the finest of the Samma sultans' Hindu-Islamic hybrid domed pavilions; Isa Khan Tarkhan's tomb of the 1640s is a walled compound with a stone-carved perimeter of unparalleled quality. UNESCO listed it in 1981.

10. Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta · 1647 CE

    Mughal Sindh's finest tile-work, patronised by Shah Jahan in exile from Delhi. The Shah Jahan Mosque at Thatta has ninety-three domes on a single square plan, all lined in the Multani blue-and-white tile that was Sindh's own tradition of the seventeenth century. Shah Jahan is said to have commissioned the mosque as thanks to Thatta for sheltering him during a rebellion; it uses no minarets and was designed to be acoustically singular.

11. Barbarikon / Banbhore · Roman era to 8th c.

    A Roman-era Indus port on the Sindhi coast that later became Debal, taken by Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 as his first act of conquest. Banbhore's excavations found the Periplus-era harbour, an eighth-century mosque that is one of the earliest in the subcontinent, and the town's abandonment around 1200 after the Indus mouth shifted. The site is thirty miles east of Karachi and connects Sindh's classical trade world to its medieval Islamic conquest.

12. Manora & Varun Dev Mandir · c. 15th c.

    The temple on the harbour rock at Karachi — the oldest continuous Hindu site in the city. Varun Dev is worshipped here as the god of the sea by Hindu sailors and fishers; the shrine on Manora island is fifteenth-century, and it survived partition and the eighteenth-century Kalhora period intact. Manora also holds the lighthouse and the customs post through which Karachi's international shipping is directed; the shrine, the lighthouse and the naval station share a rock.

13. Manghopir, Karachi · 13th c.

    Karachi's crocodile-tank Sufi shrine, said to hold Baba Farid's disciples in retinue. Mangho Pir is a thermal spring at the foot of a hill on Karachi's northwest edge; the shrine claims descent from Farid's chain, and the marsh crocodiles in its pond — believed to be his disciples' guards — are fed by the Sheedi Muslim community as part of an annual festival that draws Karachi's African-descended Muslims specifically.

14. Shivaharkaray · Puranic

    A Shakti pīṭha on the Sindhi Sea, at Karachi's edge, where Sati's eyes are said to have fallen. Shivaharkaray is one of the two Sindhi pīṭhas — the other is Hinglaj further west — and the temple sits inside the Karachi harbour area on the site of a Buddhist shrine that pre-dates it. The Karachi Hindu community, which fell dramatically in numbers after 1947, still maintains it.

Sources

• Wikipedia