Travels of Samwise takes a huge amount of work to run. If you’re enjoying this labour of love, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Dont forget to check out my new book Shattered Lands, which is available in hardback as well as on Spotify as an audiobook. Its finally out in paperback in the UK and you can order it HERE.

Today marks the 79th anniversary of Partition, and of the end of British colonial rule in the subcontinent.

The end of British rule was accompanied by the largest forced migration in human history. Some 10-15 million people crossed the new borders in a matter of months the populations, with millions never making it across the border, and overnight, cities that had been mixed for centuries were transformed. Lahore lost almost all of its Hindus and Sikhs, Delhi and Amritsar much of their Muslims.

Within a year, the princely order that had ruled two-fifths of the subcontinent had also been washed away and, with the exception of Bangladesh, the South Asian countries we know today had come into existence.

The historian Yasmin Khan has written of how we imagine these events as more distant than they really are:

“Grainy photographs of the Partition era sometimes hint that it was a ‘medieval’ horror that occurred in a poor and undeveloped landscape, but this is a manipulation of the truth; urban India was in the midst of rapid change by 1946, change which had been greatly accelerated by the industrial spurt caused by war, and although it is unwise to generalise about such a vast and variegated economy – which ranged from gritty industrial centres such as Jamshedpur (home to the largest single steelworks in the British empire pioneered by the entrepreneurial Tata family) to remote and extremely poor villages entirely dependent on agricultural crops – Partition took place in the mid-twentieth century. The battle over India and Pakistan was fought in towns and cities that would be instantly recognisable today.”

Colour photography from the first half of the twentieth century is exceedingly rare, but a small archive does exist in the form of Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet in Paris. Among them are a series of spectacular images of India which have recently been fully digitzed and made available online for free. To celebrate independence day, I thought I would write about them!

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The Archives of the Planet

Albert Kahn was born in 1860 in Marmoutier, a small town in Alsace, and left for Paris as a teenager after Germany annexed the province in 1871. He started out as a clerk at the Goudchaux bank, studying for his degrees at night and speculating in South African gold and diamonds by day. By 1898, he had one of the great fortunes in France.

In 1908, Kahn sailed for Japan and China on business and he bought his chauffeur, Albert Dutertre, a camera to document the journey. The same year, the photographer-explorer Jules Gervais-Courtellemont showed Kahn how photography could be done in colour through a new process called autochrome, an a year later, in 1909, he set up the Archives de la Planète.

Kahn was aware that the world was industrialising fast, and so for the next twenty-two years, Kahn’s team fanned out across some fifty countries to record ordinary human life before vernacular traditions swept it away. His photographers brought back around 72,000 autochromes and over a hundred hours of film: still the world’s largest collection of early colour photography.

Two of those operators visited the subcontinent. The first was Stéphane Passet, an ex-soldier who came to the Archives in 1912 with no photographic training. He landed in Bombay in December 1913, India and spent two months photographing his way up the subcontinent, before being drafted into the First World War.

Roger Dumas, who followed in 1927, was a different man. A portraitist by training, he joined the Archives in 1920 after WW1, and spent his first years photographing the guests at Kahn’s Boulogne salon. In Boulogne, he met the francophile Maharaja of Kapurthala, a guest of Kahn’s, who invited Dumas out for his golden jubilee in Punjab the following year.

For all Kahn’s pacifism, the Archives belonged to their imperial moment. The project was explicitly intended to be ethnographic in nature. Autochrome plates needed long exposures even in bright sunlight, so almost nothing here is candid: every scene has been posed by a white Frenchman with a tripod, working through interpreters.

As a result some of the subjects look patient, some amused and others look visibly uncomfortable at being made to stand motionless for a stranger. We should be careful not to mistake their stillness for serenity, or their presence in the frame for consent.

With a few exceptions, like the Tagore family, people appear as representatives of their community of tribe, and their names are rarely mentioned.

We can wonder who the “young girl” of Kapurthala was, or what the samosa-wala made of the Frenchman fussing over his tripod, but we will likely never know.

And yet Kahn's archive is extraordinarily valuable. One of my favourite books on South Asian history is The Camera as Witness, where Joy Pachuau and Willem van Schendel’s reconstruct the history of Mizoram almost entirely through photography collections. In much the same way, the Kahn collections allow us to reconstruct pre-Partition India and its many lost worlds.

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Punjab

Passet visited Punjab in January 1914, capturing the province thirty-three years before it was ravaged by Partition, and he documented a world that no longer exists. Lahore was a city whose population was still roughly one-third Hindu and Sikh, communities that dominated much of its commerce.

We see the city’s gurdwaras and temples, many of which have since vanished altogether: abandoned, repurposed, or torn down in the reprisals that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Many intact sites, meanwhile, like Ranjit Singh’s samadhi still have since lost their frescoes.

One particularly interesting photo depicts two sadhus in Lahore.

Lahore had been the seat of the Sikh Empire, and a photo survives of Gurudwara Dehra Sahib which commemorates the spot where the 5th guru of Sikhism, Guru Arjan Dev, was martyred in 1606. The gurudwara thankfully survives next to the Badshahi Mosque, although it has been much renovated since.

In Amritsar, the west gate of the Golden Temple is covered in beautiful frescoes.

We so often forget that marble was rare in Sikh architecture until the 1980s. Before kar seva volunteers clad everything in white stone, it was primarily painted stuccowork that characterised the Sikh sacred landscape.

Daily life around Amritsar is depicted too. We see pilgrims, flower-sellers, and the unhurried commerce of the city.

Other than the frescoes of the Golden Temple, the most interesting image is “Group of Tibetans near the Golden Temple,” a reminder that Tibetans used to come here on pilgrimage before the old caravan routes were cut by new national borders. Amritsar sat at the terminus of a trading world that stretched over the passes towards Yarkand and Lhasa.

A decade after Passet's journey, in 1927, Dumas travelled to Kapurthala, the extraordinary princely state where the maharaja had built himself a palace modelled on Versailles.

The jubilee celebrations are depicted in gorgeous technicolor, just two decades before the princely order was swept away and the city fell off the map.

There are bagpipes and Jagatjit palace is lit up in fairy lights. Many civilians are also depicted in their best outfits.

The highlight here, though, are the street scenes, with one spectacular haveli after another. The loss of vernacular architecture and the inability of India’s government to preserve even a single intact historic street in Punjab is one of the great tragedies of recent decades.

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Delhi

In Delhi, proclaimed the new imperial capital barely two years earlier, we see a now-lost Muslim world.

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Travels of Samwise takes a huge amount of work to run. If you’re enjoying this labor of love, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Dont forget to check out my new book Shattered Lands, which is available HERE.

In the late spring of 2024, I found myself scrambling up a narrow goat track on the scrubby hills above the ancient town of Khuldabad, in the Indian Deccan. Across the valley below lay one of the most astonishing spectacles of the medieval world.

The monolithic Kailashanatha temple at Ellora is a rock-cut wonder more ambitious even than Petra, and easily the largest such structure on Earth in the 8th century.

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It receives millions of visitors each year, yet almost none of them venture up into the surrounding hills, where another wonder lies hidden in plain sight. From the caves I drove for about five minutes and then, for the next half hour, scrambled up a goats path through thorn and dust.

Then, finally, I came face to face with what I had come looking for: an austere Ottoman mausoleum of weathered stone and peeling grey stucco, some fifteen metres tall.

Decades of sun and monsoon had gnawed at its surfaces, its walls had been daubed with graffiti and its once-delicate jaalis smashed by vandals. There were no roads leading to it. And yet, less than a century ago, this lonely structure was built as the burial place of the last Caliph of Islam.

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I had first been drawn to that hillside by an article by the Middle East Eye journalist Imran Mulla, who had written an article called ‘Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India’. The article traced the forgotten attempt of the deposed Caliph of Constantinople to resurrect the Islamic Caliphate in the Indian Deccan. Soon after, Mulla expanded the investigation into a remarkable book called ‘The Indian Caliphate’, which I reviewed for Cornucopia magazine last year.

Written in lucid, propulsive prose, Mullah reconstructs the entwined destinies of the Caliphs of Constantinople and Nizams of Hyderabad, and in the process, upends conventional understandings of the 20th-century Muslim world. So remarkable is the tale he tells that it seems astonishing no one has told it before, and for this week's Substack I thought I would give you an extended version of my Cornucopia review because the story is so utterly fascinating.

