The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  Did you know?

  These ancient toilets came equipped with a ‘lota’ for washing up. Though we no longer use the same toilet design in our homes, the lota has survived in Indian toilets!

  CAN YOU READ HARAPPAN?

  Dholavira is a good example of a large Harappan urban centre. It is on an island in the Rann of Kutch. At the centre of the settlement is a ‘citadel’, which consists of a rectangular ‘castle’ and a ‘bailey’ (the outer wall of the castle). The citadel must have contained the homes of the rich as well as public buildings. The castle, which is the oldest part of the city, was heavily fortified with thick walls and equipped to withstand military attack. Early scholars who studied the Harappan Civilization believed that they were uniquely peaceful and that there were no signs of military activity. Then why did they require such walls?

  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 maybe 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. As the city grew, more and more people began to migrate into it and these migrants could not be accommodated in the planned city. So what did they do? They settled down just to the east of the original Lower Town—forming a ‘slum’ area, so familiar to many of our big cities today! However, the political leadership of Dholavira responded to the situation. They expanded the urban limits and included the slums into the city. The slums were redeveloped and the Harappan municipal order was imposed on them, too. And that’s how Dholavira ended up with three sections—the Citadel, a Middle Town (the old Lower Town) and a new Lower Town (the redeveloped slum).

  In 2001, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 20,000 people in the state of Gujarat. The epicentre was not far from Dholavira. Indeed, this area was unstable even in those times and there were many earthquakes that would have affected the city and its development back then. What we see is not the popular image of a rigidly pre-planned city but that of an evolving urban settlement that responded in various ways to the challenges posed by nature and humans.

  When we visit archaeological sites, we tend to see the ancient buildings in isolation. But imagine what a living city would have been like! Picture in your mind the crowds of soldiers, traders, artisans and bullock carts . . . how hot and dusty it must have been. Children like you would have played in its streets!

  Even though there are many regional variations from one city to another in the Harappan Civilization, there are many things that are common to them. How they used standard weights and measures, the typical terracotta seals and so on. But we don’t know what sort of political structure was in place in those times. Much of what we know about the historic events, political leaders, religion and language from the Harappan Civilization remain mere guesses. The Harappans did have a script . . . but nobody has figured out how to read it yet!

  THE MERCHANTS OF MELUHA

  We don’t know much about the political history of the Harappans but we do know a lot about its geography. Over the last century, thousands of sites have been found and several new sites are being discovered every year. It looks like a lot of people lived in the subcontinent 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. Many 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.

  This extensive geographical spread means that the Harappan Civilization was made up of far more people than contemporary Egypt, China or Mesopotamia! What the Harappans lacked in grand buildings, they made up for in the sheer scale of their spread and the sophistication of their cities.

  From what we know about the Harappans, they were actively engaged in domestic and international trade. For land transport, they used bullock carts. Cart ruts from Harappa show that even the axle-gauge of these carts was almost exactly the same as those used in Sindh today. The streets of the big cities would have been full of these carts ferrying merchants and their goods.

  Did you know?

  Traffic jams aren’t exactly a recent phenomenon! The French traveller Tavernier spoke of how seventeenth-century Indian highways were clogged by bullock-cart caravans that could have as many as 10,000–12,000 oxen. When two such caravans met on a narrow road, there would be a traffic jam that could take two or three days to clear! The Harappan highways in those times would have been quite similar.

  There were many rivers in this region and this meant that goods and people could be ferried from one place to another by waterways. A dry dock has been discovered at Lothal, near Ahmedabad, in Gujarat. The dock, which seems to be the world’s first, 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 the warehouses.

  An estuary is a partly enclosed coastal body of salt water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it. It also has a connection to the open sea.

  There is strong evidence to show that the Harappans traded actively with the Persian Gulf. The merchant ships probably went along 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 Meluha that exported bead jewellery, copper, wood, peacocks, monkeys and ivory—goods that sound like Indian exports. It’s also likely that the Harappans exported cotton because they were the pioneers in the spinning and weaving of cotton. Even now, the Indian subcontinent is a major exporter of cotton textiles and garments.

  But what did the Harappans bring to their land from other civilizations? We don’t know! Hardly any object of Mesopotamian origin has been found at the Harappan sites. Did they import consumable goods like dates and wines? We don’t know what they bought from Iran and Central Asia either. Archaeologists have found a Harappan outpost in Shortughai on the Afghan-Tajik border. What were the Harappans doing there? Could they have gone there to buy horses? Indians have always had problems with breeding good-quality horses—even Marco Polo commented about this in the thirteenth century! We know that as late as the nineteenth century, Indian rulers imported large numbers of horses from Central Asia and Arabia . . . but we’ll talk more about this later.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO INDIA’S FIRST CITIES?

