Battle of the Hydaspes

The classical Sanskrit name for the Jhelum is Vitasta — the Wide-Spreading — from vitasti, a unit of linear measure. In Greek usage it became Hydaspes, the river that Alexander crossed to give battle to Raja Paurava (Porus in Greek).

As the first makeshift pontoons were launched, sometime about two in the morning, in May 326 BCE, the storm died as suddenly as it had erupted. And when the first Macedonians landed on the far side, they came face to face with some five hundred cavalrymen under the command of one of Paurava’s sons. In predawn darkness that day, a pitched battle was fought in the fields that the people of Mong village remember till today.

The Punjabis withdrew when their leader went down. Expecting a landing at another site, Raja Paurava was some ways downstream, eventually drawing up at full gallop at the head of his army to face Alexander. Alexander successfully used his Scythian horse archers and his cavalry to out-flank the Punjabis and, cramping Paurava’s elephants and infantry in a tight vice, stripped the advantage off the elephants. In the full heat of the battle, the animals, suffering arrow wounds, trampled their own and threw the Punjabis into disarray. To cut a long story short, Alexander proved a better tactician than Paurava.

Here we rely on Arrian: “Throughout the action Porus had proved himself a man indeed, not only as a commander but as a soldier of the truest courage. When he saw his cavalry cut to pieces, most of his infantry dead, and his elephants killed or roaming riderless and bewildered about the field, his behaviour was very different from that of the Persian King Darius: Unlike Darius, he did not lead the scramble to save his own skin, but so long as a single unit of his men held together, fought bravely on.”

Alexander sent for Paurava to be brought into his presence. Arrian tells us that as the chariot bearing the king and his teacher drew up, Alexander rode out with a small party of soldiers to meet his vanquished adversary.

Arrian based his writing on the diaries and letters that Alexander and his staff were writing home and which were still extant in the 2nd century CE when Arrian wrote. The awe that the Greeks had felt for Paurava four and a half centuries earlier, still rings clearly in Arrian’s work — and it comes not from the flowery prose of a Punjabi writer, but from a Greek general’s pen. He tells us that the Punjabi king was “over seven feet high and of great personal beauty; his bearing had lost none of its pride; his air was of one brave man meeting another, of a king in the presence of a king, with whom he had fought honourably for his kingdom.”

We find no more glowing tribute to any other adversary. In eleven years of campaigning, Raja Paurava was the only man to have won unstinting admiration from Alexander. Darius was a coward; but neither Oxyartes, the father of Alexander’s only true heterosexual love Roxanne, nor any king of the Scythians or the Pukhtuns, won Alexander’s respect. No one measured up but Raja Paurava, king of the Punjabis of the Chaj Doab.

Here the famous exchange everyone knows of took place. Alexander is reported to have been impressed by Paurava’s reply, “Treat me as a king ought.” We are told that for his part he was willing to do as Paurava wished. “But is there not something you would wish for yourself? Ask it,” urged the Macedonian. “Everything is contained in this one request.” Even in defeat, Paurava had lost none of his grace and dignity.

I imagine Alexander raising an admiring eyebrow and casting a look around his clutch of close friends. Then, surely, he would have clasped the brown, blood-soaked hand to shake (Paurava was wounded in his right shoulder). As the full import of the king’s words sank in, the Macedonian would have grabbed the Punjabi in a hug, his blonde head reaching only as high as the heaving, corselet-covered chest of the giant Rajput.

Arrian was not the only one to tell us of Paurava, however. There is more on the Punjabi king, once again from a Greek.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2011.