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The Last Caliph

Say the word ‘Caliphate’ today in the US or Europe and it evokes the beheadings and hostage videos of ISIS, who tried to usurp the term. Yet for thirteen centuries the Caliphate was one of the most significant institutions on Earth, claiming leadership of Sunni Islam just like the Pope did with Catholicism. Moreover the last Ottoman Caliphs would all have been outrageous heretics in the eyes of ISIS.

At the centre of Mulla's book is the last Caliph himself, Abdulmecid II. Described as a “talented painter, francophile, amateur literary critic and classical music enthusiast,” Abdulmecid was a moustachioed aesthete with a taste for unexpected recitations of Victor Hugo. Raised in Istanbul under house arrest after the Young Ottomans toppled his father, he had spent decades in gilded isolation at Dolmabahçe Palace, where he studied calligraphy, painted orientalist nudes, and hosted poets and artists.

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He saw himself as an ‘Ottoman European Muslim’, and was briefly a patron of the Armenian Women’s Union. One poet who visited in November 1917 recalled evenings where, amidst the prince’s paintings, a private orchestra played to an audience of artists and servants: ‘We spent four days and nights in this fashion.’

Yet the old world persisted alongside the new. Well into Abdulmecid’s forties, his harem was still guarded by eunuchs. The French novelist Pierre Loti recalls being granted access to the harem by eunuchs in “high-necked frock coats,” where he was introduced to one of Abdulmecid’s French-speaking wives, Princess Şesuvar, who was playing Bach on the cello.

The First World War destroyed this world. Abdulmecid was horrified by the conflict, blamed the Young Turks for entering it, and told journalists he was ashamed of the massacres he heard had been perpetrated against the Empire’s Armenians. When he was finally proclaimed Caliph on 24 November 1922, by which point Atatürk’s new Assembly in Ankara had already abolished the Sultanate, he inherited a hollowed office in an occupied city.

Nonethless, on the day of his investiture he was led through Topkapı to the Chamber of the Sacred Mantle, where he paid his respects to the standard of the Prophet before taking his oath. 101 guns were fired, and then the new Caliph rode to the Fatih Mosque trailed by Ottoman princes in carriages, aides-de-camp on motorbikes, cadets and lancers, before paying homage at the tomb of Mehmed the Conqueror. He founded a ‘Caliphate Orchestra’ under Osman Zeki Bey, later composer of Turkey’s national anthem. Yet it was clear that the old world was coming to an end.

On 3 March 1924, Mustafa Kemal abolished the Caliphate altogether, ending an institution thirteen centuries old. Police and soldiers entered Dolmabahçe Palace that night, and by five in the morning the imperial family had been bundled onto the Orient Express and sent into exile.

The last caliph moved to the French Riviera and began to plot the revival of the Caliphate. French writer Claude Farrère proposed giving the Caliph a French colonial possession from which to launch a new Caliphate.

Yet the most audacious plan emerged in 1931, when Mahatma Gandhi’s erstwhile ally Shaukat Ali brokered a marriage between the Caliph’s children and those of Nizam Osman Ali Khan of Hyderabad.

The aim was to unite the descendants of the Ottomans and Mughals and establish a revived Caliphate in India, which at the time held the largest Muslim population on earth, greater than the entire Arab world combined.

The World That Was Hyderabad

Less than eight decades on, the world of Hyderabad state has been so thoroughly erased from popular imagination that its difficult to imagine the Indian state of Telangana being considered the epicentre of the Islamic world.

Yet the Ottoman Caliph was clear that a marriage with the Hyderabadi royal family brought far more prestige than a marriage with any other Muslim family in the world, from the Shahs of Iran to Sheikhs of the Gulf and the Sultans of Malaya.

Established by the old Mughal subehdars of the Deccan, Hyderabad State was essentially a fragment of the Mughal Empire that had survived into the twentieth century, and its opulence was unparalleled. The eponymous capital was praised by poets as the ‘bride among cities’, with palaces built on hilltops, on lakes and even overlooking the city’s famed racecourse.

The Nizams had long been Britain’s closest allies in the subcontinent, and the city’s architecture fused Mughal and British aesthetics in unlikely ways. Ayman Garh and Hill Fort Palace were built as mock-Gothic castles while Falaknuma Palace combined a Palladian façade with a Scots baronial interior, and a ceiling brimming with Islamicate muqarnas.

Most extraordinary of all, however, was the palace of minister Salar Jung, the greatest art collector in India, whose teak baradaris were embellished with thousands of rare Chinese porcelains, renaissance Italian sculptures and Mughlai miniature paintings that made contemporary collections in Europe look provincial by comparison.

Here more than any other state, the British had found the orientalist fever dream they yearned for, where shirwani-clad noblemen ‘kept as pets tigers, ostriches and panthers’, and could occasionally be spotted hunting rare beasts across boulder-strewn landscapes. ‘The city of Hyderabad seems to have been dropped to earth from an Oriental Dream,’ wrote the author Elizabeth Cooper in her book The Harim and the Purdah.

‘It is the most Eastern city in this most Eastern land and you are filled with a sense that it is not all real, but especially staged and set up for your amusement, and when you leave it will all disappear.’

Ruling over it all was Nizam Osman Ali Khan: short, unassuming, similarly moustachioed, with ‘eyes that could pierce you… like steel’. He penned thousands of ‘perfumed ghazals’, amassed one of the subcontinent’s greatest collections of medieval literature, and transformed his state into a modern nation, with its own currency, bank and airline.

Osmania University was the Raj’s first to teach in an Indian vernacular. After the death of J. D. Rockefeller, the Nizam was crowned the richest man in the world. With a third of people living under Indian princely rule and an income and expenditure rivalling ‘those of Belgium and exceed[ing] … those of twenty members of the United Nations’, Hyderabad, the Nizam argued, was not just a princely state but a country in its own right.

Thus, in 1931, the Nizam married his sons to two of the Ottoman princesses.

A week later he purportedly secured a deed from the last Caliph, nominating their joint grandchildren as the next Caliphs of Islam. This deed is one of the centrepieces of Mulla's book, supposedly signed by the Caliph himself in red ink made from night-blooming jasmine. In it, Abdulmecid writes,

“I trust that the firstborn son from this new kinship after you [the Nizam] be suitable to the position of the Caliphate and the rulership of Hyderabad Deccan.”

The deed has provoked intense debate, with many dismissing it as a forgery, while others maintaining it is genuine. As Mullah points out, the dispute raises as many questions as it answers.

Whatever its authenticity, the Nizam acted on the vision. To signal the Caliphate’s revival in the Deccan, he ordered a grand Ottoman tomb for Abdulmecid at Khuldabad, the sacred town of Sufi saints, with instructions that the site be chosen ‘with special care that the chosen spot should be lower than all the tombs of the buried saints’.

He began construction of a grand Ottoman tomb for Abdulmecid II in the sacred Hyderabadi town of Khuldabad, a short distance from the Ellora Caves. Fifteen acres were set aside for a domed mausoleum, mosque, garden and khanqah for pilgrims. A paved road was laid from the shrine of Amir Hasan Sanjari and great door of carved sheesham was fitted.

In time, Hyderabad came to be regarded as ‘the most prominent Muslim city outside of the Holy Land’, its name uttered in the same breath as Mecca and Jerusalem.

Abdulmecid died in Paris in August 1944, as war swept across Europe. London, meanwhile, fretted over ‘the possible effect’ a Hyderabad burial might have on ‘the question of the succession to the Khalifate’ before deciding it saw ‘no objection’. Yet Abdulmecid would never actually be laid to rest there, and Hyderabad’s central place in the Islamic world would soon be forgotten thanks to the events that were to follow.

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Travels of Samwise takes a huge amount of work to run. If you’re enjoying this labour of love, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Dont forget to check out my new book Shattered Lands, which is available in hardback as well as on Spotify as an audiobook. Its finally out in paperback in the UK next week and you can order it HERE.

In the heart of old Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills, stands one of the most fascinatingly hybrid places in India.

Ram Rai Darbar Sahib was founded by the son of the seventh Sikh Guru. It is built like a Mughal Emperor’s tomb, with a domed mausoleum on a raised platform, flanked by four minarets.

On closer inspection, however, the shrine is covered with Hindu imagery. Above one doorway, Vishnu reclines on the coils of the world-serpent while Lakshmi presses his feet. Above another, a goddess charges into battle on her tiger while Shiva and Parvati ride past on their bull.

On the southern gate, meanwhile, eight faded panels hold the oldest wall paintings of the Sikh gurus anywhere in India, dressed in Mughal attire.

This is the oldest building in Dehradun and it remains the centre of worship for the Ramraiyya sect, deemed a heretic sect by mainstream Sikhs for centuries. In fact, it is the dera, or camp, that gave the city its name, endowed by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb himself.

