I'm on the mighty Indus River,
which gave its name to the whole Indian subcontinent.
And I'm beginning a journey deep into Ancient India.
A journey that will take me back 5,000 years into the past,
to discover some of its most hidden treasures.
I'll be travelling back in time to the ancient civilisation that
first grew up on the shores of the Indus.
I'll be revealing the lost Buddhist culture of northern Pakistan.
And luxuriating in the extraordinary
architectural flowering of the Mughal Empire...
and the exuberant temples of South India.
All of which produced some phenomenal artworks.
As an art historian and museum curator,
I've looked after these treasures for most of my life.
In this series, I want to explore their stories
and the people who created them.
I'm beginning my journey in Lahore, home to over five million people
and the vibrant, beating heart of modern Pakistan.
Today we think of Pakistan as an Islamic country,
and indeed it was religion that was the cause of
its violent severance from Greater India in 1947.
What was India's loss was the birth of a new nation,
the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
But what I want to explore is this country's very rich,
more complex and diverse past, which is often forgotten.
A time when women were celebrated, the Buddha was worshipped
and the Mughal Empire recreated paradise on Earth.
So to do that, I need to go to the remains of a city that makes
Lahore look as if it was built just yesterday.
A site that is not just one of the most ancient in Pakistan,
but in the whole world.
SHE SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
There's always a great sense of adventure to arrive
at a station in the subcontinent early in the morning.
With coolies carrying people's luggage,
people have got places to go,
just like I have.
Pakistan was born less than 70 years ago.
A much younger country than India.
So it is perhaps ironic that it was the birthplace
of a far older civilisation.
I spent years at the British Museum looking after treasures
from the Indian subcontinent.
But I've never made this particular journey before.
It will take me to the cradle of Ancient India.
So I've just got off the train at Harappa, we are almost 200km
outside Lahore at this tiny station, I seem to be the only person here.
But it was here, about 100 years ago, that under the British,
railway workers were creating a passageway to dig this railway,
to create this railway, and stumbled upon what appeared to be
a very ancient mound of terracotta bricks.
"How convenient", the workers must have thought,
and just used the bricks to help make the railway embankment.
But when archaeologists were eventually called in,
they made one of the great discoveries of the 20th century.
What they found defied belief.
In this quiet and neglected corner of Pakistan, an enormous city -
stretching for miles -
began to emerge from beneath the dusty plains.
It's thought the city of Harappa
was large enough to house up to 80,000 people.
This city was at the height of its success in 2,200 BC.
It's not until the late 19th century, over 4,000 years later,
that European cities reached anything like the scale and order.
Even more extraordinary than its size
was the realisation of quite how old it was.
When the archaeologist John Marshall came here in 1921,
he was the first person who fully appreciated the significance
and the actual antiquity of what this site potentially had to offer.
So I brought with me a copy of the Illustrated London News
from 1924, which was
actually when Marshall announced to the world effectively what he
had discovered and the significance of it, and it begins...
"Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to
"Schliemann at Tiryns or Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of
"Turkestan, to light upon the remains of
"a long forgotten civilisation.
"It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold
"of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus."
Marshall was trying to rewrite the story of Ancient India with one
that began here in the subcontinent,
not one that had somehow been imported from Europe
or the Middle East, as previous archaeologists had imagined.
A history that was India's own,
a new beginning, if you like, for India's ancient past.
The thing that strikes me immediately,
walking through these ruins,
is how clearly this was laid out on a grid pattern like a modern city.
These people really understood their right angles.
But what is extraordinary is what isn't here.
For a civilisation on this scale,
contemporary with the pyramids,
is there isn't any grand monument to a single ruler, there isn't
any celebration of military might or a ruling theocracy.
This was clearly, in a contemporary sense,
a much more egalitarian society.
This is not the only city built by what came to be called
the Indus Valley Civilisation,
after the mighty river that threaded them together.
Many others were later found, built to a similar template.
And yet more remain to be excavated,
still buried under mounds in the desert.
This was an empire, albeit one without any rulers,
and it is an empire that is still giving up its secrets.
Gosh, so this was only excavated five or six days before?
Yeah. Still fresh with the mud. Yeah.
You can see the accentuation of the breasts, the navel,
the wide hips.
