D.P Agrawal: ‘It is obvious that in north and west Rajasthan tectonically changed paleochannel configurations were a major factor which affected the human settlements, perhaps from the pre-Harappan times onwards. Major diversions cut off the vital tributaries and growing desiccation . . . dried up the once mighty Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers.’54
V.N. Misra: ‘Late Harappan sites are concentrated on the tributaries of the [Sarasvatī] river, originating in the Siwalik Hills. They appear to be a consequence of the desiccation of the river and mass migration of the population to less dry regions near the Siwalik Hills and across the Yamuna.’55
Marco Madella and Dorian Fuller : ‘Archaeological research in Cholistan has led to the discovery of a large number of sites along the dry channels of the Ghaggar-Hakra river (often identified with the lost Sarasvati and Drishadvati rivers of Sanskrit traditions) ... The final desiccation of some of these channels may have had major repercussions for the Harappan Civilisation and is considered a major factor in the de-centralisation and de-urbanisation of the Late Harappan period.’56
However, the Sarasvatī’s disappearance does not rule out other factors in the decline of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization. Possehl, for instance, acknowledging that ‘over the course of the third and second millennia, the Sarasvati dried up’,57 still prefers a socio-cultural cause for the end of the urban phase. In this perspective, the natural cataclysm could have been a sort of coup de grâce delivered to an already weakened socio-political fabric. Exactly in what order each contributory factor played its part, we may never know.
LESSON FROM THE PAST
Over a few centuries—this much we know—the great river died. The word is apt, for we forget too easily that a river, just like a living organism, is born, thrives, declines and disappears. In fact, the phenomenon is happening once more before our eyes: all glacier-fed Himalayan rivers—including the Ganges, the Yamuna, the Brahmaputra and the Indus—are threatened by the rapid melting of the glaciers that constitute their perennial sources. Current studies estimate that within thirty to fifty years, all of them will be reduced to the status of rain-fed, seasonal rivers.58 The chain of repercussions this will have on the whole of South Asia is beyond comprehension—at least beyond that of our statesmen, who are too busy with ‘global’ matters to even begin to grasp this disaster in the making under their very noses.
There is a difference, however, between the Sarasvatī’s disappearance and that of the Ganges or the Brahmaputra. The first was a ‘natural calamity’, as we might call it (though deforestation in Haryana and Punjab could conceivably have accelerated the desertion of the Sutlej and the Yamunā). But the second will be wholly man-made, as our hyperactivity overheats the planet and global warming causes glaciers and ice sheets to melt away. The most optimistic among environmentalists believe that we still have a few years to reverse the trend; but that will require a bold, united effort across regional and world powers, and there optimism collides with a big question mark.
The twenty-first century may well mark the end of the 3000-year-old Ganges civilization. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that it was essentially riverine. Even if numerous seasonal streams persist, they will not sustain the current density of population. While the scattered Late Harappans were able to adapt themselves to the new situation, fall back on rural settlements or create new ones, relocating themselves when necessary, where will the multitude of their Gangetic successors migrate?
Part 3
FROM SARASVATĪ TO GANGĀ
‘From the Neolithic time till almost today there has never been, in spite of spectacular changes in the course of time, a definite gap or break in the history of the subcontinent.’
Jean-François Jarrige
‘A continuous series of cultural developments links the so-called two major phases of urbanization in South Asia . . . The essential of Harappan identity persisted.’
Jim Shaffer
{9}
The Tangible Heritage
Did the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization, then, vanish without a trace? Very nearly so, if we are to believe many histories of India.
In a recent work, Romila Thapar, a noted historian of ancient India, writes that after the collapse of the Indus cities, ‘the material culture shows no continuities’.1 In this perspective, though minor cases of survival might be spotted here and there, the Harappan world completely disintegrated: ‘The civilization did indeed come to an end,’2 as Shereen Ratnagar puts it, stressing ‘the end of the traditions of sculpture, writing, architecture and, presumably, also seafaring’.3 Most of the second millennium BCE would then be a long ‘dark age’, as it has often been called, until urbanism was finally reborn in the Ganges Valley in the first millennium BCE—but urbanism of a kind wholly unrelated to its Harappan antecedent.
Some archaeologists have shared this view: A. Ghosh, for instance, wrote in 1973, ‘All the scanty data at present available taken into consideration, the possibility of Harappan urbanism surviving or resuscitating in the upper Ganga basin through the Late Harappan and ochre-coloured ware* sites in the middle of the first millennium BC may be forthwith rejected .. .’4 But Ghosh rested his case mostly on the study of pottery, and data from other fields are no longer so ‘scanty’ as they were in his time.
