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]Two years ago, I had successfully traversed along Babur’s trail of his first incursion into Hindustan. We picked up his footsteps from Gomal River, moved south along Indus, turned westward “in the bill of Mehter Suleman mountains”, crossed Pir Kanu’s tomb (Sakhi Sarwar in D.G. Khan) and trekked “Pawat Pass” (Sowra Pass) upto Chutiali in District Loralai. One day while sitting in the shade of Sandeman Lodge’s residence at FortMunro, eating sweet musk melons, Babur’s favourite fruit, I decided to follow his other incursion intoHindustan: the areas which are part of Pakistan
By Dr Raheal Ahmed Siddiqui
Babur, the founder of Mughal dynasty was the most fascinating character of Indian History. In 1494, at the age of 12, he became the “Padshah in the country of Ferghana”, and then for the next 10 years he remained a fugitive prince, wandering in Central Asia in search of kingdom, hunted and haunted by Shaibani Khan, the Uzbek warlord. Twice he captured Samarkand, the fabled city, seat of Timurid throne and twice he lost it. Babur’s transformation from a wandering prince to ruling king was completed in October 1504 when he captured Kabul and in brief time, extended his kingdom to Kunduz, Ghazni, Balakh, Kandahar and Herat
His first incursion took place in January 1505, when he crossed Khyber to see the “Country of Hindustan”, pillaged settlements around Hungu area and hunted along Kurram river valley and Gomal river. Flash floods forced him southwards, and the rest I had already covered in my previous narratives.
In 1510, after the death of Shaibani Khan in the battle of Merv, Babur captured Samarkand for the third time, but was forced to withdraw from the city within eight months. But Samarkand was not destined to be his seat of power and fame and with his forced exit for the third time from this city, an iron curtain descended across his Central Asian ambition. Babur turned east.
Babur’s second eastward march was only a raid for winter supplies in the Ningnahar Tuman (tuman – district), in September 1507 AD and great quantities of rice were taken from the Kafirs, most whom were put to sword. Babur noted in his memoirs: “As it was not found desirable to go on into Hindustan… from Kunar I went back to camp on a raft; it was the first time I had sat on one; it pleased me much”.
Babur Nama breaks off abruptly in May 1508, and the text is lost for the next eleven years. Different theories abound for this gap and according to Annette S. Beveridge, inferring from several references made in the Babur Nama and from a passage in Gulbadan’s Humayun Nama, Babur was composing the annals of 1508 onwards not long before his illness and subsequent death. Babur Nama restarts as abruptly as it had broken off with an entry dated 3rd of January 1519 when he announces his presence in the Chandawal Valley. The Tiger’s (Babur’s literal meaning in Turkish) third incursion in the subcontinent was heralded by a violent earthquake, which shook the whole valley for “nearly half an astronomical hour”. Babur diligently noted in his diary: “January 4th – marching at dawn from that camp with the intention of attacking the fort of Bajaur, we dismounted near it and sent a trusty man of Dilazak Afghan to advise its sultan and people to take up a position of service and surrender the fort. Not accepting this counsel, that stupid and ill-fated band sent back a wild answer, whereupon the army was ordered to make ready mantelets, ladders and other appliances for taking a fort”. The next day was consumed by making these preparations.
My problems compounded as Chandewal Valley and Bajaur Fort are alien to modern maps. One can safely presume that Babur, after leaving Kabul, must have travelled along Kunar River, and after capturing Chaghan-Sarai, would have entered the present Bajaur Agency through Nawa Pass. Many centuries before Babur, the great conqueror Alexander also entered India through the same pass. According to Henry George Raverty, an authority on ancient geography and history, the fort Babur attacked has never been known as Bajaur, but as “khahr (the fort), just as the main stream is called simply rud (the torrent)”. This clue was enough to send me packing for Bajaur. For that adequate safety measures had to be taken first.
I rang up my friend Dr Fakher Alam, the Political Agent of the much-troubled North Waziristan. His words mattered and one morning in mid October, we were safely deposited in the office of Assistant Political Agent of Mohmand Agency. Mashood who accompanied me from Peshawar, is always exciting company on such expeditions. His fractured Persian and fluent Pushto made him assume the role of a seasoned interpreter with added advantage of one who knows history. The Chadawal Valley, Baba Qara valley, or the Khawaja Kizar torrent, the names assigned by Babur to various places were neither found in modern maps nor in old revenue records as the APA of Mohmand Agency would later explain to us. Back on the road, we zigzaged northwards and in two hours reached the town of Khaar where the Political Agent of Bajaur Agency sits and administers.