  We now know that this civilization did not suddenly appear or disappear. Rather, these cities were built gradually, sometimes rebuilt on older sites, and their disintegration too was gradual. But why were these cities abandoned? This did not happen overnight, so it’s clear that it wasn’t because of ‘Aryan’ invasions as it had been thought earlier.

  The evidence points to the wrath of nature. A number of studies have shown that the area which is today the Thar Desert was once far wetter, and that the climate slowly became drier. It is possible that the process of drying had already begun during the Mature Harappan period (2600 BCE to 2000 BCE). Around 2200 BCE, the monsoons had become weaker and there were prolonged droughts. This was a widespread phenomenon that also affected Egypt and Turkey. Poor monsoons and droughts would have created an agricultural crisis for a heavily populated region but the Harappans were faced with an even bigger problem—the drying up of the river system on which the civilization was based.

  Most of the settlements of the civilization were around a river that we now know as the Ghaggar—not the Indus as widely believed. The Ghaggar is now little more than a dry riverbed that contains water only after heavy rains. However, surveys and satellite photographs confirm that it was once
a great river that rose in the Himalayas, entered the plains in Haryana, flowed through the Thar-Cholistan Desert of Rajasthan and eastern Sindh and then reached the sea in the Rann of Kutch in Gujarat.

  The Rann of Kutch has a very strange marshy landscape. This is partly due to the fact that it was once the estuary of a great river. Much of it is now dry desert but satellite photographs show that there is still a substantial amount of underground water along the old channels. Wells, even drilled at shallow depths, give fresh water in the middle of the Thar Desert!

  The Ghaggar emerges from hills just east of Chandigarh and is joined by a number of other seasonal rivers in the plains of northern Haryana. The Ghaggar and some of these rivers were perennial in ancient times. That is, they always had water, no matter what the season. Satellite images show that both the Sutlej and the Yamuna once flowed into the Ghaggar—this means that it would have been a truly mighty river!

  However, at some point, the Ghaggar seems to have lost its main sources of glacial melt from the Himalayas. The Sutlej and the Yamuna, its largest tributaries, abandoned it for the Indus and the Ganga respectively. Once again, this seems to have happened because of tectonic shifts. The Ghaggar no longer flowed to the sea. It may have struggled on with the help of seasonal tributaries but even these failed as the climate changed.

  All of this would have taken place over decades or even centuries and different parts of the Harappan world would have experienced these changes differently. Cities on the banks of the Indus, for example, may have suffered floods as waters from the Sutlej suddenly entered their region. The Pakistan floods of 2010 provide a glimpse of what this might have felt like—especially if such an event had caused the mighty Indus to shift course.

  What impact did the drying of the Ghaggar have on the Harappans? The climate was wetter when the Ghaggar was in full flow in the early phase of the civilization. There is evidence to suggest that urban centres actually flourished when the Ghaggar began to dry up—there is a dense concentration of Harappan sites in the Thar Desert around the time we think that the Ghaggar might have started to dry up. Maybe the drying weather briefly created conditions that allowed them to flourish.

  However, around 2000 BCE, conditions worsened. The lack of water began to affect the Harappans. Their carefully managed cities began to fall apart and they began to migrate. Too little water or too much water still causes people to sometimes migrate from their place of origin. Imagine the long lines of bullock carts, heavily laden with personal belongings, people leaving their old villages and cities in search of a better future!

  In the north, the Harappans moved north-east to the Yamuna and Ganga. In Gujarat, the cities in Kutch were abandoned in favour of new settlements in the Narmada and Tapti valleys to the south. The later Harappan sites did have cultural connections with the old ones but they remained small settlements. The old urban sophistication had broken down.

  WHERE DID THE HARAPPANS GO?

  Even though some say that the Harappan culture disappeared with the disintegration of its cities, some others put forth compelling evidence to show that many of their cultural traits have been passed on over the years. For example, Indians usually greet each other with the ‘namaste’. It is a common way to show respect. Do you know that several clay figurines from the Harappan sites have their palms held together in a namaste, too? Not just that, there are terracotta dolls of women with red vermilion on their foreheads—even today, many Hindu married women apply ‘sindur’ on their foreheads, don’t they? Still, even though all of this is very intriguing, we cannot be absolutely sure that the Harappans used these gestures and symbols in the same ways as we do now.

  The Harappans had a standardized system of ratios, weights and measures, many of which are echoed 2000 years later in the Arthashastra, a manual on governance and political economy written in the third century BCE. Some of these measures and ratios were used in India till the twentieth century! It was only since 1958 that we started using the metric system.

