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Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River by Alice Albinia, London: John Murray, 2009, pp.366, price £9.99.
Writing about Indian history, Alice found that everywhere she turned the Indus was there.
Ever since Homosapiens' first migrated out of Africa, the Indus has drawn thirsty conquerors to its banks. Some of the worlds first cities were built here; India's earliest Sanskrit literature was written about the river; Islam's holy preachers wandered beside these waters. Pakistan is only the most recent of Indus valley's political avatars (p.xv).
She recounts:
Its merchants traded with Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. A Persian emperor mapped it in the sixth century BCE, the Buddha lived beside it during previous incarnation, Greek kings and Afghan sultans waded across it with their armies. The founder of Sikhism was enlightened while bathing in a tributary. And the British invaded it by gunboat, colonized it for over one hundred years, and then severed it into two (p.xv).
The book reiterates facts of common interest like the very name of India is derived from the river. In ancient Sanskrit it is called Sindhu, changed by the Persians to 'Hindu'; and the Greeks dropped the 'h' altogether. Chinese whispers created the Indus and its cognates - India, Hindu, Indies, (p.xvi). The river itself has had many names - Purali meaning capricious in Sindhi,' Abbasin [Father of Rivers] it is to the Pathans, the Baltis also call it 'Gemtsuh' or the great head 'Tsuh-fo' [the Male River] and at its source in Tibet it is 'Senge Tsampo' [the Lion River] (p.xvii).
The book is a narrative of a journey along the Indus, 'upstream and back in time from the sea to its source, from the moment Pakistan came into being in Karachi, to the time millions of years ago in Tibet, where the river itself was born'. This river is in the heart of the book for it runs through the lives of the people along its banks like a charm, '...honoured by poets and the common folk, more than any politician, ruler or priest. And sadly it -the king of rivers, the 'Lion' is a diminished river today, having been heavily dammed by the British colonialists in the early part of the twentieth century...