HistoriCity | Revisiting the shared past of India and Afghanistan
It is quite likely that not just the Vedic culture but, according to some scholars, epics like Ramayana too were set in and around the north of Peshawar region
Today’s Afghanistan has all but completely exorcised its pre-Islamic past, but it is quite likely that not just the Vedic culture but, according to some scholars, epics like Ramayana too were set in and around the north of Peshawar region. While only a few Hindus remain in Afghanistan today, the recent meeting between the Taliban foreign minister and Indian officials in Delhi gives occasion to revisit our shared past.
Few people in India realise that ‘Afghan’ is not a homogenous group of people. A less few know thanks to the contemporary geopolitical mess that Afghanistan is, that there are at least three groups i.e Pashtuns (Pathan), Hazaras and Tajiks. There are other minor ones too like Nuristanis, Aimars, Turkmen and Baloch. The identity of Afghanistan has remained the burly Afghan Pathan, as depicted in the 1892 story , the Kabuliwala, by Rabindranath Tagore. In actuality, despite it being an Islamic republic, Afghanistan has hundreds of tribes who still cherish ancient customs over Islamic strictures.
Situated at the crossroads of trade-routes and a liminal geopolitical space between the mainland of the Indian subcontinent, the central Asian steppe and through a sliver of land in its north-east it connects to China. For the last at least a thousand years, Afghanistan has had the reputation of being an area with ungovernable and warring tribal groups none strong enough to subdue the others for a long time.
Herodotus described them as ‘most war-like’ and called them Paktues (today’s Pakhtun). Varahmihir, the 6th century Indian astrologist called them ‘Avagana’ in his text Brihat Samhita.
The region of Afghanistan though far from the Mauryan core of Magadh and capital Pataliputra was under Mauryan rule. Emperor Ashoka the Great (304 BCE-232 BCE), the first Indian king to earn that epithet, has left behind one of his rock inscriptions in Kandahar. It says, “Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King Piodasses (Ashoka), made known (the doctrine of) Piety to men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and everything thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are)…and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily”. The inscription was in Aramaic and Greek, the world was then most Hellenistic and Ashoka ruled a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-lingual empire. Ashoka’s reign also led to the conversion of people in this region to Buddhism on a large-scale as is exemplified by several sites including the giant rock-cut statues of the Buddha (they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001).
The Hindu Shahis (843 CE- 1026 CE)
Few historical records have survived from the time of the Shahis’ reign of large areas of Afghanistan, particularly the Kabul valley. Mention of them is fragmentary in the records of neighbouring kingdoms such as Kashmir. Therefore, Al Biruni (973-1048 CE) wrote in the 11th century, “The Hindu Shahi dynasty is now extinct, and of the whole house there is no longer the slightest remnant in existence. We must say that, in all their grandeur, they never slackened in the ardent desire of doing that which is good and right, that they were men of noble sentiment and bearing.” But who were the Shahis?
A straight answer is hard to come, as is the case with the remote past. Some scholars say they were Kshatriyas, others have found them to be Brahmins. The title Shah was first found used in Kushana period coins (1st -3rd CE).
The pre-Muslim rulers of Kabul, and Gandhara were called Sahis – a term which seems to be the Indianised form of the word shao. The Persian equivalent of shao is shah, a royal epithet which was also used by the rulers of these areas. The origin of shao may be traced from the Achaemenian Kshayatiyanam Kshayatiya, writes Abdur Rehman in The Last Two Dynasties of the Sahis.
Astrophysiscist and author Rajesh Kocchar writes in the Vedic Culture, “…the river names Sarayu and Sarasvati, that occur in both the Rigveda and Avesta, refer to the rivers in Afghanistan. Sarayu is the same river, Hari-rud, in both cases, whereas the name Sarasvati applied to the Helmand in the Rgveda is transferred to its tributary, the Arghandab, in the Avesta… The significance of the occurrence of the names Sarayu and Sarasvati in both the texts needs to be fully appreciated… The most natural explanation for the commonality of these names is that they were given to the Afghan rivers by the Rigveda composing branch of the Aryans”
Polyandry in medieval Afghanistan
A 7th century Chinese traveller Heun Tsang says that the people of this region married in ‘miscellaneous manner. Rehman writes citing Ferishta, the 16th century chronicler, “the tribes living along the banks of the Nilab (i.e. the Indus below Attock) up to the mountains of Siwalik practised polyandry. When a wife was visited by one of her husbands, he says, she left a mark at the door which warned the other husbands to wait till the signal was taken away”.