Almost nothing about the shrine, which features Hindu Gods, Sikh Gurus and a donation plaque from the puritanical Aurangzeb, fits with modern religious assumptions.

This is its story.

***

That the Darbar survives at all is a minor miracle. Of all South Asia’s religions, Sikhism has perhaps the worst-preserved art history, its heritage destroyed in three great waves.

The first wave came in the 1920s, when a reform movement swept Punjab, seeking to wrest control of the gurdwaras from their hereditary custodians, and to purge the faith of its ‘un-Sikh’ elements.

The great tower of Baba Atal in Amritsar, for instance, once stood at the centre of the city's memorial necropolis, ringed by over eighty frescoed memorial shrines of famous Sikhs and Hindus. In the 1920s, the reformers razed most of them, so that only the tower and a few small shrines survive, most notably the samadh of the founder of the Kapurthala royal house.

The second wave came after Partition. When British India was torn in two in 1947, massacres drove the Sikhs of West Punjab eastwards into India, and hundreds of historic gurdwaras including the faith's birthplace of Nankana Sahib were stranded in Pakistan and abandoned.

Sikh shrines east of the Radcliffe line subsequently saw far larger congregations and many gurudwaras organized reconstruction and enlargement drives in the 1950s and 1960s to accommodate them. Those in charge paid little attention to restoration norms, and simply tore down many of these centuries-old shrines to make more accommodating spaces for worship. Almost all of these gurdwaras were then rebuilt in the same new style, featuring gleaming modern marble and an onion dome.

Finally, in the 1980s, political tensions grew in Punjab with the rise of the Khalistan movement for an independent Sikh homeland. Amritsar saw a large-scale demolition drive in the thickly built areas around the Golden Temple, which included the demolition of countless havelis and shrines, many of which were beautifully painted and adorned with rare architectural features.

Then, in 1984, Operation Blue Star saw the Indian army storm Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple of Amritsar, to flush out militants. The Akal Takht and the Sikh Reference Library were two of many sacred sites reduced to rubble in the process.

The government of India subsequently reconstructed the shrine at its own cost, yet this involved the complete reconstruction of many of the damaged buildings. The Sikh community was not satisfied with this reconstruction, however, and donations poured in from the traumatised Sikh community to rebuild the complex again. The Takht was thus razed all over again, and this time the Sikh volunteers rebuilt the shrine brick by brick. In the process, Sikh committees and kar sewa groups would discover that there was much money to be made in reconstruction.

One by one over the subsequent decades, almost all of the historic gurdwaras in East Punjab have disappeared and been replaced by standardised marbled palaces. It is a huge loss because for centuries no two Sikh gurdwaras have looked like each other.

The gurdwaras in Patiala and the wider Malwa region of Punjab, for instance, had over centuries developed a unique dome style, reminiscent of but subtly different from those of nearby Rajasthan.

There was a gurdwara with a shikara in Sangrur (Nankiana Sahib), and another near Anandpur Sahib which looked like a cross between a Sufi shrine and a fortress.

Historic frescoes inside the main hall of the Baba Atal tower in Amritsar were replaced with bathroom tiles in 1992, while the ones outside were covered with marble slabs. At Nanded, in central India, two monuments built by the Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh were bulldozed in 2007–08, over the pleas of the very architects hired to save them.

Most notorious of all was the fate of the Darshani Deori at Tarn Taran, built by Kunwar Naunihal Singh, the grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. In 2018, local worshippers physically blocked its demolition. Months later, in the cover of darkness, it was largely demolished before the locals noticed it and intervened, but much damage had been done.

Even the Golden Temple is now seeing major renovations. From 2021, the main hall of the shrine has seen almost all its ceilings removed, plastered with cement, and re-painted. One cannot say how many historically valuable inscriptions noting the local donors and benefactors have lost in time, along with important patterns and motifs.

Gurmeet Rai, the conservation architect who has restored several of Punjab's Sikh monuments, estimates that 90% of the region's Sikh heritage has been destroyed in the name of renovation since the 80s.

Tragically, by the 2010s, Pakistan preserved more historic Sikh architecture than India itself.

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Travels of Samwise takes a huge amount of work to run. If you’re enjoying this labour of love, please do consider becoming a paid subscriber. Dont forget to check out my new book Shattered Lands, which is available in hardback as well as on Spotify as an audiobook. Its finally out in paperback in the UK next week and you can order it HERE.

Perhaps the strangest thing about visiting London today is that it is entirely possible to do the full tourist circuit around Westminster without any sense that this square half-mile once governed a fifth of humanity.

Evidence of Empire and the Raj, however, is hidden in plain sight, however, if you know where to look.

Take the Houses of Parliament, for example. Inside these hallowed rooms, amongst reams of paintings, stands an unlikely portrait of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir.

In 1927, ninety nine years ago today, eight monumental paintings were commissioned for the Houses of Parlia…

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Much like the Khyber Pass in the west, the passes of the Patkai hills, where India borders Burma, have long channelled migrants into the Indian subcontinent.

The Khasi language spoken in the Indian state of Meghalaya, for example, is a relative of Vietnamese and Khmer, while most of the languages of Arunachal, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram are related to Burmese, Tibetan and Mandarin.

The Ahom dynasty who give their name to Assam, meanwhile, originally spoke a Kra-Dai language related to Thai. This language family originated in southern China, in the hills of what are now Guangxi and was eventually pushed south by the expansionist Tang dynasty.

By 1238, one group of migrant Tai Chiefs had founded the kingdom of Sukhotai, the first Thai-speaking kingdom in what would later become Thailand.

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Ahom speakers migrated into the Brahmaputra valley at almost exactly the same time, led - according to legend - by a pioneer called Sukapha.

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Western Uttar Pradesh is sadly neglected, but the region contains some of the great wonders of India.

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A few years ago, and I drove out of Delhi on a whim to Asgharabad and Pindrawal, two crumbling old estates on the edge of Aligarh. They’re just 3 hours from Delhi and utterly gorgeous, but you've probably never heard of then. We certainly hadn't until Aquib reached out on Instagram and told us of a mini Awadh in the plains of the Doab. We thought it was worth a visit so off we drove out of Delhi's December smog into the fields of Aligarh.

Aquib met us at Mahmud Manzil in Aligarh Town itself, one of numerous townhouses built when Muslim gentry began moving to the town after the building of Aligarh Muslim University. From there it was another half hour drive until we came across the extraordinary gates of Asgharabad.

The Sayyid Mirs who ruled here were the Mirs of Kotaha, and once held the cool, forested ridges of Morni, just outside modern Chandigarh. But in 1857 the family threw in its lot with the rebels, and when the uprising was crushed the British stripped them of Morni and pushed them down into the plains. The Mir fell back on one of his lesser holdings, a place called Pindrawal, and there he went on a building spree.

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Architecture could often be a form of resistance in the age of Empires, and in our opinion that's precisely what's going on here. The architecture directly recalls Awadh in a very provocative way. After all, Awadh's annexation had been one of the causes behind the Uprising of 1857.

With ornate stucco fireplaces and painted ceilings, this place oozes character. It's a wonderful site and so close to Aligarh. The potential for a heritage hotel is unreal. But time has not been kind to the estate. One roof caved in last monsoon and the delicate painted ceilings are peeling. It is likely that the estate will not survive for long. The family who owns it is doing the best that they can, but without help from public or private institutions, this wonderful slice of history could soon dissappear forever.

From Asgharabad we headed to Pindrawal and along the road we spotted a gorgeous yellow gate. Inside was a small 18th century mosque - probably late Mughal - and a mazar covered with fresh marigold. Who it belongs to no one knows.

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Then finally we reached Pindrawal, another former zamindari that's now crumbling into obscurity. It's a truly amazing place, but even less remains here than in Asgharabad.

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In the early 1700s, Bengal was one of the richest places in the world. Generating 5% of global GDP, its capital Murshidabad had more wealth than the British aristocracy combined.

Indeed, so rich was this region that foreign trading companies all competed with each other for the favours of the Bengali elite. Indeed for two centuries, a forty-mile stretch of this river hosted the trading posts of five European empires.

Chandannagar, for example, became a small French colony. It became home to numerous revolutionaries and, intriguingly, to Virginia Woolf’s (and my own) Bengali ancestors. A Dutch colony, meanwhile, was established at Chinsurah, and a Portuguese one at Bandel.

Calcutta would of course become the great British city in the region, described by Lord Clive as “one of the most wicked places in the Universe... Rapacious and Luxurious beyond conception.”

