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archive A
walk around the ancient mound
archive On March 22, 1925
there was a lot of commotion in the rural dusty town of Renala Khurd some 100
kilometres south of Lahore. Governor Punjab, Sir William Malcolm Hailey, was
scheduled to arrive in the town to inaugurate the 1.1 megawatt Ganga
powerhouse built over a branch of Lower Bari Doab Canal. The power station had been
built by Sir Ganga Ram out of his own pocket who, in Sir William Hailey’s
words, “won The project, a private
venture indeed, was designed to irrigate some 50,000 acres of surrounding
lands leased by Sir Ganga Ram. There were at least three pumping stations in
the surrounding area lifting water from the main canal to irrigate the lands
and these pumping stations were provided electricity from the Ganga
Powerhouse. Over the next few decades,
the powerhouse would supply electricity to the surrounding villages as well. Having read the ordeal
faced by friend Salman Rashid in getting access to the powerhouse, I used the
good offices of the friendly DCO Okara Saif Dogar and, as expected, the doors
were wide open for us. After driving through the
winding narrow bazaars of Mitchell’s fruit farms, the fame of Renala, we
reached the canal. There was the magnificent powerhouse which couldn’t
escape notice. The Resident Engineer, Amanullah Khan from Zhob showed us
around the place. The powerhouse has five 220
KV turbines made by the English Electric Company out of which three to four
are under operation at all times. Aman was appreciative of the original
machinery and critical of the replacement parts they get these days.
Extremely energetic, he treated the powerhouse as his own and one could feel
the pride he took in his job. We were informed that the
construction of another 4 MW powerhouse, on the main canal, has been in the
pipeline for the last 20 years. It is amazing that while Ganga Ram was able
to build this powerhouse in three years in 1925, almost a century later we
are stuck with feasibility reports and planning for more than a decade. One
can only hope that the new powerhouse shall be completed within the next
couple of years without any damage to the present structure of the historical
Ganga Powerhouse. Presently, the powerhouse
produces some 600,000 units of electricity which means that it can serve some
15,000 poor to middle income households. Ganga Powerhouse provides
electricity to the surrounding villages, and guess what, these villages are
almost free from loadshedding even in summers. Ganga Ram converted more than
50,000 acres of semi-arid brackish agricultural land into one of the most
fertile agricultural lands in Pakistan — and long after he is gone, his
project is providing loadshedding-free electricity to thousands of locals. But who was Ganga Ram? He
was born in Gangapur in Jaranwala in 1851 to a police inspector. The good
inspector realised the importance of education and made sure that his son
sailed smoothly through local schools and then into the Government College.
Ganga Ram was a smart kid and so ended up in Roorkee College of Engineering
in the foothills of Himalayas. Later, he joined the Punjab
PWD Department where he designed and built a number of buildings in Punjab.
Some of these architectural feats include Lahore Museum, GPO, Aitchison
College, Mayo School of Arts, Ganga Ram Hospital, Ganga Powerhouse and not to
forget the still functional horse train from Bachiana railway station to
Gangapur in Jaranwala. He was also the architect
of Lahore’s Model Town. In 1992, riots erupted in
Pakistan after the desecration of Babri Mosque by Hindu fanatics. A number of
Hindu temples were ransacked by mobs in Pakistan especially in Punjab. Every
good Muslim felt necessary to contribute to this mayhem and Renala proved no
less. So a charged mob attacked the Ganga Powerhouse and erased Ganga Ram’s
name from the building. But it did not satisfy their anger. They found a bust
of Sir Ganga Ram at the main entrance to the building and broke it into
pieces. Soon after, the Ganga
Powerhouse was renamed as Zaheer-ud-Din Babar powerhouse. Today, an un-exploded bomb
that was reportedly dropped by the Indian Air Force in 1965 to destroy the
powerhouse has replaced the bust. Luckily, some wise men in Wapda ensured
that Ganga Ram’s name was restored to the building. However, this is not the
first time the statue of Sir Ganga Ram has attracted wrath of religious
zealots. Saadat Hasan Manto narrates that in the 1947 riots, a mob attacked
the statue of Sir Ganga Ram installed on The Mall. The mob beat the statue,
cut the nose, blackened the face and garlanded it with shoes. The police
tried to disperse the mob and during the chaos, the man who brought shoe
garland was seriously injured. ‘Let’s take him urgently to Sir Ganga
Ram’s Hospital’ came a shout from the mob. Such small incidents only
point to a grave mindset and societal psyche, becoming even more prevalent
with every passing day. In any other country such
an architectural and historical gem would be on a tourist map with thousands
of history buffs finding their way to the powerhouse to live through time.