End of Hindu Shahis Reign
The rise of Islam in the 7th century and the subsequent wave of Turkic and Turko-Arab kingdoms swept through Afghanistan and modern day Pakistan. Afghanistan and a majority of Afghans remained pagan for at least two centuries but they too were soon taken into the fold. For the Hindu Shahis, the challenge was too much to overcome and they seem to have disintegrated in the face of the Ghaznavid conquest. But it took the Ghaznavid kings more than a century to finally subdue the Hindu Shahis whose successive kings put up a stiff resistance. Most notable among the rulers of the last Hindu kingdom of Afghanistan were Bhimadeva (died 965 CE), and Jayapala who took on Sabuktigin in the 10th century, but eventually lost. However, not all of Afghanistan took to Islam.
“Al-’Utbï, the official historian of Sultan Mahmüd of Ghazni (998 A. D.-1030 A. D.), mentions the Khaljï and Afghan tribes as infidels. He adds that they were nomads (sahranishin) and brought by the Sultan under the fold of Islam. Thereafter, both of them joined the victorious army of the Sultan. Like-wise, Al-Biruni also designates the Afghans residing in the north-west of the Punjab as non-Muslims. Ibn al-Atir, writing in the early 13th century also refers to them in his account of the Ghaznavids as infidels”, writes Iqtidar H Siddiqui in The Afghans and Their Emergence in India as Ruling Elite During the Delhi Sultanate Period.
Afghanistan– India Bonds Gain Strength
Afghans had been interacting with the Indian mainland for millennia. But after the 11th century they began entering India as the warrior vanguards of armies. Though climactically the plains of India were far from beckoning, the wealth and opportunities were too much to ignore, especially for those who found themselves in precarious circumstances either politically or economically. Hussain writes, “the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate by the Muslim conquerors of north India attracted Afghan immigrants in a fairly large number because the Sultans wanted them to help stabilise their political domination over the territories conquered by them. This provided the immigrants from Muslim countries with fresh job opportunities. Among them, the Afghans, who were poverty stricken, had no traditions of urban culture”.
Afghans didn’t come as soldiers alone although that was the mainstay of their migration. They also came as horse traders, especially war horses from Khurasan, and as manufacturers of swords. They were given small territories or Iqtas as rewards for winning battles and wars, but till at least the time of Firuh Shah Tughlaq, the Afghans remained in the second league. Considered uncouth and unpredictable by the Persianised Sultans, even powerful Afghan tribes like Lodis and Nuhani, had not been able to wrest power for themselves. From Gujarat to Jaunpur and Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan the Afghans were Amirs, Maliks and Iqtadars but it was only with the Sayyid dynasty (1414-1451 CE), the fourth in the Delhi Sultanate (1250-1489 CE) that they made their first moves towards becoming rulers.
Lodis – India’s First Afghan Kingdom
Bahlul Lodi had risen up as an extremely powerful noble during the reign of Sultan Mubarak Shah, with over 20,000 cavalry he finally made his bid for supremacy. Hussain writes, “after his failure in two attempts to capture the city by force, he entered it in the late 1440s on the invitation of Hamid Khan, the wazir who had lost-confidence in Sultan Alaaddin Shah, the last ruler of Khidr Khan’s dynasty. Having stabilised his authority in the city, he ascended the throne of Delhi with the title of Sultan Bahlul Shãh in 1451. Thus the foundation of the first Afghan dynasty was laid down”
The spell-binding rise and rule of the Mughals meant that neither Lodi nor any other dynasty ever became powerful enough to be sovereign but they continued to remain important generals and vassals to the throne of Delhi. During the reign of emperor Akbar as many as 43 parganas were under nobles belonging to one or the other Afghan tribe. After the 18th century, Afghan kingdoms arose in erstwhile Mughal domains such as Rohilkand, Tonk, Bhopal, and Balasinor among others.
