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weapons A village
in the Punjab whose claim to fame is weaponry and knife manufacturing and
repair By Salman
Rashid "There
is near Khanpur in south Punjab a village called Garhi Ikhtiar Khan,"
said Omar Sheikh my policeman friend. "There is in that village an
armourer who can fix any small or large calibre weapon that cannot be
repaired anywhere else in the world." Furthermore, said my friend, this
man could also copy any weapon. And there were also cutlers renowned for
their superior knives that were exported all over the world.
If the
armament man had conjured up images of Darra, the knife maker was perhaps an
unknown version of the cutlers of Wazirabad. Having seen the produce of
Wazirabad, I know for a fact that they turn out a fantasy of hundreds of
different blades that make their way to Hollywood films like King Arthur and
Lord of the Rings. They also make Bowie knives which are stamped 'Made in
Germany' and sold for exorbitant prices in USA -- where, incidentally, the
Bowie originated. Their craft in Wazirabad, I know, is definitely very
superior. And if here were men who sent their produce to 'all over the
world', surely they were worth checking out.
Regarding
the potters, Omar had earlier clarified why Khanpur was suffixed with the
word Katora (bowl): for the fame of its copper workers and potters. Modern
times had sadly destroyed the tradition of copper and clay ware. While those
of copper were one thing, the Garhi tradition of kiln-fired pottery was so
advanced that they could produce a bowl feather light in weight yet capable
of holding over a litre of fluid. So light were these pieces, said Jamil,
that it was said a hornet trapped inside an upturned bowl would, by its
circular flight inside, cause the bowl to spin. Such was the craft of pottery
at Garhi and the collector of curiosities was supposed to have been a creator
of items of this reputed delicacy. But now, Jamil said wryly, the potters had
succumbed to changing times and moved on to other things for users no longer
cared for those featherweight creations.
Ghulam
Mustafa, the gunsmith was another thing, however. He and his brother sat in
their large, airy shop struggling with different rifles. Mustafa said that
their deceased father Ghulam Rasul and grandfather Ghulam Nabi were the real
masters who had passed on their craft to him and his brother. He produced a
sheet of paper printed in two colours and beginning to fray at the folds from
repeated handling. It was a certificate from the Bahawalpur Industrial
Exhibition of 1933 awarded to Ghulam Nabi in recognition of his 'fine knife
work'. Surely when this certificate was issued, the craftsmen of Garhi were
producing better knives. But if you ask me, the current crop can never win
such an award. What
caught my eye in Mustafa's workshop was a rather newish muzzle-loading
pistol. I asked if it was an old piece he had restored and it turned out that
he had produced it just so that his craft does not get rusty. He then
produced a license issued by the Government of Pakistan authorising him to
repair firearms. I observed that the matchlock was a fine bit of workmanship,
but could he possibly also copy, say, an AK-47. "If
I have a lathe here, I can produce anything they can in Darra Adam Khel --
perhaps better," said the man. "A lathe and a license to
manufacture and I'll produce anything. But right now I can put right any make
of firearm that no one else can repair in the country."
A price
was agreed upon and Ghulam Rasul said the man should now take a walk and come
back after the stipulated period. No sooner had the customer turned his back,
Ghulam Rasul stripped down the piece, fixed it in a quick one-two and
reassembled it. Jamil says he asked the old master why one month or even two
days for a jiffy's work. The man replied that had he said what the fault was
and that it could be fixed in no time at all, the man would never have agreed
to the quoted price. He charged, Ghulam Rasul reportedly told Jamil, not for
the nature of repair, but for his expertise. Warming
to legends, Jamil Mirani recounted another. In a museum in somewhere, UK,
there was a cannon that bore the legend 'Sakhta Garhi Ikhtiar Khan'. Although
nobody had actually seen this celebrated piece of ordnance, its shadowy
existence was commonly believed in and was a source of pride in the village.