This is a civilisation, like many ancient cultures,
that celebrated fertility, for very obvious reasons,
and these figures appear all over the Indus Valley.
'These were people who liked their bling,
'and some of the jewellery found here reveals
'the use of sophisticated manufacturing techniques.'
So this delicate bead... made of carnelian was considered
a highly precious stone and were traded really far and wide.
What's really remarkable about them is the technology they had,
using diamonds to drill these
very uniform holes through.
So they would then string them together and produce these
elaborate necklaces for elite citizens to wear.
'Unlike Pakistan today, this seems to have been a culture that
'valued, even worshipped, powerful women.
'And nowhere can this be seen better than in one tiny figure,
'a priceless treasure from the era known as The Dancing Girl...
'with the stance of an impudent teenager.'
She has all the poise of Degas' Little Dancer,
and some have described her as the Mona Lisa of ancient Indian art.
Now, the original is priceless,
and she sits here behind bulletproof glass, which...even being
a museum curator, on this occasion, I'm not able to access.
So I have here a replica in my hand,
and close up you can see...
what's really interesting about her is her stance.
For a young woman at this very early date,
she stands incredibly confidently with her hand on her hip,
her head held high, decorated with bangles.
There is a confidence and poise about her, which is
really surprising to some of our more traditional conceptions
and notions of women in South Asia.
The Dancing Girl is unusual and almost unique.
At Harappa, what has been found far more commonly are these
mysterious seals carved in reverse, presumably so they could act
as a stamp, leaving a clear image in wax,
perhaps to seal a transaction.
One of the most amazing features of these tiny seals that were found
at Harappa was that nearly 50% of them represented the unicorn,
which is a mythological animal that we usually associate with
medieval Europe, but actually it first originated here.
And clearly had great spiritual significance for these people,
because it appears over and over again,
but then completely disappeared from this region
and travelled through Mesopotamia into
Ancient Greece and into the legends of Europe
that we've all grown up with.
This is the first time I've ever held a seal from
the Indus Valley Civilisation of this scale,
and holding it at this range,
you can really get a sense of
the very, very fine craftsmanship they used.
You can see all the individual hooves. On the reverse, of course,
is this very practical, pragmatic handle that would have been
used to make the imprint of the sealing,
to mark a commodity that would have been traded,
so competently manufactured at such an early date, that it has survived
5,000 years for us to find today and for me to hold in this moment.
So why did this remarkable civilisation disappear
without trace for thousands of years?
It's hard to believe, in the heat and dust
of the excavated city, that a great tributary of the Indus
once flowed here, which supplied the city with a wealth of water.
There was in fact an indoor bathroom for almost every home,
and a sophisticated drainage system.
But over the millennia, the river changed course,
leaving the city and its farmlands without water.
It's no wonder then that this civilisation eventually collapsed.
The great River Indus dominates the history of civilisation here.
And as the river shifted course, whole cities came and went.
It was here that the next great empire emerged in the Indus Valley,
with consequences which would last for 1,000 years.
So this is the place, in 326 BC,
where that Macedonian megalomaniac Alexander the Great
crossed the river as he attempted to conquer India.
He didn't actually know where he was going,
he arrived with no language, no maps, and in fact Alexander was
so lost that he thought he had arrived
at a distant source of the Nile,
after having seen crocodiles in the Indus.
He was simply driven by a testosterone-fuelled obsession
to outdo the legendary Darius of Persia
and find this fabled land to the East,
which was known only by rumour.
Alexander was a master of self-pathologising.
You have to hand it to him.
A bit like Winston Churchill, he made absolutely sure that history
would be kind to him by writing the history himself, or at least
ensuring that his own biographers came along on his journey with him.
One of his historians, Arrian, wrote,
"When Alexander arrived at the River Indus,
"he found gifts of silver, gold and elephants from Taxilus the Indian.
"And that prince sent word he would surrender to him Taxila,
"the largest city near the River Indus."
Nearby was the ancient city of Taxila, a thriving cosmopolitan
centre, which was just like the Paris or Mumbai of its time.
It was a complete cacophony of different languages,
customs and influences.
Trusting no-one, Alexander marched into Taxila, ready for battle...
WOMAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
..but the governor welcomed him with a tribute of silver.
