The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The excavations developed slowly, initially on a small scale. Eventually, under the ground at Harappa, untouched by the railway contractors, the huge brick revetments of a fortified citadel would be uncovered, and on the west side, where the railway contractors had left off their depredations, a cutting through the citadel wall would expose a canyon of bricks, still solid, 50 feet deep. It was immediately apparent that the place had been a great city on the scale of the urban centres of the Near East. The finds at Harappa, and at Mohenjo-Daro in Sind in late 1923, took place in the same period of eighteen months or so that saw Leonard Woolley excavate the tombs of Ur in Iraq, and, of course, Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Although the finds at Harappa were less spectacular in terms of artefacts, the significance of the dig went way beyond either.

  The discoveries here and at Mohenjo-Daro represented the beginning of the history of the Indian subcontinent, taking its cities back to 3000 BC – before the Pyramids of Giza. Until the dig at Harappa, it had been widely believed in Europe that civilization in India was a foreign import, that it was the creation of the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, and the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Near East, with a little help from their ancient predecessors in Egypt and Babylon. The Indian Brahmin priests, however, had long asserted that their own civilization went back thousands of years. Their tradition of the great war in the epic poem the Mahabharata took it back 5000 years, while their traditional genealogies, the ancient texts known as Puranas, contained king lists that, if taken literally, would take Indian chronology back to the Bronze Age. In the eighteenth century some Western thinkers had been prepared to take these ideas at face value and to seek connections (however misguided they might seem now) with ancient Egypt and the Bible. But the colonial orientalist project tended in the main to dismiss Hindu thought as superstition and fetishism, a more ‘primitive’ stage of culture, which needed to be emancipated by the science, reason and religion of the West. No one believed that an indigenous Indian civilization could go back far before the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. Back in 1924, though, Marshall could have had no idea how far back Harappa might go, just that it was ‘older than anything known in India’, and (with uncanny intuition) that it must be indigenous, and ‘as distinctive of the region as that of the Pharaohs was distinctive of the Nile’. My mind whirling, I closed his account and finally fell asleep with a last feeble swat at the descendants of Masson’s mosquitoes.

  A little after 5 a.m. Tanweer wakes us with hot water and black coffee under the huge banyan behind the house, which stands like a massive, aged sentinel from a time when this region was still India. The first mauve light brings shapes out of the mist and reveals a white dusting over the salt-encrusted landscape. Cheered by the coffee, we walk out on to the site, past spoil heaps and the stumps of walls, with burnt bricks littered everywhere. We watch the sun rise from the top of the site surrounded by feathered trees, all that remains of Harappa’s rakh forest. The atmosphere is still and ghostly white. Long plumes of pale smoke rise from brick kilns, whose spindly chimneys can be seen a few miles off, spreading flat across the fields to the west along the horizon. Brick was the great building medium of the Harappan civilization, and in the Punjab for thousands of years. The brick kilns must have been working overtime back then when these giant cities were built by thousands of workers, who created huge brick-foundation platforms and giant berms and bunds to fight the unremitting floods. From our vantage point, we look over the old bed of the Ravi, which once flowed under the city walls, and we can hear the village rising, ox-carts beginning to trundle down the banks of the irrigation ditches as the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer.

  The joint Pakistani and US team is currently engaged in a new dig. Rolling back the frontiers of knowledge still further, it is now possible to trace the links with the earlier Baluchi sites excavated by the French in Mehrgahr, and to put the Indus cities in the context of a 10,000-year history of civilization in the subcontinent. Mark Kenoyer, the American on the team, is a remarkable man. Born in India, he speaks four native languages fluently, and it is his experience of the life lived rather than of books read that informs his insights into the continuities of Indian civilization. I had caught up with him in the UK before our journey, and he told me:

  Even in today’s Harappa you can see the legacy of the Indus cities reflected in the layout of houses and settlements, and in the traditional arts and crafts, which still use the old techniques. We have even found little clay toys that are identical to the ones made in the Punjab until today. These are the living links between the people of the Indus cities and the later population of Pakistan and India.

