Jalalabad: the valley between Kabul and the Khyber

Where Jalalabad lies

Jalalabad is a city, a valley and an administrative unit in eastern Afghanistan. The city lies at 34°25′ N, 70°26′ E and about 1,885 feet above sea level in the north-central part of an oval valley that stretches roughly 80 miles from east to west and about 30 miles north to south, in Nangarhar province. The Kabul river enters the region from Laghman and is joined by its main tributary, the Surkhrud, about four miles west of the city, then flows east north of the Khyber Pass towards the Peshawar valley. [1]

The city sits near the western entrance of the Khyber Pass, roughly 73 miles from Kabul and 69 miles from Peshawar as the crow flies. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi writes that Jalalabad is economically more oriented towards Peshawar but politically more connected to Kabul. The main road to Peshawar goes through the Khyber via Dakka, Torkham, Landi Kotal, Ali Masjid and Jamrud. [1] [4] Four main roads now link Jalalabad and Kabul, among them one completed in 1960 through the Ghar gorge and tunnel, and others over the Latabund pass and through Tezin. [1]

The Gandharan valley

From about the third century BCE the Jalalabad area was exposed to Hellenistic and Buddhist influences, a meeting that fed the Gandharan civilisation, which flourished from about the first to the seventh century CE. The Chinese pilgrims Faxian, in the fifth century, and Xuanzang, in the seventh, recorded Buddhist shrines in the region. Hadda, about seven miles south of the city, was renowned for shrines said to hold relics of the Buddha. [1] Boris Litvinsky adds that Gandharan stupas spread across Afghanistan from the south-east, from Hadda and Jalalabad, to the Kabul region and southern Bactria. [2]

Much of the art from this period was removed from Hadda by Europeans in the nineteenth century. The French Archaeological Delegation excavated at Hadda in the 1920s and a Japanese team worked at nearby Lalma in the 1960s, but, Hanifi writes, much of the site's heritage was lost to Soviet aerial bombing in the 1980s. [1]

Babur and the Mughals

On his first journey from Kabul into India in 1505, Babur described Nangarhar, noting how its climate, plants, animals and people differed from those of Kabul. [1] Akbar linked Jalalabad and Attock, the crossing of the Indus on the royal road to Delhi and Bengal. His son Jahangir built gardens at Nimla, about twenty-five miles south-west of the city, in 1610, and under Shah Jahan the governor of Kabul, Ali Mardan Khan, built a bridge over the Surkhrud and the covered bazaar of Kabul. [1]

1842: the end of the retreat

Jalalabad is best known in English for the First Anglo-Afghan War. The remnants of the British army, in full retreat from Kabul, made their last stand at the village of Gandamak, about thirty miles away, on the morning of 13 January 1842. Hanifi gives the size of the force that left the Kabul cantonment for Peshawar a week earlier as roughly 15,530: about 690 British soldiers, 2,840 Indian soldiers and 12,000 camp followers. One man, Dr William Brydon, reached Jalalabad that evening. [1] A British force under General Sale had been besieged in the city the day before and stayed under siege until General Pollock's army relieved it in April 1842. In October 1842 Pollock left Kabul for Peshawar, destroying Sale's fortifications at Jalalabad on the way. [1]

During the Second Anglo-Afghan War the British built Fort Sale on the city's western edge, and the treaty that gave British India control of the Khyber and Michni passes was signed in May 1879 at Gandamak. [1] [4] Hanifi notes that Amir Abdur Rahman built a garden complex in Jalalabad but paid it less attention than the rulers before and after him, because he used his resources to suppress revolts elsewhere. [1] The second British occupation also produced the first published photographs of the city and its people, and a gazetteer-style handbook on its resources, administration and history by W. Jenkyns. [1]

A winter capital

Jalalabad has long been, together with Peshawar, a winter retreat for the Kabul elite. Amir Habibullah built the palace Siraj al-Imarat in the middle of the city; it was ransacked during the revolts that preceded the abdication of his son Amanullah. Habibullah, Amanullah and Amanullah's wife Soraya are buried on the grounds of a golf course that Habibullah built, in a mausoleum facing the remains of the palace. [1]

The city was at the centre of the crisis after Habibullah was assassinated in February 1919: at Jalalabad, the winter capital where the court was staying, his younger brother Nasrullah, leader of the conservative and clerical faction, declared himself amir, while Habibullah's son Amanullah also claimed the throne. [3] The Third Anglo-Afghan War followed in May of that year. [5]

People, crops and shrines

In the late nineteenth century the Jalalabad region was home to many groups. Pashtuns, particularly Ghilzai but also Khugiani, Mohmand, Safi and Shinwari, appear to have been the most numerous, among a wide mix of settled and nomadic communities that included Arabs, Dehqans, Hindus, Mongols, Tajiks, Kashmiris, Qizilbash and sayyids. British officials of the second occupation considered the nomadic Kuchis the distinguishing element of its population. The British occupation report also records a majority of Hindus among about 2,000 permanent residents of the city. [1]

Hanifi lists the valley's produce: pomegranates, melons, walnuts, prized rice, wheat (the Gandamak variety was celebrated) and sugar cane along the Surkhrud, with a brown sugar called gora that is highly valued in Kabul and Peshawar. The mild winter attracts Kuchis and other nomads, who swell the population. Until the 1980s the region's shrines drew Muslim, Hindu and Sikh pilgrims, among them a week-long festival at Sultanpur each April that celebrated Guru Nanak's creation of the local springs. The Jalalabad medical school was founded in 1963, and the city's population was estimated at 96,000 in 2002. [1]

A centre of poetry

Jalalabad is also remembered as a centre of Pashtun poetry. When Eliza Griswold collected landays, the short Pashto couplets sung by women, she travelled to the area around the city, which she calls a centuries-old centre of poetry and landays. [6] The landay is discussed in the article on Pashto literature.