Please do not credit the Raj for everything. This is a genuine Brahui story.
LAHORE: Reader Khalid Mehmood Khuhro writes in his letter of December 6 titled “The dog’s grave” (in response to my article of December 3 of the same name) that the dog actually belonged to an English worker of the heliograph station at Kutte ji Qabar. For one, there was no heliograph station on this peak — or any other in Sindh. If there was, it is singularly curious that not a single document of the 19th or 20th century mentions it. Nor, too, are there “walls of the house and office” as Mr Khuhro writes. There is no ruin to be seen on the peak. Moreover, Raikes whose book on legends (referred to in my article) was published around 1860; this was far too early for the Raj to have considered and installed a heliograph centre on the peak in question. However, such a signalling system did exist in the Suleman Mountains in Dera Ghazi Khan.
Please do not credit the Raj for everything. This is a genuine Brahui story.
Salman Rashid
Published in The Express Tribune, December 9th, 2011.
