Journey

The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush

Stops (34)

1. Pushkalāvatī / Charsadda · before the Kushans

   Pushkalavati at the Swat and Kabul confluence, Gandhara's capital before Purushapura. Panini names it, the Ramayana makes it a foundation of Bharata's son, Hephaestion besieged it for thirty days in 327 BCE, and Wheeler's 1958 trench through the Bala Hisar mound found an Achaemenid-period ditch under all of it. The name means lotus city.

2. Purushapura / Peshawar · Kushan capital

   Purushapura, Peshawar, where Kanishka raised a wooden stupa that Faxian and Xuanzang both describe as the tallest building they had seen, and from which the Kanishka casket came. The Kushan empire held both sides of the passes, which is why its coinage carries Greek, Iranian and Indian deities together. Its stupa was excavated in 1908 and the casket inside carried Kanishka's name in Kharosthi.

3. Bala Hissar, Peshawar · two thousand years of garrison

   The fort at the city's north-west corner, standing on the mound of Purushapura itself — its height is the accumulated debris of the city beneath. Bābur noted a fort here, the Durrānis wintered in it, Hari Singh Nalwa rebuilt it in brick as Sumergarh after the Sikhs took Peshawar in 1834, the British administered the frontier from it after 1849, and the Frontier Corps holds it now.

4. Peshawar Museum · fourteen thousand pieces

   Opened in 1907 and holding the largest Gandharan collection in the world, including the Kanishka casket from Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī and the fasting Buddha from Sikri. It is where the sculpture prised out of the Mardan and Swat monasteries came to rest when it did not leave the country. Because those sites were mined for objects rather than excavated for evidence, nobody recorded which panel stood where — so a school's complete art sits here with its architecture permanently detached.

5. Kanishka Stupa, Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī · the Kushan maximum

   Kanishka's great stupa stood on this mound outside his capital, and three Chinese pilgrims — Faxian about 400, Songyun in the 520s, Xuanzang in the 630s — each describe it as the tallest building they had ever seen, a stone base under thirteen storeys of timber. Spooner dug it in 1908 and found the relic chamber intact, with an inscribed gilt-bronze casket naming Kanishka. The mound is built over now, so the largest thing the Kushans made survives as a casket in a museum and three travellers' paragraphs.

6. Gor Khatri, Peshawar · the same ground, five times over

   On the highest point of the old city, which is to say on the accumulated mound of Purushapura itself. The enclosure was laid out as a caravanserai by Shāh Jahān's daughter Jahānārā; under Sikh rule it held a Gorakhnāth temple and housed Avitabile, the Neapolitan mercenary who governed Peshawar by public hanging; the British made it an office and then a fire station. Excavation in its own courtyard has gone down through those layers to Indo-Greek material, so the compound is a section of the city beneath its floor.

7. Mahābat Khān Mosque, Peshawar · the frontier Mughal idiom

   Mahābat Khān, governor under Shāh Jahān and Aurangzeb, built Peshawar's principal mosque in the 1660s: a white marble facade, an open court with an ablution tank, two tall minarets. Inside there is no inlay — the surfaces are painted, floral and geometric work in pigment on plaster, which is what a frontier city could afford and execute. Under the Sikhs the minarets were used as gallows, with prisoners hanged from them while the congregation below kept to its prayers.

8. Qissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar · where the caravans stopped

   The storytellers' bazaar, and the Peshawar end of the Khyber. Traders coming down from Kabul and Bukhara unloaded here and paid professional reciters in the tea houses to fill the days between arrival and departure — the last commercial oral-narrative trade on the route. On 23 April 1930 troops fired on unarmed Khudai Khidmatgar demonstrators in this bazaar; two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused the order and were court-martialled, which is remembered as widely as the killing.

9. Takshashilā / Taxila · the crossing point

   Takshashila, where the passes deliver traffic into the subcontinent, with Achaemenid, Greek, Scythian, Parthian and Kushan layers stacked on each other, an Ashokan edict in Aramaic and the Dharmarajika stupa. Panini is traditionally said to have taught here and Chanakya to have left it for Magadha. Every power that came through the passes minted or inscribed here in turn, which is why the mound has five stratified cities in it.

10. Hund / Udabhāndapura · the ford that decided everything

    The Indus can be crossed here, and for long distances above and below it cannot, which is why the same few hundred metres of bank keeps reappearing. Alexander bridged it at Hund in 327 BCE before Taxila and the Hydaspes. Thirteen centuries later the Hindu Shahis, pushed out of Kabul, made the crossing their capital as Udabhāndapura and held it until Mahmūd of Ghazni took it in 1001. Akbar then built a customs fort on the spot, for the same reason as everyone else.