Bribery will get you everywhere,
and Alexander had made his first ally near the Indus.
So I'm being made into a Pakistani lady. Never a bad thing.
Everything the Greeks encountered was new, fresh and exotic.
The markets would have held spices
and foodstuffs unrecognisable to them.
THEY CONVERSE IN LOCAL LANGUAGE
Tamarind.
'It was journalistic gold dust.
'Alexander's historians were able to give a vivid
'and sensational account of an ancient society that had previously
'been unreported and obscure.'
In the dusty and crowded marketplace,
in the summer heat of Taxila, Alexander and his men
encountered strange customs, languages and influences.
It was here that they came across the naked holy men,
the Buddhist monks,
and where they first encountered the doctrine of the Buddha.
The Greeks and their new allies rebuilt
the ancient city of Taxila nearby.
SHE SPEAKS LOCAL LANGUAGE
But this was to be like no other city that India
had ever seen before.
Today, the city is known as Sirkap.
It's actually vast, spread over a really big area.
And very quickly it appears...
..there is a main boulevard,
the high-street...
and that the city was actually planned...
very much like a Hellenistic city would have been,
so the stamp is clearly here.
It's quite amazing, actually, how many walls are still standing.
How neatly ordered they are, and I suspect there would have been
a subterranean level, much like you would have found in ancient Athens.
It is a quiet, peaceful, very overgrown place now.
But it appears here... there were shops...
there, residences.
There was a great sense of order to it clearly.
Which is unusual in a typical city of the subcontinent,
which has a completely different way of organising space,
and that's the thing I find really striking here.
The thing to remember, I think, is Alexander's arrival...
was really a moment and just the start of this long relationship
between India and Greek culture
and Hellenistic culture, which went on for several hundred years.
And one result of that Greek invasion
was the effect it had on the local legend of Buddhism,
which now changed dramatically in its art and architecture.
So in amongst these low-lying stone walls is a really complete example
of an early Buddhist temple,
which has all the hallmarks of Greek influence.
You've got the stupa in the middle,
the steps leading up to it,
this motif here actually shows a double-headed eagle.
You can see these beautifully carved acanthus leaves
at the top of each of these columns.
So all around in the detail, you can see the fusion,
the Hellenistic influence,
with the traditional, local religion of Buddhism.
It's beautiful, actually.
This, of course, is the path the devotee would taken,
in a clockwise motion around the stupa,
in the hope of accruing good karma,
which is of course good for all of us.
When the Greeks arrived, Buddhism had already been established for
some centuries since the death of the Buddha himself in around 480 BC.
But their arrival had a fundamental impact
on the way the Buddha was now portrayed.
Although we are used to seeing the Buddha represented
in human form, in the very earliest manifestations
he was actually represented by his absence.
He was represented in symbolic form, like this magnificent footprint
decorated with symbols of Buddhism, which celebrated
aspects of the Buddha's life, rather than showing him in human form.
And then something really interesting
and dramatic starts to happen in this region after
the invasion of Alexander the Great, and that is the representation
of the Buddha as a real, living person in human form.
It's hard to exaggerate how important a moment
this was in the history of Buddhism.
For the first time, the Buddha was given features.
He had died too long before for anyone to remember what
he really looked like,
so the features he was given were idealised ones, and the new ideal
came from this innovative Indo-Greek culture that took Buddhism
from its home on the North Indian plain
and embedded it onto a completely new form,
one that we might find more recognisable today.
Here are youthful Buddhas with hair arranged in wavy curls that
resemble Greek sculptures of Apollo.
The monastic robe covering both shoulders is arranged in
heavy, naturalistic folds, reminiscent of a classical toga,
and compared to other more rotund Buddhas,
he has the toned body of a Greek athlete.
To see more examples of this rare and early Buddhist art,
I've been invited to a private museum with a fabulous collection
that the same family has safeguarded for over seven generations.
Hello. Hello.
Nice to meet you. I've heard a lot about you.
You're welcome to Fakir Khana Museum. Thank you, thank you.
This is a very beautiful room. You want to have a look at my collection?
Absolutely, that would be great.
Wow.
'It's a treasure trove of rare and wonderful objects gathered
'from all the great civilisations that have arisen along the Indus.