But, then, we are not any other country. Renala has striking tourism
potential ranging from guided tours through fruit orchards, Mitchells jam and
candy factories, Ganga powerhouse and pumping stations to water sports over
the mighty Lower Bari Doab Canal. The young DCO is already
planning to convert the area around canal into a public park. With support from other
agencies like Wapda and TDCP, Renala can definitely be promoted as a heritage
and agricultural tourism destination. The writer is based in
Islamabad and can be contacted at omarmukhtar16@gmail.com
A
walk around the ancient mound The rather
unremarkable town of Shorkot is usually associated with the nearby Rafiqui
Air Base. Many an Air Force officer has had a heartburn on hearing of being
posted to a place that is sizzling hot, off the beaten track, and has little
to show except a rustic landscape interspersed with odd groves of date palms.
Shorkot stands as the last
outpost of fertile Punjab, west of which lies the cheerless Thal Desert. The
two contrasting eco-regions are separated by the Chenab River which meanders
a few miles west of the town. Except for the roar of supersonic fighters
flying overhead, life seems slow as bullock carts steadily wend their way
past an eroding mound, around which Shorkot town sprawls today. Rising 80-odd feet above
the adjacent buildings and surrounding fields, the lofty mound known locally
as a ‘bhir’, is square in shape, testifying to obvious human intervention
in what was a massive natural outcrop of mud-rock. What remains of the mound
after erosion by elements and encroachment by land-grabbers, measures about
11 hectares in area. When I first saw the mound
many years ago, my query as to what the structure might be was promptly
answered by a passer-by, “Sikander-i-Azam ka qil’a”. Always a little sceptical
of Alexander’s overblown exploits — at least in what is now Pakistan —
I decided to dig deeper, so to speak. An appointment with a local
school teacher, the late Jamil Bhatti, saw me at his house located at the
foot of the mound. An amateur collector of artefacts from the mound, Bhatti
had become an authority of sorts on Shorkot’s antiquity. Since the mound is
not an officially protected monument, Bhatti thought it proper to collect
various items that surfaced after rains, which would otherwise have been
pillaged by the locals — a practice that continues, nonetheless. He had
converted his living room into a little museum, in which were displayed
several copper and bronze utensils, numerous coins, a large quantity of beads
and the usual terracotta potsherds. His collection (now displayed at the
newly-constructed, private Lyallpur Museum) has been a convenient source for
determining the chronology of the site. Archaeologist and
anthropologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, the premier authority on the Indus
Valley Civilisation, has had a look at Bhatti’s collection. In his book,
‘The Ancient South Asian World’, Kenoyer postulates that agate and
carnelian prayer beads with painted stripes similar to the ones shown by
Bhatti, became common in Northern India around 600 BC. Similarly, he thinks
that the multi-coloured glass beads found at the Shorkot mound are similar to
the ones found in Greece and the Mediterranean area. These may have been
brought in by Persian traders as well as Greek mercenaries hired by Persians
when Cyrus the Great conquered parts of Afghanistan, northern Indus Valley
and the Punjab between 558-529 BC. Greek figurines and coins found at the
site indicate that some Greek soldiers may even have settled at the site. The next time you spot an
olive-skinned and hazel-eyed local from Shorkot, you would be justified in
assigning him a Mediterranean pedigree! Much later in 326 BC,
Alexander is said to have passed by Shorkot on his way out of India, along
the Indus River. His army would, however, have been too fatigued and in a
haste to tarry longer than a few days. After all, his incessant campaigns had
lasted several years and had taken their toll. This was evidenced by a mutiny
of his exhausted troops when Alexander was prevented from ca In 1906, some men digging
the foundations of a house near the mound, chanced upon a number of copper
and iron utensils of considerable antiquity and uncommon design. The
artefacts were acquired by the Lahore Museum, and were catalogued and
properly cleaned. It was only noticed then, that a mid-sized copper cauldron
(not too different from our ‘degs’) measuring 21” in height and 22”
in diameter had a Sanskrit inscription on its shoulder. Written in Brahmi script,
it reads: “The Year 83, (the month of) Magha, the bright fifth day,
dedicated by the administrator Buddha-daso-thapita (Buddha’s appointed
slave) to the community of monks of the universal Sarvastivadi Order
belonging to the Radhika Monastery in Holy Sibipura”.