11. Takht-i-bahi · 1st–7th century

    Takht-i-Bahi on a ridge above the Mardan plain, the most complete Buddhist monastery in Gandhara: a stupa court ringed by votive stupas, a monastic quadrangle, assembly halls and cells, occupied for six centuries and never built over because the hill had nothing else to recommend it. Its stone is the grey schist that gives Gandharan sculpture its surface, quarried from the ridge the monastery stands on.

12. Jamāl Garhi · the sculpture and the plan

    Thirty kilometres from Takht-i-Bahi and built to the same scheme — a main stupa in a court, ringed by votive stupas and image chapels — Jamāl Garhi is where the Gandharan story cycle came from. Its chapels were faced in grey schist panels carrying the Buddha's life in sequence, cut in the Hellenistic-derived idiom with real drapery and volume. Cleared from 1848, the panels went to Kolkata, London and Peshawar, so the monastery survives as architecture at one site and as sculpture in three museums.

13. Butkara & Swat valley · five hundred monasteries

    The Swat valley, Udyana, where Faxian counted some five hundred monasteries and was shown the Buddha's footprint and drying-rock as local objects. It is the workshop region where the Buddha was first given human form in sculpture, and its monasteries were abandoned within three centuries of Xuanzang finding them already thinning.

14. Saidu Sharīf · the narrative programme

    A few kilometres from Butkara, and the other half of Swat's evidence. Saidu Sharif I is an excavated stupa whose Great Frieze carries the Buddha's life in a continuous band, among the most complete such schemes surviving in position rather than in a museum case. The town above it is named for the Ākhūnd of Swat, whose grandson founded the Swat State in 1917 — a princely state until 1969, with an unusual reputation for schools and swift justice.

15. Aornos / Pīr Sar · 326 BCE

    The rock the hill population withdrew onto when Alexander came through, and which he took by building a mound across the ravine that protected it — the siege Arrian makes most of, because Herakles was said to have failed at the same place. Aurel Stein rode the Indus bend in 1926 with Arrian's measurements in hand and identified it as Pīr Sar in Shangla. The identification is his and still disputed, with Mount Ilam and Una Sar both proposed instead.

16. Ghālegay & the Shingardar stupa · and the ones that were broken

    On the road below Barikot stand the great hemisphere of the Shingardar stupa, which local tradition ascribes to king Uttarasena, and a seventh-century seated Buddha cut into the rock at Ghālegay — the largest in Swat. Militants dynamited the Buddha in 2007; an Italian team spent nearly a decade reassembling the fragments and returned it to view in 2016, deliberately leaving the joins visible, so the figure now carries the record of its own destruction.

17. Barikot / Bazira · the longest section in the north-west

    Four kilometres from Butkara, and the reason Swat's chronology is better fixed than anywhere else in the region. This is the Bazira that Arrian says Alexander took in 327 BCE, and the Italian mission has dug here since 1978 through Indo-Greek fortifications, Saka-Parthian and Kushan levels, a Buddhist sacred area and an eighth-century Hindu Shahi temple — one continuous stratified urban sequence above the Swat river, which almost nothing else in Pakistan offers.

18. Amluk-Dara stupa · what the great stupas looked like

    Below Mount Ilam, and the best-preserved great stupa in Swat: the stepped drum and much of the dome still standing, third century and enlarged afterwards. It matters because almost every other Gandharan stupa has lost its elevation, so the proportions here are measured rather than guessed — which is how Kanishka's vanished giant at Peshawar is reconstructed. The Italian mission consolidated it in the 2010s after treasure-hunters had cut into the base.

19. Mankiala stupa · opened 1830

    The Mankiala stupa on the Grand Trunk road, standing more or less whole in open fields and traditionally the place the Bodhisattva gave his body to the starving tigress. Jean-Baptiste Ventura, a Neapolitan general in Ranjit Singh's service, opened it in 1830 and found relic caskets with Kushan and Roman coins — among the first stratified archaeology done in India.

20. Khyber Pass · the corridor

    The Khyber, thirty miles long and at its narrowest a few metres wide, through which the Achaemenids, Alexander, the Kushans, Mahmud, the Mongols, Babur, Nader Shah and Abdali all came, and through which the Buddhist canon and Gandharan sculptural convention went the other way. Gandharan sculptural convention and the Buddhist canon both left the subcontinent through the same defile.

21. The Kalash valleys · the last of Kafiristan

    The Kalash valleys of Chitral — Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir — holding some four thousand people with their own Indo-Aryan language, a pantheon, a strict purity geography and a festival calendar. They are the last non-Muslim community of the Hindu Kush; Nuristan across the Afghan border practised a related religion and was converted by force in the 1890s.