'Including the Indo-Greek culture inspired by Alexander's arrival,
'that became known as Gandhara.'
What's in here? It's... Goodness me. ..Gandhara.
This Gandhara is in limestone.
It has a Greek influence. Yep. Like this one.
Why these Buddhas are so special,
you know, why these Gandharas are so special,
because the skills are so high. They have made beautiful faces.
And look at this piece.
It is a broken piece, but look at the beautiful smile of Buddha.
His lips and smile, you know.
OK, I'm going to show you something very special of my collection.
It is a hidden collection, you know.
I've never opened it for anybody else. Especially for today,
I'm going to do it for you.
The special thing I'm going to show you...
no other museum has this kind of thing.
This is the original ring of Raja Porus.
Porus? Yes. As in the man... Who fought against...
Alexander the Great in 326. Yeah.
Gosh. This is done in pure silver.
This is incredibly exciting,
I'm actually holding the ring... Yes.
..worn by Porus. Yes.
That's magnificent.
Can I put it on? You may.
You can see that the physiognomy is actually very different. Definitely.
It's... Indic. Indic. Yeah.
And he has the turban on his head, big earrings.
Big earrings, everything, sunflower. And wearing the sunflower, yes.
So how did you come across the ring of Porus?
Don't ask me all these questions. Family secret. Family secret.
HORNS BEEP FRANTICALLY
This was not a one-way exchange in Gandhara.
The Greeks themselves took gold, silver and Sindh cotton
back to Europe, along what started to become a thriving trade route.
But more importantly, they also took with them a myth and a name.
The River Indus was the whole subcontinent for
the European imagination, as India.
And the stories that went back with Alexander and his men
of a wild, fabulous place filled with mystics, seers and gold
were to influence the European view of India for thousands of years.
In some ways, you could say we are still unpicking
the reality from that myth.
For it was after the arrival of Alexander and the long
Indo-Greek culture that followed that the idea of India was born.
Alexander began his chaotic trek back to Europe in 325 BC,
leaving behind him an Indo-Greek culture
which took on a life of its own.
It was a golden age for the growth of Buddhism.
A great Buddhist monastery was built here in Taxila,
at the crossroads of Asia.
So this would have been the original living quarters of the monks,
and you can see the cells all around the central courtyard,
which would have been filled with water and overlain with lotuses.
It would have been a very peaceful site.
But I suppose the thing to remember is that this wasn't a
closed monastic life in the way we think of it today.
But actually this was a centre of learning, which was very open,
very much like the great universities of the modern world.
Students at the university
came from Persia in the west,
India to the south
and from the north
along the silk route.
Perhaps most important of all came
inquisitive Chinese pilgrims,
many of whom who took
Buddhist scriptures back with them
to China.
These were the monks' domestic quarters.
Quite intimate little cells, actually very cool
in the heat of the day, overshadowed by trees, surrounding trees.
And two tiny little niches,
one of which would perhaps have been for a candle and some prayer beads.
And another one perhaps for Willie Dalrymple's latest novel.
Having worked in centres of learning for most of my life,
I actually find it really moving to think of the monks
living and working here, transcribing Buddhist scriptures
into manuscripts and preserving them over hundreds and hundreds of years.
They've opened up the cell for me, so that I can see
a replica of one of the finest of the Buddha statues, which survived
intact for centuries because it was protected from the elements.
Inside this quiet side chapel, tucked away in this corner...
..is this really beautiful, calm image of the Buddha seated in prayer
The original has actually been removed to the museum at Taxila,
but this was one of the Buddha images that Sir John Marshall
was really moved by when he came upon it back in the 1930s.
So you can see here how art began to be used to
spread the message of Buddhism
through the creation of sensuous form.
I find it tragic that so many of the Buddha sculptures here have
been vandalised and now need to be protected from Islamic extremists,
while some heads have had to be removed to museums
for their own safety.
This really dramatic representation of the Buddha
shows him during the six years he undertook fasting
as part of his journey to reach nirvana.
And you can see it is actually a complete
masterpiece of Buddhist sculpture.
It is made out of single piece of schist, and you can see how
the full-bodied form has completely withered away
and shown his ribs protruding, his arteries, his veins,
the robes are slipping off him.