As no one had seen it, so too was it not known when this piece was
manufactured, but common legend also has it that Garhi was the ordnance
factory town under the Abbasis. While
there may or may not be Garhi ordnance on display in some European museum,
the fact is that these craftsmen did not go unnoticed in the past. The
Gazetteer of the Bahawalpur State acknowledges the 'very good match-locks
and... excellent guns and swords." It goes on to tell us that the Arms
Act had restricted this trade and even though the craftsmen maintained their
expertise, the trade was all but dead. That was in 1904 when the Gazetteer
was published. The book also tells us that Garhi Ikhtiar Khan produced
pottery comparable to, if not better than, the produce of Ahmadpur East and
Khanpur. The merit of this pottery was its lightness for a bowl weighed less
than a tola, or ten grams! Omar had not been far off the mark. Knowing
my friend Raheal's propensity for old firearms, I returned to the matchlock.
Mustafa said he could also manufacture the percussion caps required to fire
the charge as well as the charge and the balls. The weapon, in other words,
was not just a replica; it was a proper working piece. He also said that he
could produce on order as many as I wanted for as little as three thousand
rupees a piece. I thought this was a steal and back in Bahawalpur later that
day I told Raheal to get out to Garhi and bring back a sackful. It might not
be a bad idea to flog these items around as antiques. Thinking
that gunsmithing was a craft always practiced by Pukhtuns, I asked Mustafa if
he too was one. No, said he, he was a Bhutta as indeed were all the cutlers
who turned out those crude knives. Now, Bhutta is a sub-clan of the Arains
who, no matter what lofty claims they make about their glorious Arab past,
are celebrated more for prowess in agriculture than anything else, so how did
he explain this. These gun-producing Bhuttas were natives of Shikarpur in
Sindh who followed Ikhtiar Khan to this place, he explained. Once here, the
man set them up as gunsmiths and cutlers and they have since followed the
craft. But there was no word on whether or not the Bhuttas had inherited
their craft from Pukhtuns, already established in this place. The
antique collector was next on the agenda and we made our way around the
narrow streets to his home. Ghulam Sarwar Naseem, sixty-four by his own
reckoning, dark of skin and white of hair, of which little had been lost, and
garrulous to the extreme was expecting us. He had laid out his treasure in
the veranda as well as in two inside rooms. There was an array of bowls,
cooking pots, tumblers, measuring vessels, small serving dishes with lids,
old paraffin lamps with missing chimneys and even paandaans. Some of the
pieces were actually ancient and therefore valuable, others simply curios of
little worth, but there was also a collection of some dozen or more antimony
pots the kind of which I had seen in Taxila Museum. Being the novice however,
I had no way of knowing the real value of Naseem's treasure. The pieces came
from all over: Sukkur, Gujranwala, Chakwal and from various mounds that
marked ruined cities of millennia past. Naseem
said that being effectively retired; he roamed the country nosing around
junkshops. Why, I asked. Why not, returned Naseem. I persisted and he said it
was a junoon -- madness. And madness knows nor follows reason. And then he
said something remarkable, remarkable for someone whose only claim to
education was "half-matric". We know of "under-matric"
folk who flunk the matriculation examination and never return to school, but
not of a half-matric. This was, he clarified, only five years of schooling.
Since being a fifth grade dropout sounded rather unimpressive, he had coined
this new term. He said
it was unjust that history was simply the story of kings, generals and
nobility, not of common people. If history told the stories of ordinary
people, it would be telling us of a whole era, not merely of a few fancy
individuals. His collection was thus another way of preserving history for
these items of daily use told of the culture of bygone times. I thought this
was a good deal of learned sense from someone who said he was only half a
matriculate. With
some difficulty we took leave of Sarwar Naseem and headed for the three-domed
mosque of the eponym Ikhtiar Khan and dated to 1174 of the Muslim calendar or
1760 CE. The facade was a mess of modern accretion: gaudy pre-fabricated
miniature minarets and domes and a liberal smear of cement plaster all washed
a brilliant white. But the interior was still as Ikhtiar Khan would have
ordered it. The frescoes, a bit faded after two and a half centuries, were
still pretty well preserved and I was thankful that the ignorant hand of some
half-baked renovator had not destroyed the beauty of the interior. I had
always thought that squinches turned the square plan into an eight-sided drum
from which the dome would then spring. Here, while the two subsidiary domes
followed this pattern, the main dome acquired the octagonal shape from half
domes in the four corners. I wondered if this was unusual and what an
architectural historian would say to it. More remarkable was the repetitive
frieze that ran around just below the drum of the dome for it represented the
yoni of Vedic worship. I did not discuss it with Jamil and also resolved not
to write about it for fear of some misguided bigots putting their destructive
hand to it. But I succumb now to temptation. As an
echo to the original interior, there stood a pair of slender teetering
minarets outside. Detached from the main building and across the courtyard
they stood looking terribly precarious. When the mosque was built there would
have been a boundary wall enclosing the courtyard and the minarets would have
stood at the corners of the wall. But with the pulling down of the wall,
these structures were rendered unstable. When they finally come down in a
cloud of dust is now only a matter of time -- or sooner if someone leans
against them. Ikhtiar
Khan is said to have been a right pious man for legend makes him a Haji
eleven times over. It also believes he was a Kalhora from Sindh who
established Garhi. The Gazetteer casts a somewhat different light on this. It
was originally known as Garhi Shadi Khan after its founder who was an
official under Khuda Yar Khan Kalhora in the beginning of the 18th century.
