THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE INDUS VALLEY, “INDUS KHORASAN” AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN EURASIAN GEOPOLITICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY HISTORY
Let us first describe the geographic feature called the Indus Valley and its historic and current relevance — before analysing its structure and future prospects.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The Indus Valley marks the turbulent watershed between Central Asia and the Subcontinent — or in more academic terms, between the Turco-Iranian world and the Indian world.
The territory of the modern nation-state of Pakistan is uniquely transposed upon the geography of the Indus Valley, in fact it seems to have been deliberately designed around this feature by the British geopolitical planners who executed the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
In terms of physical geography, the Indus Valley extends from the Karakorams in the north, to the Arabian Sea in the south. In the west, the Sulaiman Mountain Range forms its natural boundary, whereas to the east are the vast flat lands of North India centred on the Gangetic Plain.
The formative feature of the Indus Valley is the elaborate system of five major rivers flowing from the Himalayas — from which the Persian term “Punjab” is derived. All of these rivers converge with the Indus in central Pakistan, making it even mightier from that point onwards.
Below, we will attempt to analyse the importance of the Indus Valley ethno-region and how its character was formed — and where it is likely destined to go.
CULTURE AND POLITICS
We cannot for obvious reasons go into the full details of this topic here, except for giving a brief overview which illuminates the historic character of this region.
The Indus Valley was home to one of the oldest known and most sophisticated civilisations on Earth. By the time the arrivals here began of the Indo-Aryan branch the Indo-Iranian peoples, this Dravidian civilisation was in decline and these arrivals event effectively terminated it, absorbing its cultural and ethnic legacies and incorporating them into the lower tier of what was to become the Vedic Caste System. The Indo-Aryans do owe a great deal to these legacies whether or not they like to admit it. Latterly successive waves of Indo-European, Iranian Scythians and Proto-Turkic and early Turkic peoples from the direction of the Eurasian Steppe continued arriving here 1500 to 2000 years after the Indo-Aryans and mixed with the lower ethno-racial castes of the old Vedic system, subsequently getting Indianised — with the resultant Jats, Rajputs and Gujjars greatly swelling the second or warrior “Kashtri” (Kshitrya) Caste which absorbed these new entrants.
The Indus Valley had become a major Eurasian invasion route into the fabulously rich Indian world, actually representing the entrance to India. The post-Vedic arrivals and resultant racial compounds were turbulent and quarrelsome peoples, who adopted the settled agricultural lifestyle offered by this fertile area…however they remained constantly at war among themselves and with fresh external invaders (and in perpetually servility to one or another foreign master).
The last such stage of these invasions began in the Ghurid times and brought newer Turco-Persian entrants, who brought Islam with them. These became the basis for Indian Muslim statehood in the form of the Delhi Sultanate and later Timurid Empire.
However the major difference was, that the areas of the Indus Valley comprising the west bank of the Indus had continued to preserve their dominant Iranian ethnic composition, cultures and languages — in other words the Pashtun-Afghan and Baloch.
IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE IN MODERN TIMES: PAKISTAN
The arrival of European power in the Indus Valley started with the conquest of Sindh by the British in 1842 and was completed by the annexation of Peshawar in 1849. More than anything else, the British had actually expanded and annexed this part into their empire with the aim of countering the moves of their Russian European rivals further to the north in Eurasia — whom they saw as threatening their prize possession India; for the British the India that really mattered began far across the Indus. For this purpose they envisaged the creation of a complex multi-tiered security zoning structure to serve as a buffer on the north-western approach to their Indian “Raj”. This elaborate “Frontier” consisted of Afghanistan, the Pashtun Tribal Belt and the NWFP in that order — with the Punjab and its “martial races” being the last element of this arrangement.
Later on, as the British hold declined and empowered Indian elites clamoured for political independence, geopolitical planners then consolidated the above defensive features into an entity named Pakistan — which was formed not to protect any British Raj per se, but critical Western petroleum and strategic interests in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf region. The British Empire had by then declined to give way to its American protégé (in effect the “Second British Empire”), while Tsarist Russia had given way to the USSR.
According to the scheme, Pakistan was to be detached from the main portion of the Raj (peninsular India) which was being given political independence — and was to be handed over to a proxy Muslim Indian dominated majority (North Indian refugees, Punjabis and Sindhis) ruling elites. It was to be a rentier state ruled by a regime of dependent parasite proxy political, feudal, business and bureaucratic elites propped up by Western aid and under the effective control of its military, which was the chief Western proxy element. It was to play a “spoiler” role in the region, serving as a multipurpose tool against Soviet/Russian moves and policies in this crucial region at a time when a tense peace prevailed, instead of acute conditions of global war — which after 1945 would ultimately be atomic in nature. Considering all these facts, it can be seen clearly that Pakistan, formed physically around the Indus Valley area, played its role quite effectively from 1947 to the present….and we can also see why it is now declining and so unstable.
“INDUS KHORASAN” AS A NATURAL HISTORIC ETHNO-GEOGRAPHIC REGION OF THE INDUS VALLEY
Lacking expert drawing equipment and making do with rudimentary means, I have tried my best to annotate ordinary maps to explain my concept of “Indus Khorasan”. I think I have succeeded.
PHYSICAL LAYOUT: A map of Indus Valley showing the “Indus Khorasan” ethno-geographic region made to show archaeological sites of the IVC or Harappan Civilisation. On this map, the overall Indus Valley drainage basin is shaded in grey. The area bounded in green lines at the top (northwest) represents the Kabul River Valley (KRV), which is divided into two parts: the Upper Kabul River Valley (UKRV ) or Ningarhar Valley… and the Lower Kabul River Valley (LKRV ) which is also called the Peshawar Valley. Both of these are separated by the Upper Spin Ghar Range and connected by the “bottleneck” of the Khyber Pass. This range connects the Hindukush to the Sulaiman Mountains. The Kabul River Valley connects Indus Khorasan and Khorasan proper, while the Sulaiman range divides them.
Across the River Indus from the LKRV and west of Hazara District, the flat region continues in north-westernmost Punjab, where it is known as the Potohar Plateau, being bounded in its east by the Margalla foothills of the Lower Himalayas.
Finally the black line denotes the eastern skirt of the main Sulaiman Mountain Range. It is between this mountain range and the River Indus that the ethno-cultural region of “Indus Khorasan” can technically be said to lie. However the boundaries of the ethnic and cultural influences of the Indus Valley are understandably far more shaded and nuanced, and the present extent of the Indus Valley influence can rather be considered as declining well on the other side of these mountains in the Sistan Arghandab-Helmand River Basin and correspondingly in the Zabul and Ghazni locations. The British were well aware of this fact when they placed the Durand Line.