Babur’s chronicle continues. On 6th January 1519 his forces attacked the fort from northwest after crossing the flowing stream (rud in Pushto) and pushed the Bajauris into the fort. Then he used something which was employed for the first time in Indian warfare – gun powder. Babur notes: “As the Bajuris had never seen matchlocks (tufang), they at first took no care about them, indeed they made fun when they heard the report and answered it by unseemly gestures. On that day Ustad Ali Quli shot at and brought down five men with his matchlock…”. Bajauris learnt the hard way the destructive power of gun powder and their ignorance must have amused Babur when he wrote: “After that it so became that not a head could be put out (of the fort walls) because of fire.” At dusk the army retired for the day.
The next day, at dawn, the Mughals attacked the fort. By breakfast time, Dost Beg’s men had undermined and breached the northeastern tower with explosives and entered the fort. Meanwhile the northwestern wall was scaled by ladder and “this strong and mighty fort was taken in two or three astronomical hours”. Babur wrote: “As the Bajauris were rebels and at enmity with the people of Islam, and as, by reason of the heathenish and hostile customs prevailing in their midst… they were put to general massacre and their wives and children were made captive. At a guess more than 3000 men went to their death though a few got away from the eastern side of the fort”. The identity of those poor Bajauries is easy to establish; followers of a pagan religion with “heathenish customs”, they were none other than those known to us as “Kafirs”, the ancient Greek tribe displaced by the Persians during the Punic Wars and whose presence was noted by Greek historians during Alexander’s passage through this area. After the fort was taken, Babur inspected it and noted that it was littered with dead bodies. Later in the residence of Sultan Bajaur, he bestowed the fort and the area to Khawaja Kalan, son of Maulana Muh.
The Bajaur assault was important on two accounts. First, Babur’s description of the swift assault reveals great changes in his command after a decade. The trained officers know their work, and he allows them to do it without joining them. Most importantly, Babur has managed to obtain European firearms, both matchlock shoulder pieces and a cannon or two. “Ustad Ali Quli fired both matchlock as well as ‘firingi’,” Babur’s translation of cannon. We are deprived of Babur’s own account of how he had acquired these firearms, as the records of the last decade were lost. The names of new artillery engineers suggest that they were Turks, but how they reached Kabul with their firearms, through the intervening Persians, their bitter enemies, remains a mystery. But at this point in time, Babur possessed the only effective cannons east of the Caspian and as his subsequent battles show, these artillery pieces provided him the cutting edge over Indian armies.
Muhammad Fahim Wazir, PA Bajaur Agency, was expecting us but was not aware of the purpose of our visit. People do visit Bajaur following the trail of Alexander the Great. Last year there was a German lady who came over from Kabul looking for Alexander’s route; there is a small village few miles north of Khaar called Sikendro, thought to be the camping ground of the Macedonean forces. We felt like 18th century pioneer explorers trying to penetrate the Dark Continent.Failing to provide us a clue about the legendary fort of Khaar in Bajaur, the PA remembered somebody mentioning an old mosque in the vicinity of the Khaar town. Mashood and I thought that we had reached a dead end as far as Babur was concerned, but since we had few more hours to kill, visiting the mosque was not a bad idea.
From the outskirts of Khaar town, we turned left and ascended gradually along a curved road, till it levelled off at the promontory where an old graveyard lay before us. On inspecting the few widely spread graves, we found pieces of old pottery and broken burnt bricks, sure signs of an early settlement.
Mashood thought this must be the place we were looking for. From this point one gets a commanding view of the valley on three sides; the forth side (west), where the hillock spreads wider, being covered by houses of various dimensions. A fort at this place in Khaar with high walls would give a “strong and mighty” look, as Babur had described Bajaur Fort in his memoirs. But this evidence, based on pieces of pottery and its strategic geographical location, was not enough for me to draw any conclusions.
We entered the settlement, crossed the high wall of Nawab’s Qila, and turned left in a blind alley, which ended at the doorsteps of a mosque. At first sight from the courtyard, the newly plastered and painted mosque looked as insignificant as the hundred year old Nawab’s “Qila”. For a moment I thought that we had wasted another day, but on stepping inside the main building, I was amazed to see how architectural antiquities are corrupted in this part of the world. The mosque had a large central dome, sandwiched between two smaller domes, each resting respectively on octagonal drum and squinches, with wide arches interconnecting the three structures. This was a typical architectural formula, so commonly found in mosques of Mughal era. Cement plasters in recent decades had obliterated all signs of intricate stucco calligraphy or colourful designs that must have adorned its wall. Enamel paint and an added high roofed frontal verandah had masked the front elevation of this mosque to an extent that on first sight from the courtyard, we relegated it as being insignificant. Mashood’s Pushto came in handy and soon Muslim Khan, a lecturer of Urdu in the local college, showed us to a roundish stone, on which the muezzin used to stand for giving Azan; this stone had fallen into disuse some decades ago when loudspeakers were introduced in Bajaur Agency. According to Muslim Khan the mosque is perhaps four or five centuries old.
