Troubled waters

Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia

When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history.

Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have the conquest of Sindh, the botched finale of the British Raj, Independence, and the horrors of Partition. Most of the Indus, sacred to Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, now ran through the newly created Islamic republic of Pakistan. Trouble followed.

Travelling on, Albinia dredges up history — the importing of African slaves by Muslim traders and the unenviable place their descendants occupy in today’s society; the changing forms of slavery that persist: unpaid temple workers; debt-ridden peasantry, subjugated women. From a token headscarf to a chador exposing her eyes, Albinia dons a burqa with mesh panel that gives her 20 per cent vision and renders her reassuringly invisible to Muslim males.

Her enthusiasm is insatiable, her disregard for danger alarming: she risks her life, slithering down vertical hillsides in old trainers, battling snowstorms, frequently lost, crossing a turbulent stretch of river in a crate strung on a wire between a cliff and a mulberry tree. If a villager mentions ancient rock carvings or mysterious stone circles, she hauls him off to help her find them. She makes illegal border crossings, enters the Khyber…

Meandering like the river, her narrative conjures up Sufi saints and marauding conquerors.