136. The Kingdom of Sikander: A Memoir of Lost Heaven

*An Anecdote from the Valley*

Legend holds that the fair-skinned peoples of Kashmir, Gilgit, the Hunza Valley, and Baltistan are descendants of Alexander the Great’s soldiers. Readers of Rudyard Kipling’s *The Man Who Would Be King* — or viewers of the superb film adaptation — will recall how the local tribes awaited the return of Sikander, Alexander’s son. There may, in fact, be substance to this charming legend.

Alexander fought his way through the Khyber Pass and entered northern India via the Indus Valley in 327 BC. The following year, he won a major battle against the local king at Hydaspes, but his army refused to march any deeper into the subcontinent. Before returning to Persia, he left behind many thousands of his elite Macedonian troops, with orders to marry local women and establish Greek satrapies. In classical times, Macedonians and most Greeks were a fair-skinned, blue-eyed people — revealing their northern, even Germanic, roots. They were a far cry from today’s Hellenes, who are products of centuries of mixing with Ottoman Turks, Slavs, and other Balkan peoples.

Cut off from India and Afghanistan by the ramparts of the Karakoram and the Himalayas, the Greco-Kashmiri gene pool remained relatively isolated until modern times. The result is people who appear strikingly different from their neighbours — like marooned survivors from a lost shipwreck, beached and forgotten long ago on a strange, uncharted island.

Many natives of Hunza, Kashmir, the Swat Valley, and Chitral look distinctly Aryan. The Kafir Kalash — a little-known non-Muslim tribe with the curious custom of selecting the village’s strongest man to mate with all its virgins — appear as though they have followed this practice for centuries, perhaps to preserve their gene pool. Where did these fair-skinned people come from, if not from Alexander’s hoplites?

*The light-skinned peoples of Kashmir, Gilgit, the Hunza Valley, and Baltistan are descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great, the legend says. And maybe it is true. Maybe the Macedonians did stay, did marry, did build a kingdom in these impossible mountains. But if Sikander’s soldiers ever return to claim their inheritance, they will find only bones and bunkers — and a people who have forgotten how to live without war.*

*The kingdom in the clouds remains: still beautiful, still scarred. And no one is about to hand over heaven, of all places, to a hated enemy. *

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