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Lahore Fort is one of the greatest forts anywhere in the world. Dating from at least the 11^th century, the fort was occupied by Mahmud of Ghazni, destroyed by the Mongols, rebuilt under the Delhi Sultans, and later became the seat of both the Mughal Empire and the Sikh Khalsa.

Each ruler left their mark on the fort, and the result is an astonishingly layered monument. In Jahangir’s quadrangle, for example, you’ll find frescoes of the pope painted by Goan artists who were attempting to convert the Emperor to Catholicism. Elsewhere, you have some of the best preserved Ranjit Singh-era murals in existence, often depicting Krishna.

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Without a doubt, however, the greatest masterpiece in the fort is the Great Picture Wall.

Stretching over half a kilometre, it is covered with 116 tilework images depicting everything form elephant polo to pari angels and azdaha dragons.

Back in 2018, I spent a summer interning with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Pakistan who were restoring the wall to its former glory, and this month, almost a decade later, it is finally complete!

Its one of the greatest conservation success stories anywhere in South Asia, and so I thought that this week I should write about its extraordinary history, as well as the absolutely mammoth effort that its taken to restore it to its former glory!

Tile Traditions of the Subcontinent

South Asia once had one of the great tile traditions in the world, but today it has almost entirely been lost. Many people who visit the Lahore picture wall are reminded of the buildings of Isfahan and Samarkhand, with their shimmering blue tiles, yet in the words of Arthur Millner, who recently conducted the first serious survey of South Asian tiled architecture:

“Ceramic tiles are perhaps one of the richest, and certainly the most underappreciated, of Indian art forms; probably nowhere else has such a bewildering array of colours, designs and technique been produced. The quality of workmanship, at its best, more than rivals the finest in Central Asia and Anatolia.”

Unfortunately, centuries of monsoon rains have washed away South Asian’s tilework, meaning that they are much less well preserved than their Central Asian counterparts. Yet, if you know where to look, you can still catch a glimpse of the tradition that would culminate in the picture wall.

The earliest tiled buildings in the subcontinent appear in the 13^th century in the form of the Lal Mahra tombs near Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan. Millner suggests that

“the impetus for the introduction of glaze must have come from migrant craftsmen fleeing the turmoil created by the Mongol invasions in Khorasan in the Northwest.”

Very quickly, however, the craft was blended together with indigenous glaze and terracotta traditions, and would subsequently be passed around the region by a succession of dynasties like a baton in a relay race.

The Ghurids would spread blue-tiled architecture into the Indus and Gangetic plains with Multan’s Bahauddin Zakaria tomb built in 1262, Hansi gate built in 1302, and the Rapri Idgah built near Agra in 1312.

Later, under the Tuqluqs, tilework got more sophisticated, and was commissioned as far west as Multan’s Rukn-i-Alam tomb, and as far south as the Chand Minar in Maharashtra’s Daulatabad.

Indeed the Tuqluq era Begumpur Masjid in Delhi was actually the inspiration for Samarkand’s largest tiled mosque, the Bibi Khanum, not the other way round as we might imagine. Unfortunately, only a few of Begumpur Mosque’s tiles remain, and the ASI has shown little interest in restoring it to its former glory. The general public is thus left to imagine that tilework is more of a feature of Central Asian than South Asia.

The Deccan would become a particularly important experimenting ground in tilework. Extraordinary tiles have been restored in the Golconda Tomb domes, inside the Badshahi Ashur Khana and on the great Madrassa of Bidar.

By the time the Mughals arrived, tiled architecture was already a thoroughly Indian art form, commissioned by multifaith patrons across wildly different regions. The Portuguese in Goa, for example, hired Deccani craftsmen to produce tiles for their churches and palaces, while in Gwalior, the Hindu Tomar Dynasty covered their ancient fortress with the greatest tiled ducks in art history.

Building the Picture Wall

The Lahore picture wall itself was probably commissioned in the 1620s by the Great Mughal Emperor Jahangir.

The reign of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir is often overlooked between the more militaristic rules of Akbar and Shah Jahan. Yet it was, in many ways, the Golden age of Indian science and observation, and its probably my favourite period of Mughal history.

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Back in February, whilst touring my book Shattered Lands in Pakistan, I spent a month tracking down Pakistan’s remaining Hindu heritage.

The land that now constitutes Pakistan was one of the birthplaces of Hinduism. The Rigveda was first composed here, Classical Sanskrit was first codified by the grammarian Panini on the outskirts of modern Islamabad, and several of the most important Hindu temples in the subcontinent - from Kashmir’s Sharda Peeth to Baluchistan’s Hinglaj Mata - now fall within the country’s borders.

The most spectacular temples I came across on my trip were the temples of the Salt Range, built by the Turk and Hindu Shahis, the last two Hindu dynasties to rule over the region. Yet with the exception of Katas Raj, they are all closed for worship today. Indeed tragically few Hindu sites are actually worshipped in Pakistani Punjab today, despite the quiet revival of Sikh and Jain heritage across the province.

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I was thus surprised when I began to track down temples in Karachi, because with few exceptions, they were all very much active. Walking through the gate of the Swaminarayan temple, for example, a large poster announced the timings for a Ganesh Rath procession through the city. A second poster printed in Urdu advertised a Hindu pilgrimage to the Temples of Katas Raj, sponsored by the Government of Pakistan.

Behind the gate, a woman in a red shawl sat on a chequerboard floor praying to Krishna. Then the priest appeared, introducing himself as Pandit Vijay, and began to explain its history.

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We still don’t know the religion of the Indus Valley civilisation – no temples have ever been discovered - yet by the early centuries AD, religious devotion in Sindh was incredibly varied. Buddhist stupas testify to the prevalence of Buddhism, while the extraordinary bronze Brahma that was unearthed in a field nearby testifies to the prevalence of Hindu worship here. Indeed this Gupta era image of Brahma remains the earliest known metal image of Brahma anywhere.

Greek and Persian gods also thrived here, and hoards of Sassanian coins have suggested that the presence of Zoroastrianism in Sindh may be much older than we typically imagine.

Whatever the case, everything changed in 712 AD when the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the region and brought political Islam to the subcontinent for the first time. The caliphate’s new subjects were subsequently granted the status of dhimmis, and permitted to worship in their temples so long as they paid the extortionate jizya tax on non-Muslims. A grand sun temple in Multan, for example, was kept as both a source of revenue as well as to keep the idol hostage - it could be threatened to deter attack.

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Buddhism soon disappeared from Sindh as Buddhists began to adopt Islam, yet Hinduism survived and blended into Islamic tradition. The Sindhi river God Jhulelal for example, was quickly adopted as a Sufi saint by Sindh Muslims. Boatmen who propitiated Jhulelal also made offerings at the tomb of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan, whose epithet Lal testifies how closely integrated their worship became. At Odero Lal, meanwhile, stands a Mughal shrine dated to 1684 divided by a single wall. Muslims pray to Sheikh Tahir on one side while Hindus perform aarti to Jhulelal on the other, and both revere the Indus that runs nearby.

Karachi emerged in this syncretic world when, in the late 18^th century, the Talpur Mirs fortified the fishing settlement of Kolachi into a major port, and as the town transformed into one of the great ports in Asia, a host of new communities began to arrive.

One of the earliest was the Parsi community, and the H. J. Behrana Parsi Dar-e-Meher, a Zoroastrian fire temple consecrated in 1849, still stands in the heart of Saddar. It is one of the oldest buildings in the city, and was built to mirror the architecture of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis. The Parsi community subsequently built much of modern Karachi, and also gave the city its first elected mayor, Jamshed Nusserwanjee.

Christians also began to settle in the city. The 1867 St Andrew’s Kirk, first example, was built for the Scottish Presbyterian community, complete with gothic-timbered interiors and a memorial to the Highland Light Infantry.

Goan Catholics, meanwhile, found employment in the city as teachers, clerks, lawyers, judges and railway men. They subsequently built churches and schools, and would eventually give the city a Goan mayor.

St Patrick’s Cathedral, a soaring pile completed in 1881, remains the heart of Catholic Karachi, and Lal Krishna Advani, the Indian politician and architect of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, was one of the many students who studied in the Cathedral school next door.

By 1893, the city even had its own Synagogue. One member of the community, Abraham Reuben, became a councillor on the Karachi city corporation in 1936.

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Cunningham was one of the most extraordinary men of his generation and, sixteen years earlier, he had founded the Archaeological Survey of India. He had been brought to the small town of Besnagar, just outside Vidisha, to look at an inscribed stone pillar that local people still worshipped as a fertility shrine called Khamba Baba. Yet in doing so, he brought to light one of the greatest discoveries of all time.

