The Age of Kali (50 page)

We had only turned the first of the great U-bends when the car began to shake and rattle like a boiling kettle. ‘Car going ruk-ruk,’ observed Murtazar. ‘This ruk-ruk not good noise.’ It certainly wasn’t. But the car jolted grudgingly on. Below, the fields of the plain of Peshawar receded in to a quilt of patchwork squares,
broken by seams of poplar avenue. We crawled on, up and up, and suddenly we were there. The Traveller gave a last metallic groan and turned its nose triumphantly down in to the valley on the far side. ‘Olden car is golden car,’ said Murtazar in a tone as much of surprise as of pleasure, and as if to reward the car for its good behaviour, he turned the ignition off and let the Traveller freewheel down the slope to the banks of the Swat river.

So relieved was I to have achieved the top of the pass that it was several minutes before I began to take in the astonishing beauty of the valley in to which we were rapidly plunging. It was like entering a lost world, a forgotten Eden isolated on its high Himalayan plateau.

We were passing rapidly through the vortex of an ashok avenue, flanked on one side by the blue Swat river and on the other by green orchards watered by bubbling irrigation runnels. There were mangoes and cherries, quinces and apples, apricots and almonds, and beyond the orchards there were thickets of tamarisk and casuarina as well as groves of mulberry trees belonging to silk farmers. There were children paddling in the streams, and girls carrying brushwood bundles on their heads, and old men sitting in the shade, sucking at their silver
hookahs
. Everywhere you looked were the undecayed remains of the Gandharan golden age: colossal Buddhas and reliefs of the Kushan King Kanishka cut in to the rockface; huge
stupas
rising from hexagonal drums; and a series of fortresses sitting on vast bluffs of rock overlooking the old Silk Road.

Though many of the most remarkable surviving Gandharan remains lie around the top of the Malakand Pass, Gandhara’s ancient capital is sixty miles to the south, at Taxila. When Alexander appeared at the mouth of the Khyber, the King of Taxila wisely
decided against challenging the Greeks. Instead he met Alexander in Swat and guided him through the forests of rhododendron and alpine clematis to the walls of the city. Here, for the first time, Alexander’s troops were able to rest and take in the Indian scene.

To the Greeks, familiar with the glories of Athens, Babylon, Susa and Egyptian Memphis, the buildings of Taxila were unremarkable: the houses were made of mud and uncut stone, and were laid out without any central order or plan. But what did amaze them were the Pathans who lived there. ‘Physically, the Indians are slim,’ wrote Alexander’s Admiral Nearchus. ‘They are tall and much lighter in weight than other men … they wear earrings of ivory (at least the rich do), and they dye their beards, some the very whitest of white, others dark blue, red or purple or even green … they wear a tunic and throw an outer mantle around their shoulders: another is wound round their head. All except the very humblest carry parasols in summer.’

Others wore no clothes at all. Two miles outside Taxila, the Greeks came across fifteen naked wise men who laughed at their cloaks and knee-high boots. They demanded that the foreigners should undress if they wanted to hear some words of the ancient wisdom of India. ‘But the heat of the sun,’ wrote one of Alexander’s men, ‘was so scorching that nobody could have borne to walk barefoot, especially at midday.’ So the Greeks kept their clothes on, and the senior guru questioned them about Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes. Later, the gurus, still naked, dined at Alexander’s table: ‘[They] ate their food while standing,’ wrote one witness, ‘balanced on one leg.’

Although Alexander only stayed at Taxila for a matter of weeks, his visit changed the course of the city’s history. Visiting the museum at the entrance to the archaeological site, I wandered through the rooms looking at the Gandharan sculptures, some of which dated from nearly a thousand years after Alexander’s death. Even the Buddha, that symbol of Eastern philosophy, had undergone a process of Hellenisation: his grace and easy sensuality was thoroughly Indian, yet the images in the Taxila museum were all
defined by Western ideas of proportion and realism; moreover the Buddha was wearing a toga, European dress.

Most remarkable of all was the coin room. Over an entire wall were scattered the gold and silver coins of a millennium of Taxila’s rulers. It wasn’t just that the coins were all modelled on Greek originals. What was amazing were the names of the rulers: Pantaleon, King of North India; Diomedes, King of the Punjab; Menander of Kabul; Heliochles, King of Balkh. They hinted at the strange, hybrid world these kings inhabited. They brought East and West together at a time when the British, the only other Europeans who ever succeeded in ruling the area, were still running through prehistoric fogs dressed in bearskins. The coins of Heliochles of Balkh were typical: they showed a Roman profile on one side – large nose, imperial arrogance in the eyes – but on the reverse Heliochles chose as his symbol a humped Indian Brahmini bull.

Outside, among the ruins – which are spread out over a distance of some fifteen square miles, and overgrown with hollyhocks and wild foxgloves – it is this strange mix of Europe and Asia that continues to grip the imagination. At Sirkap on the edge of Taxila, the Bactrian Greeks founded a classical Greek quarter in 190
BC
. It was to be the New Taxila, a great advance on the old city, and they carefully laid out the streets in a grid of straight lines, like a chessboard. As at Athens, a magnificent boundary wall loops around the residential areas and rises up to the fortified citadel, Sirkap’s answer to the Parthenon.

