Pakistan was created to allow Muslims to live as free citizens without
the fear of being dominated by a resurgent, occasionally hostile, Hindu
majority. However, not feeling secure even in independence, Pakistani
people have driven themselves to a social and historical narrative that
strives to align our genetic origins with our religious roots in the
East.
In pursuit of
this goal, we have also shed our heritage; the very values and customs
that defined a nation.
Some of these trends to de-link from the
indigenous Indian society started a millennium ago in an atmosphere of
insecurity due to frequent armed incursions from the Western passes.
After independence, the Pakistani nation should have felt secure enough
to display affinity with this land but then the religious zealots took
us on a confounded and misleading trajectory.
At the outset, let it be clear that there is no illusion about religion
being an important factor in the lives of people all over the world.
Even in this age of relative atheism, “living together” and secularism
in the liberal Western countries, where people have been estranged from
religion, the church continues to hold a visibly important place in
society.
Irrespective of the level of affinity with religion, births,
deaths and marriages are often solemnized as religious events in the
church by a priest.
Even under the communist regimes, where religion was
officially abolished and legally suppressed for a hundred years, people
continue to find solace in divine convictions.
We in Pakistan have employed religion as a pivot to distance ourselves
from our own land, culture, history and heritage.
There has been little
realization that in attempting to be what we are not and in rejecting
what we are, we will be lost as a people. Being neither here nor there
implies that we are nowhere.
We have an apt proverb in Lashkari for this
situation that describes a creature as one half partridge and the other
half a quail. That is our true description too.
In trying to move away from being Indians, we have induced ourselves to
be Arabesque or Persianate.
Now, of course, the Arabs, Persians and
especially Turks are our closest social and religious kith and kin, our natural
allies and we feel a natural affinity for them.
A large section of our
people carries their genes, as well as habits of dress, food, culture
and surnames.
However, we belong to the South Asian Subcontinent. We are
neither Arabs, nor Turks, nor Persians. Even if we try to be one of
them, we shall become unacceptable intruders and imposters.
Try telling
an Arab that in being a Syed, one is an Arab; or telling a Turk that
one’s surname of Bokhari entitles one to be a Turk; or a Persian that
being a Shirazi by name, one is Persian.
Instead of acceptance, such a
claim can only raise a mocking smirk!
One staggering loss in this identity crisis has been a name that has
been appropriated by our Eastern neighbor.
We are children of the
Indus.
Most of the country and its nearly entire grain producing
farmlands are drained by this river and its numerous large and small
tributaries.
There are three major geographical divisions of the
Subcontinent.
One of them is the Vindhya Hill ranges that separate North
and South India.
The second is the gentle hump separating the
east-flowing Ganges and its tributaries and the West-flowing Indus and
its tributaries – this distinguishes the modern nations of Pakistan and
Bharat.
The Persians called the land Hindush, a Sanskrit equivalent of Sindhu,
which was the historical local reference to the Indus River.
Even the
ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as
“The people of the Indus”.
We, the people of Pakistan were therefore in
error in simply relinquishing the name ‘India’ to our eastern neighbor.
It is our name.
The great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata tells us that Bharat, meaning the
‘Cherished’, was a descendant of the Lunar dynasty and was the ancestor
of Kauravas and Pandavas, two antagonists of that epic battle.
We are
also told that he sacrificed horses on the banks of the Yamuna, the
Saraswati and the Ganges, but none for the Indus.
Bharat, therefore, is
the proper religious, cultural and natural name of a country that
reveres the Mahabharata and the Ganges.
That the people beyond the Indus were called Indoos or Hindus, who
happened to be of a different religion, is a geographical allusion and
not a religious one.
Nevertheless, we the people of Pakistan,
irrespective of their religion, are the true Indians; the inhabitants of
the land of the Indus.
Of course this cultural loss has now gained
permanence as Bharat and India are the official names of our eastern neighbor but we need to be mindful of our cultural loss in losing our
rightful alternate name.
The second loss is that of historical narrative. This is a great loss
and has multiple dimensions.
The Subcontinent was ruled by Sultans of
Turkic and Persian origin for seven hundred years, from the Ghaznavid
raids in or about 1000 AD to Nader Shah’s invasion in 1739 AD.
