Nangarhar fills a long, warm valley in eastern Afghanistan where the Kabul River, joined by the Kunar, runs east towards the Khyber Pass. Its capital, Jalalabad, lies only about 575 metres above sea level, and its mild, almost tropical winters have drawn rulers, gardeners and travellers for centuries. The name is usually traced to ancient Nagarahara, often explained as “the land of settlements”, and few parts of the country hold so many layers of history in so small a space.
A river plain below the White Mountain
The Jalalabad valley stretches roughly 130 kilometres from west to east. The Kabul River is its main artery: the Surkhrud joins it just west of Jalalabad, and the glacier-fed Kunar near the city. Along the southern border rises the Spin Ghar, or Safed Koh, whose perennial streams water the fields below and whose flanks still hold belts of natural forest.
Summers on the valley floor are fierce, often passing 40 °C, and rainfall is low, around 200–400 millimetres a year, so farming depends on canals, springs and karez channels. A dam at Darunta, built in 1957, generates electricity for the province.
Buddhist Hadda and Mughal gardens
Between roughly the first and seventh centuries CE the valley belonged to the world of Gandhara, where Hellenistic and Buddhist influences met. Its great sanctuary was Hadda, a few kilometres south of Jalalabad, a place of pilgrimage whose shrines were said to keep a fragment of the Buddha’s skull, a tooth, some hair and his staff. Hadda is famous for lively stucco sculptures in a Hellenistic-tinged Gandharan style, most of them from the Kushan period. French and Afghan archaeologists excavated it in the twentieth century; much of the site has since been lost, and surviving pieces are divided between the Kabul Museum and the Musée Guimet in Paris.
Nangarhar’s mild winters also pleased the Mughals. In 1508–09 Babur laid out his Bagh-e Wafa, the Garden of Fidelity, on a rise south of the fort of Adinapur: a four-part garden with a running stream and trees of oranges, citrons and pomegranates, to which he later added bananas and sugar cane. The Mughal emperor Jahangir built gardens at Nimla in 1610, and in the early twentieth century Amir Habibullah raised the Seraj al-Emarat palace in Jalalabad. The city itself has its own entry in this atlas.
People, fields and markets
Most people are Pashtun, from tribes such as the Shinwari, Mohmand, Khogiani and Safi, and Pashto is the main language. Pashai is spoken in some highland valleys, Dari is also used, especially in administration, and in past centuries Jalalabad’s bazaars also counted Hindu and Kashmiri traders. Each winter Kuchi herders come down with their flocks to the warm plain around Jalalabad.
Farming is the backbone of life. Rice, maize, wheat, sugar cane and vegetables grow on irrigated land, and Jalalabad’s oranges and watermelons are known well beyond the province. Olive groves line the road to Torkham, the region has long been known for gora, a brown cane sugar, and its old Gandamak wheat was once especially prized.