Cunningham didn’t realise what he was looking at, but within a few decades, archaeologists digging around its base would uncover possibly the earliest Hindu temple that has ever been discovered. The inscription on the pillar, meanwhile, contained the earliest dated reference to the god Krishna anywhere.

Most surprising of all, the Krishna devotee who had inscribed the pillar was a Greek man called Heliodorus, a descendent of the soldiers of Alexander the Great.

Born in Taxila, near modern Islamabad, Heliodorus had been sent as an ambassador to the great Shunga capital at Vidisha by the Greek king Antialkidas of Punjab in 115BC. He had subsequently erected a “Garuda-column” in honour of “Vāsudeva, the god of gods” and had it inscribed in the Prakrit language.

I first visited the Heliodorus pillar aged 19, a few months after visiting Taxila, and ever since, the Indo-Greek world has been one of my great obsessions. I spent the rest of that year travelling through India, Pakistan, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan in search of it, and arrived at Oxford a year later to read Sanskrit and Persian rather than the particle physics I had originally intended (I actually did my high school internship at the large hadron collider at CERN).

‘Yavanas’ - the Sanskrit word for Greeks (literally Ionians) - showed up a lot in my subsequent Sanskrit studies, and I grew more and more frustrated that Sanskrit wasn’t considered part of Classics in the way that Latin and Greek were. The Hellenistic far east was one of those subjects that was too Indian for the classicists and too Greek for the Indologists, despite how utterly crazy the whole story was.

In the twenty-first century, we often look back on Classical Greece as a hermeneutically sealed civilisation that gradually evolved into Christian Europe and “Western Civilisation”. Yet Alexander’s conquests created a Hellenistic world stretching as far east as the Indus. Alongside Stoicism, Epicurean philosophy, Euclid and Archimedes, the Hellenistic world also produced the earliest depictions of Krishna and Balarama, and possibly Shiva and Lakshmi as well. Modern Hinduism and Buddhism preserves aspects of Greek religion that died out millennia ago in Europe.

We too often forget that India, Pakistan and Afghanistan were all more central to the Hellenistic world than Britain, Germany, or indeed the United States.

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In the Wake of Alexander

In 330 BC, having burned the Persian capital of Persepolis to the ground, the twenty-six year old Alexander of Macedon decided to march his army even further eastward, pursuing remnants of the Persian court into what is now Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Here he founded numerous cities including them Alexandria-in-Arachosia (Kandahar) and Alexandria-on-the-Caucasus (Bagram). Then, in the spring of 327 BC, he crossed the Hindu Kush and descended into the Swat valley.

It was in the great city of Taxila that Alexander’s men first encountered the naked ‘gymnosophist’ philosophers - Jain or Hindu shramana ascetics. Alexander summoned them to his court, but they refused and when Alexander threatened to kill them, one of the philosophers replied that death would merely free them from a worn-out body.

From Taxila, Alexander continued east, facing one last battle against the great king Porus. At the Beas river, however, his exhausted soldiers mutinied and refused to march on towards the Ganga.

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High in the eastern Taurus mountains of what is now south-eastern Turkey, near the peak of Mount Nemrut overlooking Mesopotamia, stand the severed heads of ten collosal gods.

It is genuinely one of the most extraordinary places I have ever been, particularly in April when the peak is ridged with snow.

Built over two millenia ago, Nemrut Dağı was once the central religious sanctuary of the hellenistic Commagene kingdom that flourished in the upper Euphrates between 163 BC and 72 AD. At a first glance, the statues appear classically Greek with Zeus, Apollo and Hercules all making an appearance.

But this is not the classical greece we are used to and Zeus, for example, is identified with Ahura Mazda, the Supreme God of Zoroastrianism.

Overshadowed by the Roman and Parthian empires, the Commagene kimgdom has long been treated as a footnote in the history books. Yet there are few places where the strange world created by Alexander the Great's conquests is so visibly on show. Moreover it was here that the first science fiction novel about a war with aliens was written in 200AD. Welcome to the wierd and crazy world of Nemrut Dağı.

The Conquests of Alexander

In 332BC, a young Macedonian called Alexander trekked through the Sahara desert in search of the oracle of Siwa.

He was just twenty-four years old, but he had already achieved more than most people could dream of. Setting out to avenge his father's death, he had now twice defeated the Persian army, first at the Granicus, then at Issus. Wrestling the great Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon from the Persians, Alexander had then marched into Egypt, been crowned Pharoah, and founded a new city called Alexandria.

Just when everyone expected him to march east into Persia, however, he had suddenly ordered his men to instead march west into the Sahara desert and seek out the great Oracle.

In the ancient imagination, Siwa stood second only to Delphi in the power of its prophecies. Alexander's companions would later claim that he had been guided through the dunes by talking snakes; that water had run out and his men had begged him to turn back, and he had emptied the last of the water-skins into the sand so that there could be no retreat. After days of marching, however, they finally reached the oasis.

Upon his arrival, Alexander was admitted into the inner sanctuary of the temple. What he and the priest of Amun discussed has never been recorded. But Alexander emerged from the consultation convinced that he was the son of a god and that the world was his to take.

From Siwa, Alexander marched east. At Gaugamela, in modern Iraqi Kurdistan, he defeated the Persian King Darius III in the field of battle for the third and final time. Within days, Alexander's troops had occupied Babylon and Susa, and burnt Persepolis to the ground.

It was at this point that he might have turned back. But instead, Alexander set off even further east, pursuing remnants of the Persian court into what is now Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

At a certain point, if the chronicles are to be believed, he no longer needed a reason to keep marching east. He just sought the edge of the world. It was only when he reached the river Beas in what is now Punjab, that his army finally refused to go further.

The descendants of Alexander’s army went on to found a number of kingdoms across modern day Pakistan and Afghanistan. Greek sculptors began crafting images of Indian gods and Greek words entered Sanskrit poetry. A fascinating hybrid world emerged, which would last hundreds of years.

I first grew obsessed with this world a decade ago on my first trip to Lahore Museum when I unexpectedly came across statues of Athena and Hercules, alongside images of Buddha wearing a toga.

A week later, in Taxila on the outskirts of Islamabad, I came face to face with the easternmost Greek temple ever discovered.

A few months later, I was visiting Sanchi in central India when an auto-rickshaw driver offered to show me some old temples. He took me on a tour of nearby Vidisha and, among other things, to the Heliodorus Pillar - set up in the second century BC by the Greek ambassador of an Indo-Greek king, a devotee of Vāsudeva (Krishna).

At the end of that year, I began studying Sanskrit and Persian at Oxford. Throughout the course, however, I grew more and more frustrated that Sanskrit wasn’t considered part of classics, and that we were relegated to the Oriental Studies faculty. Half of our texts seemed to mentioned Yavanas (Ionian/Greeks/Westerners) and yet the Classics department seemed completely cut off from ours.

It’s a reminder that “the West” is not a hermetically sealed concept. Alexander’s conquests would create a Hellenistic world centred on the Mediterranean, gifting the modern world not just Stoicism and Epicurean philosophy. Even more interesting for me, however, is how the Greek world transformed early Buddhist, Hindu and Zoroastrian philosophy - and was transformed by them in turn.

In today’s Substack, therefore, I want to take us into the crazy world of the Commagene kingdom, the Mesopotamian mountain where the Zoroastrian gods of the erstwhile Persian Empire began to be identified with Zeus for the very first time.

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Eight years ago, in 2018, I spent a summer studying Farsi at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, a short drive from one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam.

It was my second visit to Iran, having been on a summer exchange program in Isfahan University two years earlier, but I quickly found that Mashhad was a very different place indeed. Absolutely everything in the city seemed to centre on the holy shrine of Imam Reza, which remains among the most visited holy places on earth, and the third largest Muslim place of worship in the world after Mecca and Medina.

From dawn till dusk, elderly pilgrims weep at the latticed windows of the mausoleum, and young men run their hands along the silver railings of the shrine. Others like me, meanwhile, beeline straight to the Goharshad Mosque, built in 1418 on the orders of the Timurid queen.

The most unexpected part of the complex for me, though, was the museum which was filled to the brim with objects from India. One of the shrine's most prized Qurans, for example, was endowed by Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Hyderabad in 1562, while a second was handwritten by Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty. A sign at the museum even traces the family of Ayatollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Iran, to the Kingdom of Awadh in Northern India.

