Taking the High Road

Amar Grover

Publishing Date: Wednesday, November 16 2005

Gilgit is a major staging post in the heart of Pakistan's Northern Areas. Many travellers stop here to break up their journey along the Karakoram Highway between China and the hot Punjabi plains. Most mountaineers bound for K2 head east from Gilgit to Baltistan. A few head west into Chitral in the Northwest Frontier. While long and rough, this last route is among the most exhilarating in Pakistan. The scenery alone would justify the trip, but I was also drawn to Gilgit by its association with one of the more colourful episodes of the Great Game.

Perhaps more than any other, the 19th century was a period of geographical expansion, as the world's superpowers scrambled for unclaimed territory. In Central Asia, British India and Russia vied for control of the land between the empires. Into this remote and hostile mountain environment went spies charged with exploring the lie of the land and the movements of the enemy.

On a Stroll in Chitral Bazar

Having established an agency in Chitral in 1889, the British sought allies among locals leaders in order to establish some sort of foothold. However, their plans were set back in 1892, when the death of Aman-ul-Mulk, the Mehtar or ruler of Chitral, sent the region into chaos. Over the next three years, power changed hands numerous times as Aman's sons turned on each other. The British were wrong-footed at almost every turn. Frequent acts of fratricide and treachery were bedevilled by Afghan and Pathan pretenders while the Russians lurked menacingly nearby in the Pamirs.

In an effort to regain control, the British political agent in Chitral, Major George Robertson, appointed a token mehtar, 14-year-old Shuja ul-Mulk, and occupied the ul-Mulk's fort in Chitral with a garrison of around 500 Sikh soldiers. What seemed at first to be a deft move soon turned to disaster. His occupation offended the Chitralis, and the pretenders closed in and laid siege to the fort. The government sent thin reinforcements to diffuse the situation, but when they were ambushed and killed and their ammunition seized, the British began to worry that the unrest might spread along the frontier.

The elaborate entrance to Chitral fort, where Robertson's men were besieged for 47 days

Relief forces were rushed into action, 14,000 from the south near Peshawar and just over 500 from Gilgit led by Colonel James Kelly. The Peshawar contingent may have been larger, but Kelly's force proved the more effective. Their heroic 250-kilometre march to Chitral via the Shandur Pass stirred the press and enthralled the public.

Drawn by the fascinating accounts of British imperial history in this region, I decided to travel the Gilgit-Chitral road, which today almost exactly follows the route taken by Kelly's men.

In the 1890s, Gilgit was a tenuously held outpost of the empire. "Today, for all its hustle and hustle, it remains isolated, linked to the outside world by a single surfaced road and a daily flight. Ten kilometres west of town, the tarmac gives out as barren ridges loom over the foaming Gilgit River. Poplar avenues herald small villages and shade patchwork fields. Across the river at Sherqila stands a small watchtower, the remains of an ancient fort whose 19th-century ruler excelled at polo. It's here that Kelly spent the second night of the journey.

A view of Chitral from one of the mehtar's summer retreats shows
the town in a lush fertile valley surrounded by dramatic, barren slopes

The bulk of Kelly's men were Sikh 'pioneers', essentially road-builders. For speed, they did without tents and wore sheepskin coats against the cold. They carried Martini-Henry rifles, picks and shovels, and the Mountain Battery dragged two heavy guns.

'Political teas' with local headmen lubricated their progress. Published accounts of their remarkable journey reveal a mood of almost surreal nonchalance. "Good eggs and bacon will carry a man through a long day most successfully," wrote one of Kelly's officers, a Lieutenant Beynon.

Several suspension bridges now span the Gilgit River, linking forgotten valley kingdoms such as Ishkoman and Yasin. At checkpoints, bored policemen oversee arbitrary registration procedures. Simple dhabas, or eateries, rustle up skillets of tasty okra, dhal and potatoes, all served with piping-hot nan bread. The track sweeps across dun ridges and boulder-strewn gullies, where the trout-rich river is an intense cobalt blue.

Kelly's route forked up the Ghizr River through small gorges and shallow defiles, where the villages are smaller and more austere. After pausing at Khalti, a beautiful slender lake formed around 13 years ago after a flood, we took our Jeep up a moraine spur beyond Chashi to the deep-set Phandur Lake. Kelly had also expected to find the lake here, but the year before his expedition it had drained away when a natural dam collapsed. It was near here, in the early April snow, that Kelly's problems began.