And in particular, if you look at his face,
the eyes are completely sunken. The cheeks are sallow, but there is
a certain serenity to his expression.
This is not the expression of a dying man,
this is the expression of a man who is on a path,
looking for something. If you look very carefully into his eyes,
they are actually open, they are actually looking at you
as you stand before him.
And beneath you can see the narrative sequence,
the story that tells that actually
he realised this wasn't the way to enlightenment,
and that he ended up begging for food to feed himself,
and continued on his journey to nirvana.
In other regions of South Asia, Buddhism ultimately survived
only in small pockets, whereas this area surrounding
the high Indus had a different kind of sacred landscape altogether.
Here, more than 3,000 Buddhist institutions
flourished across Gandhara.
It is a very calm place to be here early in the morning
in northern Pakistan.
And there's a sense of sadness at how remote
these sites are today.
Given how important they were in transmitting this
incredible world religion right across Asia.
And the world has not only forgotten, but I suspect
it doesn't really know that Buddhism, as we know it today,
actually emanated from this part of the world,
right here in Pakistan.
And Pakistan gets a hard rap for exporting
Islamic fundamentalism, which I think is really quite unfair
and a very limited view of this rich country.
So why was it that Buddhism spread from here
to the four corners of Asia?
Because this area of Pakistan
was at the heart of one of the busiest trade routes in Asia,
market towns like these exchanged art, ideas
and cultural influence just as easily as they did
textiles, ivory and spices.
And as the merchant class grew more prosperous,
they could afford to turn their attention to manufacturing.
These images of the Buddha were being mass-produced to
cater for expanding markets in the Far East.
The irony is, of course,
that a religion based on principles of austerity
and rejection of the self, its ego and material wealth
now found itself enveloped in decidedly commercial concerns.
The craftsmen of Taxila have always known what sells.
It may not be serene statues of the Buddha any more,
but instead we've got shiny, glittering disco leopards,
which would not look out of place in a Duran Duran video.
The one other thing you see when you're travelling around Pakistan
are these incredible bursts of colours,
which are these painted trucks.
And I'm here at the moment in a yard where they not only make
the trucks and repair them, but also take great care to decorate them.
It's slightly intimidating, it's a very male environment.
There aren't any Page Three pin-ups,
but what there are, are these magnificently-worked trucks.
This is one of my absolute favourites.
It's got all the scale of an American juggernaut,
but look at the difference.
Every inch of this vehicle has been decorated, painted, made colourful.
It is glittering in the sunlight. Here, in the centre,
you've got Father of the Nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
flanked by the Pakistani flag.
And everywhere there is colour, symbols of fish,
which they particularly like here because it gives them
lots of opportunity to provide texture
and colour and pattern.
You don't see a lot of colour in what people wear.
The men are dressed in quite earthy colours,
and the woman may be brightly dressed,
but many of them are covered in the veil, and then you see this
incredible burst of colour along the road for everyone to enjoy.
There's a lot of detail on the outside,
there's these wonderful tassels.
And then when you look on the inside,
an absolute driver's boudoir.
I wanted to have a look in one of the actual workshops,
where a lot of the crafting of these designs actually takes place.
I like to think that these skills
are an echo of the Taxila craftsman of old.
Their fine work with gold, silver and precious stones helped
build ancient trade routes here, and thus the spread of Buddhism.
Yet however successful abroad, by the eighth century, Buddhism had
all put disappeared in Pakistan itself.
So why is their virtually no trace of it in the country
that was for so long its home?
It's not in Pakistan but in China
and the Far East that Gandharan civilisation
made its greatest impact, and its influence can still be felt today.
Through the early Chinese pilgrims that came here,
Buddhism established a firm foothold in Imperial China.
So it was natural that in later centuries Chinese monks would
want to return to see the source of their Buddhism.
What they found, however, left them saddened.
By the time this monastery and stupa at Bombala were built,
more than 500 years after Alexander, Buddhism in northwest India
was being eclipsed by more intruders from Central Asia.
For the stories of grandeur also brought a series of invaders,
like the White Huns, upon the region,
and eventually the grand city of Taxila was brought to its knees.
In the seventh century,
when the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang came to Taxila to find
the source of the Buddhism that had transformed China, it lay desolate
and in a state of half ruin, a mere shadow of its former glory.
