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> LES EMPIRES DE L'INDUS, par Alice Albinia - Éditions actes Sud 2011 - 408 pages - 30,50 €. — Paru en 2008 en Angleterre l’ouvrage est paru en 2011 en France. Son auteure, Alice Albinia, a été l'une des invitées du festival des Etonnants Voyageurs 2019 de Saint Malo. Etonnante voyageuse, en effet, que cette jeune Anglaise aussi érudite qu’aventureuse, diplômée de littérature anglaise à Cambridge. Collaboratrice de revues littéraires indiennes à Delhi, elle s’est préparée à l’Ecole des Etudes Orientales et Africaines (SOAS) de l’Université de Londres à un voyage d’études qui l’a menée le long du mythique fleuve Indus, du Pakistan à l’Afghanistan.
Elle nous fait vivre à la fois le passé et le présent de la vie du fleuve, objet de conflits autour de la maîtrise de ses eaux entre les frères rivaux que sont les Indiens et les Pakistanais.
Elle retrace avec une immense documentation à l’appui, l’histoire des invasions mogholes, celle de la Partition et de ses drames ; elle nous entraîne dans le Punjab pakistanais, pays d’origine de guru Nanak et du Sikhisme puis à la recherche des vestiges, saccagés par les Talibans, du bouddhisme dont elle pense qu’il a pu, en ces lieux, ne pas être aussi éloigné de l’islam qu’on le dit. Elle suit, à pied, la route empruntée par Alexandre le macédonien, conquérant sans pitié de ces contrées… Le Pakistan n’est-il pas, paradoxalement, la terre des vedas ? C’est sans jugement ni préjugés, mais en questionnant sans cesse l’absurdité des frontières et des séparations arbitraires, qu’elle nous présente la société pakistanaise dans toute sa diversité et sa complexité. —Marie-José MATHIEU
—Infos Yoga, (125), Janv./Févr. 2020, p. 40

The book is very readable. However, it was spoiled by the author devoting a whole chapter on following Alexander's footsteps. It just shows her admiring views of Alexander, who was no better than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. She also did not write much about the Vedas or the Tribal people where the Indus starts. Overall, it is a well-written book.

Merged review:

Very well written book. ( )

Alice Albinia’s book is one of the best book in the travel literature genre that I’ve read in recent times.

Wanderlust, astonishing sense of adventure, and a never-ending hunger to gather little known facts and the history of every place she visits is what makes her such a brilliant travel writer. A lot of research has gone into the making of the book, and it is evident from the numerous journals, books and ancient scripts she quotes to emphasize her findings. It’s the best kind of book with such a delightful mixture of travel, descriptions of the people, the culture, the history, the flaws, the merits, the geography, the architecture, the political scenario, quaint facts and trivia about every place she sets foot on while tracing the course of the Indus river.

She traces the Indus from it’s delta in Sindh, Pakistan and reaches up to it’s source in the mountains of Tibet, travelling through Afghanistan, India and China. I won’t mention the details of the exhaustive list of facts she unearths during her travels, but here is a glimpse of few intriguing facts that the book describes.

1. Pakistan’s current socio-political and cultural scenarios,an in-depth view of the delta region to swat valley,the various tribes...Sheedis in particular, who claim to be descendants of Bilal, an Ethiopian who was Prophet Mohammed’s follower.