These
ruling families, their fellow migrant noble compatriots and their
chroniclers legitimately traced their history to their own lands of
origin.
Unfortunately, this trend, fueled by the religious class, crept
in the psyche of most of the Subcontinent’s Muslims.
My paternal
grandfather’s great grandfather converted to Islam. He was a migrant
from Kashmir to Amritsar. My family had lived in the valley for
centuries since the Aryan irruption from Central Asia.
How do I shun or
escape this history and at what point do I cut short my past and
dishonestly develop factitious links to some prominent town or
personality of the erstwhile Abbasid province of Khorasan?
This is not
to say that those who do so, believing that to be their factual lineage,
are wrong but the question still stands: at what point in time does one
start belonging to the land that has nourished one’s forefathers and
delete the various prefixes and suffixes that indicate them to be
progeny of intruders and raiders of this land?
When renouncing the history of our part of the land, we have become
alienated from some of the sons of this soil who should have done us
proud.
The first of these is the dignified Raja Porus who was born in
the Punjab and his kingdom extended over the Chaj Doab – the land
falling between the rivers Jhelum and Chenab.
His blood descendants are
more likely to be living amongst us rather than across the border. We
should claim him as one of our heroes.
There is hardly any reason for
repudiating his legacy from our national narratives especially when the
famous battle of the Hydaspes, between the ancient Punjabi armies of
Porus and Greek forces of Alexander the Great was fought in 326BC.
That
happened 900 years before Islam and 300 hundred years before
Christianity came into being.
We live on an ancient land that was a
thriving concern much before these religions came into existence. We
should be proud of that.
Taxila – Takshashila – of the ancient world- was the centre of a great
civilization. One of its greatest luminaries was Chanakya, also known as
Kautilya.
He was a philosopher, a political scientist and an economist.
His Arthasastra is perahps the first ever treatise on politics, statecraft and economics, predating Machiavelli’s The Prince
by 1,800 years.
He mentored Chandragupta, the architect of the Mauryan
Empire and served as his Chief Minister.
He was in his 40s when
Alexander traversed from north to south through the land that
constitutes all four provinces of Pakistan.
He helped in defeating and
expelling the Greeks from Punjab to well across the Indus.
He is perhaps
the greatest Indian of the ancient world and he was born and raised in
Taxila; on the northern slopes of Islamabad’s Margalla Hills.
For some reason, we in Pakistan today portray Chanakya as a villain and a
demon whereas he was a realist and understood the complexities of
governing a large empire populated with diverse nationalities.
He was a
great philosopher of political science and laid the foundations of this
discipline of scholarship.
His appearance in the sketches available on
the internet casts him as a typical temple priest.
They are images
conceived by a Brahmanical mindset and may or may not bear any
similarity to the historical Chanakya. However, that is immaterial.
He,
too, lived much before the advent of Islam or Christianity and
Pakistanis should not hold a religious grudge against persons of
pre-Islamic times.
We should be proud that our land – in the neighborhood of our capital city – gave birth to this sage.
We could
even establish a department in Taxila university in his name to teach
political science and political economy, the subjects that he conceived.
Among so many others, another local achievement of great significance
that we have neglected to tell our children is the fact that the oldest
mathematical manuscript in the world was found at Bakhshali, a village
north-east of Mardan.
The document, carbon dated to AD 224-383, contains
the first recorded zero in history.
The 70 leaves of birch bark contain
mathematical rules, problems and their solutions in arithmetic, algebra
and geometry, on topics of fractions, square roots, progressions and
equations of linear and quadratic type.
That is a lot of modern
calculations.
No wonder that India is acclaimed as the original home of
numerals and mathematics!
It flourished in the regions encompassing the
Taxila civilization from where it spread eastwards to the rest of the Subcontinent and westwards to the Iranian plateau and beyond.
The cultural and scientific achievements that are the legacy of the
Gandhara civilization are primarily our heritage and not necessarily
that of the people of the Ganga-Yamuna or trans-Narmada regions who now
take the overwhelming amount of credit for these inventions.
It is actually the ancestors of modern-day Pakistanis who have given
numerals and mathematics to the world.
We should feel that pride and
claim the honor.
The next part of this series will discuss our lost heritage in terms of festivals, names and religious figures.
Author of the article, Parvez Mahmood, retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a
software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and
historical issues.