In 1753 Ikhtiar Khan took the place by a 'sudden attack.' Having fortified it
(Garhi incidentally means a small fortification), he named the place after
himself and held it until 1784 when the more powerful Nawab Bahawal Khan II
annexed it to his state. Interestingly,
while local lore believes Ikhtiar Khan to have been a Kalhora, the Gazetteer
tells us that he was a Mundhani, a surname that to me appears to be of Baloch
origin. We are also told that he was from Gundi; a place I hadn't known
existed until my reading of the Gazetteer. It reveals nothing further about
this place and I have failed to locate Gundi in the Atlas of Pakistan as well
as in F. S. Aijazuddin's Rare Maps of Pakistan. Ikhtiar
Khan, whoever he was and from wherever he came, seems to have done well for
himself. The Abbasis, who followed, did even better to have elevated the
place to the level of an ordnance factory. But times change and now the old
ordnance makers do only knives or firearm repair. I suspect there may not be
much money in the repair business and Mustafa and his brother just might be
the last exponents of that fading craft. And if the cutlers don't improve
their product, they too might become an all but forgotten legend. I wonder
then what another traveller will find in Garhi Ikhtiar Khan in, say, the year
2106.
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This
worked up images of a Punjabi version of Darra Adam Khel. While the latter is
snug in the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan where no law holds, Garhi
Ikhtiar Khan is smack in the centre of Pakistan (Garhi lies thirteen
kilometres due west of Khanpur) and in settled areas (where also the writ of
the State mostly does not hold). And when it does, it does so only
selectively. In any case even in that state of failing, the State cannot
permit anyone to manufacture arms in areas where it pretends its writ holds.
Consequently the man in Garhi can now only repair licensed weapons.
And
so there I was at the door of Jamil Mirani, the Nazim of the Garhi Union
Council. Since Omar had called him earlier, the good man had arranged that I
see all local "tourist attractions." Besides the gun and knife
makers, this included a collector of curiosities and an old mosque attributed
to Ikhtiar Khan. This collector was once a potter of good repute, it was
reported. But he gave up the craft after a couple of his sons went off to
make petro-dollars in the Persian Gulf. He went into retirement and travelled
all over the country purchasing anything that seemed worn out and ancient.
After
the mandatory tea and biscuits, we went into the main bazaar which was a
narrow lane lined with stores and covered over with palm frond matting. The
knife makers were a disappointment. They produced just one variety of folding
knife whose only merit (or demerit?) was the incredibly sharp blade and
point: it was clearly a weapon of violence and murder. But it was crude,
without any quality or refinement. This vicious looking knife was good for
use in the kitchen said the maker who gave me a piece as a gift.
That
was a tall claim and seeing my somewhat sarcastic smile Jamil narrated that
one day as he was chatting with Musatafa's father, a customer came around
with a rifle that did not work. The man had shown the piece to several
gunsmiths, but they had all been unable to pinpoint the fault. Having heard
of him, he had fetched up in Garhi. Ghulam Rasul went over the piece and
informed the owner that it would take him a month to repair it. After a good
deal of haggling, he reduced the time to two days.