2. She traces and co-relates the origin, rise or fall of various religions on the banks of the Indus. Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Christianity, all evolved through centuries and highly influenced by invasions and pilgrimages on the Indus valley. Hinduism proliferated during the early eleventh and tenth century A.D. and has persisted through the centuries despite invasion by Muslim rulers in the Indus Valley. She describes the Sadhubela temple in Pakistan, the Hindus worshipping Uderolal or Jhule Lal, the river God of Indus who travels on four palla fish. And then there was the spread of Buddhism mainly by King Asoka as far as the borders of Afghanistan. The Buddhist stupas, the Bamiyan Buddha, the Buddhist people of Ladakh and Tibet, Chinese pilgrims tracing the routes of spread of Buddhism centuries ago…everything comes alive in Albinia’s descriptions. Then Islam came with Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, whose plundering of the famed Indian treasures is a historical legend. Mughals followed but with varying tolerance for other religions, from Emperor Akbar’s exemplary tolerance to Aurangazeb’s zilch religious tolerance.
Then Sikhism started out in 15th century, with Guru Nanak’s birth on the Indus valley, and the spread of Sikhism throughout the centuries by the rest of the ten Gurus, Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule, and the holy place Nankana Sahib still in Pakistan. She also visits the Golden Temple in Amritsar, on the banks of the tributaries of the Indus. Christianity came late with the British invasion of India, and it’s spread by Christian missionaries. The influence of British on the people and the customs of this region, the tactics followed by the British to spread their empire are wonderfully detailed too. Right up to the Independence of India.

3. She deals with the Partition of India, the after-effects, the large-scale migration, and the horrible massacres in the name of religion and the geographical boundaries which were peacefully cohabited by the same people for ages. The “divide and rule” policy of British culminating in the Partition of India, the thoughts and arguments of the Indian and Pakistani politicians who witnessed, welcomed or argued this change…a valuable insight is provided by the book.

4. She also describes the people and their varying customs in every place with perfect detailing; the Pashtuns, the Sheedis, the Ladakhis, the Dards, the Kalash being the most interesting. The Kalash have their own religion, resides in mountainous Northern Pakistan, a community whose customs have remained unvaried through thousands of years, believed to be the original Aryans, has the custom of burying people in open coffins, and the women enjoys the kind of freedom which is rare in the country. She also writes about the polyandrous communities of Ladakh and Tibet, where women have dominated men throughout the centuries. The polyandry is more out of necessity than personal choice, the limited resources makes traditional marriages a no-no because inheritance problems will arise in the little provisions the families have.

5. Architecture and heritage sites are a prominent feature in this book. The Harrapan and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations, the Buddhist statues and stupas, the numerous caves and stone circles populating the Indus banks, the temples and mosques dating back thousands of years, and stone carvings some dating back to 80,000 years, she encounters them all. But is dismayed by the indifference these architectural jewels are treated by people and little has been done for their preservation by the archaeological societies.

6. Albinia writes beautifully about her final and highly adventurous journey to the source of Indus in Tibet. But she’s in for a terrible shock when she realizes that the Chinese had dammed the Indus a few months ago and she had actually been following the tributaries of Indus all along. The construction of dams altering the course of a river, that originated far earlier than humans arrived on this Earth and had flowed without anyone disturbing it’s course, for purposes like generating electricity and irrigation has altered the entire geography and as a result the lives of the people inhabiting that region. Poorly planned and injudicious construction of dams by all the countries through which the Indus flows is highly condemned in the book. BY construction of the dams in India and Pakistan, Punjab has the best irrigated fields but the people of the delta have to drink diluted sewage water or the highly saline water. Agriculture is impossible and only fishing in the ocean remains the only source of livelihood there. The aquatic animals have suffered too, by dams blocking their routes of migration.

7. She describes the Indian and Pakistani border military camps, the Kargil war, the sentiments of the people involved, Kargil now, and the issue of Kashmir, the object of dispute since Partition.

I’ve left out a million details, but I highly recommend this book to everyone if history and travel even remotely intrigues you. ( )

Very well written book. ( )

Nominally a travel book, this book attempts to incorporate, very unsuccessfully in my view, dollops of history and anthropology into its sluggish course. It's a turgid book in which both the author and the locals fixate on mind-numbingly esoteric religious folklore, fanciful family genealogies which ("of course") extend back to Adam, and interminable discourses by shade-tree blowhards on the sources and solutions to Hindu-Moslem hostility. Although the portions of the book which present actual history are more succinct and marginally more interesting, the snippets thrown in are too scattershot and devoid of context to provide insight. Whatever the opposite of a "charmer" is, this book is it. ( )