From there you can stand on the citadel walls and see the expanse of houses unfold beneath you. It is a scene of striking – almost suburban – regularity: it could be any modern New Town, except that each street is punctuated with Buddhist shrines, not supermarkets, and that the whole city was built nearly two hundred years before the birth of Christ. Most intriguing of all, one of the shrines bears the insignia of the double-headed eagle. Centuries later the same symbol was to become the crest first of Byzantium, then of the Habsburgs, and finally of Imperial Russia. Its first
appearance, here in a lost city on the edge of the Karakorums, is one of Gandhara’s great unsolved mysteries.

My favourite of the Taxila ruins, I decided, was that of the monastery of Julian, named after its founder, an Imperial Roman envoy who converted to Buddhism. The monastery was always a place of retreat, and even today, a ruin, it still retains its original calm. I arrived there late in the evening, just as the smoke from the village fires was forming a perfect horizontal line above the fields. At the foot of the hill, below the olive groves, leathery black water-buffaloes sat with their legs folded beneath them. Above, there were parakeets among the olives, and as I walked up the hill flights of grasshoppers exploded from beneath my feet.

I was shown around by the elderly
chowkidar
, who as a young man had participated in Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation of the site. He was a fascinating old man, and as he explained the function of the different ruins the monastery came to life. Soon I could see the orange-robed monks tramping clockwise around the
stupas
, queuing for their food in the refectory, or snuffing out their oil lamps in their austere stone cells.

Best of all, I could visualise the builders. They were men with a sense of humour, for they had included in the design a hundred little conceits, all lovingly pointed out by the
chowkidar
. Here were a series of grotesque Atlantes – they had narrow Mongol features, handlebar moustaches and giant earrings – groaning as they sank under the weight of the
stupa
which was resting on their shoulders. Here – and this was obviously the
chowkidar
’s favourite – was a scene from the temptation of the Buddha: as he sat meditating under an arch, two girls appeared around the corner flashing their breasts at him, trying to distract him from his spiritual quest. Round the base of the
stupa
the
chowkidar
pointed out more temptresses – some extending their legs, others baring their bottoms, others proffering amphorae of wine: ‘Girls, dancing, drinking – all no-problem to Mr Buddha. He liking only prayer, preaching and hymn-singing,’ said the
chowkidar
approvingly. ‘Buddha-sahib is very good gentleman.’

Remarkable as these remains are, it is difficult at first to understand how the warlike Pathans could be descended from the gentle Hellenistic philosophers who created the civilisation of Buddhist Gandhara. Yet they are, and if you visit the museum in Peshawar you can slowly begin to understand the connection which links the warlike tribesmen in the bazaar to the philosopher-soldiers of Alexander’s army.

The most obvious link is material. In the wonderful friezes of sculpture which illustrate the ancient Buddhist scriptures, the Gandharan sculptors included details from the everyday life they saw around them, details which one can still see repeated in the lives of the people of the Frontier today. The writing tablet and reed pen which the Buddha uses as a child are still used in the more remote Frontier primary schools. The turbans which the Gandharan chieftains sported in the sixth century
AD
have yet to disappear, and many of the tribesmen still dye their beards, just as they did when Nearchus wandered through the streets of Taxila in the third century
BC
. The sandals of the Bodhisattvas are still worn; their musical instruments still played; their jewellery still manufactured in the silver bazaar today. Even the design of the houses remains more or less unchanged by the passage of time.

But the link with the world of Gandhara runs even deeper than this. The Peshawar museum is home to one of the most magnificent collections of Buddhist images in existence. Room after room is filled with spectacular black-schist figures, standing, meditating, preaching or fasting. The images follow a prescribed formula. The physique is magnificent: muscles ripple beneath the diaphanous folds of the toga. The saviour sits with half-closed eyes and legs folded in a position of languid relaxation. His hair is oiled and
groomed in to a beehive topknot; his high, unfurrowed forehead is punctuated with a round caste-mark. His face is full and round, the nose small and straight, the lips firm and proud.

It is only when you have stared at the figures for several hours that you realise what is so surprising about the Gandharan version of the Buddha: it is its arrogance. There is a hint of rankling self-satisfaction in the achievement of
nirvana
; a sneer on the threshold of enlightenment. This is the Buddha as he was in life – a prince. And soon you realise where you have seen that haughty expression before – outside in the bazaar. Unlike the tendency to grovelling subservience which you find in some of the other peoples of the subcontinent, the Pathans meet your gaze. Hawk-eyed and eagle-beaked, they are a proud people; and as the Buddhas demonstrate, their poise and self-confidence directly reflect that of the Gandharan Bactrian Greeks who sculpted these images in the plains of Peshawar nearly two millennia ago.