He described the monasteries as "filled with shrubs
"and solitary to the last degree, wasted and desolate",
and the monks as "indolent and given to indulgence and debauchery."
And in some ways one could say the old tolerance of Taxila,
the cosmopolitan university open to all faiths,
also now lies in ruins.
There's a lovely echo around the valley here,
and you can just imagine how it would have sounded
when all the Buddhist monks here would have been chanting.
It does feel desolate.
It feels like you've happened upon something that's hidden away
that was once a great civilisation,
much of it is still to be excavated,
and there's a sense of desertion here,
which is really quite poignant.
There are real contemporary echoes today,
in terms of the desecration of Buddhist monuments in Bamiyan
and also in this region, by the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban.
Greater Pakistan is probably confused by its Buddhist history,
only because there's been a state-sponsored Islamic agenda here,
which really denies the texture and longevity of this land,
which was always a frontier province,
it was always many different groups of people, and you can't
really undo and unpick that complexity without leaving a vacuum.
The invaders who destroyed the old Buddhist cultures were
followed out of the Afghan mountains centuries later by more horsemen
from the north, who brought with them a new religion.
Islam.
CALL TO PRAYER
And to explore the Muslim legacy they left behind, I've come back
to the city they founded,
the cultural centre of modern Pakistan - Lahore.
I've just arrived in Lahore, it's the middle of Eid,
the greatest celebration - it's sort of Christmas, Easter
and everything rolled into one.
There's great excitement on the streets, children out playing,
big national holiday, and it's just wonderful to be here.
It's the best time of year in the Muslim calendar.
Although perhaps not if you're a goat or a cow that's being
fattened up for the occasion.
CALL TO PRAYER
I love being in this city.
The sights, the smells, the sounds, it's like an assault
on the senses, but it really, really brings you alive.
Around 1000 AD, the Muslim sultan Mahmud of Ghazni gained control
of the Indus Valley, and Lahore rose up as a great city under his rule.
Scholars and poets gathered from as far away as Iraq and Samarkand
and made Lahore a city of music and the arts.
HE SINGS IN OWN LANGUAGE
'Today, Ali Sethi typifies a younger group of Pakistani artists
'who are rediscovering how much their country's past
'still has to say to them.'
Is there something about the fact that it's a song of suffering
that draws people do it? Yeah, absolutely.
Every person that I've ever heard singing it,
like, sublimates or channels, whatever it is they're feeling,
whatever pain or angst or, like, you know,
achy emotion they're feeling, into this song.
And I've heard, you know, traditional musicians,
people you would call minstrels,
singing it with tattered clothes at shrines in deserts,
and I've heard kids in jeans and t-shirts,
with joints in their hands, singing this, you know,
with great feeling and fervour, and taking great ownership of it.
And that seems to me to be a great miracle of life here,
is that despite so much...
truncation, and so much revisionism,
you know, and so much loss of
what ought to have been memorialised,
there is still this... Persistence.
..persistence. This really amazing persistence of things that
are ancient and that are very strong and that continue to live in us,
and that we continue to, sort of,
pour into newer forms, ever newer forms
and styles and situations, and yet we're not conscious of those things.
Politically, we are very young, and culturally we're very old.
So what does that make us?
Interesting. It makes Pakistan very interesting.
I agree, I agree.
THEY SING IN OWN LANGUAGE
To see how Islam has lasted for 1,000 years in Lahore,
I've come to this ancient shrine.
Even though Taliban suicide bombers killed 42 worshipers
here in 2010, the congregation still comes to praise Islam
in verse, song and dance.
You know, spiritual music is very powerful,
and I think all the people who go to shrines,
they lose themselves.
It's like going into another space and...
It's like a trance. It's a trance, it's the trance music.
I've seen 500 people going into a trance for hours.
You get caught up in the energy of it as well. There's a momentum.
You get caught up in the energy,
and the best thing is that they do it not alone.
They're doing it with friends, and hundreds of them doing it.
And it's like headbanging
or something that you do at a rock concert.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SONG ENDS
By the 10th century, Lahore was being described as a place
with impressive palaces, large markets and huge orchards.
500 years later,
this thriving cultural hub of a city became a natural choice
for a capital for the greatest of Muslim connoisseurs - the Mughals.
