Artisanship and Music on the Flood Plains of Swat A Cosmological Recalibration of Value in Charsadda

Pushkalavati was once the bustling capital of the Gandharan empire. Meaning Lotus Flower City in Prakrit, Pushkalavati was a central hub of Buddhist spirituality and learning. Over 2500 years ago, Cyrus the Great marched eastwards and Gandhara was eventually annexed into the Acaemenid Empire. The Persians spread so far as to become the largest empire the world had ever seen up to this point. What stories of craftsmanship and spiritualism trundled back along those ancient routes had enough magnetism and inspired enough curiosity for a young Aristotelian student from Macedonia to push the boundaries of his known world. In 327 BCE Alexander the Great with Iliad in mind and sword in hand defeated the Achaemenid Empire and would advance even deeper into the Indus River Valley than Cyrus before him. Although it lay at the extremities of these men’s vast empires, Gandhara’s supposed peripherality is only emphasised in the formation of the Greco-Persian imagination and chronicling. Gandhara was a critical node of something far more ancient than the machinations of these western leaders could have fully understood. This spiritual centre of gravity seduced eastward gazers for thousands of years right up to the present day. Why do outsiders keep coming to this humble region? I find myself here over 2 millennia later in the Indian summer of 2023 with no such grand designs as Messrs Alexander and Cyrus.

Here now, just on the edge of the site of old Pushkalvati lies Charsadda. Charsadda literally means four roads from the conjunction of ‘Char’ meaning four and ‘sadda’ meaning road. This town which sits at the meeting point of three rivers: The Jindi, Swat and Kabul has for centuries been a junction of peoples and cultures. Over time, tribal peoples have existed for millennia in a melting pot of various Indo-Aryan empires that passed in and out through the Hindu Kush’s Khyber Pass. The changing iconography of the Buddhist incarnations unearthed here trace a semiotic trail of the different imperial relationships with the spirituality of the region. From a chiselled muscular upper body with halo suspended behind his head, surrounded by Grecian columns, to the various poses of assurance in Buddha’s emaciated condition – the diverse artisanal representations reveal the enduring power of Buddhist customs in the same region across imperial epochs. However, the interpretation of excavated relics has commonly been understood as the imprinting of Persian, or Greek, or Indo-Scythian, or Kushan cultural hegemony over a conquered land. I find this linear narrative of expansion, cultural influence and decline hard to stomach. For it locates the unearthed relics of the Indus Valley as the peripheral fecundity emerging as the west met the east. It relegates Indus relics to a form of debris on the outskirts of grander imperial polities. Now the time has come to piece together these fragmented and forgotten histories and for them to exist independently with the Indus River Valley and its peoples at the centre of the story. As a region which has always captivated the western imagination, it can no longer have its past, present, and future shaped by it. The native dialectic between life, death and transcendence has begun to be unearthed in this region, and its discourse must be demarcated on its own terms.

We can learn much from these artefacts, poorly housed in museums across the Peshawar and Swat Valleys. But the true spirit of the region will always linger in the cultures of the people who live on. In and amongst the conflict and conquest and various polities which tried to mediate the lives of tribal peoples from Pushkalavati to Charsadda, the people of place have continued living their lives in this landscape. When I walked in the streets of Charsadda, I felt the wisdom of the ancients transmitted through time in the handicrafts of the local Pathan artisans. Charsadda is renowned for its winter shawls which are woven together on complex wooden handlooms. I stood mesmerised as the colourful threads became intertwined with the repetitive pat of feet on wooden paddles and the wizard-like wielding of threads, twirling hands operating the rope-pulleys of an ancient wooden companion. Our tendency to romanticise these cottage processes in the storytelling is compelling but dishonest. The men, women and young people who ply their livelihoods at this historic juncture greet me with grins, curiosity, but mostly indifference. What is wonderous to an outsider is the quotidian for a person of place. A repetitive ritual amongst the impermanence of life. The generational lineage of their craft stirred an admiration within me. How can this beauty have been consigned to the periphery of Pakistan’s consciousness? Surely this humble family should be the centre piece of Pakistani pride. Each shawl which takes around ninety minutes to weave provides only 80 PKR/unit more than the material that was so dexterously fed into the looms. As the injustice of this economic condition shocked the mind of an outsider, the shawl making process continued unperturbed. The cultural production at this meeting of rivers defines its own value in situ to its land, environment, a laborious love, and the needs of its community. A realisation of alternative value begins at the threshold of spaces which do not abide by linear ways of being. Each colourful thread in each shawl stretches back across time to embody the innate value of ancestral lineage.