  MOHENJO-DARO: THE MOUND OF THE DEAD

  About 150 miles below Harappa the rivers of the Punjab join to become the Indus, from which the name India (Hind in Persian) is derived. The sensational finds in the early 1920s showed that, like the Nile and the Euphrates, the Indus river valley was home to a great early civilization. The Indus, like the other Himalayan rivers, is swollen by the spring snow melt, and above all by the summer monsoon. Before the modern construction of barrages, a million tons of silt a day were carried past to be deposited on the riverbed or at the delta mouth. This led to a progressive aggregation of the plain, which has pushed the mouth 70 miles into the Arabian Sea since the time of Alexander the Great. Sometimes the huge weight of silt forces the river to break its banks and find another course. A famous passage in the writings of Strabo about Alexander’s expedition describes how they saw ‘a deserted zone which contained more than a hundred towns with all the villages dependent on them. The Indus having quit its bed, had moved across to another bed on its left bank, a deeper one, and poured into it like a cataract. No longer irrigated, the region formerly inundated on its right bank, whose bed it had left, now found itself high and dry above the level of the annual floods.’

  After the initial discoveries at Harappa, Marshall and his Indian colleagues now looked for an untouched site in this southern region of the Indus and in 1923 they chose a promising site 400 miles to the south in the arid plains of Sind. Here was a vast ruin still crowned by a Buddhist stupa of the Kushan period, the time of the Romans in the West. Mohenjo-Daro, the ‘mound of the dead’, lay on a ridge in the floodplain known to locals as ‘the Island’. Although the ridge is now deeply buried by the annual flooding that covered the plain even in Indus times, it must have been much more prominent during the prehistoric period, with the early city standing on a massive artificial platform high above the plain and entirely surrounded by water during periods of flood. Despite the ravages of time, and of floods that had cut a great swathe across the site, it was still huge, by far the largest of the Indus cities, extending over a square mile, with widespread mounds and outlying suburbs.

  On the mound whole sectors of housing had survived in good condition, with deep, brick-lined wells, and latrines at the end of every block, which were connected to sewers large enough to walk in. Everything was planned with strange regularity: ‘Anyone walking through it for the first time,’ said John Marshall, ‘might fancy himself surrounded by the ruins of some present-day working town in Lancashire.’ The most imposing part of Mohenjo-Daro was the Great Bath, which was in the citadel. It is a finely built, brick-lined bathing tank 40 feet long, with a large building on the side variously interpreted as a temple, or even some kind of ‘college’. Not unnaturally, the excavator, Rakhhaldas Banerji, suspected some connection with later ritual bathing tanks in Indian temples. The citadel is an impressive construction built on a high mound of dirt, with an artificial brick platform that it is estimated would have taken 10,000 workers about thirteen months to create. This upper city rises from the floodplain, covering an area about 600 x 1200 feet. An ancient brick bund or flood barrier 4 miles to the east diverted the main flow of the Indus away from the city.

  In its heyday, Mohenjo-Daro would have dominated the riverine trade networks moving from the coast to the northern Indus pla
in, as well as the trade routes leading to the passes in the Bolan valley to the west. One of today’s excavators of Mohenjo-Daro, Michael Janssen, thinks the empire must have been linked by boat. ‘Life in Mohenjo-Daro was semi-amphibious. For four to five months of the year the plain of Sind was a vast sheet of water. The cities were linked by river, and there must have been a revolution in boat transport to create what looks like a gigantic network; this may also help to explain the homogenization of the material culture.’ Close to Mohenjo-Daro, on the Indus at Sukkur, you can still see these kinds of boat – great wooden vessels with ornate sterns some 80–90 feet long, carved wood deck-houses, and huge sails – just as depicted on Indus seals. Flat-bottomed, to cope with a wide, shallow river, strong current and frequent winds, they are a living continuity with the Bronze Age.