Today’s Afghanistan has all but completely exorcised its pre-Islamic past, but it is quite likely that not just the Vedic culture but, according to some scholars, epics like Ramayana too were set in and around the north of Peshawar region. While only a few Hindus remain in Afghanistan today, the recent meeting between the Taliban foreign minister and Indian officials in Delhi gives occasion to revisit our shared past.
Few people in India realise that ‘Afghan’ is not a homogenous group of people. A less few know thanks to the contemporary geopolitical mess that Afghanistan is, that there are at least three groups i.e Pashtuns (Pathan), Hazaras and Tajiks. There are other minor ones too like Nuristanis, Aimars, Turkmen and Baloch. The identity of Afghanistan has remained the burly Afghan Pathan, as depicted in the 1892 story , the Kabuliwala, by Rabindranath Tagore. In actuality, despite it being an Islamic republic, Afghanistan has hundreds of tribes who still cherish ancient customs over Islamic strictures.
Situated at the crossroads of trade-routes and a liminal geopolitical space between the mainland of the Indian subcontinent, the central Asian steppe and through a sliver of land in its north-east it connects to China. For the last at least a thousand years, Afghanistan has had the reputation of being an area with ungovernable and warring tribal groups none strong enough to subdue the others for a long time.
Herodotus described them as ‘most war-like’ and called them Paktues (today’s Pakhtun). Varahmihir, the 6th century Indian astrologist called them ‘Avagana’ in his text Brihat Samhita.
The region of Afghanistan though far from the Mauryan core of Magadh and capital Pataliputra was under Mauryan rule. Emperor Ashoka the Great (304 BCE-232 BCE), the first Indian king to earn that epithet, has left behind one of his rock inscriptions in Kandahar. It says, “Ten years (of reign) having been completed, King Piodasses (Ashoka), made known (the doctrine of) Piety to men; and from this moment he has made men more pious, and everything thrives throughout the whole world. And the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are)…and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future, by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily”. The inscription was in Aramaic and Greek, the world was then most Hellenistic and Ashoka ruled a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-lingual empire. Ashoka’s reign also led to the conversion of people in this region to Buddhism on a large-scale as is exemplified by several sites including the giant rock-cut statues of the Buddha (they were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001).
The Hindu Shahis (843 CE- 1026 CE)
Few historical records have survived from the time of the Shahis’ reign of large areas of Afghanistan, particularly the Kabul valley. Mention of them is fragmentary in the records of neighbouring kingdoms such as Kashmir. Therefore, Al Biruni (973-1048 CE) wrote in the 11th century, “The Hindu Shahi dynasty is now extinct, and of the whole house there is no longer the slightest remnant in existence. We must say that, in all their grandeur, they never slackened in the ardent desire of doing that which is good and right, that they were men of noble sentiment and bearing.” But who were the Shahis?
A straight answer is hard to come, as is the case with the remote past. Some scholars say they were Kshatriyas, others have found them to be Brahmins. The title Shah was first found used in Kushana period coins (1st -3rd CE).
The pre-Muslim rulers of Kabul, and Gandhara were called Sahis – a term which seems to be the Indianised form of the word shao. The Persian equivalent of shao is shah, a royal epithet which was also used by the rulers of these areas. The origin of shao may be traced from the Achaemenian Kshayatiyanam Kshayatiya, writes Abdur Rehman in The Last Two Dynasties of the Sahis.
Astrophysiscist and author Rajesh Kocchar writes in the Vedic Culture, “…the river names Sarayu and Sarasvati, that occur in both the Rigveda and Avesta, refer to the rivers in Afghanistan. Sarayu is the same river, Hari-rud, in both cases, whereas the name Sarasvati applied to the Helmand in the Rgveda is transferred to its tributary, the Arghandab, in the Avesta… The significance of the occurrence of the names Sarayu and Sarasvati in both the texts needs to be fully appreciated… The most natural explanation for the commonality of these names is that they were given to the Afghan rivers by the Rigveda composing branch of the Aryans”
Polyandry in medieval Afghanistan
A 7th century Chinese traveller Heun Tsang says that the people of this region married in ‘miscellaneous manner. Rehman writes citing Ferishta, the 16th century chronicler, “the tribes living along the banks of the Nilab (i.e. the Indus below Attock) up to the mountains of Siwalik practised polyandry. When a wife was visited by one of her husbands, he says, she left a mark at the door which warned the other husbands to wait till the signal was taken away”.