22. Nandana, the Salt Range · c. 1018

    Nandana in the Salt Range, where al-Biruni measured the angle of dip to the horizon from a summit of known height and computed the radius of the earth to within about half a percent. He used the method because he could not reach the Iraqi plains where his predecessors had used a longer baseline, so a Ghaznavid frontier fort carries the best pre-modern measurement of the earth.

23. Rohtas Fort · 1541–48

    Rohtas, twelve gates and a four-kilometre circuit in the Salt Range, built by Sher Shah Suri 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 was never seriously attacked, which was the point. Twelve gates, a four-kilometre circuit and a garrison, built in seven years and never tested.

24. Wazir Khan Mosque, Lahore · 1634–41

    The Wazir Khan Mosque at Lahore, the most completely tiled building in the subcontinent: cut-and-glazed kashi-kari over nearly every surface in cobalt, turquoise, green, yellow and white, with calligraphy the length of the prayer chamber. It is entered through a bazaar whose shops were endowed to pay for its upkeep, which they still partly do.

25. Bahāuddin Zakariya & Rukn-e-Ālam · the Indus corridor

    Multan, the great crossing of the middle Indus and the shrine city of Bahauddin Zakariya and Rukn-e-Alam, whose tomb is among the largest pre-Mughal domes in South Asia. It also held a famous sun temple that Mahmud's forces destroyed, and it is where the blue tile tradition that reached Lahore and Thatta was worked out.

26. Aror / Brahmanabad · the Sindh corridor

    Aror and Brahmanabad, on old courses of the Indus, 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, and both were abandoned by the water.

27. Barbarikon / Banbhore · the Indus mouth

    Barbarikon of the Periplus and Debal of the Arab accounts, where Muhammad bin Qasim landed in 711 and where one of the subcontinent's earliest mosques stands. The same harbour served the Roman trade and the Arab conquest, and the river then left it some distance from navigable water. The Periplus gives its pilotage and the Arab chronicles its siege, twelve centuries apart on the same anchorage.

28. Shah Jahan Mosque, Thatta · c. 1647

    The Shah Jahan Mosque at Thatta, ninety-three domes, no minarets, red brick and blue Sindhi tile, designed so that a sermon from the mihrab carries to any corner without amplification. Shah Jahan gave it to the town in thanks for shelter during a revolt against his father, and it looks like no imperial Mughal mosque at all.

29. Makli Necropolis, Thatta · half a million graves

    The Makli ridge above Thatta, a funerary landscape where royal, Sufi and mercantile memory accumulated over four centuries in carved stone and glazed tile. The Indus then moved, the trade went to Karachi, and the cemetery is now considerably larger than the living town below it. Royal, Sufi and mercantile graves accumulated on one ridge for four centuries without a single plan governing it.

30. Chaukhandi tombs · 15th–18th century

    The Chaukhandi tombs east of Karachi, several hundred stepped sandstone graves of Jokhio and Baloch families, carved all over with geometric bands and rosettes — jewellery on women's graves and weapons and mounted riders on men's. Nothing in the Islamic world looks quite like them, and almost every one is unnamed and undated.

31. Derawar Fort · 9th and 18th century

    Derawar in the Cholistan desert, forty round bastions thirty metres high, visible for forty kilometres across flat sand. It stands on the dry bed of the Hakra, along the same palaeochannel as Ganweriwala — one of the five largest Harappan cities and still essentially undug — so a medieval fort marks a Bronze Age river.

32. Hinglāj Mātā · the westernmost pitha

    Hinglaj Mata, a cave shrine in a gorge of the Hingol in the Makran desert, counted among the Shakta pithas and the westernmost Hindu pilgrimage of any scale. Local Muslims call it Nani Mandir, Zikri and Baloch communities have long attended it, and it is the largest Hindu gathering in Pakistan.

33. Sehwan Sharīf · the Qalandar

    Sehwan Sharif, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar on the Indus, where the dhamal is danced to drums in the courtyard by men and women together and Hindus attend alongside Muslims. It is the least orthodox major shrine in Pakistan and among the most heavily attended, and it was bombed in 2017.

34. Attock Fort · 1581

    Akbar's fort at the Indus, built to hold the crossing on the road to Kabul during the campaign against his half-brother Mirzā Hakīm, and the point where the Grand Trunk Road meets the river. Once it was there the traffic moved to it and Hund became a village. Nādir Shāh, Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, the Sikhs and the British all had to take or pass it, and the railway bridge of 1883 was thrown across beside it for the same reason under a different flag.

Sources

• Wikipedia