In fact, evidence that has been growing by leaps and bounds during the last few decades has been painting a very different picture. Some archaeologists, such as Possehl, now speak of ‘transformation’5 rather than ‘end’ of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization; in the terminology proposed by Jim Shaffer, the Late Harappan phase (roughly 1900-1300 BCE) is called the ‘Localization Era’, to reflect the splintering of the Harappan tradition into localized forms no longer cohesively held together. In that view, there is no ‘end’, but a series of transitions that reflect both ‘continuity and change’,6 in Kenoyer’s words. Shaffer goes so far as to suggest that the end of Harappan urbanism might itself be something of an illusion:
The often stated disappearance of urban centers noted for the Late Harappan [phase] is an assumption7 . . . There is no conclusive archaeological evidence to indicate that large ‘urban’ settlements disappear.8
Far more extensive excavations will alone put this challenging statement to test. What concerns us here is the quantum of continuity: did the Harappan culture fizzle out, or were some of its elements transmitted to the historical developments in the Gangetic region, where India’s classical civilization grew? If it was the latter, were those transmissions of a fragmented, incidental sort (‘disconnected’9 as Ratnagar calls them), or did they form a more substantial body, a significant bridge between the two cultures?
This debate has been growing in intensity in recent decades for a reason extraneous to archaeology: scholars who hold that hypothetical Aryans invaded or migrated into the subcontinent towards the middle of the second millennium BCE divide India’s protohistory into the ‘pre-Aryan’ and ‘Aryan’ eras, with the Harappan world falling into the former and the Gangetic into the latter. In this view, these two civilizations, being the creations of different peoples speaking different tongues, using different technologies, and having very different religions and cultures, are perforce separated by a gulf: a ‘Vedic Night’, as it was often called or, in Wheeler’s phrase, a ‘Vedic Dark Age’.10
The Indus civilization is thus seen as brilliant, no doubt, but ephemeral and solitary—an island in space and time: ‘That civilization is not the direct origin of the Indian civilization’,11 writes the French scholar Bernard Sergent, the ‘direct origin’ being the Ganges civilization supposedly created by the recently arrived Vedic Aryans. Between the two is an ‘immense “gap”. . . the historical discontinuity between Harappan India and historical India’.12 ‘Discontinuity’ is indeed the keyword of the invasionist perspective, which has been the dominant one since the days of Marshall, who was perhaps the first to label the Harappan culture as ‘pre-Aryan’. In 1961, the noted British prehistorian and archaeologist Stuart Piggot, another propon
ent of the ‘Dark Age’13 concept, affirmed that ‘the long-established [Harappan] cultural traditions of northwestern India were rudely and ruthlessly interrupted by the arrival of new people from the west’.14 A.L. Basham concurred, finding the culture of the incoming Aryans ‘diametrically opposed to its [Harappan] predecessor’.15 The contrast is total, the gap unbridgeable. More recently, the US Sanskritist Michael Witzel, an ardent proponent of the Aryan invasion theory, wrote, ‘The Indo-Aryans, as described in the Rig-Veda, represent something definitely new in the subcontinent. Both their spiritual and much of their material culture are new.’16
Therefore the question before us is: Was the Ganges civilization built upon a legacy from its predecessor (and if so, how much of a legacy), or was it completely unrelated to it as the above scholars assert? Let us begin with the ‘material’ aspect before we move to the ‘spiritual’ in the next chapter.
URBANISM AND ARCHITECTURE
Excavations of historical urban centres in the Gangetic region have been disappointingly few and limited in extent, with many of them lying buried under modern cities and therefore being largely inaccessible. Even with such limited data, Jim Shaffer17 and the British archaeologist Robin Coningham,18 among other scholars, have highlighted parallels between the Harappan city and its counterpart of later historical times. For instance, both generally had an internal planning based on a grid plan; both had monumental public architecture; both had enclosing fortifications.
