EVEN MORE than the Vedas and the Epics, Sindh figures very prominently in, of all places, the annals of Sikander that is Alexander.
British historians used to talk of Alexander as ``the world conqueror'' who ``came and saw and conquered'' every land he had visited. He is still advertised in Indian text-books as the victor in his war with India's Porus (Puru). However, the facts as recorded by Alexander's own Greek historians tell a very different tale. And Marshal Zhukov, the famous Russian commander in World War II, said at the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun, a few years back, that India had defeated Alexander.
Alexander fared badly enough with Porus in the Punjab. Indeed, Porus put him on the spot when he told him: ``To what purpose should we make war upon one another. if the design of your coming to these parts be not to rob us of our water or our necessary food, which are the only things that wise men are indispensably obliged to fight for? As for other riches and possessions, as they are accounted in the eyes of the world, if I am better provided of them than you, I am ready to let you share with me; but if fortune has been more liberal to you than to me, I have no objection to be obliged to you.''
Alexander had no reply to the questions posed by Porus. Instead, with the obstinacy of a bully, he said: ``I shall contend and do battle with you so far that, howsoever obliging you are, you shall not have the better of me.'' But Porus did have the better of Alexander. In the fighting that ensued, the Greeks were so terrified of Indian prowess that they refused to proceed farther, in spite of Alexander's angry urgings and piteous lamentations. Writes Plutarch, the great Greek historian: ``This last combat with Porus took off the edge of the Macedonians' courage and stayed their further progress in India.... Alexander not only offered Porus to govern his own kingdom as satrap under himself but gave him also the additional territory of various independent tribes whom he had subdued.'' Porus emerged from his war with Alexander with his territory doubled and his gold stock augmented. So much for Alexander's ``victory'' over Porus. However, what was to befall him in Sindh, was even worse.
In his wars in Iran. Afghanistan, and north-west India,. Alexander had made so many enemies that he did not dare return home by the same route he had come. He had, therefore, decided to travel via Sindh. But in Multan the Mallas gave him hell.
When Alexander's hordes invaded Sindh with the novel war-cry ``Alalalalalai! `` the Sindhis were obviously scared. The rulers of Musicanus, Sindemana, and Patala --- identified by Dr. H.T Sorely I.C.S. author of The Gazeteer of Sind (1968), as Alor, Sehwan, and Hyderabad, respectively- fled. (``Patala'' is believed to be a Greek corruption of ``Patan'' which means river bank or sea shore). But before long they collected their wits and gave Alexander a very bad time. Notes H.T. Lambrick, a former commissioner of Sindh, and author of the Sindh before Muslim Conquest: ``There was a subtle power in Sindh which created the will to resist the foreigner, the influence of the Brahmins.'' Dushhala's settling of 30,000 Brahmins in Sindh had not gone in vain!
Alexander confessed to his friends back home: ``They attacked me everywhere. They wounded my shoulder, they hit my leg, they shot an arrow in my chest, and they struck me on my neck with a loud thud.'' At one stage word had spread in the Greek camp that Alexander was dead --- and he had to be propped up and exhibited as alive!
Alexander never excused the Brahmins for persuading the Sindhi king Sabbas to stand up and fight. To the horror of the local people, he had a whole lot of them slaughtered. However, he was so impressed with the quality and spirit of the Brahmins that he captured and kept with him ten of them. Plutarch's account of Alexander's questions and their replies makes interesting reading.
``The first being asked whether he thought the most numerous the dead or the living, answered, `the living, because those who are dead, are not at all'. Of the second he desired to know whether the earth or the sea produced the largest beasts, who told him. `The earth, for the sea is but part of it . His question to the third was, `which is the cunningest of animals?' `That,' said he, 'which men have not yet found out.' He bade the fourth to tell him what argument he used with Sabbas to persuade him to revolt 'No other,' he said, `than that he should either live nobly or die nobly.' Of the fifth he asked, what was the oldest, night or day. The philosopher replied, `Day was oldest, by one day at least'. And perceiving Alexander not well satisfied with that account, he added that he ought not to wonder if he got strange answers for his strange questions. Then he went on and inquired of the next, what a man should do to be exceedingly beloved. `He must be very powerful, without making himself too much feared.' The answer of the seventh to his question, how a man might become 8 god, was, `By doing, that which was impossible for man to do.' The eighth told him, `Life is stronger than death because it supports so many miseries.' And the last philosopher, asked how long he thought it decent for a man to live, said `till death appeared more desirable than life'.''
