Hur do Chir haveli (Salt Range Punjab)

by Salman Rashid

Raja Afrasiab, the Sarangal Gakkhar, lives in a lovely old haveli of the classical design in village Hur Do Chir in the Salt Range of Punjab. I had imagined this meant there were two neighbouring villages where chir trees grew, but I was wrong: there wasn’t a pine tree in sight and there was only one village of this name. Nor too did Afrasiab know the origin of the name. He told us, however, that the village was formerly called Soga Dutt, apparently after an early local influential man.

We had left the Mandra-Chakwal road at village Sahang and motored through undulating country to fetch up in the village and had found Afrasiab waiting. He told us his family had not one, but two havelis to show. The first one, itself rather austere, had a hugely beautiful carved door. Here were flowers so extravagant that they could only have emerged from an artist’s mind intertwined with vines of equally exaggerated style and beauty. Here were sets of pilasters growing out of pots that, according to Kamil Khan Mumtaz, the noted architectural historian, symbolised the treasure of Laxmi.

The jamb and the lintel were profuse with curvi-linear forms and the arch above the door was another abundance of similarly rich flowers and leaves. In the spandrels shone two sunflower-like designs and the outer rectangular panels were again filled in with more pilasters, geometrical patterns and phantasmagoric flowers and vines. One had grown to expect such artistry in Chiniot and Multan or other larger towns. Hardly in a place as remote as Hur Do Chir.

Remote today, the village, situated as it is amid ravines and broken ground, would have been all but inaccessible in 1926 when Zaildar Sultan Mahmood, Afrasiab’s grandfather, had undertaken to build this haveli. Timber for the door, so Afrasiab relates, came from the market in Jhelum town, carted across the Salt Range by camel. Azeem, the master whose celebrity spread wide as the greatest woodworker of the area, came from a neighbouring village and was hired at two annas per day. Such a master would surely have worked with a complement of helpers and this sum would have paid for the lot. For eight months the Azeem and his team laboured over the timbers before they could all be put together to make up the door.

Two annas per day translate into sixty per month or four rupees and twelve annas per month. Which in turn would mean thirty rupees in all for the eight months it took to complete this fantasy in wood. Other than that Afrasiab did not know how much the timber and its transportation from Jhelum had cost. Nor did he know the full cost of the haveli.

                              (c) Mr Salman Rashid, 2014 acknowledged with thanks