Place · Kabul-river city & winter capital · Afghanistan
Jalālābād
The city in the warm Kabul river valley between Kabul and the Khyber, used as the winter capital by Afghan rulers because the snow does not close it. It is the near end of the Peshawar road, which makes it the first Afghan city of any size for anyone coming up through the pass, and the last for anyone going down. The British garrison here held out through the winter of 1841–42 while the Kabul force was destroyed on the road above, and it was to Jalālābād's walls that the surviving Dr Brydon rode in.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.434, 70.448
Worth knowing
Bāchā Khān chose to be buried here rather than in Pakistan, and his grave in Jalālābād is the reason both sides of an Afghan civil war stopped fighting for a day in 1988.
Connections (3)
- Contemporary capital withKābul
Kabul and Jalālābād are a summer capital and a winter one, ninety miles and about fifteen hundred metres apart. Kabul at eighteen hundred metres closes with snow; Jalālābād in the Kabul river valley does not, so the Durrānī and later Barakzai courts moved down for the winter and back up in spring. The road between them through the Khyber gorges is the same one the British army took in 1841 and did not complete: the garrison at Jalālābād held while the Kabul force was destroyed above it.
- Site adjacencyHadda
Hadda lies a few kilometres outside Jalālābād, and it was one of the great Buddhist centres of the Kabul valley — a complex of stupas and monasteries whose stucco heads, excavated by Barthoux in the 1920s and by Afghan and French teams later, are among the most immediately Hellenistic sculpture the region produced. Xuanzang describes the relic of the Buddha's skull bone being shown there for a fee. The site was largely destroyed during the fighting of the 1980s and after.
- Samadhi atAbdul Ghaffār Khān (Bāchā Khān)
Bāchā Khān asked to be buried at Jalālābād rather than in Pakistan, where he had spent much of his life in prison, and the choice was a statement: the Pashtun country he had organised did not stop at the Durand Line. He died at Peshawar in January 1988 and the funeral procession crossed the Khyber. Both sides of the Afghan war declared a ceasefire to let it pass, and an estimated two hundred thousand people attended — the only occasion on which that war stopped for anything.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jalalabad” and “Abdul Ghaffar Khan”. Lady Sale, A Journal of the Disasters in Affghanistan (1843); contemporary press reporting of the 1988 funeral.
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