The Grand Old Trunk Road, Part I

Originally published Sept. 3, 2007 on Desicritics

It was not a goose step! The Pakistani border guard high-kicked his leg above his head some six feet and six inches above the ground. Across from him his counterparts made their aggressive moves, staying of course on the Indian side of the border of Wagah. Their uniforms were spectacular, and their head gear, looking like papier-mâché cocks combs added at least six inches to their height, making them look seven feet tall. I stood and watched the aggressive ceremony, a fierce, glaring, challenging, change of the guard ceremony. Just like the beginning of a cock-fight. On the India side a crowd had gathered to watch the tamasha. Wah, said a little boy as he gazed up at the very tall men putting on their display. Wow!

Way Back Then

The Grand Trunk Road I knew as a child when living in a unified India ran past our home in Taxila, and then south to Amritsar. The road was often rough, full of potholes, road-bumps galore in villages to slow traffic, and narrow. Later in the late 1980s I traveled north from Lahore to Peshawar and the road was similar. I am sure that now the pot holes must be filled and the road has been broadened to multiple lanes and shoulders reinforced. I am sure the traffic has increased ten fold, filled with gaily decorated buses and air conditioned coaches that can whiz one to Sukkur or Peshawar. I am sure that ox carts with lanterns hanging at the back, moving slowly at night, are also things of the past, or slow moving tractors pulling trailers piled high with sugar cane.

In my youth I crossed this area many times in my dad’s 1937 Ford. In our Taxila days we took the Grand Trunk Road down to Lahore and on to Amritsar to see the Golden Temple. Later in my teens we reversed the trip since we were living in Ludhiana and made our way as far as Amritsar and that was as far as we could go. There was a road block of huge proportions at the Pakistani border. Now as an adult, looking at the Wagah crossing I saw a strange phenomenon. I looked into India this time and thought about the tough time travelers would have on busses or in private cars getting across the border. The scene of the guards seemed to be a parody of the relationships between the countries, particularly on the Pakistan side. I felt it was staged hostility, challenge, a display of one-up-man-ship.

In Pakistan, I have traveled on the Grand Trunk Road all the way to Peshawar a number of times and have stood and looked across at the Khyber Pass and saw quite another border scene, traffic, lots of traffic seemed to be moving back and forth. In the local bazaars you could buy practically anything. When I traveled in the NWFP into rural areas to meet farmers who had been growing poppies and who now were trying to make it with alternative crops, (1985) I looked at the vast mountainous countryside, at the dark valleys with hints of green and small roads and trails. The border was porous and the tribal people moved back and forth with ease across the international boundary, the invisible line. My Pakistani counterpart from the Ministry of Agriculture pointed and said, “See. That is the line that separates us from Afghanistan.” Where?

The Durand Line, what is that? It is the line that demarked Afghanistan from the British Indian Empire, a line agreed upon with Amir Abdur Rehman Khan on Nov. 12, 1893, that has been disputed, discussed and cussed ever since. But the Pushtuns who lived on, around and across that magical border have always felt that the land is theirs, and they rule it as they deemed appropriate by their own laws and with their own leadership. They move back and forth with ease across the hills and valleys. It is a porous tribal border.

Those words, back and forth with ease, stuck with me. The Grand Trunk Road I knew as a child when living in a unified India ran past our home in Taxila. What a fantastic thing the old Grand Trunk Road was, India’s oldest highway, and certainly its most historic one. We traveled it with ‘ease’, dodging buffalo and bullock carts, people crowding on the road, camels, donkeys, and of course traffic that came at us which was bigger than we were, pushing us off onto the shoulder. But it was with relative ease that one could move and enjoy the cultural-religious nature of Mother India, its temples and statues, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist. What a fantastic, colorful mélange; no other road has carried such a baggage of history, which includes the magnificent Mogul cities. I would encourage you to look at Raghubir Singh’s book, The Grand Trunk Road: A Passage Through India to take a beautiful photographic tour of the road of roads. This corridor moves goods, people and of course ideas. In much the same way as ‘all roads lead to Rome’, the Grand Trunk led into the heart of the sub-continent from its most southern tip all the way to ... Wagah.