The philosophers in turn posed him questions of their own. Dandamis (Dandamani?) asked Alexander why he undertook so long a journey to come into those parts. Kalanus (Kalyan) refused to talk to Alexander until the latter stripped himself naked and then heard him with humility and attention. Kalyan then conveyed to Alexander that his roaming far and wide was not good either for him or for his country. Reports Plutarch: ``Kalanus threw a dry shrivelled hide on the ground and trod upon the edges of it, to show it would not straighten out that way. He then stood on it in the centre, to show how it straightened out immediately.'' The meaning of this similitude was that he ought to reside most in the middle of his empire, and not spend too much time on the borders of it.
However, life in Sindh for Alexander was something more than these encounters with Brahmin philosophers. And the worst was yet to come. When he saw the mighty Indus, he thought he had found the source of the Nile! The presence of crocodiles in the Indus only confirmed him in this belief, since they were also present in the Nile. With much relief and great fanfare, his army sailed down the Indus in hopes of reaching Egypt. But they soon found themselves at sea, literally. Here the monsoon and the tides --- both unknown to his native little land-locked Mediterranean country --- bewildered him to no end. He split his army into two --- one half led by Alexander, to go by lower Sindh and coastal Baluchistan to Iran, while the other half, led by Nearchus, to proceed by sea. Soon the two halves lost contact, each thinking the other lost and dead! On the land route, the paucity of water drove many of them mad. As and when they found a pond, they would jump into it and drink and drink and drink until they bloated up dead! Of the 40,000 Greeks who had started out by land from Sindh, only 15,000 reached Iran. Writes Robin Lane Poole, the modern biographer of Alexander: ``All of them agreed that not even the sum total of all the army's sufferings in Asia deserved to be compared with the hardships in Makran. The highest officers were alive --- and so was Alexander --- but they had suffered a disgrace which was agonizingly irreversible. Alexander had known his first defeat''.
Obviously Alexander's Indian trip was about as ``successful'' as Napoleon's invasion of Russia. He, however, consoled himself with the thought that Queen Semiramis of Assyria, who had invaded Sindh, had been able to get back with only 20 men --- and Cyrus of Iran, with only seven.''
However, Alexander's Indian adventure was not entirely unproductive. He had introduced the Indian elephant to the West. He was so much impressed by the broad-bottomed boats carrying grain up and down the Indus, that he had them introduced in Greece. The Greeks now introduced five times more spices in the West. Sissoo (Sheesham) wood of the Punjab was used to build pillars for the Susa Palace in imperial Iran. He would, no doubt, have carried the mango also, but for the fact that its over-eating had given the ``God-king'' no end of loose motions. And so Alexander forbade mango-eating in his camp.
Evidently this sweet-sour experience with the mango was not confined to Alexander alone. When G.D. Birla took a basketful of the choicest Alphonsos as a gift to Khrushchov, the latter declined them with thanks and said that that `strange fruit' did not suit the Russian stomach.
The Greeks had many interesting things to say about Sindh. Admiral Nearchus, who had led the Greek retreat by sea, noted that Sindhis were tall and slim and wore white leather shoes with thick soles, to appear taller. Vanity is neither recent nor imported!
Alexander had himself found Sindhis ``healthy and temperate and partaking of community meals.'' Obviously the Langar did not start with the Sikhs. He had also noted that the Sindhis ``hated war, and loved medicine'', the science of health and long life.
There is one thing more the Greeks and the Sindhis have in common --- the Sindhi bhoonda or buja --- the peculiar Sindhi gesture of denunciation with an open, outstretched hand. When the Greek Cypriots wanted the British out of Cyprus, they had burnt the Union Jack with this ``handy'' denunciation. And when at the peak of the Pakistani people's demand for democracy Zia-ul-Haq toured Sindh in September 1983, he was greeted with the same gesture.
According to Prof. Demetrios Loukatos, this gesture has been in use in Greece since ancient times and it had even spread to the Romans and the Balkanians, particularly the Albanians. In Greek, it is known as moudja. With `b' often changing into ``m'' in Greek, the moudja comes very close to the Sindhi Buja or bhoonda.
Here is a good theme for a doctoral thesis --- to find out whether it was a gift from Sindh to Alexander or the other way round. Or whether it was carried to Greece by our Panis that is Phoenicians thousands of years before.