Empires of the Indus, by Alice Albinia
When Alice Albinia set off for the source of the Indus she was not embarking on a quest for the unknown: she knew where the river rises. She wanted to start her journey at its mouth, the delta on the Arabian Sea, to travel upstream to Tibet and tell the story of the river which gives India its name. Empires of the Indus covers a 2,000-mile journey and 5,000 years of history.
Albinia’s prize-winning first book is a personal odyssey through landscape and time, fed by scholarship. Her pages resonate with great names: Timur, Genghis Khan, Alexander, Aurangzeb. But before that we have the conquest of Sindh, the botched finale of the British Raj, Independence, and the horrors of Partition. Most of the Indus, sacred to Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, now ran through the newly created Islamic republic of Pakistan.
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