In her impressive and very original first novel, not only does Alice Albinia discover this history, but goes on to narrate it in a style that enthrals both the head and the heart. The seeds for the book, we are told, were sowed in 2000, when while reading the Rig Veda — which, as she later discovers, is set in the Indus Valley, implying that “Hinduism’s motherland was not in India, but Pakistan, its demonised neighbour” — she first stumbled upon the evocative descriptions of the ‘Unconquered Sindhu’ or the Indus river. And thus began Albinia’s “obsession” with the river. Eight years later, the result is a delightful and insightful travel-cum-historical narrative that takes the reader through several geographical, civilisational, cultural, religious, political and social landscapes.

Her remarkable journey — which is sometimes legal and at others dangerously illegal — begins in Karachi, among the untouchable Bhangis, who are single-handedly responsible for cleaning the city’s stinking and festering sewers. It is through their stories that Albinia introduces the reader to the horrors of the 1947 Partition — an event that till date continues to foster virulent hatred in the hearts of millions of Indians and Pakistanis. With Partition, says Albinia, “the citizens of India and Pakistan have suffered the stifling of their mutual history, and the loss of access to lands, languages and faces that were once part of their shared vocabulary”.

But the protagonist here is not any individual, or community, but the Indus river, which was treated with the same thoughtlessness at the time of Partition. And as she travels from the mouth to the source, traversing Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Tibet in the process, Albinia discovers that the mighty river — which once cradled nascent and progressive civilisations alike, was the muse of saints as well as poets, and an integral link between various cultures — is now slowly dying, choked by conflict, unthinking water management policies and sheer neglect. Today, the Indus dries up much before, in the plains of Sindh, instead of completing its natural course and merging with the Arabian Sea. The delta has shrunk from 3,500 sq. km to a mere 250 sq. km.

Alice Albinia was born in London in 1976. She read English literature at Cambridge University and South Asian history at School of Oriental and African Studies, London. In between, she worked for two years in Delhi as a journalist and editor. Empires Of The Indus is her first book, for which she won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Work in Progress.

But during the course of her journey, the intrepid and ever-observant Albinia does find remnants of the cultures and people that once flourished alongside the Indus. She comes across the Kalash, who have been proclaimed by Pakistan to be ‘the key to India’s Aryan mystery’. They are, she says, “neither Muslim, Hindu, nor Buddhist, the Kalash religion is syncretic, involving a pantheon of gods, sacred goats, and a reverence for river sources and mountain tops”.

Albinia also stumbles across the Sheedis — some of whom are also to be found in Gujarat — who are the descendants of African slaves brought from that continent into Asia by Muslim traders centuries ago. Once a proud people, they now struggle to disguise their heritage.

Albinia’s captivating account takes us back 4,500 years to the time of Mohenjodaro, reinterprets the tales of Alexander’s entry into the region, and exposes us to rich but forgotten archaeological remains such as the tombs of the Kalkhoras, the rulers of Sindh in the 18th century. But these tombs, which are adorned with frescoes depicting scenes from life as it was in those days, lie abandoned and ignored. “In Europe,” observes the author, “such treasure would sustain an entire tourist industry. Here, they stand in a windswept desert, blown by the sand, visited only by the occasional porcupine.”
The book is a brilliant chronicle of a river that has at one point or another nurtured at least four major religions of the world — Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism.

But sadly, the Indus, once a mighty river that inspired poets and intimidated explorers, is in danger of running dry.

Kuldip Nayar turned 24 on the day of Pakistan’s creation. And the same day, he and his family left their meal midway to take refuge in Sialkot jail as a precaution. Later, the family left for India in batches. Ironically, Nayar’s first job in Delhi was with an Urdu newspaper, which had at one stage supported the two-nation theory. The arrival of a million Punjabi refugees in a city of half a million people turned Delhi into a Punjabi city in one stroke. And the Punjabis, Nayar points out, “crowded out the dainty, decent culture of Delhi with our crudeness and indiscipline”.

Asif Noorani’s migration was relatively smooth. His family moved to Pakistan only in 1950, when he was eight years old. And their migration was more for economic promise than due to a threat to life. Adjusting to rustic Lahore was hard on cosmopolitan Bombayites. They moved to Karachi, which was being transformed by migrants into a cosmopolitan business hub.

Even for those tired of Partition prattle, these personal accounts are a refreshing change on the theme.
Feroz Ahmed

Despite being confronted with the stereotypes and cliches that define and circumscribe India in the western imagination — caste, chaos, IT geeks, poverty, arranged marriages and ultra-macho men among others — this Indian-American author avoids falling prey to them. In fact, she does one better — she subverts these stereotypes creating an ambivalence that we all feel but find ourselves unable to articulate. But what impresses most is the complete absence of the nostalgia, romantic or otherwise, which has been the hallmark of most novels written by diasporic Indians.

Jain manages to tell, with humour and startling honesty, not just her story, but also that of a nation that is so much in flux at the moment that it is almost impossible to make a definitive statement about it. The sociological commentary on India’s contemporary caste, cultural, sexual, gender and class divides is made while telling the stories of the young men and women she encounters in her search for a husband.

Her style is simple yet effective, and the ‘Harvard-acquired vocabulary’ does help, too. But some things just cannot be explained, says Jain. One of which is because someone isn’t a wrong husband, does not make him a right husband.
Sumati Nagrath

In his first authorised memoir, Buffet finally allows a glimpse into his struggles, follies and learnings, and how they provided him the wisdom that is behind his success. In The Snowball, the reader is given access to the private life of this legendary man — and it is a story that is complex, compelling and, in many ways, very real.

(Businessworld Issue 30 Sep-06 Oct 2008)