Yet the most remarkable link to India of all is a brutalist concrete monument on a heavily polluted traffic intersection just outside the shrine complex. This is the mortal tomb of the man who shattered both the Mughal and Safavid Empires, ransacked Imperial Delhi, and stole the Kohinoor diamond: Nader Shah.

A Mughal-esque Tomb in Iran

It was in pursuit of Nader Shah’s legacy that, two days later, I set off two hours north of Mashhad to Kelat-e-Naderi.

The road from Mashhad crossed flat agricultural land and then, without warning, the earth folded upward into a series of sheer cliffs and narrow defiles. The town itself sat at the foot of the Koppeh Dagh mountains inside a natural fortress, ringed on all sides by vertical rock, and accessible by only two narrow passes.

Kalat-e-Naderi feels completely different from the rest of Iran. It was besieged by Alexander the Great, finds mention in the Shahnameh Persian Book of Kings and was the only fortress to ever resist Timur. Yet despite its central role in Iranian history, the town feels more South Asian than Persian.

Bollywood music blares out of small kabab shops and the local biscuits, made from crushed nuts, fennel and aniseed taste of mukhwas. Locals, dressed in Shalwar Kameez even gossip of ‘Hindustani treasure’ hidden in the surrounding mountains.

In the centre of the town, stands an extraordinary sandstone structure covered in floral stucco reliefs, nestled in a fragrant Char Bagh of saffron crocus and red roses. The Mughal Empire never reached Iran, but the building was unmistakably the work of Mughal craftsmen. It was not built for a Mughal, however, but for the man who conquered them.

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Although forgotten today, this whole region very nearly annexed to British India and many of the nearby Arab sheikhdoms like Dubai and Kuwait were recognised as Indian princely states.

Go to the Iranian oil town of Abadan today and you’ll find yourself face to face with a British Indian-style mosque, built by Punjabi, Bengali and Burmese subjects of the Raj. It is a story which explains why we are where we are today, and it’s far more centred on India that you might expect.

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The Sheikh of Arabistan

In the late 19^th century, Iran - or Persia as it was still known - was not yet a centralized nation-state. Although the Qajar Shahs in Tehran held nominal authority over the country, the imperial centre was weak, and Tehran outsourced much of its day-to-day governance to a patchwork of provincial governors. Just as in the British Raj, many local princes operated with near-total autonomy as long as they paid lip service and the occasional tribute to the Shah in Tehran.

One such provincial prince was Sheikh Khaz’al ibn Jabir, who ruled a sheikhdom called Arabistan from his capital of Mohammerah (now Khorramshahr). In was in Khaz’al’s territory that, in 1908, oil was first discovered at Masjed Soleyman, and a year later, the Indian Empire’s Gulf Resident Percy Cox was dispatched to negotiate an agreement with the Sheikh. The Sheikh agreed to lease Abadan Island for what would become the largest oil refinery in the world.

By this point, nearly a third of the Arabian Peninsula including most of the Persian Gulf states had been absorbed into the British Raj. From Aden to Kuwait, a crescent of Arabian protectorates used the Indian rupee, were policed by Indian troops, overseen by the Indian Political Service, and answerable to the Viceroy of India. These Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire were all legally part of ‘India’ under the Interpretation Act of 1889, appearing in the Alqabnamah, the standard list of Indian Princely States.

For almost two decades, Muhammerah too would appear in this book making it, for a brief moment, an informal part of the British Raj. Indeed the Imperial Gazetteer of India noted carefully that “there are certain matters connected with Persian territory which lie under the special control of the Government of India.”

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Abadan as a Raj Enclave

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company quickly became Britain’s single most important overseas investment and in the process, Abadan was rapidly transformed into a little India.

A gymkhana club was built in Abadan for the British service class, whilst an Indian style mosque, known as the ‘Mosque of the People of Rangoon’ was erected near the refinery, its lotus finials symbolizing the Empire that tied Burma to the Persian Gulf.

Indian workers were usually transferred directly from the Rangoon Refinery through the coordination of the Burma Oil Company and by the mid 1920s, there were almost 5000 Indians employed in Abadan (16% of the total workforce). The Government of India effectively co-managed the Persian oil industry's labour supply.

To this day, as Rasmus Christian Elling writes in Ajam Media Collective, “There are numerous English words in Abadani dialect, as well as loanwords from Hindi and Punjabi… The Anglo-Indian past is also reflected in the food culture, which differs from Persian cuisine with spicy curries, chapatti bread, pakora snacks and chutneys.”

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Back in 2022, the historian Rana Safvi and I set out to document the forgotten temples of Old Delhi.

We had been spurred to action after a botched “restoration” had destroyed the city’s oldest surviving Hindu frescoes - artworks dating back to the 18th-century reign of the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah. Following this loss, we launched a social media campaign to protect what was left of Delhi’s historical temples.

To our surprise, the most common response online was absolute shock that Delhi - as the historic capital of succesive Muslim Empires - even had historic Hindu temples. In today’s political climate, the destruction of temples during the centuries of Islamic rule in India is a fiercely contested issue. For many, the idea that the heart of the Mughal Empire was filled with hundreds of active temples seemed entirely preposterous.

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Calcutta was once the second city of the British Empire - a city which on any given day was thronged by Bengali, Armenian, Tamil, Odia, Chinese, Arab, Scottish, Spanish, Malay and Japanese migrants and traders. Over 5000 Jews called the city home and in the 19th-century, they became the pivot of one of the most consequential trading networks in Asia, tying together Jewish communities in Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Their network, built on opium and indigo, helped shape the modern map of Asia and although there are only 17 Jews left in the city today, I think it says something about Calcutta’s cosmopolitanism that it was the local Muslim community who opted to care for the city’s synagogues after the Jewish community left.

“They stand and do their namaz [prayer]. We sit and do our namaz. That is the only difference between us,” caretaker Anwar Khan told Al Jazeera a few years ago.

“It is very sad that Muslims and Jewish people are fighting today in Gaza and Israel. But their house of God is also our house of God. We will take care of it all our life.”

The First Jews of Calcutta

India has one of the worlds oldest Jewish communities, concentrated mostly around the Malabar and Konkan coastline. Tradition places the arrival of the Cochin and Bene Israel communities anywhere between the 8^th century BC and the 5^th century AD.

The existence of synagogues in North India, meanwhile, is first attested to in a 1616 letter from Thomas Roe as well as a 1594 farman of Akbar’s declaring that, “if any of the infidels chose to build a church, or synagogue, or idol temple, or Parsi Tower of Silence no one was to hinder him.” Sadly no precolonial synagogues have survived in North India, yet the shrine of Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian mystic of Jewish origin, continues to be venerated at the base of Delhi’s Jama Masjid today.

Calcutta’s Jewish community has much more recent origins, however, and Aleppo-born Shalom Obadiah Cohen is usually credited as the founder of the community. Moving to India in the mid-18^th century, he kept a fascinating diary in Judeo-Arabic, noting that his family refused to join him “even if the entire distance from Aleppo to Surat were paved in jewels.”

Cohen arrived in Calcutta in August 1798 and moved into the jewellery trade, serving as court jeweller for Nawabs of Lucknow. He later sold jewels to Ranjit Singh in Lahore where, according to tradition, he was asked to value to Kohinoor diamond. Then, in 1831 Cohen served as one of the founding members of Calcutta’s first synagogue, the Neveh Shalom Synagogue.

The Rise of the Opium Trade

The Bara Bazaar area where the first synagogue was constructed remains one of the most dizzyingly diverse places in India. Some of Calcutta’s earliest buildings can be found here including a Indo-Portuguese Church built by the Eurasian descendants of Bengal’s Portuguese settlers and an Armenian church built in 1690, the year that the English were first granted Calcutta as a trading port. The earliest Calcutta Jews rented their first prayer hall until the construction of the Neveh Shalom Synagogue.

The area only got more diverse over time though. In the 19^th century, Baghdadi Jewish merchants began to dominate the Opium trade with China, with the Sassoon family handling around 70% of the trafficked opium volume by the 1860s. Poppy from Patna and Ghazipur was processed at the East India Company’s enormous factory, shipped down the Ganges and Hooghly to Calcutta, and from there transported to China.

This opium flooded China’s cities with addicts, triggering two Opium wars, destroying the Qing dynasty, handing Hong Kong to the British and sending waves of Hakka Chinese refugees to Calcutta. Many of them moved to the Bara Bazaar area, and India’s first Chinatown was established under a mile from the Neve Shalom Synagogue (a topic I want to write a separate Substack about in the future).

In 1856, the wealth from the Opium trade funded a second Jewish house of worship for the city: the Beth El Synagogue.

