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COVER STORY: AFGHANISTAN
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
After Bamiyan, India lost its
most enduring Afghan link
It wasn't merely Dr Watson
who, on foggy evenings on London's Baker Street, felt a nagging pain from
the bullet wound he suffered in the Afghan war. In the second city of
the empire, a child named Mini struck up a strange friendship with the
hot-headed but kind Kabuliwala, Rahmat Khan. From London to Calcutta,
and from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Rabindranath Tagore, Afghanistan has
held out a strange fascination, a feeling, as Lord Curzon wrote in 1889,
"of almost superstitious apprehension".
Yet, it wasn't always a sense of exotic unfamiliarity that drew Indians
to Afghanistan. For nearly 2,000 years before the Durand Line delineated
India from its turbulent neighbour in 1893, Afghanistan was central to
the Indian consciousness. It wasn't another piece of the Great Game jigsaw;
it was part of the grand civilisational reach of India. It was Gandhara,
the land of the self-denying Gandhari and the notorious Shakuni whose
wiles deprived the Pandavas of a kingdom. It was the land of King Nagnajit,
described in the Aitareya Brahmana as a great Vedic teacher.
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Under Threat: While Gandhara artefacts survive in museums abroad
(right), this Kushan ivory piece (left) from Bagram could be a Taliban
casualty
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Writing in the 2nd century, the Greek chronicler Ptolemy included today's
Afghanistan in his definition of India. So much so that Arachosia-corresponding
to the region around Kandahar-was called "White India". Three
centuries later, the Chinese traveller Fa-hien also included substantial
parts of Afghanistan in India. Much later, in the 16th century, Akbar's
minister Abul Fazl described Kabul and Kandahar, then parts of the Mughal
empire, as the twin gates to India. Indeed, Babur, the founder of the
Timurid dynasty in India
is buried in the Afghan capital. "The eastern regions of Afghanistan,"
concluded historian R.C. Majumdar, "were always regarded politically
as parts of India, and the rest of the territory remained Indian in culture
and predominantly within the
political orbit of India ..."
Bamiyan, located at the entrance to a pass on the foot of the Hindukush
linking the Kabul valley with the silk road at Balkh (Bactria), was the
foremost symbol of this civilisational link. Buddhism having been introduced
to the region, first by Ashoka and subsequently by the Kushanas, the world's
largest Buddhas were carved out of the mountain cliffs during the 3rd
and 4th centuries. The figures, towering at a height of 175 ft and 110
ft, were good examples of Gandhara art. That school of sculpture had a
strong Hellenic influence and was marked by the crimpled robes and moustaches.
Visiting Bamiyan between 1819 and 1825, William Moorcroft and George Treback
wrote that the taller idol was referred to as Sang-sal or Rang-sal and
the smaller one was called Shah-muma. "The name of the smaller idol,"
they noted, "is evidently only a corruption of Shak-muni." They
recorded the local belief that the initial mutilation of the figures was
carried out at the behest of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Even Genghis Khan
who massacred the entire population of Bamiyan in 1221 had apparently
left the idols untouched.
When the Chinese traveller Hsuan-Tsang visited it in 630 A.D., Bamiyan
was a thriving Buddhist centre, with many hundreds of monks living in
the caves dotted around the statues. It was ruled by a king whose family
had migrated from Kapilavastu, the birthplace of Buddha in Nepal. Bamiyan
was also intimately linked to neighbouring Kapisa (also called Kafiristan
and renamed Nuristan after its people were converted to Islam in the 1890s)
where a Kshatriya Buddhist king patronised some 100 monasteries with 6,000
monks and a few Hindu temples. According to I-Tsing, a Chinese who visited
India between 671 and 695 A.D., there was a Kapisa temple in Bodh Gaya,
with the priests coming from Afghanistan.
Nor was Bamiyan the only major centre of Buddhism. In Hadda, visited by
both Fa-hien and Hsuan-Tsang, archaeologists unearthed the ruins of 531
stupas and many examples of sculpture in the Gandhara style. Digs in the
Kushan summer capital of Bagram, north of Kabul, unearthed painted glass
from Alexandria, plaster matrices, bronzes, porphyries, and alabasters
from Rome, carved ivory from Mathura and lacquers from China. A massive
Kushan city at Delbarjin, north of Balkh, and a major hoard of beautiful
gold ornaments near Sheberghan, west of Balkh, have also been excavated.
A Surya image and the remains of a temple in the Gupta style were found
in the Khair Khaneh hill, north-west of Kabul. Many of the artefacts unearthed
in Afghanistan are fortunately preserved elsewhere. The museums in Berlin,
Peshawar and Kolkata have large collections of Gandhara art.
The Hindu-Buddhist presence in Afghanistan was maintained till the early
10th century by the Shaivite Shahi kingdom that in its heyday extended
from Kabul to Kashmir. The Shahi kings, notably Jayapala and his son Anandapala,
resisted the encroachments of the neighbouring Ghaznavids for 25 years.
Their final defeat at the hands of Mahmud is said to have begun the process
of the civilisational truncation of India. With the destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddhas, the most enduring reminder of India's presence in Afghanistan
has been removed. The Taliban hasn't merely assaulted its own national
heritage, it has amputated a part of India.
-Swapan Dasgupta
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