It is a tale of two bridges. One, a real one and the other a bridge on a movie set. The real one is the Attock Bridge over the Indus whereas the other is the bridge in the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. The common elements between the two are two officers who took pride in and protected the bridge under their command.
The movie The Bridge on River Kwai was based on a 1952 novel written by Pierre Boulle. According to the story, the Japanese wanted to connect Bangkok with Rangoon by railway during WWII. The hurdle in completing the line was the Kwai River located in Thailand. The Japanese established a prisoners of war camp on the banks of the river. The idea was to use the multinational prisoners to build the bridge. A stern Japanese Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) ordered all prisoners including officers to work on the bridge. When reminded that the Geneva Accords excluded officers from manual labour, the colonel tears and throws away the copy of the Geneva Accords. Col. Nicholson (Alex Guinness), the highest-ranking British officer in the camp, refuses to work and is punished with solitary confinement in an underground chamber. After much back and forth, the Japanese officer agrees to have the prisoners work under the command of their own officers.
Col. Nicholson (Alex Guinness) in front of the bridge that his soldiers built over the River Kwai
Major Shears (William Holden), an American officer in the prisoners of war camp, makes a daring escape from the camp during which he is wounded. After weeks of wandering in the jungle he is eventually found half dead by some friendly villagers. He is nursed back to health and eventually makes it to the British colony of Ceylon. While he is waiting his return to the US, his services are transferred to the British and he is ordered to lead a group back to the bridge to blow it up.
The wooden bridge spanning the river is finally completed under the direction of Col. Nicholson, who takes genuine pride in the workmanship of prisoners under his command. He would often take strolls on the wooden span to inspect the railway tracks and bridge foundations to make sure there were no flaws and that the inaugural train could pass successfully over the bridge.
The boat bridge at Attock below Akbar’s Fort
Major Shears and his party of porters and demolition experts make their way through the jungle to reach the bridge. They work in the dark of night to wire the foundations of the bridge. They had planned to blow up the bridge as the inaugural train entered the bridge. Col. Nicholson, in one of his last inspections, detects the detonating wires. He tries but cannot stop the detonation and in a spectacular scene, the bridge is blown up and the train, with all the dignitaries, plunges down into the river. The movie was filmed on location in Ceylon (Now Sri Lanka).
Now the real bridge.
The 30-mile Khyber Railway was completed in 1925. It was mostly to safeguard against Russia
The Attock Bridge across the Indus was built in 1883 to connect Punjab with what later became North West Frontier Province (NWFP). It was not until 1901 that the area between the Indus and Afghanistan was given the status of a province and was named North West Frontier Province.
A postcard dated December 8, 1915, showing the first bridge across the Indus at Attock. The bridge was replaced by a new span in 1929
Prior to the building of a permanent bridge, there was a boat bridge over the Indus under the shadow of the imposing Attock Fort. The fort was built in 1588 by the Mughal Emperor Akbar to guard the main West-East route that connected Afghanistan with India. The Boat Bridge at Attock featured prominently in M.M. Kay’s 1978 epic novel The Far Pavilions.
The government of British India was weary of the expansionist designs of Tsarist Russia. It feared an invasion of India through the northern Pamir Mountains. So, it was deemed necessary to connect NWFP with the rest of India. It was to be a vital link where army and ammunition could be moved right up to the frontier with Afghanistan.
Police officer Syed Murtaza Shah Bukhari
The 30-mile Khyber Railway was completed in 1925. It was mostly to safeguard against Russia. The thirty-mile-long Khyber Railway, from Peshawar to near the Afghan border, made it possible for the British to access the width of NWFP right up to the Afghan border. The missing link, a vital one, was the lack of a bridge on the Indus. Just as the missing link between Burma and Thailand was the Bridge on the River Kwai.
As an interesting quirk of history, it was realized later, much later, that the Russians could not have entered India via the Pamir Mountains. They were impenetrable.
