Peshawar

Peshawar sits on one of the oldest inhabited sites in South Asia. As Purushapura it became the capital of the Kushan emperor Kanishka in the second century AD, and the enormous stupa built after his death outside the city, described by Chinese pilgrims and excavated in the twentieth century, was one of the wonders of the Buddhist world. The surrounding plain was the heart of Gandhara, whose sculptors combined Hellenistic technique with Indian subject matter, and whose work fills the Peshawar Museum.

The city's later history was written by whoever held the road from the Khyber Pass. Mahmud of Ghazni, Babur and a succession of Central Asian armies came through it; the Mughals fortified and gardened it; the Durrani Afghans made it their winter capital in the eighteenth century; the Sikhs took it in 1834; and the British annexed it in 1849 and made it the headquarters of their frontier administration, adding a cantonment, a railway and Islamia College. In April 1930 the Qissa Khwani Bazaar was the scene of a mass shooting of unarmed protesters from Abdul Ghaffar Khan's non-violent movement.

After Partition the city became the provincial capital, and from 1979 the Soviet war in Afghanistan transformed it: millions of refugees arrived, arms and aid flowed through, and the city became a base for the mujahideen and later a listening post for journalists and agencies. The years after 2001 brought insurgency across the border districts and a long series of bombings in the city, including the attack on the Army Public School in December 2014 in which more than 140 people died, most of them children. Security improved from the mid-2010s, but militancy in the surrounding districts increased again after 2021.

Peshawar is a Pashtun city with a Hindko-speaking core: the old families of the walled city speak Hindko, while Pashto is the language of the wider province and of most of the population. Afghan communities, some of whom have lived here for more than forty years, add Dari to the mix, and the border with Afghanistan is social as much as political, with families and trade on both sides.

Pashtunwali, the customary code, governs much of daily conduct: melmastia, or hospitality to any guest; nanawatai, refuge for those who ask; and the settlement of disputes by jirga, a council of elders. The hujra, a men's guest house, remains the place where news is exchanged and disagreements resolved. Two Pashto literary traditions are constantly quoted, the devotional verse of Rahman Baba and the martial poetry of Khushal Khan Khattak, and music means the rabab and the tabla, with the attan danced in a circle at weddings.

The crafts are those of a caravan city: Peshawari chappal sandals, cut from heavy leather; woollen shawls, caps and the flat pakol; copper and brass work; and the carved woodwork seen on the balconies of the old houses. Cricket is the mass passion, and the province has produced a remarkable line of fast bowlers. Manners are formal — elders greeted first, right hand used for eating and giving, tea pressed on every visitor — and social life is strongly separated by gender in public.

Around two million people live in the city, with a much larger population in the district and the towns spreading along the roads to Charsadda and Nowshera. The population has grown fast for four decades, first with Afghan refugees and then with families displaced from the border districts, and unplanned building has filled much of the farmland that once surrounded the old city.

Trade is the engine: Peshawar is the exchange point for goods moving between Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the bazaars deal in cloth, dried fruit, tea, spices, electronics and transport. Marble, furniture and food processing are the main industries, government and the university are large employers, and remittances from Pashtuns working in Karachi and the Gulf support many households. The informal economy is very large.

Days begin early, pause for prayers, and end with long evenings in the bazaars, which stay open late. Most social life happens at home or in the hujra rather than in public venues, and weekends are for family visits and weddings. The standing problems are air pollution, which is severe in winter, traffic, electricity and water supply, the future of the Afghan refugee population as repatriation pressure grows, and the return of militant violence to the districts nearby, which keeps security visible on the streets.

Peshawar's food is the food of the Pashtun hills: meat, bread and rice, cooked simply and served in quantity, with far less chilli and spice than in Punjab or Sindh. The chapli kebab is the city's own — minced beef mixed with tomato, onion, coriander seed and pomegranate seed, pressed into a wide flat patty and fried in a shallow pan of fat until the edges crisp — and it is eaten straight from the pan with naan.

Namak Mandi, the old salt market, is known across Pakistan for its mutton: karahi cooked with nothing more than tomato, salt and ginger in a heavy iron pan, and tikka grilled over wood, sold by weight and eaten with the hands from the pan. Kabuli pulao, rice steamed with lamb stock and topped with sweet carrot and raisin, and rosh, meat stewed with almost no spice, show the Afghan kitchen's long presence here. Fish fried in the winter months and lamb roasted whole for large gatherings complete the repertoire.

Bread is baked in tandoors on nearly every street, including the thick, chewy naan often labelled Peshawari elsewhere in the country. Meals are followed by qehwa, green tea scented with cardamom and drunk from small glasses, offered to every visitor and customer; sheer chai, the salted pink tea of the northern regions, appears in winter. Sweets mean sohan halwa, jalebi and mithai by weight, and the dried fruit and nuts of the bazaar — almonds, pistachios, apricots and raisins traded from Afghanistan and Central Asia — are as much a part of the city's food as any cooked dish.