Samarqand Fort

Salman Rashid

Chakwal district, once part of the old Jhelum district created after the British annexation of Punjab, lies in the heart of the Salt Range. This is a country of low hills (Chehel Abdal near Choa Saidan Shah, the highest, being about 1200 metres) and deep gullies that mostly run with a trickle of water that turns into a torrent with a fall of rain. The ravines, eroded over millions of years of flowing water, have wind-sculpted verges of fluted pillars that recall the work of some Gandharan master mason. And the land is tinged red by the sodium in the salt that this district is famous for.

In this country, barely twenty kilometres west of Kallar Kahar, in a landscape dominated by the picturesque Gambhir River, hidden among the shallow folds of phulai-covered hills lie the ruins of a fort called Samarqand. But first of the Gambhir. As evocative names go, this one is remarkable: in Sanskrit it signifies ‘deep’. To my mind it recalls that far-off time when the singers of the Vedas first came to the land of the Sindhu River. Those were days of much greater precipitation and this winding river caught between jagged cliffs flowed deep carrying its red-tinged alluvium.

The newcomers may have had to wait on its far bank for it to subside and permit them across. Although they sang hymns to the Maha Sapta Sindhu and to its various tributaries, they do not mention this river; they only gave it a name. For them this was the Deep River. Even today when the rains come, the Gambhir, without a bridge in this reach of its course, becomes impassable.

West of this river one fetches up in the sleepy little hamlet of Maira Emma. Ask anyone of Samarqand Fort and they will point a low hillock about three kilometres to the south. Local historians being as ignorant as they are, one fool living in Bhaun village would have people believe that this Samarqand was the ‘city’ that gave its name to the more famous one in Uzbekistan. According to this ‘historian’, Salt Range Samarqand folks left this town in the reign of the great Kushan king Kanishka to migrate across the mountains and establish its namesake city in Central Asia. Of course this ‘expert’ offers no proof to substantiate this idiotic theory.

This man, who has published this spurious ‘research’ in local rags, has never read Alexander’s history to know that Samarqand (Maracanda in Greek annals) was taken by the Macedonian conqueror six hundred years before Kanishka. And that it was here he committed the shameful act of murdering his general Clietus the Black — the very man but for whom Alexander would have been cut down in the battle of the Granicus River in Turkey.

Dr Saifur Rahman Dar carried out an archaeological survey in the Salt Range back in the early 1990s. I have had access to his report (which sadly remains unpublished to this day) and know Dr Dar postulates that the fort was built in the 13th century. During this work he was also given a copper coin by a local who had found it at the foot of the hill upon which the fort stands. Badly eroded, the coin only yields this little information: ‘Sultan (illegible) Shah and that it was minted at ‘dar ul mulk Delhi.’

Samarqand today comprises of only a few bits of walls here and there and three or four circular turrets now completely filled in with earth washed down by rainwater. These structures sit on the northern slope of the hill, while the south side uses the sheer side of the hill as its defence.

Now, this fort does not lie on a main route through the Salt Range. It moreover sits on a hill that is difficult of approach: on all sides it is surrounded either by low, desiccated hills and troughs or by narrow chasms that can suddenly be flooded by rain. In the valley below Samarqand, a tiny stream flows that could never, not even in those distant times of greater rains, have supported a large city as the local ‘historian’ claims. Anyone can see that there is room neither for a large city near the fort nor for agriculture to support its population.

Since Dr Dar’s survey, no other archaeological investigation has been carried out to add to our cursory knowledge of Samarqand in the Salt Range. Consequently, it is easy to try and build a scenario.

In February 1221, Jalaluddin, the fugitive king of Khwarazm, was defeated by Chengez Khan on the west bank of the Sindhu River. The battle took place a hundred kilometres northwest of Samarqand where the village of Nizampur today stands in Nowshehra district. Jalaluddin shamefully fled across the river leaving his family and concubines to the pleasure of the Mongols.

Many of his soldiers followed him across the river and soon the man had a force of about one thousand. He immediately set upon plundering local villages for rations and arms before eventually heading out for Delhi to seek the help of Sultan Iyultimish in his struggle against the Mongols. Fearing for his own safety the Sultan refused and Jalaluddin returned to the Salt Range disappointed.

Chengez Khan, who had meanwhile withdrawn to Afghanistan, heard of his enemy’s activities and sent out another force against him. Without giving fight Jalaluddin fled to Multan and Uch but, with summer progressing, finding it unbearable in the south and with the Mongols retreating once again to the highlands, returned to the rather moderate climes of the Salt Range. Here he made peace with the local chieftain Rai Khokhar Sangin.

With the Mongols still breathing down his neck, Jalaluddin would have asked what Khokhar Sangin did in the event of pressure from an enemy. Why, we have this fortress difficult of approach and even harder to take because of its location, the Rajput chief would have said. Having seen the remote fortress, Jalaluddin may have funded his new-found ally to enlarge and strengthen the existing fortress so that the two confederates could hide away in it should the Mongols come against them yet again.

Even as work progressed on the fort, the summer monsoon arrived and the normally harsh and barren hills broke out in verdure. I have seen these parts in the blistering dry heat of May and again in August and the contrast is remarkable. Perhaps it was one rain-soaked August afternoon, the sun low in the west in a sky fleeced by piled up cumulus, a cool wind scudding over the hills, birds creating a riot of song in the phulai and sanatha when Jalaluddin looked out across the spreading vistas.

Pining for his distant home, now squarely in Mongol hands, with little hope of ever returning to its vineyards and farmlands, he may have sighed out loud and said ‘Oh, Samarqand!’ and the name caught. Conversely, could it be that moved by the monsoon verdure, he asked his Rajput ally to name his secret refuge after the home he had to abandon on pain of death?

We may never know how it actually came about. But the scenario I paint is not implausible; it may very well have unfolded. Howsoever the name came to be, one thing is certain: no one ever left from this Samarqand in the reign of Kanishka to establish a city of the same name in distant Central Asia.