35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
comment. Only later did it dawn on me that what Hadji must have
been referring to was Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill had seen his
first real action out there as a subaltern in 1897, using the material
to launch his literary career with an action-packed book published
in 1898 as The Story of the Malakand Field Force.
The Malakand Pass, or Staircase, as it would be more
appropriately named, connects mother Pakistan and what were then
the three princely states of Swat, Dir and Chitral. But the lush,
fertile valley we were entering – so very Swiss, as Ray had rightly
said – seemed like another world altogether, a Shangri-la secreted
outside time. Malarial swamp it most certainly was not.
Yet Swat has been very much inside time. The valley was the site of
Alexander the Great’s battle at Massaga, recorded by Arrian and
Curtius in their histories, and of other battles fought by the
Macedonian armies, too. Between 500 BC and around AD 800, Swat –
taking its name from the river, known in Sanskrit as Sweta, or ‘white’
– was the Udyana, the ‘garden’ of Greco-Buddhist culture, and a
good candidate for the hidden mountain paradise of travellers’ lore.
The Moghul emperor Babur mentions it as ‘Swad,’ but essentially
nothing is heard about the place from the fall of Buddhist civilisation
until nearly a millennium later. By then the Yusufzai tribe, from
Afghanistan, were migrating through Peshawar and north, pushing
the inhabitants of the valley, whoever they were, east across the Indus,
while they settled in the fertile paradise themselves.
Hazrat Abdul Ghafoor was the notorious akond of Swat,
immortalised by Edward Lear. Of course, the Swatis themselves
revere his memory for very different reasons today. A Yusufzai
warrior-saint, the akond led his tribes against British forces
commanded by Brigadier-general Neville Chamberlain, grandfather
of the future prime minister of England. The akond’s grandson,
similarly, would become ruler of Swat. This campaign culminated
in the historic battles of Ambella in 1862. The akond – also known
as Saidu Baba – died in 1877, and was interred in a shrine in the
exquisite mosque at Saidu Sharif, which would become the state
capital. Both of the akond’s sons having died in battle, no obvious
leader emerged and anarchy reigned for the next forty years. In 1897,
when the tribes rose en masse against the British, the mullah Mastun,