Our modern conceptions of value, mired by exotification and commodification are corrupting to this older form of authentic value. Across the threshold entered – cultural hierarchies and a system of racial capitalism. The taxonomizing and categorising and codifying of value in the alien administration of local goods. A value carefully engineered by market forces as opposed to a value derived from inter-generational labour and the soul of the craft. In modern modes of production, these handicrafts are designated as anachronistic and an antiquated tradition. Perhaps its artisanal authenticity can be used to appeal to metropolitan consumers who thirst for an authentic and un-alienated way of being. However quaint the process is, the production will always produce a product. A product which can only fit an imagination for economic imperatives and strip away the essence of productive value. Even commodified crafts are of low standing in the conversation around the cultural rejuvenation of Charsadda, Pakistan and the Indus River Valley. And so, in the underbelly of global capitalist systems, ancient crafts are relegated to the bottom of a global hierarchy of value. As a formation of mind and place – Pakistan as a national project has accepted this assigned status. A graveyard for ancient cultural heritage.

As you make your way through Charsadda, the most striking spectacle is its graveyard. It sprawls for what seems like miles across the jagged terrain. Although smaller than it once was, it still stretches over twelve square kilometres. Layer upon layer of ancestral burials, buried cheek by jowl, spilling onto roads, while shanty towns encroach onto old sites. Decrepit settlements hauntingly perch on the edges of the graves. Unlike mass burial sites in the region such as UNESCO recognised Makli, Charsadda’s cemetery is a resting place for mostly ordinary graves of ordinary people. The communal resting place is not demarcated by any visible boundary. To the alien eye it seems like total chaos. When this tradition of communal burying began, we do not know. Qassim Jan Mohammadzai points to a common conception of land ownership practiced by Pathan tribes. This type of land ownership is known as Shamilat. Whatever its origin and the particular genealogies of this burial ground, it is clear this land has been the final resting place of tribal peoples for millennia. A place where the local Indus folk drew breath and crafted breath-taking beauties on the contested terrain of a fertile and spiritual land. Empires waxed and waned and embalmed their lasting legacies by creating muscular monuments to their cultural times. We visit them deliberately, to marvel at or to glean some wisdom from their aura. They induce reflection of the relationship of past peoples to their own mortality. They are relics nodding to a past structure of feeling, but one which is distinct and foreign from yours and consigned to the past. Charsadda’s relationship with death is very much alive. The boundary between the living and the dead is as blurred as where the settlements meet the edge of the cemetery, merging into a continuum.

This is not a part of the world unfamiliar with displacement and death. The Partition of British India in 1947 baptised Pakistan in a crucible of violent migration. Up to 10 million refugees uprooted and moved across the newly drawn divisions of the Punjab, finding new homes, forging new communities, often leaving behind familial roots in the hope of opportunity or fulfilment elsewhere. Perhaps migration is Pakistan’s most sustained national tradition. The semi-nomadic traditions of the tribes of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are inherently at odds with the borders that recognise the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These borders are lines of systematised violence for the local populations that straddle the Hindu Kush. A people who are guided by the landscape, the earth and their local customs were suddenly judged as civilian populations without any of the rights that are ostensibly afforded civilians in the Greco-Roman tradition. Craftsmen of great prowess became new pools of labour, ready to be exploited by the mechanisms of global capital. Afghans were coerced to surrender to subaltern labour conditions in newly configured circuits of imperial extraction. Shawls from the frontier are exported to global markets to cosy a diaspora who have grown cold with native alienation and yearn for a warmth that no shawl can provide. Not surrendering to global capital will leave you at the mercy of other pernicious forces. Saudi and US funded madrassas conspicuously rise from the graves of Charsadda, beckoning the next warriors of jihad. From 1979, soldiers forged int the foothills of the Hindu Kush moved across to fight an American funded war against the Soviet Union. In the other direction, streams of Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan to escape this proxy war, and the unstable and brutal Mujahadeen (1992-1996) and Taliban (1996-2001 and 2021- present day) regimes that followed. Those who left were saddled with precarity and confirmed stateless. The exodus continued in the aftermath of America’s illegal invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, frightfully re-animating the twin city axis of Peshawar and Kabul. Made famous as the gateway into the riches the subcontinent, now transformed as a corridor for displaced peoples. At the time of writing, the Pakistani government has announced its intention to forcibly deport 4 million Afghans from the country. For over four decades, these people have fled from the local and global patriarchal violence of those who wish to control their culture and their livelihoods. Another generation of children is again being forcibly displaced.

