| Tradition has condemned Jhelum to be linked with Bucaphela, the horse of Alexander the Great. It deserves better, as Salman Rashid's latest monograph on the city, the river and its environs testifies. |
| Few parts of the Punjab are as replete with the ruins of history as the Jhelum District, once the thoroughfare for invaders - from the Greeks to the Mughals - hurrying in from the north-west and then scurrying back with its wealth. It is fortunate that it has a writer of Salman Rashid's erudition and sensitivity to collate its folklore, its traditions, and its legends so skillfully. |
| Mr Rashid is a modern amalgam of Arrian and Herodutus, and it is perhaps not surprising that he relies upon their accounts - the earliest we have of this area - to create a grid within which to reconstruct his chronology of the significant sites to be found there. He begins his voyage of rediscovery with a delineation of the origins of the name Jhelum, known variously by the early Hindus is the Vitasta or the 'wide-spreading river', and by the Greeks as Hydaspes and later still the Biyatta. |
| Alexander fought his famous battle against the local king Paurava nearby. He gained a kingdom but lost his horse which died of battle wounds or simply of exhaustion. It is a telling insight into our unquestioning acceptance of history (invariably a record by the victors) that we should refer to Paurava by his Greek name Porus but localize Alexander as Iskander. It is equally revealing of us, as Salman Rashid complains, that we prefer to commemorate the success of the foreign invader, rather than the valiant resistance put up on behalf of our ancestors by their unsuccessful leader. |
| The location of the open land around the Jhelum had ordained it to be nothing more than a garrison - whether for Sher Shah Suri who began a magnificent fort at Rohtas, later to be completed Akbar, or by the British who established Jhelum as one of their first cantonments after their annexation of the Punjab. The thoroughfare that once led from the west to the east reversed its traffic when the railway line was laid and the sturdy bridge (in 120 years it needed overhauling only three times) was thrown across the temperamental river in the 1870s. |
| Salman recounts how verdant the area was, as rich above the ground as below it. It teemed with wildlife that attracted the hunter's instinct in Jahangir who conducted a battue there, timber remained a main export until it was unsustainable, and the underground salt mines at Khewra continue to supply rock salt even today, after a millenia of excavation. If parts of those surroundings were in perpetual commotion, other parts remained tranquil, such as the Tilla Jogian - the seat of yogis of a contemplative order. |
| Salman introduces the reader to forgotten sites such as Baghawala, associated with Mahmud of Ghazni and Akbar, the baoli or water tank at Khukhar, and to the increasingly popular shrine of Ghulam Haider Shah, built in 1908 and already a rival to much older sites of veneration. |
| If one was to pluck from the garden of Salman's narrative two flowers that would symbolize the whole, I would select first his irreverent dismissal of the modern tomb built by someone who should have know better to Shahab ud Din Ghori at Dhamiak. He argues that as the body of the murdered ruler was in fact taken back to Ghazni, it was more likely that any spot associated with his interment would have been for his less commemorable viscera, removed for embalming purposes. |
| The second would be the quotation he has found in Jahangir's memoirs of his visit to Jalalpur. Here it is again, in its entirety |
| 'In the Ghakkar tongue bhakra is a jungle. The jungle is composed of cluster so flowers, white and scentless. I came the whole way from Tilla to Bhakra in the middle of the riverbed, which had running water in it, with oleander flowers of the colour of peach blossoms. In Hindustan this plant is always in full bloom. There was much of it on the banks of this river. The horsemen and men on foot who were with me were told to put bunches of the flowers on their heads, and whoever did not had his turban taken off; thus a wonderful flowerbed was produced.' |
| Which modern leader do we know who would have shown such a joyous, spontaneous reaction to his surroundings and then to have recorded the happy event in his memoirs. Gone are the days when rulers left a legacy of their minds for posterity. Gone are the days when administrators pored over chronicles to produce invaluable District Gazetteers. We should therefore be all the more grateful to Salman Rashid for having recreated with his inimitable pen a fascinating panorama of Jhelum District, and to his publishers Sang-e-Meel for adding to their already rich reservoir of books on Pakistan's history, culture and archeological sites |