The Beth El synagogue’s basement wine cellar holds Chinese clay amphorae. Kosher red wine was made here until the 70s and stored in these Chinese vessels, a visible remnant of the Opium trade that funded the synagogue’s construction. Outside, a tandoor was built to bake matza bread for Passover, a reminder of the growing Indian sensibilities of the Jewish community here.

Changing Identities

By the mid 19^th century, British India was home to many thousands of Arab-speaking Jews from across the Ottoman Empire. Most settled in Bombay, but many Baghdadis also settled in Calcutta, with the most influential families were the Ezras, Elias, Judahs, Sassoons, Belilios and Musleahs.

The Baghdadi Jews of Calcutta also distinguished themselves from the subcontinents other Jewish communities – the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews – and instead sought to be recognised as Europeans. Nonetheless, the community gradually began to absorb Indian traditions. Baghdadi Jewish proposals were organized through a “baat pucca” and before a marriage there would be a “henna party”.

A Jewish wedding crown kept in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, meanwhile, hints at the way in which Jewish ritual items were indianised. A crown or diadem is often worn during certain Jewish marriages, covered with birds and the tree of life iconography. In this crown, however, the crown is shaped like a turban, the tree of life is shaped into a turban ‘sarpech’ ornament, and the birds become peacocks.

A similar phenomenon is visible in Calcutta's ketubah art. A ketubah is a Jewish marriage contract outlining the groom’s financial obligations to the bride and in the early days, Calcutta’s Jews decorated their manuscripts in the Persianate manuscript tradition. By the mid 19th century, however, the city’s ketubahs are replete with Indian imagery, from tigers and peacocks to twin fish imagery reminiscent of the Mughal mahi maratab. The fish in particular were appropriated for a Jewish purpose, as “a wish for fertility - and a hex against the evil eye.”

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Christianity is the third largest religion in India and Pakistan, and the fourth largest in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. South Asia today has three Christian-majority states: Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya.

Nonetheless, Christianity remains marginal to the region’s imagination of itself. Joy Pachuau, the brilliant author of Being Mizo, notes how India’s Christian-majority northeastern states are always urged to show off their ‘tribalness’ at Republic Day rather than celebrating their Christian culture. “The region’s association with modernity is… not considered legitimate” she writes.

People often assume that the faith arrived in India with European Colonialism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed Christianity may have olders roots in India than in many of the European countries who later tried to impose the religion. The arrival of Europeans may have brought diverse new sects of Christianity to South Asia, but the religion itself long preceded them.

According to tradition, the Christian faith was actually brought to South Asia by one of Jesus’ disciples themselves - St Thomas. Certainly, by the the second century AD, India had a thriving population of Christians, possibly larger than the Christian population in Europe at the time.

As a result, numerous precolonial South Asian Empires - from the Cholas to the Pallavas - were actually dotted with churches alongside temples.

Armenian Churches dotted the Gangetic Plains, and Nasrani priests preached along the Malabar coastline and Mughal Emperors commisioned paintings of the Virgin Mary. One particularly extraordinary Indian princess would eventually become the patron saint of the Mexican city of Puebla. As a result, South Asia has produced some of the most extraordinary - and undercelebrated - works of Christian art anywhere in the world.

South Asia’s Christian art has fascinated me for years, and so to celebrate Easter this week, I have decided to write a Substack on it. This article is by no means comprehensive and reflects my own travels more than anything else. There is so so much more depth to the subject than I can cover in a single article and so my aim here is merely to arouse curiosity and make you appreciate the glory of South Asia’s Christian art. Enjoy!

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The Christians of Lahore

My search for the roots of South Asian Christianity began on Basant in the Pakistani megacity of Lahore.

Lahore isn’t often associated with Christianity, yet it has two of the most beautiful Cathedrals (one Protestant and one Catholic) in the subcontinent. Both are of course Colonial creations, built in 1887 and 1907 respectively to serve the city’s British colonial elite.

Yet Christianity’s presence in Lahore long predates the British. Both a Jesuit and Armenian church were established in the city during the Mughal period, and although neither survives, it is still possible to see Christian frescoes of St Gregory in the Emperor Jahangir’s bedroom in Lahore Fort.

The most ancient Christian relic in the city is older even than these murals, however. Indeed on the right hand side of the nave in Lahore’s Cathedral Church of the Ressurection is a small cross embedded into the wall.

This cross was found in 1935 at Taxila, an extraordinary archeological site near Islamabad, and it may just be the oldest evidence of Christianity in the subcontinent.

To understand how this cross got here we have to go back 2000 years to the life of St Thomas, Jesus’ direct disciple. It’s a fascinating, if controversial, story and one that is far too little known.

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In Search of St Thomas

According to a tradition still held by around six million Christians in Southern India, soon after Jesus’ death in 52 AD, his disciple Thomas set sail from Egypt to Perisa, Gandhara and then Kerala. The communities he is believed to have founded came to be known as the Saint Thomas Christians or Nasranis.

Whether or not Thomas actually visited India remains hotly disputed, but an account of the third-century Syriac manuscript from Edessa called The Acts of Thomas, certainly claims that he did. This apocryphal text was later labelled heretical by the Catholic Church on account of its description of St Thomas as Jesus’ twin brother.

Yet it also describes St Thomas as meeting a Gandharan king called Gondophares before sailing south and establishing a church in Southern India. This legend gained unexpected historical weight in the nineteenth century when silver and copper coins bearing the name of “Gondophares, the King of Kings” began to surface in the Punjab and Afghanistan.

This king turned out to have reigned in Gandhara from around 19-46AD, precisely when St Thomas is alleged to have visited. When the Taxila cross was discovered in 1935, therefore, it created a storm of interest. Could this be proof of the lost Christian community established by St Thomas?

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A decade ago in 2016 I spent a summer studying Farsi at the University of Isfahan. As bombs now fall on my old university town, I've been doomscrolling through my old photos and wondering where my friends are now.

Much of this beautiful city - including two of its UNESCO world heritage sites - have now been hit by missiles. It feels pointless writing about the destruction of buildings when thousands of people are being killed in AI-ordered drone strikes right now but I nonetheless thought it might be a good time to share a few of my memories from Isfahan, a city often known as 'Nisf-i-Jahan' or 'Half the World'.

In the 17th century, Isfahan was larger than London, more cosmopolitan than Paris and richer than both. It is one of the most historic cities in the world and a rival to Venice or Istanbul in terms of layers of history. Even today, it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. We can only hope it remains that way.

Isfahan appears to have been settled during the Bronze Age, and shows up as a large and diverse city during the reign of Cyrus the Great. A 4th century Zoroastrian fire temple is our most prominent evidence of the pre-Islamic city. Perched on a mountain overlooking the Zayanderud river, it was probably built under the Sassanids though evidence suggests the mountain was used for religious purposes as early as 2,500 years ago.

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In the central Mexican city of Puebla, a short drive from the largest pyramid ever built, stands the world’s most unexpected Mughal tomb.

It’s hidden inside the 18th century Templo Explatorio del Espiritu Santo, a baroque masterpiece just off the city's main square with the most incredible sacristy.

The art fuses Baroque European and local Nahua (Aztec) motifs, with doors that wouldnt be out of place in the Alhambra. You know you're in the right place when you spot a giant fresco of Francis Xavier bringing Catholicism to India.

Pass through the doorway and you'll finally come face to face with a grave covered with a Persian rug, decorated with a giant AI rendering of a Mughal Princess.

This is the grave of Caterina de San Juan - aka Mirra - a 17th century Mughal princess. Possibly the granddaughter of the Emperor Akbar, she converted to Christianity under the influence of court Jesuits, was kidnapped by Portuguese pirates after being expelled from the capital, and was sold as a slave in the Phillipenes before eventually being trafficked to Mexico.

Here she travelled across the ruins of the former Aztec Empire, won her freedom, endured an abusive marriage, became a counter-reformation mystic, nearly became a Catholic Saint, and possibly inspired Mexican national dress.

For a fleeting decade in the seventeenth century, engravings of her face were the most venerated icons in New Spain. The longest book ever published in the history of the colonial Americas was an exhaustive, three-volume hagiography dedicated entirely to the miraculous events of her life.

Within just ten years of her death, however, the Spanish inquisition burnt all evidence of her life and banned people from worshiping her. All that survived was her grave and a memorial plaque that reads “Catharinam de San Juan, Quam Mogor Mundo… dedit” - Catharina de San Juan, who the Mughals gave to the world.”

A century later, however, she remerged as the “China Poblana,” a symbol of Mexican nationhood. Its an insane story that is remarkably unknown in India today, while in Mexico today, shes often confused with a Chinese princess.