  It has long been known that the game of chess originated in India. Chess pieces that look a lot like the modern equivalents have been found in Harappan sites. Isn’t it amazing that a game we play in our modern world was also played more than 4000 years ago? The streets of Kalibangan, a large Harappan site in Indian Punjab, are laid out with widths in a progression prescribed in the Arthashastra. Perhaps this indicates that the Harappans didn’t just disappear but that they live on amongst us? This is why it is no coincidence that genetic data on ANI-ASI mixing fits exactly with the period when the Harappans were migrating. This mixing led to what we now know as the Indian civilization. However, as we said at the beginning of this chapter, there is one other parallel source that we must turn to which gives us clues about the origin of civilization in the Indian subcontinent—the Vedic tradition.

  DIGGING THROUGH THE RIG VEDA

  The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of the Hindu tradition. There are four books or Vedas—Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva. They consist mostly of prayers, hymns, and instructions on how to conduct rituals and fire sacrifices. They were composed and compiled over several centuries by rishis or poet-philosophers.

  The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four and is organized in ten sections. It is the oldest book in the world and remains in active use. It’s considered by Hindus to be the most sacred of texts and one of its hymns, the Gayatri Mantra, is chanted by millions daily even today.

  The Rig Veda is composed in a very old form of Sanskrit. But how old? We don’t know for sure. The dates vary from 4000 BCE to 1000 BCE. Dating it is no easy task since it was probably compiled over decades or even centuries and remained a purely orally transmitted tradition till the third century CE. However, it is clear that the Rig Veda belongs to the Bronze Age as it does not mention iron. The earliest possible mention of iron comes in the Atharva Veda, which was compiled many centuries later and talks of a ‘krishna ayas’ or ‘dark bronze’. Since we know that iron was in use in India by 1700 BCE, this would roughly date the Atharva Veda. Perhaps the Rig Veda was compiled a few centuries earlier, no later than 2000 BCE and possibly a lot earlier.

  Since the nineteenth century, the Rig Veda has been used to find out more about early Indian history. While the book is about religion and philosophy and does not concern itself with social and political conditions, it does give us an idea about Bronze Age society, its social customs, its material and philosophical concerns, its gods and its tribal feuds. But it’s difficult to make out historical events from the hymns.

  The geography of the book, though, is very clear. To the east, the book talks of the Ganga river, and to the west, of the Kabul river. It also talks of the Himalayan mountains in the north and the seas to the south (i.e. the Arabian Sea). This is a very well defined geographical area and roughly coincides with the Harappan world.

  What’s most interesting is that the Rig Veda speaks repeatedly of a great river called the Saraswati. It is described as the greatest of rivers. No less than forty-five of the Rig Veda hymns shower praise on the Saraswati! No other river or geographical feature has got so much importance—the great Ganga is barely mentioned and the Indus, although referred to as a mighty river, is not given the same amount of respect. The Saraswati, on the other hand, was considered to be the mother of all rivers. It was even called the ‘inspirer of hymns’—it’s quite possible that the Rig Veda was composed on its banks.

  However, there is no living river in modern India that fits this description. Some historians say that the Saraswati was simply a figment of imagination. Others believe it is the Helmand river in Afghanistan. But why go to other sources when the Rig Veda itself describes the geographical location of the river? In the Nadistuti Sukta (Hymn to the Rivers), the major rivers are listed from east to west, starting with the Ganga. The hymn clearly places the Saraswati between the Yamuna and the Sutlej.

  There is only one river that could fit this description—the Ghaggar! It seems very likely that the Rig Vedic people and the Harappans w
ere dealing with the same river. Unlike later texts, the Rig Veda does not mention a drying Saraswati. It mentions clearly that the Saraswati entered the sea in full flow. This would suggest that the text was composed before 2600 BCE! The Rig Veda talks of poets and compositions from an even earlier age but these works have not survived. Could it be that this culture coincided with the early Harappans? Not everyone may agree with these conclusions but these are definitely possibilities.

  TRUE OR FALSE?

  Why do some find it difficult to believe that the Rig Vedic people and the Harappans were the same? One of the oldest arguments is that the Rig Vedic people were nomads from Central Asia who could not have built the sophisticated cities of the Harappan civilization. They claim that this is why the Rig Veda reveals little knowledge of India’s geography beyond the North West. But then, the Rig Veda neither mentions an invasion nor does it provide any information about Central Asia. All we can understand from the text is that these people were living in the area that corresponds roughly to modern Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab (including Pakistani Punjab). They also knew of the Himalayas in the north, the seas in the south, the Ganga to the east and eastern Afghanistan to the west. It is possible that they may have known about South India and Central Asia but the text doesn’t make any mention of this.