And Now

The narrow funnel that is at the Wagah border is extremely effective in holding back land travel. It restricts movement, traffic, goods, people and liberating ideas, though somehow there is hope, even in Pakistan; popular Indian songs, raunchy movies, and DVDs slip through and trade is increasing between the two countries. But the grand trunk road is truncated effectively at the Pakistan border. The greater the stress about Kashmir, the more the Pakistani sabers rattle, the tighter the funnel gets and the higher the guards at the border kick up their heels and look really fierce and the longer it takes for one to get through immigration and customs, even if all the right papers and visas are in hand! On the other hand, to the south, the road of roads is celebrated.

In 2003 the Indian department of tourism and culture and a tire company, Birla Tyres, came together to celebrate the Indian part of the road. “It is said that since the Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, 3,500 years ago, the road served as a corridor for movement of travelers, goods, armies ...”. Now that is a persistent road! The magnificent cities of Mogul and British India were highlights! The road was an open and effective land corridor connecting travelers to the wonders of India. It used to be that this corridor ran all the way to Afghanistan, through the amazing city of Lahore and on to historic Peshawar. But international border crossings have prevented what used to be a land corridor for cultural exchange on which people moved with ease. To the north the road led to cultural wonders now seen by very few from India. How many younger Indians have visited Lahore? How many Pakistani’s have visited India and seen its wonders? Few. The lack of a communication corridor has reinforced cultural biases.

In Lahore I was talking to a young Pakistani man about the Taj Mahal. He looked troubled. “The builder of the Taj Mahal was a Muslim. The great mogul treasures such as the Shalimar Gardens were made by Muslims, Pakistanis.” I reminded him of the partition and a unified India and that Muslim history on the sub-continent existed before 1947. I reminded him that Lahore, as cities go is ancient. Written histories go back as far as 1206. Europe at that time was, ah....sort of primitive. Genghis Khan and his hordes were on the move. But India was a thriving civilization. Qautb-ud-din Aybak was crowned Sultan of Lahore in 1206. The Silk Road was established, bringing trade items into India from China. In more modern history, Akbar the Great was emperor in the period from 1584-1598. Fantastic buildings were constructed in Lahore. Gardens with fountains were delighting the women of his harem in Kashmir and in the Punjab. Two hundred years later, 1776, a declaration of independence was made in America. Lahore was thriving. The Taj Mahal had been standing already for almost two hundred years in Agra.

Sipping garamchai we spoke now of our life in Lahore, the miserable hot season, the humidity and his visit to the Ravi early in the morning. I had written a poem that day, and of course had carried the draft in my pocket. We sat in a small tea house and drank tea. “Would you like to hear a poem I wrote about Lahore?” He smiled and nodded, not knowing what to expect. I cleared my throat.

CITY ON THE RAVI
Ravi city , fathered by many
Iron Fort, Ram Chandra named
Loh-Awar, a fortress by the river
Shabuddin Ghuri a despot’s abode
Fragrant gardens of Kamran Mirza
Zannana of Akbar, keep of Nur Jahan
Tomb of Anarkali, pomegranate blossom
A burial place of jealousy and regal shame
Aurangzeb the righteous, builder of mosques
Moghul splendor, Badshahi Mosque grandeur
Sikh and Guru strongholds, Mogul desecraters
Pakka British Raj, white bungalows and botanicals
Minar-e-Pakistan, Zia al Huq, land of the pure, wars
Capital of Islamization, border disputes, atomic rockets
Ten million dung fires, stifling heat, five calls to prayer
A Trunk Road sarai, life corridor; Khans and slaves alike
Oh glorious Lahore, City on the Ravi, fathered by so
many

Muj ko samaj nahin ahta. “I do not understand,” he said. “What is meaning of ‘fathered’?”

To the north there are wonders! In Kipling’s time the movement along the road led to Lahore. His story, The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows, was prescient of the horrors of the Partition’s woes and sorrows. Anthony Weller’s work, Salon Wanderlust, Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road, speaks of current Lahore and a different view perceived by Lahore citizens of their decaying Mogul treasures. “A Pakistani mother who wants to frighten a misbehaving child will still let him know that So-and-so Singh will come and get him unless he straightens out.” The Salon Wanderlust goes on to say that when you’ve been into your fifth great mosque or palace or tomb in a morning and find that the Sikhs had stripped it bare of the semiprecious décor two centuries ago, then used it as a “...dump, storehouse or whorehouse, it does something to how you might have enjoyed Amritsar.” I begin to see how the Wagah border guards on both sides got the expression on their faces. The nightmare of partition still rankles.