"We shall not stand again on the head of the Buddha at Bamian." Bruce Chatwin, prophetic as always, in his Lament for Afghanistan
Here, as a small personal lamentation for the destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001, is a photo-reportage from my trip in 1976, just before the Russian invasion. The country was already full of Russian military 'advisers' and their tanks, wearing the livery of the Afghan army, but it was still free, a merry place, rich in every kind of enterprise: at least, for the menfolk. Since then, one army after another, one corrupt government after another, has troubled the country.
The great Buddha statues were carved out of the solid sandy rock of the valley walls in the 6th or 7th centuries AD. Many caves were also hollowed out, forming whole monasteries where the monks prayed and meditated.
The village women, veiled according to Islamic custom, carry heavy pots of water to their homes. Their lives are as hard as those of their domestic animals.
This farmer is using a traditional spade to adjust the irrigation for his little field by hand. The techniques of digging, planting, and irrigating are simple but not easy -- the water can easily wash the little plants away, or half the field can dry out while the rest is waterlogged. Similar men with similar spades are illustrated in medieval Islamic manuscripts from the 13th century.
The life of the men, while still simple, is appreciably more relaxed than that of the women. They can come and go as they please, such as to this little tea-house in the countryside. The Taliban have taken this traditional patriarchy to extremes, forbidding women from almost all activity outside the home, even going to school or university, while those women who once received professional training are prevented from practising.
The size of the two great Buddha statues can be appreciated from the little streets of Bamiyan. Tiny human figures can just be seen at the foot of this Buddha. Photos like this one are now all that is left of these mighty symbols of devotion: their niches today stand empty as monuments to human folly and violence.
Two village boys on a donkey
The village bakery under the peaceful gaze of the Buddha made bread and cakes for locals and visitors alike. Few tourists have come to Afghanistan since 1977; fourteen years of Russian bombing and violent resistance by the Afghans in defence of their homeland reduced the houses to rubble, smashed the canals and irrigation systems, filled the fields with mines and forced much of the population to flee. Today it's happening in Ukraine. Not much seems to have been learnt.
Turbaned men in the Afghan dress of grey jackets and baggy trousers stride across the desolate waste.
In the days when it was possible to travel anywhere, the trucks were resplendent with rainbow colours, and piled high with anything from firewood to wolfskins. Safety was relative: the driving was fast and furious, the drivers often had poor eyesight, hashish was smoked incessantly, and the burnt-out wrecks of head-on collisions were not infrequent by the roadsides.
Brass samovars glitter in an Afghan tea-shop or Chai Khana. Another world.
The schoolmaster teaches the village school under a comfortably breezy thatched shelter. He writes on a blackboard.
In the fertile valley, the villagers reap their cereals in a biblical scene, sitting with sickles and wicker baskets, gathering in the harvest.
Humped cattle tolerate the harsh conditions well, surviving on poor grazing despite wide swings in temperature.
Fuel of any sort is scarce. These donkeys may have travelled miles to fetch their loads of brushwood for use in cooking fires.
Amidst the drought, life is sustained by the Bamian river that meanders through its mountain valley.
Beyond Bamian is a high semi-desert plateau, and the forbidding mountains of the Hindu Kush ('death to the Hindus'), snowy even in summer. The shepherds stand watching their fat-tailed sheep. The men chew green snuff which they keep in small mirror-topped tins; the sheep, in every natural colour, find something to chew on the bare stony ground.
I scanned the images from my 35mm Kodachrome colour slides. These are (or were) little rectangles of coloured celluloid mounted in little frames of thin card. The celluloid film contained tiny particles of a chemical sensitive to light, which had to be kept in total darkness until processed with chemicals to form a positive image (where normal film produced a negative image). The images were displayed to family and friends using a projector in a darkened room. The projector was a lamp in a box that shone its light through a lens, focused on the slide, and out through another lens on to a screen. The screen was made of white coated cloth like an old-fashioned cinema screen. I realize, explaining this, that the words have either fallen out of use, or have taken on new meanings. I suppose this is in itself a small metaphor for how humanity has moved further and further away from nature and traditional techniques of every sort.