Matthew Vaughan

“As we walked along the ramparts we could see them going about their business – veiled women walking here and there, men riding motorbikes or cars, people going to visit their neighbours – and I marvelled yet again at the uniqueness of life in a place like Pakistan, where a community of several hundred people live, work, eat and do their laundry inside the walls of one of the most historically significant military fortifications in south Asia.”
― Matthew Vaughan, Land Of Beauty, Land Of Pain: Seeking The Soul Of Pakistan

“​I stood there, on the gatehouse with the floodplain of the Kahan River in front of me and with raindrops softly pocking the stone parapet around my feet, and I looked and I thought.  Pakistan is a complex land, far more complex than its portrayal in the media would suggest, and Rohtas is the perfect example of its convoluted, tangled past.  It was built by a Pashtun hailing from the other side of the subcontinent in order to prevent a deposed fellow Muslim ruler from returning from exile and to keep another Muslim tribe suppressed and docile.  It contains the private residence of a later Moghul Emperor’s Hindu general and an abandoned Hindu temple, all but swallowed up by an encroaching jungle, and was later captured by the Sikhs who ruled over a large swathe of what is now Pakistan from 1799 to 1849; the nearby gurdwara testified to their presence.  Even the style of the fort’s construction told the same story: it contained elements of Persian, Afghan, Hindu and Turkish architectural forms.  The fort is a relic from a previous era, a time before the concept of the nation-state, a time when empires rose and fell, when warlords could carve out kingdoms for themselves which might last for a decade or for three centuries, a time of profound cultural and religious ferment.”
― Matthew Vaughan, Land Of Beauty, Land Of Pain: Seeking The Soul Of Pakistan