There was a time, a hundred-odd years ago, when it was the British who were the new arrivals in Chitral. Seeing Chitral’s western passes as potentially vulnerable back doors through which the expansionist Russians might steal into their Indian empire, they installed a garrison at the fort. The Great Game, as the rivalry between the two 19th-century superpowers came to be known, saw one of its more dramatic moves played out in Chitral in 1895.
The Ul-Mulk family were at the centre of events. Siraj’s great-grandfather Aman died in 1892 after a 35-year reign, instigating a vicious war of succession in which his various sons quarrelled with, plotted against and killed each other, until one decided his best hope of survival was to create a local alliance aimed at throwing the British out of their kingdom.
The siege of Chitral may not be as well known as those of Khartoum or Mafeking, but it was pretty heroic stuff, as the defenders, mainly Sikh troops under British officers, forced to eat their horses to survive, held out for 48 days before being relieved by a force of men, mules and cannons that had marched over the high passes of the Hindu Kush in the middle of winter.
The fort where the horse-eaters held out is still there, sitting low on a promontory round which the muddy grey river swirls. Its 25-foot-high, 240-foot-long walls still stand, but they look a little sad, with plaster cracked and fallen away, revealing the bare bones underneath. Groves of tall trees loom over the bedraggled ramparts and beneath them contented cows chomp their way through fields of wild cannabis.
Chitral’s ageing fort is upstaged by its neighbour, an exuberantly decorated mosque in a central Asian style with onion domes and white stucco, paid for by Siraj’s grandfather in the 1920s.
I ask him if it was common for ruling families to sponsor mosques.
He laughs.
‘Well, I suppose, like in England, they wanted God on their side.’
The sound of chanting comes from a long, columned chamber off the courtyard. We step inside. Sixty young boys are learning the Koran by heart. They kneel before copies of the Book, rocking backwards and forwards on their haunches as they recite.
A mullah sits at a small table, peering myopically at a text as he listens to a boy sitting in front of him.
‘These boys are being forced to learn the Koran in Arabic, a language quite foreign to them,’ whispers Siraj, as we watch.
‘It’s like reading prayers in Latin.’
Many of the boys watch us back, clearly much more interested in what we’re doing than what they’re learning.
Repetition of the Koran, at the expense of other subjects like science and maths, has become the main discipline of these madrassas, religious schools, which have increased in number since the Taliban was thrown out of Afghanistan and fled across the border.
‘It won’t last,’ says Siraj. ‘They have nothing much to offer the people.’
Polo, on the other hand, seems to have a lot to offer. Chitral’s polo ground is a long, green rectangle behind the Mountain Inn, sloping up quite markedly at both ends.
An early evening training game is in progress, and even this draws a crowd of several hundred. As Siraj explains:
‘Over here you don’t have to be a rich man to play polo. You could be the most important person in Chitral, but if you happen to be playing on the field here you could be written off by your barber or your shoemaker.’
Polo thrived here on the border country after being introduced from Persia, and was known to be played on occasions with enemies’ heads and sheep carcasses.
Unlike the international game, invented by the British, which is broken into seven-minute segments, at the end of which horses can be substituted, they play what they call ‘free-style’ polo, with no referee and no rules. Each chukka lasts 25 minutes, with no change of horses, unless one is injured.
At half-time, Siraj introduces me to the captain of the Chitral team, his brother Sikander, ten years his junior. He’s hot and sweating after a first half in which he’s been evaluating his new horse, Bucephalus. (Another example of the resonance of Alexander the Great, Sikander being a derivation of Alexander, whose favourite horse was Bucephalus.)
This is one of the last trial games before selection of the team to take on arch-rivals Gilgit in the biggest free-style polo match in the world.
It’s to be played on the top of the 12,000-foot (3660 m) Shandur Pass, the highest point of the mountain road that connects the two competing communities. At least 5000 Chitral fans will make the journey up to the pass to support their team.
Sikander grins broadly, and grips my hand in a firm Ul-Mulk handshake.
‘See you there!’
Day Twelve : Chitral
Therapeutic recovery time at Hindu Kush Heights. The food is good and varied here, cooked with a light touch and the emphasis on home-grown vegetables and treats like mushrooms off the mountains, quite a relief from the heavy curries of Peshawar. The scenery is magnificent without being overpowering, mountains with a human face, and our last night in Chitral is to be marked by a visit to a baipash, an old Chitrali house where local music and dancing will be laid on. My heart sinks as the dreaded spectre of a ‘folklorique’ evening looms. Siraj is enthusiastic, though, and describes what we shall see and hear as the last of its kind, a style of music and poetry that is ‘locked in the mountains’.
We drive out, crossing the river over a sturdy suspension bridge built by the British in the 1920s at the personal request of Siraj’s grandfather. He’d been so excited by hearing of the invention of the car that he ordered a fleet of Baby Austins to be delivered to him in Chitral, without realizing that cars couldn’t cross rivers. The bridge was obligingly completed by sappers from the garrison in two months.
His grandfather’s ignorance of cars sounds pretty comprehensive. Apparently, when the tyres wore out, he just sold the cars. A lucky dealer from Karachi bought the whole lot, changed the tyres and sold the fleet in mint condition.
The baipash is a carefully preserved 300-year-old house, approached through a large garden with tall and immaculate dry-stone walls, reinforced with horizontal timbers to protect against earthquakes. The layout inside is the traditional single chamber with a central hearth and opening in the roof above for smoke to escape. Around the walls are darkened wooden stalls where cattle would once have been kept. The columns that support the roof are also wooden and carved with plant and flower motifs. It’s dark, stuffy, cosy and presided over by a tall, gaunt man with white beard and thick, sprouting eyebrows. With a strong and piercing gaze, he reminds me of a manic Scots preacher.
He’s 77 years old, with a wicked sense of humour. At some length, he expounds on the abundance of hallucinatory substances in the sylvan glades of Chitral.
‘Did you ever try any of these drugs?’ I ask him.
He shakes his head.
‘Oh no. But I’ve been smoking hash for 40 years.’
Once the music begins I can’t take my eyes off him. Like the venerable leader of a jazz band, he’s at the very heart of the action, sometimes plucking skilfully at a sitar, sometimes singing, but always urging others on, holding out long thin arms and flicking his bony wrists in time to the beat of sitars, tambourines and a pink jerrycan that does for percussion.
The pattern is the same each time. The music starts slowly, then one of the audience gets up and begins to move with delicate shuffles of the feet and upraised arms, gradually becoming more animated. As the tempo of the music accelerates, so does the speed and intensity of the movement, until both merge into a stomping, exultant crescendo, which leaves everyone exhausted, ecstatic and applauding wildly.