We should preserve Hindu and Buddhist sites and encourage followers from India and the West to see their heritage.
Footloose, NOS, The News International
Religion of the masses
Gallivanting around Rahim Yar Khan recently, I was told of two
stupas in the district. And so there I betook myself to the ancient holy places
By Salman Rashid
In reverence to Siddhartha, the Mahatma Buddha, the founder of their religion, Buddhist people build stupas. As repositories of Buddha’s relics, these structures, half-domed and circular, serve as focal points for worship. Deep inside the drum of the structure, carefully placed there at the time of construction, is a tiny relic casket containing either a tooth or a nail clipping or hair supposedly from the Buddha’s person. Some famous stupas are believed to contain the begging bowls used by the saint. Worship consists of circumambulation of the shrine.
The discovery of the stupas of Taxila and several sites in Pukhtunkhwa led most of us to believe that the stupa was native only to the north. But the most famous one in the south is the trademark stupa of Moen jo Daro. Indeed, John Marshall began his excavation with a view to investigating this ancient mound. What he found underneath was way beyond his belief.
There are other stupas in Sindh. The one is near Jacobabad outside Thul, a town that takes its name from the Sindhi word for stupa. The other lies off the Hyderabad-Badin highroad and goes by the name of Sudheran jo Thul after a mythical prince of Nerunkot as Hyderabad was anciently known. Experts date these two to just over two thousand years old.
Gallivanting around Rahim Yar Khan recently, I was told of two stupas in the district by my friend Raheal Siddiqui. And so there I betook myself to the ancient holy places.
Three kilometres north of the town of Allahabad on the highroad to Liaquatpur, Basti Sial is a small village in the heart of southern Punjab cotton country. The stupa sits amid tamarisk and ber trees surrounded by square patches of cultivation. A far cry from the stupas of, say, Swat or Taxila, this one is a misshapen, dust-coloured angular hump no more than four metres tall.
Like the Thul stupa of Jacobabad, the drum of this one in Basti Sial is square in shape. It is constructed of sun-dried bricks measuring 30x15x7.5 cms. Bricks of this size (and some even larger) were commonly used more than two thousand years ago from the deep south of Sindh up into northern Punjab.
The angular drum sits on a packed mud plinth whose brick facing, if there was any, has long since disappeared. Each side of the drum measures 7.3x7.3 metres and when it was complete may have been about ten metres high. The stupa does not appear to have been plundered because if there was a relic casket, it would be somewhere inside the drum which is undisturbed. Locals ascribe no superstition to the monument, nor do they recognise its significance. Since the Department of Archaeology is unconcerned and because of our national disregard for history, I fear, this stupa will by and by be swallowed up by agriculture.
Lalu wala Thul lies hard by the road leading from Khanpur northward to the village of Pucca Laran (the r is palatal and the n nasal). Like its sister stupa the drum of this one is also square in shape. Much larger than the other, it sits on a higher plinth which contains some kiln-fired bricks besides sun-dried ones. Unable to reach the bricks in order to measure them, I nevertheless think they measure the same as those used in the other one. In its heyday, this stupa must have been an impressive sight rising no less than some fifteen metres above the surrounding ground.
Chroniclers travelling with Alexander of Macedonia recorded Buddhism as a major religion in what is now Pakistan. Of course there were also Zoroastrians and Hindus – this latter name having been coined in medieval times; we do not know what Hindus were known as back then. Although Buddhism suffered greatly at the hands of the savage Huns under Tor Aman and his son Mehr Gul in the latter part of the 5th century, it endured and was the religion of the masses at the time of the Arab conquest of Sindh.
And so, as the Arabs under Mohammad bin Qasim marched north to Multan, they must have passed by Lalu wala Thul and the Basti Sial stupa. Even at that time these monuments were well over a thousand years old. On the other hand, Alexander passing through here in the autumn of the year 326 BCE saw them prim and new, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred years old.
None of the Greeks with Alexander comment on the religion of this particular area. But we do know that the people who barred Alexander’s southward journey through Rahim Yar Khan are called Sogdians in the chronicles. Now, Sogdia was the country lying north of the Oxus River, that is, the modern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and its people were the Sogdians. But even so there is no discrepancy.
South Punjab and Sindh were home to the Rajput clan of Sodha which name was corrupted to Sogdian by the Greeks. The battle against them was hard-fought but after defeating them Alexander, being what he was, did not destroy their holy sites. We know that rather than being antagonistic towards the many religions he came across on his conquests, Alexander readily performed their rites. Indeed, his lack of bias comes across clearly when he was grieved to see the damage inflicted by grave robbers to the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Now, Cyrus was the king who consolidated the Achaemenian Empire more than two hundred years before Alexander set out to dismantle it. In the same vein, the two stupas and the accompanying schools would have been permitted to function unmolested.
Mohammad bin Qasim was no molester either. And so the stupas of Rahim Yar Khan may have thrummed with piety and worship well into the 10th century. By then Buddhism, which had gone into decline with the Hunnic attacks, was replaced by Hinduism and Islam. Slowly the sound of chanted prayers reverberating off the bricks of the stupas dimmed and eventually died.
They were left to the vagaries of nature. Very likely man moved in to help himself to the baked bricks facing the monuments. Erosion quickened until we are left with the stubs of once glorious religious buildings. Thankfully the area has scant precipitation or even these mud structures would have long since been lost. Who knows how much longer these milestones to the distant past will yet endure.