The point of Gilgit, now as always, is strategic. High above the snowline, somewhere midst the peaks and glaciers that wall in the Gilgit Valley, the long and jealously guarded frontiers of India, China, Russia, Afghanistan and Pakistan meet. It is the hub, the crown's-nest, the fulcrum of Asia.
(The Gilgit Game)
Gilgit, like Kashgar, was an outpost in the 'Great Game', the imperial hide-and-seek between Britain and Russia, well into the 20th century. A succession of political agents managed by grace or guile to stay in charge, and in 1935 Britain actually leased back the entire Agency from Kashmir. At the end of the 1940s, Britain split India into two separate countries, a Muslim-majority Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India. Kashmir - with a Hindu ruler, a Muslim majority and a lovely vale beloved by both Hindu and Muslims - was the biggest hot potato. Following a jihad, a holy war, proclamed by tribesmen from the Noth-West Frontier Province, the maharajah flew to Delhi and asked for military help. India accepted, subject to an eventual vote by Kashmiris. The people of the Gilgit region would have none of this and staged their own rebellion, arresting the new governor and demanding to become part of Pakistan. The two newborn countries went into war, war which still goes on.
Meeting pointThree mountain ranges, the Himalayas, the Karakorum and the Hindu Kush, meet in one single point. Called Gilgit.
A traveller would be constrained to wonder whether such an inhuman mass of snow, lifeless mountain and ravine was not meant to be denied to mankind.
Gilgit and beyond.
It is a small township in the heart of the Western Himalayas. Remote in the extreme the place is today the administrative centre of Pakistan's sparesely populated Nothern Areas. Beyond it, and on all sides save for a vulnerable supply line back to Kashmir,
there stretched virgin territory. South to the Punjab of British India, west to Badakshan in Afghanistan, north to Tashkent in Russia and east to Sinkiang in China, this rectangular sea of mountains stretched for hundreds of all but impenetrable miles.
The Gilgit Game is simply the story of how and by whom such a wilderness was explored and appropriated.
