On the Grand Trunk Road in northern Pakistan

From Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, it takes about two hours on the expressway to reach the city of Peshawar, 120 miles away in northwest corner of the country.

However, my preferred route is not the expressway but an ancient road that meanders through the countryside and takes twice as long.

While on the expressway the surrounding countryside becomes a blur, and one cannot put small towns, hamlets, and rivers in proper historic perspective. The slow travel on the ancient road is like traveling through 3,000 years of history.

The ancient road was built by a visionary 15th-century Indian king by the name of Sher Shah Suri. The road linked Kabul in the west with Kolkata in the east across the 3,000-mile width of India. Along the way were 1,700 rest stops and caravanserais, or roadside inns, where travelers could stay, unwind, barter, and swap news. The royal couriers would get fresh horses and continue the journey to get the mail to the capital Sasaram about 300 miles short of Kolkata.

When the British arrived in the 17th century, parts of the road were in disrepair. They rebuilt it mostly along the same route with some changes here and there. They called it Grand Trunk Road or G.T. Road. It was in so many ways like the famous U.S. Route 66 that stretched from Chicago to California. G.T. Road became a storied landmark throughout undivided India.

Just 15 miles from the Garrison town of Rawalpindi on the way to Peshawar and on the eastern bank of Indus River, are the ancient ruins of the city Taxila, the site of an ancient university founded in 1000 B.C. It was here that a scholar by the name of Panini wrote the first grammar of Sanskrit.

Much of the “Mahabharata,” the great Hindu epic poem, is believed to have occurred in Taxila. Legend has it that in Taxila Buddha cut his head off to feed a hungry lion. A village on the western bank of the river is called Sirkap, or cut head, in memory of the legend.

Another 10 miles brings one to the town of Hassan Abdal, site of the third holiest shrine in Sikh religion. In the 16th century Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikh religion and his disciple, Mardana, stopped here to rest. The guru stopped a large boulder hurtling toward them with his hand. The boulder with the hand impression of Guru Nanak is the center piece of a shrine that was built on the site. The shrine is called Punja Sahib, or the Honorable Hand Shrine. (In the Sikh religion honorific Sahib is attached to all sacred sites as well as to the Sikh scripture.)

Twenty-five miles farther west along the Indus River one comes to Attock, where in 1581 Mughal Emperor Akbar built a magnificent fort to guard the main caravan route from Afghanistan to the Indian plains. The imposing fort still stands sentinel over the confluence of the Kabul and Indus Rivers. A boat bridge under the shadow of the fort was the main crossing on the Indus until the British, in 1883, built a two-tier steel bridge a few miles downstream for rail and vehicular traffic.

In 324 B.C. Macedonian Alexander crossed the Indus just 20 miles north of here to reach the “edge of the world,” as Macedonians believed at the time the India was the end of the world. Many towns carry his name, and Sikander, or Alexander, is a common name given to the boys in these lands.

The Attock Fort and the boat bridge featured prominently in M.M. Kaye’s 1978 historic novel The Far Pavilions.

Sir Olaf Caroe, a governor of North West Frontier Province — now Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province — wrote about his journey home in his 1958 monumental book The Pathans:

“But to him [who returns home to the Frontier] the unmistakable change of atmosphere is felt at Margalla, 40 miles before the crossing of the Indus and close to the site of Taxila. Here he will smell the scents of homeland as a voyager putting out from France knows he is in England when he sights the cliffs of Dover. …”

On my journey towards Peshawar on the G.T. Road, when I see the hamlet of Khairabad across the Indus and see the Attock bridge materialize in the distance, I know I am now close to my destination.

It is only 50 miles through small towns and their layered history that I will reach the outskirts of the city that has remained part of my being my entire life.

S. Amjad Hussain is an emeritus professor of surgery and humanities at the University of Toledo. His column appears every other week in The Blade.

Contact him at:

aghaji3@icloud.com.