Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (5 page)

BOOK: Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography
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2
People of the Lost River

As we move from prehistory to history, we
are immediately confronted by a problem of plenty. The early history of India has
two parallel sources, but there is a great deal of disagreement about how they fit
together. On one hand there is the archaeological evidence of the sophisticated
cities of the Harappan Civilization (also called Indus Valley or
Indus–Saraswati civilization). On the other hand, there is the literature
of the Vedic tradition. Their geographies and timelines roughly overlap but
archaeologists and historians have long had difficulty reconciling them. Indeed,
this has remained a hot topic of discussion among scholars and often deteriorates
into a political debate. I do not claim to have resolved the debate. Therefore, I
will tell the two stories separately. I will then focus on the one thing that the
two sources agree on: the drying of a great river that the
Rig
Veda calls the Saraswati. No matter which way one looks at it, the drying of this
river was an important geographical event that defined early India.

THE HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION

Till the early twentieth century, as
already discussed in the previous chapter, it was believed that Indian civilization
began with the ‘Aryan Invasions’ that were supposed to have
taken place around 1500
BC
. These European-like Aryans
were supposed to have come from Central Asia and to have conquered the subcontinent
and then ‘civilized’ the native population. It should not be
lost on the reader that this theory evolved in an intellectual milieu in which
Rudyard Kipling was composing poems such as
The White Man’s
Burden
. The theory was based on the discovery of some linguistic affinities
between European languages and Sanskrit. The date of 1500
BC
was mostly arbitrary. It ignored the fact that both ancient texts and
folk traditions have always maintained a much older timeline, but these were
considered mythical and dismissed. To be fair, there were no known archaeological
equivalents of Egyptian pyramids or Sumerian cities to prove an older history.

However, new discoveries would radically
challenge this view in the early decades of the twentieth century. When the
Lahore–Multan railway line was being built in the late nineteenth century,
wagon-loads of bricks were removed from old mounds to be used as ballast. The bricks
were of exceptionally good quality and most people assumed they were of relatively
recent origin. In the winter of 1911–12,
D.R.
Bhandarkar of the Archaeological Survey of India decided to visit one of the sites
in Sindh called Mohenjodaro (which literally means Mound of the Dead). He came away
unimpressed. In his view, the bricks were of a ‘modern type’ and
the locals had told him that they were from a town that had been abandoned just two
hundred years earlier. He could not have been more wrong. Fortunately, in the 1920s,
Rakhal Das Banerji and Sir John Marshall of the Archaeological Survey decided to
revisit the site. Another team led by Daya Ram Sahni began to excavate another site
called Harappa in Punjab (both these sites are now in Pakistan). They soon realized
that mounds of bricks scattered along the Indus Valley were the remnants of a much
older civilization, a contemporary of the Sumerians, the Minoans and the ancient
Egyptians. It was named the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization.

Soon, more and more sites began to be
discovered. The reason that the Harappan sites were ignored for so long is that they
lack grand structures like the Pyramids of Giza that stare out at a visitor. There
are large buildings that have been given names like ‘granary’,
‘assembly hall’, ‘citadel’ and
‘college’ but these designations are essentially arbitrary. We
do not know what these buildings were really used for and, in most cases, we have
little more than foundations and lower walls. There is nothing that is obviously a
great palace or a temple. One of the few major buildings that we can definitely
identify is the ‘Great Bath’ in Mohenjodaro but even in this
case we do not know if the structure was used for religious rituals (as in later
Hindu temples), a bathing pool for the royal family or some completely different
purpose.