Honestly its the craziest story I have dived into in 2026 so far. Enjoy!

A Catholic Mughal Princess

China Poblana is one of the most enduring symbols of Mexican nationhood. Dressed in a beautifully embroidered blowse, shawl and long skirt, 19th century Mexican folk tales trace her roots to China.

Nonetheless, the three earliest sources on her life, each written by priests with whom she was close, all agree that she was born ‘Mirra’ in the kingdom of ‘Gran Mogol’ – the Great Mughal.

For generations, scholars viewed the fantastical claims about her origins with scepticism. The narrative seemed too tailored to the orientalist fantasies of colonial Mexico to be rooted in historical reality. Yet in 1990, the scholar Alexander Bailey Gauvin showed that “when the fragments of her childhood are placed against the background of seventeenth-century Indian history, even the more outrageous claims of her biographers become possible.”

Indeed Mirra appears to have been a Chagatai Muslim aristocrat from either Delhi, Agra or Lahore. Her primary biographer and Catholic confessor, the Jesuit Alonso Ramos, even went so far as to claim she was a direct granddaughter of the Emperor Akbar himself!

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On this day, eighty-two years ago, a battle unfolded on India's eastern frontier, in the city of Kohima, that changed the fate of World War Two.

Its a story that features heavily in my book Shattered Lands, but is remarkably unknown by most people. Even in India, the story of the Second World War is still usually told as a story centred on Europe. But the war would be the ‘most general conflict’ in Asian history since the Mongol Conquest. In a matter of months, conflict would sweep across the continent from eastern China all the way to India, and in the following years war would claim almost thirty million lives.

Over the next six years India would undergo militarisation on an enormous scale. When the war began the Indian Army consisted of 205,000 soldiers from British India and another 84,700 hailing from the princely states. By the end of the conflict India had deployed the largest ‘volunteer’ army in history: 2.5 million men, out of whom 90,000 would be killed or maimed. In the words of historian Yasmin Khan, ‘Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did.’

Clash in the Patkai Hills

By early 1944, the British Empire was on the verge of collapse. Following the humiliating fall of Singapore and Japan's subsequent conquest of Burma, the Imperial Japanese Army stood at the very threshold of the British Raj. For two years, the jungle-clad mountains of the Indo-Burmese frontier served as a grueling, malaria-ridden stalemate. However, the Japanese high command, sensing a fading window of opportunity, conceived a bold and brutal gamble: Operation U-Go. The plan was to strike across the rugged frontier, seize the vital supply hubs of Imphal and Kohima, and shatter the Allied presence in South Asia.

And so, in 1944 the two largest empires of the twentieth century - the British and Japanese Empires - prepared to clash in the Patkai Hills, the mountain range separating India from Burma.

A Japanese attack in the Arakan lured British and Indian troops to the Indo-Burmese coastline in February. Then, on 6 March, Japan’s U-Go offensive launched: three divisions of the Fifteenth Army crossed the Chindwin – tens of thousands of men, accompanied by ‘12,000 horses and mules, 30,000 oxen and more than 1,000 elephants’ – and marched on India.

Two divisions headed for the Manipuri capital of Imphal, and another contingent of fifteen thousand Japanese troops proceeded further north to the Naga town of Kohima to try and cut off the road. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

The twin battles of Imphal and Kohima have been variously called ‘one of the greatest Allied victories of the war’, the ‘greatest Japanese military disaster of all time’ and ‘one of the four greatest turning-point battles of the Second World War’. And yet the British Indian army were already calling themselves the ‘Forgotten Army’ – neglected by the press compared to the great armies and battles in Europe and the Pacific.

The Japanese reached Manipur first, the princely state on the IndoBurma frontier and the ‘only considerable oasis of flat ground in the great sweep of mountains between India and Burma’. Dotted with medieval temples and centred around the moated Kangla Fort, Manipur’s capital Imphal had been a picturesque town before the war. But by 1944 over two hundred thousand refugees had marched through and camps had spread across the countryside.

Meanwhile, 120,000 Allied troops poured into the area from the other direction as Slim prepared to engage the Japanese in the Manipur valley itself, where Japan’s supply lines extended over the Patkai. One affluent young Meitei woman recalled the sense of panic when the people of Manipur realised war was coming to their doorstep.

“Prophecies from the Purans began floating freely, with nobody actually knowing how they originated. The one that caught the people’s paranoid imagination most was that the flight of 18 white egrets across the Manipur sky would signal the beginning of the war. When the phenomenon was sighted, the advice was to flee and take shelter at places with names beginning with the consonant ‘K’. Everybody watched the skies day after day for the white birds with anxious expectation and apprehension.”

The Imphal valley, previously a backwater of the Raj, turned into a microcosm of the British Empire. Gurkhas and Punjabis prepared to fight alongside Burmese, Nagas and Scots, and Manipuri women sang and danced for South African soldiers. ‘Some of us became very close to the Africans,’ recalls Naorem Kalimohon. ‘Sometimes after dinner, they took us to Laithemfam … to watch movies and other performances.’

Many of the military generals later to rule Pakistan, like Ayub Khan, were stationed here alongside soldiers like Sam Manekshaw, subsequently the Chief of Indian Army Staff. In December 1944, when Wavell knighted General Slim in the city of Imphal, a young Manekshaw would be one of two Indian officers decorated at the ceremony. The other was Lieutenant Niazi, the future Pakistani commander who would surrender East Pakistan to Manekshaw’s Indian Army.

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A few months ago, I wrote about the extraordinary cultural renaissance that emerged in the Bengali town of Bishnupur in the mid-16th century.

Here, as Mughal armies began encroaching upon Bengal, the local Malla rulers turned toward the ecstatic light of Vaishnavism, and set out to transform their homeland into a new Vrindavan. Over the subsequent two centuries, almost thirty terracotta temples were constructed across the surrounding region of Mallabhum.

As a result, Bishnupur today is an open air museum where stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are told in baked clay. Musicians stand frozen mid-note, warriors mid-charge and Mughals and Rajputs debate with one another in elaborate court scenes.

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I first grew fascinated by Bishnupur's ancient heritage during a visit to the Bishnupur Museum. This absolutely fantastic (but hopelessly underfunded) institution holds hundreds of extraordinary artefacts from Bankura district’s ancient past.

The greatest is the extraordinary 10th century Mahakal Bhairava, who holds a dagger in one hand, a chakra in the other and bares his fangs. Two gandharvas swoop overhead.

What struck me most, however, was that around 70% of the collection seemed to have been found at a place called ‘Joypur’.

There was no sign to explain why this might be the case, but after some digging through the literature on Bishnupur, I learnt that Joypur village - some 15km east of Bishnupur - actually stands atop the ancient Malla capital of Pradyumnapur.

These idols, therefore, are evidence of Mallabhum's ancient capital, and their diversity is striking. There are images of Vishnu, Buddha, Shiva, Parshvanatha, Ganesh and Surya. Its a very different world from the exclusively Krishna-focused faith of modern Bishnupur.

Unfortunately, there was no information in Bishnupur itself on the ancient capital. We thus determined to visit it ourself. And so began a fascinating and completely unexpected journey through Ancient Bengal.

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In the Shadow of Tamralipti

Ancient Mallabhum was forged in the shadow of ancient India's greatest port: Tamralipti.

Based where the Ganga emptied into the Bay of Bengal, Tamralipti connected the North Indian plains with the Indian Ocean. Ships sailed as far afield as Suvarnabhumi (Southeast Asia), China and the Roman Empire. Roman authors such as Strabo all mention the extraordinary wealth that emanated from this fabled port.

Most goods that reached Tamralipti simply travelled up the Ganga rievr to cities such as Pataliputra and Varanasi. Yet some goods also had to pass through the jungles of Mallabhum to more distant inland cities.

It was likely in order to secure safe transit through these jungles that merchant guilds first began to patronise remote Buddhist and Jain monastic orders here, which served as waystations along the jungle trade routes.

Then, around the 8th century, Tamralipti began to fade from prominence. Unable to rely on the flow of wealth from abroad any longer, local magnates instead began to vie for authority over the vast resources of the forest itself. Among them were the Mallas of Pradyumnapur who began to patronise the worship of Shiva and Durga. These local magnates would later evolve into the Rajas of Bishnupur.

The erstwhile capital is today a rather gorgeous and slow paced town. Like Bishnupur it is dotted with terracotta temples, although most of these are 19th century creations of the Datta and De zamindars, who grew wealthy from the textile trade.

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