हिंदीOn this day
Standing

Kabul

The city on the river the Rigveda calls the Kubha, for centuries a seat of kings of the Indic world: the Turk Shahis and then the Hindu Shahis, until the Saffarids took it around 870. Hindus and Sikhs lived here until the last decades, worshipping at the Asamai temple.

Built: City on the Kubha (Kabul) river; seat of the Shahi kings until c. 870Where: Kabul province, Afghanistan, Afghanistan34.53° N, 69.18° E
  1. c. 870
  2. 25 March 2020
  3. 18 June 2022
Photo: John Burke · Public domain

01The Kubha and the Shahis

The Nadistuti hymn of the Rigveda names the Kubha among the western rivers that join the Sindhu, and the Kabul river has carried that name since. Gandhara and Kapisa, to the east and north, were lands of the Indian world for a thousand years. Until the ninth century Kabul was held by the Shahis, first the Turk Shahis and then, when their minister Kallar, as al-Biruni calls him, took the throne, the Hindu Shahis. Around 870 Yaqub ibn al-Layth, the Saffarid of Sistan, took Kabul, and the Hindu Shahis moved their capital east to Udabhandapura on the Indus. Their kings, Jayapala and Anandapala among them, fought on from there against Ghazni for over a century.

02Asamai and the last Hindus

Hindu and Sikh traders, Khatris and Aroras of Punjabi speech, kept their temples and gurdwaras in Kabul through the centuries of Afghan rule. On the hill called Koh-e-Asamai stands the temple of Asha Mata, from which the hill takes its name. After the civil war of the 1990s most of the community left for India and the West. In July 2018 a suicide bomber killed Sikh and Hindu leaders in Jalalabad, and in March 2020 gunmen killed some twenty-five worshippers at the Har Rai Sahib gurdwara in Kabul. On 18 June 2022 the Karte Parwan gurdwara was attacked. India brought out most of those who remained, and by 2023 only a handful of Hindus and Sikhs lived in Kabul.

The life of this place

  1. c. 870The Saffarid Yaqub ibn al-Layth takes Kabul; the Hindu Shahis move east to Udabhandapura.
  2. 25 March 2020Gunmen attack the Har Rai Sahib gurdwara in Kabul.
  3. 18 June 2022The Karte Parwan gurdwara is attacked.

People

JayapalaRuler
Reigned c. 964–1001 CE

Jayapala

Hindu Shahi king who faced Ghazni

Nearby

Jamrud Fort (Fatehgarh)Standing
Maratha ascendancy and the Sikh empire

Jamrud Fort (Fatehgarh)

The fort Hari Singh Nalwa built in 54 days at the mouth of the Khyber Pass in 1836, the farthest western bastion of the Sikh empire. He fell defending it against the Afghans on 30 April 1837.

Peshawar (Purushapura)Standing
Shungas, Satavahanas, Kharavela and the Sangam Kingdoms

Peshawar (Purushapura)

Purushapura, the city at the foot of the Khyber, was Kanishka’s capital and later a city of the Hindu Shahis, before whose walls Jayapala fell to Mahmud in 1001. Hari Singh Nalwa governed it for the Sikh empire in the 1830s.

Attock FortStanding
Maratha ascendancy and the Sikh empire

Attock Fort

The fort over the Indus crossing where Maratha horsemen watered their horses in 1758 and the Sikh army beat the Afghans in 1813. To say a thing ‘reached Attock’ became a Marathi way of saying it reached the farthest frontier.

Waihind (Udabhandapura, Hund)Ruined
The long resistance: Sindh to Tarain

Waihind (Udabhandapura, Hund)

Udabhandapura, the Waihind of the Arab writers, on the right bank of the Indus above Attock, was the capital of the Hindu Shahi kings Jayapala and Anandapala. Near it in 1008–09 Anandapala’s allied army fought Mahmud of Ghazni and lost.