Alice Albinia > Quotes

“Tradition is a fragile thing in a culture built entirely on the memories of the elders.”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“Disconcerting as it is to pious Hindus, the Rig Veda has its heartland in Pakistan. From”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“He died that night – if not a broken man, then a profoundly disillusioned one. He had wanted an undivided Punjab and Bengal; he had hoped to win Kashmir and Junagadh52; he had fought for the moral high ground. His people, by 1948, were homeless, disorientated and angry. The central government was quarrelling with the Sindhis; the Mohajirs with the locals; the country as a whole with its neighbour. Everybody”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“Then again, it was precisely from a fear of democracy–the voting power of majority Hindus, and the dread that Muslims, as a minority in independent India, would be disenfranchised–that Pakistan had come into being.”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“Both have full lips and a rounded nose – evidence, say some, that the Indus people were direct descendants of migrants out of Africa 80,000 years ago. Perhaps, as some historians have long argued, the Indus people were subsequently displaced from the valley by immigrant Aryans, thus becoming the non-Sanskrit-speaking ‘Dravidians’ of south India. ‘Meluhha’, the word that Mesopotamians used for people from the Indus valley, may be related to mleccha, the term that the Sanskrit-speakers used for anybody who could not speak their language – such as those in south India.”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

“Below me are artillery lines, curved stone walls built in overlapping crescents along the hillside. I wonder what scholars of the future will make of them, the stone circles of our war-torn generation.”
― Alice Albinia, Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River