A Bailey bridge on the track between Mastuj and Buni, shortly
before a difficult stretch of road near Nisa Gol

Tents provide shelter for visitors to Shandur top, next to the
grandstand of what is probably the world's highest polo ground

In summer, shepherds spend several months at Shandur Pass
tending their flocks and making butter-cream and curd

After an episode in which he had to coax hack 100 Yasin coolies who had bolted one night, Kelly took his men onto the freezing, narrow plain near Teru, where the snow lay belly-high to their mules. "The wind and cold had peeled the skin off our faces till it hung in flakes," wrote Beynon of the frostbitten men huddled in the open. He reported that for a few rupees, a local mullah-cum-charlatan offered 'infallible charms' against the terrible weather. But the trail was vague and the mutes got stuck. Makeshift sledges for the vital seven-pounders barely worked, so the guns had to be dismantled and carried in pieces, 50 metres at a time.

On my journey, I travelled in August and found more favourable conditions. Women with tall pillbox hats tended sun-ripened fields at Barsat, and timid marmots fled across boggy meadows at Langar, the valley at the foot of the pass.

The 16-kilometre stretch up over the Shandur Pass and down to the first Chitrali village at Sor Laspur was the worst for Kelly's men. Unwilling to suck snow, they grew parched, and when the sun shone they were blinded by its glare. As we followed the rutted track, our wheels spun, splattering mules loaded with shepherds' kindling. While it wasn't an especially steep climb, our driver gunned the engine with gusto for his final whooping thrust to the 3,753-metre pass.

Shandur Top, as the locals call it, undulates gently for several kilometres, with two lakes and a rudimentary Chitral Scouts checkpoint. There's a small grandstand where the annual Gilgit-Chitral polo tournament is held; with a skyline teased by the jagged peaks of the Hindu Raj and Hindu Kush, this is surely among the world's most spectacular polo grounds. One of our passengers had family here for the summer grazing, so we diverted to a cluster of crude shepherds' huts, where we hunkered down behind stone walls and lunched on fresh robs dipped in butter-cream and curd.

The Chitralis never expected Kelly to cross the pass. And when he made it through, the morale of his men rose for a variety of reasons. Having left the domain of the Maharajah of Kashmir, a Hindu, the British felt they could once more eat beef. And at Sor Laspur, some villagers were 'politely requested' to leave their homes and billet officers.

On they marched by the Laspur River and, after a skirmish at Chokalwat, they relieved a minor siege at Mastuj. At last there was a sense that they had the initiative. Set in a broad, open valley, Mastuj tries hard to be a town. Its crumbling fort - which Bevnon reckoned could be brought down with a good kick - is now occupied by the aged son of Robertson's mehtar.

Though put to flight, the Chitralis believed they still had an ace up their sleeve. They retreated to Nisa Gol, about an hour down-river, close to a rickety bridge that crosses a bottleneck of surging water. Here, a sheer-sided 75-metre ravine was long considered an example of impregnable 'Fortress Chitral'. On 13 April 1695, about 1,500 of the Chitralis waited here for Kelly's men to arrive. Despite the difference in numbers and the enemy's Snider rifles and stone breastworks, Kelly came at them, scaling ladders and all. Two hours later, with a mere six dead and 16 wounded, they had breached Nisa Gol.

"Today, jeeps still drive gingerly here as the track creeps across unstable scree. Back on the vast, sloping alluvial fan dotted with crops and orchards, there are terrific views of 6,550-metre Buni Zom and a distant Tirich Mir, at 7,706 metres the Hindu Kush's highest peak.

Shortly before Buni village, the tarmac resumes, a velvety ribbon of road weaving high above the Mastuj River all the way to Chitral. The relief force detoured from the main route near here, having heard rumours of a blocked trail and ambushes. Later, they saw their comrades' bodies on the shoals and floating down-river, victims of the skirmishes that had first galvanised the British. Then, two days short of Chitral, a messenger rode in to camp. The besiegers had fled. Having almost succumbed to fire and a tunnel-mine, the fort was finally free.

Shahi Masjid, Chitral's main mosque, dominates the small town's skyline.In the distance, the snow-capped peak of Tirich Mir rises above the rest of the Hindu Kush and the clouds

Although the campaign was over, there was a feeling of disappointment. Beynon felt the fleeing Chitralis gave "just cause for complaint by not playing the game". But Robertson's men were undoubtedly relieved. Rations were very low - they had been forced to eat their horses - and the latrines were putrid. Despite spirited resistance, personified by the Sikh sepoys rigging a Union jack from their turbans, morale was sapped by 47 days of siege.

In the rosy afterglow, the tenacious Sikhs, both those who had been trapped in the fort and those who had toiled with Kelly, were commended in a deco-rations ceremony. "From a career point of view," writes Peter Hopkirk in The Great Game, "Chitral was clearly a good place to have on one's CV."

Shahi Masjid with view of Hotel adjacent to it

Today the old fort is still Chitral's largest building. But the ul-Mulks have built a modest hotel beside it, and Chitralis are now obsessed with a different kind of game; polo. Late one evening I heard celebratory gunfire rattling off the hills. The police had been playing the Scouts and I wondered who had won. "Here in Pakistan," quipped a local man, "the army always wins."