The article in The Jakarta Post (May 1, 2009) ignores some basic historical facts and therefore the likely origin of the name "Hindu Kush" (which is mentioned as Hindu killer) given to that part of the Himalayan range which borders on the present Pakistan and Afghanistan.

When the Aryans (who incidentally founded the Vedic culture now considered synonymous with the Hindu religion) settled down on the river plains below the Himalayan ranges in the Northern parts of what is now called Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, there were no Muslims and no Afghanis. The Aryans used the Sanskrit language.

What is now referred to as Afghanistan was (largely) known as "Gandhar" (from where the current Afghani province of Kandahar derives its name).

As the Mahabharata epic mentions, when the Pandava/Kaurava clans of Hastinapur dominated the sub-Himalayan region, a Gandhar Princess named Gandhari was accepted in marriage with the Kaurava King Dhritarashtra.

In Sanskrit, the language of the time, kush means a kind of very sharp grass (after which a son of legendary "Ram" was named, as mentioned in the Ramayana epic, several centuries before the Mahabharata).

"Hindu Kush" may be thus be a mutated form of the Sanskrit words "Sindhu Kush" to denote resemblance of the jagged Himalayan peaks of the Hindu Kush range with sharp grass that can be found along the banks of the Sindhu river (or the Indus which also originates from this part of Himalayas).

The word Hindu itself is based on the river Sindhu. It is therefore likely that the name Hindu Kush was derived even when there were no Hindus around (since the prevalent religion was Vedic), or for that matter the world was yet to come across a Muslim person, because the Muslim religion itself was yet to be formed.

The people of this region, even when they were not Muslim, were indomitable.

The global expansionist wave of Alexander the Great was so strongly resisted by these people (in about 330 BCE) that Alexander could not progress further eastward.

The land was then Buddhist for quite some time under the Kushan Kings (who were the Buddhists that built the Great Buddha statues of Bamiyan which were destroyed by the Taliban). Continuing internal turmoil divided the region into several smaller kingdoms centered in (present) Herat, Ghazni, and Kandahar etc. which by themselves were never stable.

The various warlords/satraps controlling different parts of present Afghanistan were routinely resisting, at different times, the non-Hindu Iranians (trying to expand eastwards), the non-Hindu Mughals (trying to expand westwards), the non-Hindu Russians (trying to expand southwards) and the non-Hindu British (trying to expand westwards).

The mountain range was all along called Hindu Kush even when the people of the region were fighting non-Hindus.

C.G. (SHEKHAR) MOGHE

Jakarta

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