Who is burried thee?

Salman Rashid

In the bleak, tortured landscape of the north-eastern Potohar Plateau Dhamiak had remained uncelebrated since the beginning of time. Lying amid a wearisome tangle of narrow and meandering gullies, tinged red by sub-soil salt and thinly covered with scrub, it never had reason for fame or glory. Its only claim to fame was for being a staging post just off one branch of the old Rajapatha, or King’s Road, that has been in use from ancient times. While the main royal road leading west through Punjab went by the Salt Range, this branch followed the same alignment as the modern Grand Trunk Road by way of Jhelum, Sohawa and Gujar Khan – though none of these towns would have then existed.

This latter was the road less travelled; the majority of traffic passing through the heart of the Salt Range. The celebrated Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang writes of his prolonged sojourn at Taxila (631 AD) and a visit to the monasteries of the Salt Range. Thereafter, he tells us of his journey to Kashmir. Though he does not describe his route, it is evident that he would have used this road. Nine hundred years later Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, tells us of having travelled by the ‘sub-montane road’ through the country of the warlike Gakkhars of the Potohar Plateau en route to Lahore in November 1523.

In between a remarkable event took place by this lesser branch of the King’s Road. This event would have remained no more than a footnote in our history had we not become masters of a missile that needed to be named after a hero. And since from the moment of our conversion to Islam, we were divorced from our earlier history, all heroes had to be, necessarily, Muslims. So it is that Muiz ud Din, better known as Shahab ud Din Ghory, a Turkish chieftain from the narrow and impoverished valley of Ghor, southeast of Herat in Afghanistan, is celebrated by sub-continental Muslims for his invasion and mastery of the northern part of India.

In 1203 rumour reached the Khokhar Rajputs of the Salt Range that Shahab ud Din had been killed by the Mongols on the wind-scoured grasslands of far away Central Asia. Having been nominal feudatories of the Ghorid sultan, these doughty warriors began to assert their independence by closing the roads that passed through their territory. Thereafter they set about raiding Ghorid dependencies in Punjab. But it was only rumour: Shahab ud Din was alive and by 1205 brought retribution upon these people in full force. The battle fought near Gujrat was all but carried by the Khokhars until Turkish reinforcements under Qutub ud Din Aibak arrived from Delhi to turn the tide. The Rajputs were routed after a great slaughter and the country returned to Turkish control.

Smarting under the shame of defeat, the Rajputs set their hearts on revenge. Barely a year later, when the Ghorid sultan was returning from Delhi to the Afghan highlands, he was done in. The sources say that it was either a single individual or a small band of Khokhars (no more than three) that stole into the king’s camp, dispatched his bodyguards and repeatedly stabbed the king as he slept in his tent. And even before an alarm could be raised, these intrepid guerrillas had vanished into the dark of night while the sultan lay dying in a pool of blood.

The sources are also divided on another issue: the location of this historical event. At least two early sources tell of the king’s tent having been pitched by a ford on the Sindhu River and that the Khokhars entered his camp by swimming in. But the Tabakat-e-Nasiri of Minhaj ud Din Siraj, generally considered fairly reliable as an historical source, very categorically states that the murder took place at ‘the halting place of Dhamiak ….. at the hand of a disciple of the Mulahida.’ The Mulahida or heretics here being the Ismailis, a persuasion that many of the Khokhars followed at that time. Several contemporary and later writers agree with Siraj that Dhamiak was indeed the site of the murder.

And so it was that when it came time for us to name our missile we called it Ghory: therein lay a symbolism. The Indians call their missile Prithvi (after Prithviraj Chauhan) we are one up because Shahab ud Din Ghory had eventually won victory after an initial defeat at the hands of the Chauhan king. Having done that we also needed to re-invent history. This was easily do-able because we knew from folklore that Shahab ud Din Ghory had died at Dhamiak. Being well-known for our national aversion to reading, the creators of this new history did not bother to consult the books and simply went ahead to raise the white marble tomb of the Ghorid sultan at Dhamiak. The Turkish king was thus duly indigenised, but Dhamiak became the burial place of deception for real history has another tale to tell.

The Tabakat-e-Nasiri tells us of the dispatch of the king’s bier from Dhamiak towards Ghazni. Now, it needs be told that at the time of this murder (1206 AD), Afghanistan was held by the Turks as different principalities all owing allegiance to the sultan. While Ghor was held by the sultan’s cousins, Ghazni was under the control of Taj ud Din Yalduz, one of Shahab ud Din Ghori’s most trusted slaves and generals. As the funerary procession accompanied by amirs from both Ghor and Ghazni crossed the Sindhu River and arrived in the vicinity of modern day Kohat, a dispute for the possession of the coffin as well as the considerable treasure being borne with it broke out between the two parties.

