Shilajit, Hunza Water and Hunza Matters: Questions You Should Get Ready to Answer with a Hunza Surname
Before I share anything, I will start by laying my cards on the table. I am from Hunza, and I have promised to bring Shilajit to our hostel guard whenever we needed a favour like borrowing his Sohrab bicycle for a ride or get Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) — especially when we needed to get VCR in our hostel. Folks of the current time may not know that VCR was a devil of a device for playing VHS tapes. Getting a VCR in a boys’ hostel was one of the most daring acts of its time. You needed a tall boy to leave his national identity card with the video-wala to get the divine machine.
In my experience, being from Hunza has worked for me, winning me small favours. I started using the hunzai surname in my email account and since then whenever I shared my email with anyone related to work or pleasure; I used to get interesting questions like: Are you from Hunza? Have you tasted Hunza water? Can you bring some for me? Hunza water is a general euphemistic replacement word for wine. Senior persons started asking me about the efficacy of the Salajit or Shilajeet for bone strength or libido.
Coming back to the point, between my current reading lists, a friend forwarded me a bootlegged copy of the book Hunza Matters: Bordering and Ordering Between Ancient and New Silk Roads by Kreutzmann Hermann. I was in between the current readings so I thought I should finish the current reads before I buy the hardcover of the book.
In the meantime, I came across a few Twitter hashtags about the book. In all fairness, I did not want to read the WhatsApp copy as I had an informal interaction with Mr Hermann in Karimabad Hunza where he impressed me with his fluent Burushaski. I called all the usual places like Mr Books, Saeed Book Bank and the other bookshop opposite the Saeed Book Bank, of which I have been a keen patronizer over the years. I was told ‘Kitab Aanay Wali hai’, in Urdu it meant the book is about to arrive.
I could not keep my curiosity cat in control, downloaded the WhatsApp version on the iPad, parked my existing reads and plunged into Hunza Matters. Eid Holidays gave me pleasant breathing room from work to forage for the book.
For starters, it’s an amazing book based on an anthology of previous work. The work hinges on the initial observations of the travellers, expeditions, colonial administration officials and clandestine papers about Hunza. The contextual setting is superb with an unapologetic expression of facts. As a hunzukutch- a person hailing from Hunza, I found the observations stark, grounded in the anthropological experience of the author with the mountain communities of Hunza.
Growing up in a literary family has its own accounts. Most of the books about Hunza and Gilgit were about travelogues by colonial officials or in form of autobiographical accounts of local royalty. Books like Gilgit Rebellion by Major Brown and Between Oxus and Indus by Reginald Charles Francis Schomberg were amongst the interesting titles I saw on my family bookshelves. I have found most of such Hunza based literature to be in the form of travelogues.
I find Hermanns story to have a similar basis as that of a western television series known as Myth-Busters: It breaks all the assumptions about Hunza created over a century by Lorimers’, Younghusband and Mustansar Hussain Tarar of their times. An ideal book for a Netflix documentary.
Hermann has mapped out the agrarian and pastoral practices in a way that even an ordinary hunzukutch may not have known. He has documented the undocumented. He has mentioned exorbitant levies and tax rates faced by Shinaki and Gojali communities. Time is ripe for centre hunzukutch to apologize over the exploitative microstate-craft, though centre hunzukutch may not be enjoying a royal lifestyle except a few privileged families engineering and acting on behalf of the microstate.
Paraphrasing the words of Captain George Howard Bretherton, who was among the early game hunters visiting Gilgit, calling Hunza- a Liliputian valley sums it all up. His observation that extensive emigration will be the only safeguard against starvation became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The only downer in the book was summarizing the whole exercise under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a transborder economic and defence collaboration. Dovetailing CPEC with Hunza history and cultural fabric is not a scholarly justice. Although I respect the intellectual liberty of the author, I reserve my opinion that the epilogue of the book did not do justice to the scholarly work of an author’s research, experience, passion, and lifeblood in the form of a manuscript. The book is more than its epilogue.
Hermann in his sense has torn the veneer of romance attached with Hunza. It is a time when Hunza and Hunzukutch should come to terms with the story of survival and struggle. Hunza was a microstate with its geographical settings and aspirations. It is a must-read for people interested in Hunza’s history, ethnography, and culture.
Hunza Matters echoed so many stories which were told in my household as ordinary hunzukutch. Be it livestock raising, winemaking, devising local recipes, Nagar conquest, and Nilt Battle highlighting the bravery of Nagar people fighting Kashmiri Dogra forces.
I feel the mystery around Hunza will still be there as I still come across the requests for Hunza Water and Salajit, although in a discrete manner. A recent episode being my colony park guard in Islamabad who greets me during my jogging asked me about my annual holiday plans. To cut short, shyly he asked me if I could get him Salajit whenever I am back home.
No matter whether Salajit works or not, let us keep the Hunza mystery alive.
Author: Moin Uddin is an occasional writer who dabbles in culture, economy, and psychology. He publishes on moinhunzai.medium.com and tweets @moinhunzai