Conventional violence emerging from the machinations of modernity are not a novel phenomenon for this region. Today brings a new form of violence. The violence of water. A river system, that for so long was the bountiful provider for livestock, trade, navigation, irrigation, and religious rituals – all the fruits which made the Indus Valley so enchanting to the outsiders, suddenly emerged as a fearsome foe. When the Swat River burst its banks after the floods of August 2022, hitherto untold devastation was caused. Intermittent flooding of river communities has been the way of the water for time memoriam, but in this anthropogenic epoch, the scale and intensity of flooding at Charsadda has been unprecedented. Already internally displaced peoples of the region now face the lived reality of colonial violence through climate change related flooding. Those who remain struggle to navigate altered hostile environments. Those who leave in search of new horizons have already for over a decade washed up on Greek shores – the very same shores where the imaginations of adventurists were fired 2000 years ago. If the privileges of the global north are predicated on the environmental destruction of the global south, then the rupture of the global south will shake all those privileges to their core. A generation of deracinated children is re-forming at the frontiers of imperial violence, built layer upon layer on the deracinated generation that came before. They will no longer all be buried in Charsadda. Their energy is being dispelled all over the world. In life and in death, their fate will be the death nail in any semblance of western civilisation that still claims to exist. Their culture of resilience in the face of such precarity and impermanence are scattered debris rarely featuring in the civilisational annals. Instead, their history is an embodied history, in life and in death, embalmed in the bones of the generation who follow. What is not written of these discarded histories can not and will not simply washed away, for in the people of place and in those who are forced into a diasporic condition, a searing truth will linger on, holding up a mirror to the glaring myopia of those complicit in violence inflicted upon them.

Having passed through Charsadda’s graveyard on a balmy late October afternoon, our party settled for lunch at an inconspicuous restaurant on the flood plains of the Swat. The previous summer’s floods had destroyed many of the settlements along the banks of the river. Those concrete constructions still standing were stained with flood marks which reached up to six feet high. In the floods’ aftermath NGOs arrived at the site. They reconstructed the buildings without sensitivity to local household customs which demand separate gendered spaces and navigation of communal areas. Outsiders continue the tradition of arriving with their foreign, monolithic, undiscerning blueprints, promising uplift. On the ground, alien administration serves only to intensify dependency, entrench imperial social relations and wither away the culture of place. Built on the same site of the previous settlement with the same crumble-prone concrete, it was totally unfit for recreating a home in this fragile environment. So instead, a restaurant was opened where once a home had been. The owner was an old Pathan man with wispy white hair on sides of his head which grew seamlessly down into a well-groomed beard. After preparing us some delightful local cuisines he sat down next to our table on a simply strung wooden charpai to play his rebab for us. He humbly but honestly admitted that he hadn’t been playing for long – only fifteen years. In the face of his volatile and violent environment, he shared that his self-teaching of the Rebab provided him with a sense of solace and resilience. As he plucked and strummed us into a state of rapture and awe, the ancient melodies of the Indus conjured a generative temporality. A space of co-existence which transcended the times, rekindling the fire which enticed so many eastward expansions. And the transcendence of this place which has been muddied in the multitude of orientalist imaginings, begins to gain some footing amongst the squelching mire of myths, parading as histories. In a world of rising flood waters, how we choose to value the artisan and the musician who derive dignity and value from their ancestral roots, deep in the rich Indus soil, will determine the fate of us all. For too long their stories have been shoehorned in at the fringes of teleological histories of progress. A cosmological recalibration of whose histories we value and why we value them is long overdue. It is time we started re-orienting ourselves around new centres – the old centres will not hold.

ⁱ Qasim Jan Mohammadzai, ‘Glimpses of History in the Cemetery of Charsadda (Ancient Pushkalavati)’, Ancient Pakistan, (xx), 2009.