End of Hindu Shahis Reign
The rise of Islam in the 7th century and the subsequent wave of Turkic and Turko-Arab kingdoms swept through Afghanistan and modern day Pakistan. Afghanistan and a majority of Afghans remained pagan for at least two centuries but they too were soon taken into the fold. For the Hindu Shahis, the challenge was too much to overcome and they seem to have disintegrated in the face of the Ghaznavid conquest. But it took the Ghaznavid kings more than a century to finally subdue the Hindu Shahis whose successive kings put up a stiff resistance. Most notable among the rulers of the last Hindu kingdom of Afghanistan were Bhimadeva (died 965 CE), and Jayapala who took on Sabuktigin in the 10th century, but eventually lost. However, not all of Afghanistan took to Islam.
“Al-’Utbï, the official historian of Sultan Mahmüd of Ghazni (998 A. D.-1030 A. D.), mentions the Khaljï and Afghan tribes as infidels. He adds that they were nomads (sahranishin) and brought by the Sultan under the fold of Islam. Thereafter, both of them joined the victorious army of the Sultan. Like-wise, Al-Biruni also designates the Afghans residing in the north-west of the Punjab as non-Muslims. Ibn al-Atir, writing in the early 13th century also refers to them in his account of the Ghaznavids as infidels”, writes Iqtidar H Siddiqui in The Afghans and Their Emergence in India as Ruling Elite During the Delhi Sultanate Period.
Afghanistan– India Bonds Gain Strength
Afghans had been interacting with the Indian mainland for millennia. But after the 11th century they began entering India as the warrior vanguards of armies. Though climactically the plains of India were far from beckoning, the wealth and opportunities were too much to ignore, especially for those who found themselves in precarious circumstances either politically or economically. Hussain writes, “the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate by the Muslim conquerors of north India attracted Afghan immigrants in a fairly large number because the Sultans wanted them to help stabilise their political domination over the territories conquered by them. This provided the immigrants from Muslim countries with fresh job opportunities. Among them, the Afghans, who were poverty stricken, had no traditions of urban culture”.
Afghans didn’t come as soldiers alone although that was the mainstay of their migration. They also came as horse traders, especially war horses from Khurasan, and as manufacturers of swords. They were given small territories or Iqtas as rewards for winning battles and wars, but till at least the time of Firuh Shah Tughlaq, the Afghans remained in the second league. Considered uncouth and unpredictable by the Persianised Sultans, even powerful Afghan tribes like Lodis and Nuhani, had not been able to wrest power for themselves. From Gujarat to Jaunpur and Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan the Afghans were Amirs, Maliks and Iqtadars but it was only with the Sayyid dynasty (1414-1451 CE), the fourth in the Delhi Sultanate (1250-1489 CE) that they made their first moves towards becoming rulers.
Lodis – India’s First Afghan Kingdom
Bahlul Lodi had risen up as an extremely powerful noble during the reign of Sultan Mubarak Shah, with over 20,000 cavalry he finally made his bid for supremacy. Hussain writes, “after his failure in two attempts to capture the city by force, he entered it in the late 1440s on the invitation of Hamid Khan, the wazir who had lost-confidence in Sultan Alaaddin Shah, the last ruler of Khidr Khan’s dynasty. Having stabilised his authority in the city, he ascended the throne of Delhi with the title of Sultan Bahlul Shãh in 1451. Thus the foundation of the first Afghan dynasty was laid down”
The spell-binding rise and rule of the Mughals meant that neither Lodi nor any other dynasty ever became powerful enough to be sovereign but they continued to remain important generals and vassals to the throne of Delhi. During the reign of emperor Akbar as many as 43 parganas were under nobles belonging to one or the other Afghan tribe. After the 18th century, Afghan kingdoms arose in erstwhile Mughal domains such as Rohilkand, Tonk, Bhopal, and Balasinor among others.
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