  If you could have glimpsed it from the air, Mohenjo-Daro in its heyday would have been a vast, irregular hexagon, the suburbs protected by enormous brick embankments against the river inundations. The main part of the city was a warren of houses, overlooked by the citadel with its fine buildings. Imagine the burning Sindhi summers, with cotton awnings stretched over sun-baked courtyards and streets, just as one can see today; or the chill winters, with domestic wood fires sending myriad streamers of smoke lifting over the rooftops and swirling in spindrifts across ink-black monsoon skies, while carved boats with great cotton sails leave the jetties and head downriver towards the Gulf, with their cargoes of precious wood, elephant ivory, cotton and lapis lazuli.

  THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

  So a picture emerged with dramatic swiftness in the 1920s of the earliest civilization of India. It was bigger in area than Egypt and Mesopotamia or any other ancient civilization. We now know there were over 2000 major settlements, extending as far as the Oxus river in northern Afghanistan, some of which were big, planned cities on the Near Eastern model. Most of its mounds remain unexplored, including several huge ones near Harappa. Using data from Alexander’s day, the Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the first century AD, said the Punjab had 5000 large settlements that deserved the Greek name polis (city). The old riverbeds here are still lined with great city mounds; and the dried-up Ghaggar-Hakra bed has 1500 prehistoric sites, some, like the untouched mound of Ganwerianwala, the same size as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Not only were they vast, they were also populous. The size of the civilization is estimated at anywhere between 2 million and 5 million people, although no one knows for certain, and is surely a pointer to the fact that with nearly 1.5 billion people today, the Indian subcontinent is the most populous place on Earth, and it no doubt was in ancient world.

  But who were the rulers? The archaeologists think that there are several perplexing clues. Mohenjo-Daro bears all the signs of a city that was willed into existence by some powerful person or group of people; a ‘founder city’, like, say, Alexandria. The streets were straight, laid out on a north–south and east– west grid. The houses of brick on top of stone foundations seem to have been built to standard designs. Nearly all of them were connected to a city-wide drainage system, and each block had one or more water wells, but there are no great tombs as we find in, say, Egypt, Iraq or China, and no great palatial buildings. Yet although there is no material evidence for rulers, all around is indirect testimony to some kind of powerful, centrally directed organizing influence. Who oversaw foreign commerce by sea and regulated the system of weights? Who established the uniform sign system in the script? How to explain the apparently common religion, uniform pottery and coherent Indus style of artefacts over a period of 700 years, spanning nearly thirty generations? ‘We have the strange situation of a complex ancient society without the ostentations of ideology or evidence of a focused leadership, like a king or queen,’ says Mark Kenoyer. ‘There’s no real model in history for a civilization like this one.’

  Strangest of all for the archaeologists is that they found no evidence of war and conflict. In Egypt and Mesopotamia war was the great occupation of Bronze Age rulers. In inscriptions and images on stelas, art and sculpture, war is the central theme. Here that is not the case. And did the ancient Greeks not say of Indians that they never waged aggressive war beyond India out of their own deep-rooted cultural aversion and ‘their respect for justice’? Certainly they had fortified cities, but there are no images of war on the thousands of Indus seals, and no depiction of warfare, captive-taking or killing.

  ‘Is it possible,’ asks Mark Kenoyer, ‘that in the long, gradual evolution of over 4000 years of local cultures before the age of cities, they worked out how to organize their settlements, interact with other communities, what to do with surpluses, how to pass on knowledge and how to resolve conflict? It’s an intriguing idea that early India was different from other civilizations. The answer to that is that we don’t know.’

  Although the later history of India was often incredibly violent, it is clear that the idea of non-violence runs very deep in Indian thought, from the Buddha, the Jains, the Ashokan edicts and the Gupta kings through to Mahatma Gandhi, and it may not have been new in the fifth century BC. Jain culture in particular has very archaic features, and derives from the zone of the Indus civilization in Gujarat. But if anything like that were true, it would be unique in the violent history of humanity.

  WHY DID THE CIVILIZATION COLLAPSE?