Yet, the Harappan sites are remarkable
for their attention
to urban design and active municipal
management. At its height, the Harappan civilization was very consciously urban. A
large city like Mohenjodaro (now in Pakistan) may have had a population of around
40–50,000 people. Furthermore, we see meticulous town-planning in every
detail—standardized bricks, street grids, covered sewerage systems and so
on. Similarly, a great deal of effort was put into managing water. The solutions
varied from city to city. Mohenjodaro alone may have had 600-700 wells. At Dholavira
in Gujarat, water was diverted from two neighbouring streams into a series of dams
and preserved in a complex system of reservoirs.
1
Many houses, even modest ones, have their own bathrooms and toilets connected
to a drainage network that emptied into soak-jars and cess pits. The toilet commodes
were made up of big pots sunk into the floor. Most interestingly, as historian
Upinder Singh points out, the toilets came equipped with a
‘lota’ for washing up.
2
This must count as one of the most important and enduring of Harappan
contributions to Indian civilization. Unfortunately, the toilet design did not
survive quite as well as the lota.

DEALING WITH SLUMS AND
TECTONICS

Dholavira is a good example of a large
Harappan urban centre. It is on an island in the strange salt-marsh landscape of the
Rann of Kutchh. At the centre of the settlement is a ‘citadel’
which consists of a rectangular ‘castle’ and a
‘bailey’. It is thought that the citadel contained the homes of
the elite as well as public buildings. The castle, which is the oldest part of the
city, was heavily fortified with thick walls and was probably
meant to withstand military attack. Early scholars had a belief that the Harappan
civilization was uniquely peaceful and that there are no signs of military activity.
I disagree. As the citadel at Dholavira suggests, defence was a key consideration.
The times and technologies may have been different, but human nature was the
same.

In front of the citadel there is a large
open ground that could have been used for many purposes—military display,
sport, royal ceremonies or perhaps the annual parading of the gods. Archaeologists
have found tiered seating for spectators along the length of the ground. Beyond the
ceremonial grounds was the planned area where the common citizens lived. This
division into a Citadel and Lower Town is quite common in larger Harappan
settlements. Interestingly, as the city grew, it continued to attract migrants who
could not be fitted into the planned city. This led to the growth of informal
settlements just to the east of the original Lower Town. As we shall see, the
problem with slums is a recurring theme in India’s urban history and we
find them in Mughal Delhi, colonial Bombay and in virtually every modern Indian
city. The difference is that the political leadership of Dholavira responded by
expanding the urban limits and incorporating the slums into the city. According to
Dr R. S. Bisht, who led the excavation of the site, we can still discern how the
civic authorities redeveloped the slums and imposed Harappan municipal order on
them. Thus, Dholavira ended up with three sections—the Citadel, a Middle
Town (i.e. the old Lower Town) and a new Lower Town (the new extension).

The city also had to respond to the
vagaries of nature. Dr Bisht mentions earthquakes that repeatedly affected
Dholavira,
including a particularly severe one around 2600
BC
.
3
We were violently reminded of the tectonic instability of the region when an
earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 20,000 people in the state of
Gujarat on 26 January 2001. The epicentre was not far from Dholavira.

Thus, the picture is not the popular one
of a rigidly pre-planned city but of an evolving urban settlement that was
responding in various ways to natural and human challenges. When one visits an
archaeological site, one tends to admire the ancient masonry in isolation. In
reality, Dholavira was a living city that would have been crowded with soldiers,
traders, artisans, and bullock-carts. Imagine the heat and dust, the sound of
children playing, and street-vendors haggling with their customers.

Given the geographical spread of the
civilization, it is not surprising that there are regional variations. Nonetheless,
there is an extraordinary level of standardization including weights and measures,
the characteristic terracotta seals and so on. This has led many commentators to
argue that there was a centralized empire that imposed order over the whole system.
Unfortunately, we know nothing about the political structure and, as already
mentioned, we have yet to find any building that can be definitely identified as an
imperial palace or a political centre. In fact, we know almost nothing for sure
about historic events, political leaders, religion and language. The Harappans did
have a script but it has not yet been deciphered.