For this is where Islam from Persia met
the land beyond the Indus, to recreate a paradise on earth.
Lahore is often described as the city of gardens,
of gardens watered by the Indus.
The city reached the peak of its glory during the Mughal rule.
Not only did they build lavish monuments
and splendid gardens, they bestowed upon Lahore
customs and traditions that have echoed down the ages.
And it's Islam which is often credited with introducing
a new concept to Pakistan,
the concept of purdah.
Purdah or purd-ah was originally a Persian word
that came to India with the Mughals,
and means veil or curtain, and was a way for a wife to show
complete loyalty to her husband.
Eventually it was also taken up by high-class Hindu woman
as a form of protection.
Previously in the subcontinent, all women were uncovered
from the waist up,
as we've seen previously in the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro.
And here we have these wonderful architectural metaphors
for the veil in these jali screens,
which would have been a way to separate the women from the
world outside, but also for them to create their own world within.
So what lay behind these walls was
often very intriguing to the commoner.
The politics of the harem was much more complex than we might imagine.
Nowhere can this be seen better than in the relationship
between the Mughal emperor Jahangir and his charismatic wife Nur Jahan.
MUSIC: Wonderwall by Ryan Adams
Born on a caravan travelling from Tehran to India,
she became the last but most beloved wife of the Emperor.
Jahangir's two brothers had died of alcoholism and, as Crown Prince,
he was not much better himself,
being heavily addicted to opium.
So when he came to the throne,
he depended completely on his favourite wife to run
the kingdom, while he built rock star extravaganzas like this -
a minaret in which to keep one of his favourite pet deer.
It's perhaps a little unfair to
think of Jahangir as the Noel Gallagher of the Mughal Empire,
because, despite being a playboy,
he had many other qualities.
This was, of course, the long summer of the Mughal Empire,
and in that time he patronised the arts,
he built beautiful buildings and he was a very just emperor.
And he had Nur Jahan by his side,
with whom he had this complex, romantic, intimate relationship,
which involved, obviously, love, but also political power,
and in a sense they ruled the empire together.
Just a step behind the magnificent public balcony where the Emperor sat
to give audience is this darker chamber, which was actually
the nerve centre of power.
And who was here? It was Nur Jahan, his beloved wife, the Empress,
the Mughal empress.
And she actually held a lot of power in the Mughal court
and made many of the decisions.
So she was effectively standing just over his shoulder
whispering in his ear, directing him
while he was holding court to his public just beyond.
So this series of chambers, private chambers,
was actually built for Nur Jahan by Jahangir,
and she traversed these spaces in privacy,
but completely connected to the public government
imperial decisions that he was making just a few feet away.
So, despite the dust and graffiti of centuries,
including King Jahangir's phone number,
you can really get a sense of how magnificent
these private quarters would have been.
I mean, there's still a lot of intricate paintwork
to be seen down here,
and there's an image of the sun-god right in the centre up there.
So you have to imagine that these internal chambers would have
been really sumptuous.
The floors were laid with marble,
they would have been covered with Persian and Mughal carpets,
and the walls would have been very, very colourful,
a rich palette of colours, which would have painted the stuccowork.
And here in particular, you see a very Persian motif of the
vase of flowers, which, of course,
the Mughals brought with them to India.
I particularly love this space
because if you look up, the ceiling is covered with mirrors.
And there's also a little bit of restoration work that's taken place
which shows you the depth of colour
that actually there would have been
during the time that Nur Jahan would
have been walking through these rooms.
And there are remnants, still, of gold paint and blue,
to be seen on the stuccowork above the doorway here.
And if you imagine that all of this Technicolor would have been,
with the lighting,
would have shone off and reflected from the mirrors
that are overhead. This really would have been a sumptuous
interior chamber for the Empress Nur Jahan.
Her grip on the reins of imperial power was absolute.
But such were the rules of purdah, that no other men ever got to see
her face. Not even, bizarrely, the artist who painted her portrait.
So, Salima, this is a very intimate image of the private quarters...
Yes.
..of a high-class lady.
Yes, and preparing herself for her toilette,
and obviously preparing herself for something important.
And when you consider that it is invariably a male artist who
is doing this and with no access...
So there would have been no access, certainly not this kind?