The two-tier Attock Bridge was opened in 1883 and functioned well for 40 years. However, with the passage of time, the span had become distorted and the girders severely over stressed. So, a new span was constructed
close to the first span and completed in 1929. The old span was demolished. Two bridge inspectors, Muslim Karam Elahi and Sikh Prem Singh, who could barely speak and write English, became the heroes of the Attock Bridge and went on to play pivotal roles in building of other bridges in North India.
Every evening, Murtaza Shah would don his starched and freshly ironed uniform and wear his Sam Browne belt across his chest, to inspect the bridge
Attock Bridge was a strategic link between NWFP and the rest of India. Hence, both ends of the bridge were heavily fortified. Before entering the bridge, vehicles had to make a sharp right-angle turn. Because of the narrow width of the road, vehicular traffic was maintained as one way. Two policemen stationed at either end would, by visual observation and telephone communication, stop and start the traffic.
First railway engine being carried to NWFP by a barge across the Indus at Attock
Syed Murtaza Shah Bukhari was a scion of the Syed clan of Peshawar City. He was a nephew of the famous Bukhari brothers Syed Ahmad Shah (Pitras Bukhari) and Syed Zulfiqar Ali Bukhari. He was also the husband of my elder sister. Murtaza Shah had joined the police force as a sepoy or policeman but advanced to the level of head constable and then a junior police officer or thanadar. It was in the later capacity that he was posted as officer in charge of the Attock Bridge in the early 1950s. The NWFP police oversaw the entire span including the eastern end that was in Punjab. I would occasionally travel 50 miles between Peshawar and Attock by bus or train to stay a few days with my sister and brother-in-law.
During those stays, I witnessed the coming and goings of the people and their interaction with the police. While there was not much checking of buses and the passengers’ luggage at the frontier end, the checking was rather routine on the Punjab side. Buses coming off the bridge on the Punjab side were required to stop for clearance by the Punjab police. In those days, the smugglers’ market near Peshawar attracted many a visitor from Punjab to shop for reasonably priced foreign goods. I saw policemen from both provinces taking advantage of the situation and lining their pockets. It was also a known fact that whole truckloads of contraband could pass without being stopped by prior arrangement with the police.
Every evening, Murtaza Shah would don his starched and freshly ironed uniform and wear his Sam Browne belt across his chest, to inspect the bridge. If I were staying with them, I would tag along. We would climb the hidden stairwell at the fortified eastern end of the bridge to emerge on the upper railway tier. With a few sepoys in toe, he would walk in the space between the elevated steel platform that runs the entire length of the bridge and the tracks. He would keenly look for any suspicious items on the tracks. We never found any. He would stop every 15 or 20 steps and stomp on the platform that would echo and send small vibrations that we felt under our feet. It was his way of making sure there was nothing wrong with the bridge. We would go half the length of the bridge and then turn around. The other half would be inspected by the staff stationed on the Frontier side.
Even on non-windy evenings, there blew a cool breeze. On windy days it was impossible to stay steady on our feet. Hence, the inspections on those days were limited to checking the lower vehicular deck of the bridge.
Syed Murtaza Shah Bukhari took his duty as officer in charge of the bridge rather seriously. Every once in while he would report happenings on and around the bridge to his superiors in Peshawar.
His possessiveness of Attock Bridge paralleled that of Col. Nicholson’s. Both officers, one real and other fictional, understood the serious responsibility that had been given to them. Both officers fulfilled that responsibility well beyond the call of duty.
Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain is an emeritus professor of surgery and an emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Toledo, USA. His is also an op-ed columnist for the daily Toledo Blade and daily Aaj of Peshawar. He may be reached at aghaji@bex.net
Dr. Sayed Amjad Hussain is an Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery and an Emeritus Professor of Humanities at the University of Toledo, USA. He is the author more recently of A Tapestry of Medicine and Life, a book of essays, and Hasde Wasde Log, a book of profiles in Urdu. He may be reached at: aghaji3@icloud.com