The Gupta year mentioned corresponds to 403 AD which was the peak of
the Golden Age of Guptas. A similar copper vessel found in a monastery near
Tarbela in 2000 attests to a Gupta cultural imprint, as far as Gandhara
domains. The citadel of Shorkot
housing the monastery thus marks an important religious, and possibly the
political centre of Sibi country, Sibi being a prominent tribe often
mentioned in Sanskrit literature. Sibi people (also written as Sivi) are
mentioned in Rigveda. A Jat clan by the name of Sibia, still exists in India
today. While the Ayodhya-based
Guptas had overrun much of central India, present day Punjab, Sindh and
Rajasthan remained feudal tributaries. To keep the annual tribute from the
Sibis flowing, as also to keep an eye on possible Persian forays, a frontier
garrison at the western-most limit of Gupta influence was in order. The
Shorkot citadel may, thus, have been the handiwork of any of the first three
Gupta Kings. Evidence of this citadel
appears as a baked brick circular bastion, besides other brick structures
towards the north-western side that have been exposed by rain erosion, as
well as earth removal by the locals. As Bhatti took me for a
walk around the mound, he confided that he owed part of his collection to his
school children. “They are allowed to go off from classes and hunt for
coins and other artefacts that wash down whenever it rains. “You have seen
the results,” he continued, almost urging me for an endorsement of his
unusual methods. I did agree that the interest of the youngsters in
archaeology must have increased manifold with such field research! According to Bhatti, the
Shorkot mound had been disgorging artefacts from times immemorial, and his
hunch was that his city represented the continuing Harappan tradition after
the functional order of the Indus Valley cities had broken down. He hoped
that more organised archaeological work could be undertaken at his cherished
site. The erudite Kenoyer (who,
interestingly, speaks Urdu and Punjabi with relish) explains that the social
and political state of affairs of the Indus Valley Civilisation started to
‘transform’ after about 1900 BC, known as the Late Harappan Era. This was
due to complex processes of change, including overextension of economic and
political networks and changing river patterns along with periodic floods
that disrupted the agricultural base of its major centres of production. This transition from an
integrated and centralised political structure of the Mature Harappan Era
(2600-1900 BC), to numerous competing local polities continued till about 600
BC, when various Indian and foreign dynasties started to take hold. In
Kenoyer’s words, these were “multiple centres of influence” compared to
the earlier “integrated” order. Shorkot, like over 200
similar sites in Pakistani Punjab that are marked by prehistoric mounds,
attests to this localisation of the Harappan tradition. We will have to wait
for the Department of Archaeology to organise a digging project in earnest,
to be sure about the Shorkot mound being rooted deep in the Late Harappan
Era. The Sibipura narrative
would have remained incomplete if I hadn’t heard of the copper vessel that
was supposed to be lying at the Lahore Museum. I was, however, disappointed
to learn that there was no trace of it and the senior staff told me that,
“it must have been transferred to India in 1947”. Quite obviously
something was badly amiss, since I had read a research paper written in 2004
by Harry Falk of the Institute of Indian Philology at the University of
Berlin, in which he says this about the vessel: “Today it is on display in
the Lahore Museum”. To me, it was more than
just an empty cooking cauldron that was dedicated to the monks of Radhika
Monastery. I would like to think that it contained a lavishly cooked offering
for religious purposes; perhaps it was saffron coloured rice sweetened with
brown sugar (gur) — complete with a garnish of coconut slivers and luscious
raisins — which the monks had partied on. Would not that event in
Sibipura make it one of the oldest recorded instances of ‘deg charrhana’,
I wondered? ksrtfl@yahoo.com
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like
a hero and gave like a saint”. 
mpaigning
in the Indian heartland, after hitting Beas River. It is, therefore, unlikely
for these later Greeks to have left behind any enduring biological or
material vestiges during their fleeting passage out of India.