Babur Nama has no mention of any mosque being built by Babur during his Bajaur campaign. It might have been Khawaja Kalan, Babur’s nominated governor of Bajaur, or his successor, who built this mosque. It is easier to guess that the mosque must have been located inside the fort which itself was perched strategically at the top of a hillock dominating the surrounding valleys. We walked back to the edge of the alley, from where Muslim Khan pointed towards some distant scattered houses in the northwest, across the gently flowing stream, still called rud as mentioned by Babur. That place, some 2 or 3 kilometres away from our current location is still called Babur Shah – the place where Babur rested.
On the way back, Fazal Rabi, Subedar of Bajaur Levis took us to a chashma about a kilometer from the main Khaar road. Fresh water bubbled from the bottom of this rectangular pond whose walls were duly plastered with cement, reminiscent of an abandoned water supply scheme. A causeway allowed excess water to flow out into the main rud stream. It was teeming with orange coloured fish and was known as ‘nawai dand’, after a newly wedded bride drowned here. A sizeable pipal tree added to its holiness, and fishing was forbidden by some age old tradition. Nawab Abdul Subhan Khan of Bajaur had converted this spring into a water supply scheme, but it fell into disuse in 1980s.
On the morning of January 8th, 1519 AD, a day after his victory, Babur rested near a spring in the Bajaur valley. At Khawaja Kalan’s request, most of the prisoners were pardoned. However, a few, “most stubborn sultans” were put to death and their heads were sent to Kabul, Badakshan, Qunduz and Balkh with letters of victory. Babur noted in his memoirs: “Shah Mansur Yousufzai, – he was with us as an envoy from his tribe, was an eyewitness of the victory and general massacre. We allowed him to leave after putting a coat on him and after writing orders with threats to the Yousafzais”. Babur’s military campaigns against Yousafzais would not be completed without the narration of the romantic legend of Bibi Muberaka. But that is another story and will be told separately.
Fiction, not fact
Before I was leaving Bajaur, the Political Agent gave me a document entitled A short note on Bajaur, written in 2001 by Ghulam Habib, retired Extra Assistant Commissioner from Village Kot, Malakand Agency, containing the most bizzare history I ever read. My knowledge was enriched by finding that “Mr. Herodotus” came with Alexander and that the "King Phillips (sic), grandfather of Alexander also came to Bajaur, but while he was busy fighting, he received the sad news of the death of his keep Nesa. He erected a monument in her memory and returned to Greece without advancing towards India.
The author Ghulam Habib claimed to have met Mr. Toynbee and discussed in person some historical facts of “great importance”. His romantic lore regarding Alexander the Great goes like this: “According to Mr. Toynbee, the famous British historian, Bajaur and its surrounding area was inhabited by a tribe known as Asakini. When Alexander reached Nawa Pass, the female ruler of Asakini sent her senior officials with olive leaves to Alexander with the message that these leaves were sacred to Greeks as well as to Asakins, therefore, they may be pardoned without bloodshed. They were pardoned. When Alexander reached the capital of Asakini, he met the young queen and fell in love with her. Alexander married her without the consent of Asakini tribe. He spent only one day with the queen and after he left, misfortune fell on her. The people told the queen that as she had lost her honour with a foreign person, she could not remain their ruler. She was dethroned. She went to Tora Ghondai located on the border of Dir and Bajaur. In extreme grief and sorrow, her body melted on the mountain. This story is narrated by the people of Dir and Bajaur even today without knowing that it relates to Alexander the Great and Asakini Queen”.
Ghulam Habib is hardly grounded in history. His “Mr Herodotus” had died a hundred years before Alexander’s birth while King Phillips never came to Bajaur. Philip and not Phillips was Alexander’s father and not his grandfather. So far as the love tale of Alexander and the queen of the Assacenians is concerned, there is an iota of truth in it. This bit of history is preserved in Curtius’ account who also tells us that the queen, Cleophis, had a son who was believed to have been fathered by Alexander.