I have never head ofthis place - anyone else know it?
Footloose, NOS, The News International
Punjab Government rescues the thousand year old Pattan Minara
By Salman Rashid
I do not care what other good or bad things Javed Mahmood, Chief Secretary Punjab, has done, but I laud the man for saving Pattan Minara from certain doom. He has not just done me a favour, he has preserved for posterity one little bit of our ancient history – one bit that was threatened by mindless bureaucracy.
I first saw Pattan (Ford) Minara (Tower) just outside Rahim Yar Khan town back in the year 2001. Two things I knew immediately. One, that the building was more than a thousand years old and, secondly, that the Sindhu River which today rolls some thirty kilometres westward, once flowed right past this curious little building.
The tall building rising on a square plan has two storeys, both with doorways facing west. The ground floor cubicle, accessible by a flight of steps, is empty, but for some modern graffiti, while the upper cannot be reached without a ladder. Above the plain plinth, there runs on the three facades (other than the front) a frieze of omega-shapes. Above, in the centre of each facade, is a deep-relief rendition of a temple with two square pillars and domed roof topped by the same omega shape. Above it runs a frieze of large-petalled half flowers housed in semi-circles.
This is topped by another frieze of omega shapes above which is a broad band with squares in relief arranged to form zigzag lines. But the most remarkable ornamentation that topped all this is now gone. This was a half-dome jutting out on all three sides as if to shade the central ornamentation. The base of this half-dome is again richly ornate with geometric and omega designs as well as with what must have been a central aigrette.
The base of the doorway on the upper floor is badly damaged and I suspect this is where the ladder would have rested. But above the doorway one can clearly see the remnants of a cantilever for a balcony. This same is repeated again on the south facade. Apparently, the roof of the building could be climbed to come out on the balcony.
The entire building is crafted from kiln-fired bricks and the ornamentation is realised through cut bricks. We see this same on the Hindu Shahya temple of Sassi da Kallara near Talagang (Chakwal district) in the Salt Range where we also see the omega and the half-flower. Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the noted architect and historian, says that the omega or three-leaf clover was an artistic representation of the Buddhist temple plan which the design of the Hindu Shahya temples sprang.
The flow of the decorative brickwork also recalls the work seen on the mysterious tomb of Khaliq Wali near Kabirwala (Khanewal district) as well as that of Saddan Shaheed on the Muzaffargarh-Jhang highroad. While the former has been heavily vandalised by art collectors, the latter still retains most of its brick ornamentation. Now the tomb of Khaliq Wali and Sassi da Kallara are dated to around the end of the 10th century and that of Saddan Shaheed to a hundred and fifty years later.
This means that for a period spanning over two hundred years, this style of brick ornamentation was popular with Hindu and Muslim architects alike. It also means that the temple of Pattan Minara is about the same age and was built for the same purpose, that is, as a Hindu house of worship. Although multiple floors in a Hindu temple are not unusual, this sort of design with external ladders as well as ornate balconies to step out on is not seen elsewhere.
No archaeological studies have been carried out at Pattan Minara and so we have only the Gazetteer of Bahawalpur State (1904) to guide us. It says that there were four similar, but somewhat smaller, towers with the Minara in the centre. The peripheral buildings were pulled down in the early years of the 18th century by a local landlord who cannibalised the bricks to build a fortification.
The Gazetteer also records the tradition that the tower had ground plus three floors. When the top floor fell is not known, but the second storey was pulled down as late as 1740 by a kinsman of the earlier vandal. At that time an inscribed brick was discovered which recorded, in Sanskrit, the founding of this monastery during the time of Alexander the Macedonian. The Gazetteer does not record what became of the brick.
The existing building is clearly post-Alexander, but if there was such a brick, it could only indicate that this site was occupied by a building which may indeed have been built at Alexander’s time. We know from history that Alexander did pause in this area where the Sodha Rajputs gave him a run for his money.
All around the tower are a number of mounds and it is evident that this area once had a thriving population that lived in a cluster of townships. Surely that would have been when the Sindhu flowed past here bearing trade and commerce from distant marts to whatever this urban centre was called and providing enough irrigation to enable her husbandmen to cater to local food requirements – and perhaps also for export. However, none of these mounds have been investigated and we do not know what secrets they hold.
Recently in Rahim Yar Khan, it went out to Pattan Minara again only to be horrified to find large construction machinery working about two hundred metres from it. It turned out that in all its mindlessness the Public Health Engineering Department had seen it fit to build a set of huge tanks to collect Rahim Yar Khan city’s sewage. They did not seem to realise that sewage seeping into the ground would raise water level which will eventually push up salinity. Nor too did they understand that salt would have destroyed the ancient brick structure.
To make matters worse, one section of the cultural mounds was to be cut up to let the huge pipeline connecting the city’s sewers with the tanks to pass through. This could only have happened in a country as blighted as Pakistan: anywhere else such a scheme, it at all it had to be sited near an ancient monument, would have been placed a few hundred metres away. Here we have morons who cared nothing for history riding in roughshod to destroy an ancient monument.
In a recent meeting at the Punjab Secretariat this bluishness most foul was brought to the notice of the Chief Secretary who ordered immediate cessation of the work. We now hear that the sewage storage tanks are being shifted some ways off and we can only hope that it is appropriately far-off. Had it not been for the Chief Secretary, we could safely have washed our hands off Pattan Minara.
PS. A foreign NGO in cahoots with some local agencies has put up a signboard near the tower. Some self-styled ‘historian’ who has never read a book in his life and was called upon by these NGO-types for the historical content in the sing has turned Pattan Minara into Alor. Even a half-literate person knows that Alor sits a few miles east of Rohri town. Such idiots cannot be proud of what they have, they yearn for things that they do not have.