Absolutely. No, no.
No access at all. So this is kind of second-hand information which
was fed to the artist and presumably...
Through who?
Presumably through the informants.
So there's a lot of imagination,
a little bit of fantasy, which is involved in this.
But then the other ways in which, presumably,
they got to know what women did, what they got up to.
So you find you do have works... I mean, for example,
that one, in which there's a rival life
going on in the women's quarters.
Amongst the women themselves.
Yeah, and they are enjoying themselves.
They have some of the same pastimes as men, actually.
They're smoking, they're... Drinking.
Uh, I don't know whether they were drinking the same things,
but presumably they were having a jolly good time.
Jahangir's reign was a golden age that only came to an end
with his death in 1627.
The tomb that was built for him was magnificent in its ostentation.
The building was clad in zigzags of white and yellow marble,
and there was once an ornate pavilion built here on the roof.
But not far away is the much smaller mausoleum of Nur Jahan.
She had tried to intervene with Jahangir's succession,
and as a consequence was confined to Lahore for the rest of her days.
She lies not alongside the love of her life, but beside her daughter,
in an unassuming tomb she had to build for herself.
She left a message that expresses her sorrow.
Nobody would come to light a lamp,
no moths would come to burn their wings on such lamps,
and no cuckoos would even sing within the tombs
of Nur Jahan and her daughter.
But to remember Nur Jahan best, I've been allowed to
return to the beautiful Palace Of Mirrors in the
women's quarters of the Lahore Fort,
at night, when it's empty and deserted.
This surely is her true spiritual resting place -
as a woman who patronised the arts
and helped make Lahore a glittering centre for artists and writers.
As it still is.
OVERLAPPING CHATTER
THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE
Hi, I'm Sona.
Hello, how are you?
Lahore is a very spiritual city
because here you find all the arts.
It is also a city of music and of politics.
If this wasn't a dry country,
I could have sworn there was something in this orange juice,
but it's at parties like this that you can really sense that
visual artists, writers, poets in Pakistan today are
really engaging with the rich cultural past
and unpicking it and exposing it,
and exploring it, to reveal that this isn't just a country
with a 50-year Islamic history, but something much, much deeper.
So what I've done is... She has raised all the funding.
One of the artists at the party has produced a work that has
become famous and which explores the tensions
between old and new Pakistan,
and its relationship with the West.
I've been particularly drawn to this remarkable series
that you did called The Veil.
Can you tell me, firstly, what inspired you?
What was the moment that made you choose this subject?
I was intrigued to see in this post-9/11 period, to see
Western media in particular, whenever there was a mention of
a Muslim country, it will be referenced
with the image of a veiled woman.
So, in a way, I think it kind of reduces
the representation of women from a certain part of the world,
which made me think of another simplification of the woman
in the minds of the men, especially, from the non-Western world,
because of their exposure to pornography.
So in this work Rashid has used this process of photomontage,
where, when you enter the room,
you encounter one particular image
which on this occasion is a series of burqa-clad women,
completely veiled, including the face.
And then when you come in closer,
you're opened up to a whole other landscape.
The pixelations are tiny images of pornography,
which are captured from the internet,
and widely disseminated all over the world.
So he's playing on that idea of contradictions
of the perceptions that we have in this apparent distinctions
between what goes on in the East and the West.
Pakistan has a population of over 200 million people,
greater than Russia. Its position at the crossroads of Asia
makes it crucial to world politics.
And yet my journey through the country has been
a reminder of how little outsiders know about its complicated past,
and equally complicated present.
Today, Pakistan is searching for its identity.
Not because it doesn't have one, but because this civilisation,
this 5,000-year-old civilisation, is so textured and multilayered.
And some of that history is shared and contested with
its neighbour India, but a lot of isn't,
because this was always a frontier land between India to the south,
China to the North, Afghanistan, Iran and Ancient Babylon and Greece.
And running through this, like an artery, nourishing civilisations
that have lived here, has been the River Indus.
In the next episode of Treasures Of The Indus, I'll explore
what happened when the Islamic conquerors who swept into
Lahore in the 16th century travelled even farther down into India,
when the Islam of the Mughals collided
with the kingdoms of Hindustan
and created some of the finest architecture
the world has ever seen.