  Towards 1800 BC, after 700 years of apparent stability, the Indus civilization collapsed and its cities were abandoned. Its disappearance, apparently leaving little trace, poses another big question: what led to its downfall? There have been many suggestions, including, as we shall see, outside invasion. But experts are now increasingly looking at climate change as a chief factor. In London I went to see Sanjiv Gupta, an expert in geology and hydrography at Imperial College. Sanjiv deals in aeons of geological time, in which a mere 4000 years is as yesterday. The level of analysis now possible in his field is staggering; for example, he can take grains of sand from a riverbed and tell us where they came from. At present he is looking at one of the most controversial questions in early Indian history – the possible existence of a great river system east of the Indus that dried up in the Bronze Age and that some identify with the legendary lost sacred river, the Saraswati. He is still formulating the questions he will ask when he can take an expedition on the ground.

  On the screen in Sanjiv’s office are satellite images of Rajasthan, different colours denoting sand-dunes, vegetation and the presence of water. He explains:

  The Punjab has many lost watercourses. Here rivers change course quite dramatically, and most of the big rivers have shifted by several miles, even in the last two or three thousand years. But the big question at the moment is whether there really was a lost river. Local oral traditions were noticed by the British in the nineteenth century, and several gazetteers pick up this idea of a lost river. The explorer Aurel Stein, searching for sites connected with Alexander the Great in the 1930s, took horses down the Beas, where he came upon a vast depression, up to 2 or 3 miles across. Now look at what we see with the satellite photos …

  On the computer screen a montage joins three landsat images, and a dark, snaking line appears, stretching from northeast to southwest across the Rajasthani desert.

  Look at the dark line winding across Rajasthan before it loses itself in the sand-dunes of the Thar desert. There’s definitely something there, though we need to go on the ground to confirm it. There are no habitation sites there today, but now look at this. We’ve computerized the main Bronze Age sites using information from Indian and Pakistani archaeologists, and data from surface surveys on both sides of the border. The Pakistani team tracked 1500 sites through the desert of Cholistan, and they all seem to map out a feature that connects with ours.

  On the screen, a line of orange dots appears, clustering alongside the dark, snaking feature, all of them representing settlements from the Harappan civilization in its last phase, when we know the big cities, such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, were still functioning. The feature seems to extend fo
r over 90 miles of the Thar desert, from Rajasthan across the Pakistan border.

  We can go in and focus on individual places. Let’s take one site. This one, 120 miles southeast of Harappa, is Kalibangan, excavated by Indian archaeologists in the 1970s. It’s a major Harappan-period city and stands right on the dried-up bed you saw on the satellite imagery. Clearly, this once held water. In the Bronze Age Kalibangan was on a river, or a major seasonal source of water, and was an important centre of population. Now obviously, you couldn’t have had all these sites where there was no water, and the reason for their existence is the river whose drying up we can date pretty closely. So what happened to the people? Now look at this.

  On the screen appears a new set of data: a series of green dots flashes up, spreading across from the area of the lost river to the plain of the river Ganges and the Jumna. The number of sites along the Indus has now declined, and they vanish altogether from the area of the presumed lost river; but many more have now appeared in the Ganges–Jumna doab (the tract of land lying between the two rivers). It looks like a massive shift of settlement and population.

  ‘These green dots are the sites that were occupied after the end of the Indus cities. Those cities died out over a century or two around 1800 BC, including all the sites along the lost river; then these sites developed, moving eastwards into the upper Ganges and Jumna valleys, becoming the centre of the next phase of Indian civilization – indeed, right up until today.’

  ‘So did they move due to environmental collapse or climate change?’ I ask.

  ‘Maybe there was a change in the monsoon regime,’ says Sanjiv, ‘but it certainly looks as if the amount of water on the Ghaggar-Hakra diminished, and that helped prompt the movement of people eastwards. It looks like it, but the only way to be sure is to go and examine the geology and sediment. To get accurate dating we have to get out on the ground.’