From all accounts it appears that a minor battle was fought. The Ghoris were defeated and routed. The funeral then proceeded to Ghazni by way of Sankuran that we today know as Shalozan. This is a right beautiful, well-watered valley of orchards and farmland lying a few kilometres to the northwest of Parachinar. It was at Sankuran that Yalduz kept headquarters and as the bier reached in this vicinity, we hear of him riding out to meet the body of his lord and master. The histories tell us of how having seen the grim procession from a distance, Yalduz dismounted and came up to the bier with ‘utmost veneration.’ It is also recorded that he wept so inconsolably that his grief moved others to tears as well.

Arriving at Ghazni, the sultan’s body was buried in the madrasah he had founded during his lifetime and named after his daughter – his only child who survived beyond infancy. To recount the subsequent battles between the houses of Ghor and Ghazni over the late sultan’s treasures is beyond the scope of this story. Nevertheless all available histories tell of the corpse of Sultan Shahab ud Din Ghory safely reaching and being buried at Ghazni.

Yet we have a marble monstrosity plonked amid the furrowed badlands of the Potohar Plateau. The building can be reached by a blacktop motorable road that takes off to the east of the Grand Trunk Road at Sohawa exactly opposite the fork that goes in the other direction to Chakwal. Less than twenty kilometres from the main highway, the white tomb can be spotted from some way off. The façade bears a plaque that briefly tells of the sultan’s exploits against the Rajputs. It would be foolish to imagine that the plaque would also recall the chivalry of the victorious Rajputs in the first encounter. For the Rajputs a battle was no different from a sport: when they routed an enemy, they did not stoop so low as to pursue and annihilate a withdrawing army. They broke away and jubilantly went their own way. They permitted the vanquished foe to live to fight another day.

Be that as it may, the question is: if the king’s corpse was borne to Ghazni as history testifies, who is buried in this tomb? No one. At least not a person. It must not be forgotten that summer had begun and the body would have started to rot very quickly in the Punjabi heat. As was the practice, the sultan’s courtiers would in all probability have eviscerated the corpse. All that would have been buried at Dhamiak was the liver and the excrement-filled royal intestines. As time passed and memory faded, it was only remembered as the burial of Shahab ud Din Ghory ignominiously murdered at the hands of an Ismaili Khokhar sworn to revenge.

When it came time to reincarnate the Ghorid king as a missile, the tomb was raised as a sort of proprietorial claim over that exalted personage. History was not consulted and if official historians were required, of them there were aplenty falling over each other to attest to the veracity of the murder at Dhamiak. As has been the way of this breed of experts, the rest of the truth was not revealed. And so the marble Tomb of the Viscera was raised.

If, however, the mausoleum only commemorates the location of the sultan’s last moments on earth, then the raising of this edifice is doubly criminal. In a country where ordinary folks, superstitious as they are, worship every available tomb, this will only create yet another giver of sons and wealth. This will give them another demi-god to worship and pray to.

Postscript: When Jehangir, the fourth Mughal emperor of India, died in Kashmir in the summer of 1627, his body was brought to Lahore by way of Bhimber and Gujrat. As it neared this latter city, it was already beginning to putrefy. Evisceration was the only way to impede further damage. The material was buried just outside town. Today there stands a tomb over that site and the plaque commemorates the mausoleum as that of ‘Shah Jehangiri.’

Over time the humble intestines of a rather worldly monarch were deified. Today Shah Jehangiri boasts of a large weekly gathering; the annual urs being an even greater affair. Men and women come from distant corners of the country; it is said, to seek the intervention of the intestines in the acquisition of health, wealth and children. Some of them surely are granted their desires. The Auqaf Department that was raised to curb such mindless superstition actually abets in its spread for every new shrine in the country means more income for the department. Even if the shrines contain only excrement-filled intestines.

Fellow of Royal Geographical Society, Salman Rashid is author of several books including jhelum: City of the Vitasta and The Apricot Road to Yarkand, Riders on the Wind, Between two Burrs on the Map, Prisoner on a Bus and Sea Monsters and the Sun God. His work - explorations, traveling and writings - appears in almost all leading publications.