THE MERCHANTS OF MELUHHA

Despite our near-total ignorance about
the political history of the civilization, we now know a great deal about its
geography. Over the last century, thousands of sites have been found and several new
sites are being discovered every year. It appears that the subcontinent was very
populous even at this early stage. The core of the Harappan civilization extended
over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and
extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core
area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on
the Makran coast of Baluchistan, not far from Iran. There is even a site in Central
Asia called Shortughai along the Amu Darya, close to the Afghan-Tajik border. Thus,
the geographical spread, the number of sites and implied population of the Harappan
civilization dwarfs that of contemporary Egypt, China or Mesopotamia. What the
Harappans lack in grand buildings, they make up for in the sheer scale of their
civilizational reach and in the extraordinary municipal sophistication of their
cities.

We also know that the people of the
civilization were actively engaged in domestic and international trade. For land
transport, the Harappans used bullock-carts that are almost exactly the same as
those that can still be seen in rural India. Cart ruts from Harappa show that even
the axle-gauge was almost exactly the same as that of carts used in
today’s Sindh. The streets of Mohenjodaro, Harappa and Dholavira would
have been full of these bullock-carts ferrying goods and merchants. Thousands of
years later, French traveller
Tavernier would speak of how
seventeenth-century Indian highways were clogged by bullock-cart caravans that could
have as many as 10,000–12,000 oxen. He goes on to describe how, when two
such caravans met on a narrow road, there would be a traffic jam and it could take
two or three days for them to pass. One can imagine Harappan highways would have
been quite similar.
4
Perhaps it was one of the great continuities of Indian history.

The numerous rivers of the region would
have been useful waterways for ferrying goods and people. A dry dock has been
discovered at Lothal in Gujarat where vessels would have docked. It is a short drive
from modern Ahmedabad and is worth a day-trip. Little more than foundations and
drains have survived of the urban settlement and the visitor may need help from the
friendly staff of the archaeology museum (across the car park) to make sense of it.
However, the dock—the world’s earliest known—is an
impressive structure. It was connected by a canal to the estuary of the Sabarmati
river and a lock-gate system was used to regulate water flow during tides. Next to
the dock are the remains of warehouses. Standing on the brick blocks of the
warehouses, I imagined the humourless customs officials who would have peered
suspiciously at the merchandise being unloaded from the boats.

There is strong evidence that the
Harappans traded actively with the Persian Gulf. The merchant ships likely hugged
the Makran coast, perhaps with a pit stop at Sutkagen-dor and then sailed on to the
ports of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamian tablets mention a land called Meluhha that
exported bead jewellery, copper, wood, peacocks, monkeys and ivory
5
. These
sound like goods that Indians would have exported.
It is also likely that they exported cotton textiles since the Harappans were the
world pioneers in the spinning and weaving of cotton.
6
To this day, the Indian subcontinent remains a major exporter of cotton
textiles and garments.

Strangely, we have no idea what the
Harappans imported. Hardly any object of Mesopotamian origin has been found at
Harappan sites. Perhaps they imported consumables like dates and wine but we really
do not know. The same can be said about trade with Iran and Central Asia. As already
mentioned, archaeologists have found a Harappan outpost in Shortughai on the
Afghan–Tajik border. What were they doing there? One intriguing
possibility is that they were there to buy horses. The inability to breed
good-quality horses would plague India right into the nineteenth century and force
Indian rulers to import large numbers from Central Asia and Arabia. Marco Polo would
comment on this in the thirteenth century. We will return to this issue later.

WHAT HAPPENED TO INDIA’S
FIRST CITIES?

We now know that this civilization did
not suddenly appear or disappear. Excavations in Mehrgarh, near Quetta in
Balochistan, show the gradual evolution from Neolithic village to an increasingly
more sophisticated culture from around 7000
BC
. The
earliest recognizably Harappan sites date to 3500
BC
.
This early phase lasts till around 2600
BC
. We then enter
the Mature phase from 2600
BC
to 2000
BC
. This is when the great cities were at their height. Note that this
is a Bronze Age culture and there is no systematic use of iron. Then, from
around 2000
BC
we have a steady
disintegration that lasts till 1400
BC
—what is
usually called Late Harappan.

BOOK: Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography
10.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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