In a recent study,19 Piotr A. Eltsov went further and proposed that in both cities, fortifications had a symbolic rather than a utilitarian role, standing for authority and segregation; in other words, they played the same part as grandiose palaces, temples or royal burials did in other civilizations (such as the Egyptian). Eltsov also noted the absence of palaces in the early Gangetic cities20 (to the limited extent of the excavations), which echoes the same absence in the Indus-Sarasvatī cities. A careful, site-by-site analysis of such features led him to squarely place the Harappan and the Gangetic city within the same framework, the origins of which, he suggested, went back to pre-Harappan times: ‘The ethos of the ancient Indian Civilization is shaped during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic Periods.’21
Let us be a little more specific. We have seen fortifications at a number of Harappan sites, from Kalibangan to Dholavira; Mohenjo-daro’s and Harappa’s mounds are also thought to have been fortified. Walled enclosures were of vital importance to the Harappan mind, although a practical usefulness did not seem to be their primary purpose. We find the same situation in historical cities such as Mathura, Kaushambi (both on the Yamuna), Rajghat (near Varanasi), Rajgir, Vaishali (both in Bihar), Shishupalgarh (near Bhubaneswar) and Ujjain (near Indore). The last city’s mud fortifications, for instance, were as wide as 75 m, 14 m high, and ran for some 5 km; it would have taken no less than 4200 labourers toiling for a whole year to erect them! Kaushambi’s 6 km-long rampart of compact clay was about 20 m wide at the base and rose to 9 m; it was strengthened in places by massive revetments of large baked bricks (Fig. 9.1). Shishupalgarh’s rampart was 33 m wide, over 7 m high and formed a perfect square with a perimeter of 4.8 km.22 The fact that so much labour and energy were spent to erect these colossal fortifications in both the Harappan and Gangetic cities strengthens Eltsov’s thesis of a common tradition.
Moats often girdle fortifications: we saw one around Banawali, and other Harappan sites are also thought to have had protective moats; they become the norm with most historical cities (for instance, Kaushambi, Rajgir, Shishupalgarh and Ujjain), and are reflected in the meticulous instructions spelt out by Kautilya in his famous treatise on governance, the Arthashāstra, which is usually dated to the age of Chandragupta Maurya in the fourth century BCE.
Parallels can also be found in the layout of streets. Kalibangan had street widths standardized in an arithmetic progression: 1.8 m, 3.6 m, 5.4 m and 7.2 m; we find traces of such a system at Kaushambi as well,23 where a road 2.44 m wide is broadened to the exact double of 4.88 m; more significantly, the Arthashāstra24 prescribes streets in widths of two, four or eight dandas, with the danda being a unit of length generally taken to be about six feet or 1.8 m. More than the actual values, this concern for standardization appears to have Harappan roots (we saw it in the brick ratios, too, and will soon see it in the system of weights).
We marvelled at the garbage bins along the streets of Indus cities, and find them again at Taxila’s Bhir Mound, for instance.25 As regards the splendid Harappan drainage system, it is true that nothing so systematic or extensive has so far been unearthed from historical cities, but that could be partly due to the limited nature of the excavations; even then, drains of baked bricks, sometimes as part of sewerage systems, did emerge at Taxila,26 Hastinapura, Kaushambi, Mathura and other sites.
Town planning apart, the structures also exhibit continuity. Pillared halls are a case in point: at Mohenjo-daro, a hall with four rows of five pillars each finds an echo in distant Pataliputra (today’s Patna), where a large hall with eight rows of ten pillars overlooks an ancient canal.27 The common ratio (5:4 and 10:8) is intriguing to say the least, and hard to ascribe to mere coincidence.
We noted (Fig. 7.2) the unique shape of Banawali’s apsidal temple; it finds a parallel in Atranjikhera28 (some 90 km northeast of Agra), where an apsidal temple is dated around 200 BCE (Fig. 9.2). Roughly 8 x 6.5 m in size, it is about one and a half times larger than Banawali’s structure, but of similar proportions, with the only difference being the square platform at its centre, where the worshipped deity probably stood.
Coming to the Harappan house, it has often been shown how it follows a few specific plans, generally based on a central yard with rooms on three sides and a wide entrance on the fourth—a general layout which persisted in historical sites (such as Bhita near Allahabad) and is still found in many parts of today’s rural India. In fact, in a detailed study, Anna Sarcina demonstrated in 1979 the similarity of house plans at Mohenjo-daro with those in modern Gujarat.29
Construction techniques also survived. B.B. Lal documented a few:30 for instance, a peculiar mixture of terracotta nodules and charcoal was found not only in the flooring of Kalibangan houses, but also in those of neighbouring villages 4500 years later; its ability to keep insects and dampness away is doubtless the reason for the persistence of this tradition. At Pirak, Jarrige (whom we met as the excavator of Mehrgarh) and his colleagues were ‘very struck’ by a pattern of ‘four levels of niches symmetrically arranged all along the walls’, and even more struck when they found an identical pattern of niches in the houses of nearby Hindu quarters that had been abandoned at the time of Partition—3000 years after their Harappan predecessors.31
The trademark Harappan well, built with trapezoid bricks (see Fig. 5.5), did not disappear either; it has come to light at quite a few historical sites, even in the south.32 Huge soak jars of terracotta also remained in use in post-Harappan times.33
Taken together, the above traits establish that despite significant differences, urban developments in the Indus-Sarasvatī and Ganges regions do belong to ‘a single Indo-Gangetic cultural tradition which can be traced for millennia’; in the words of Jim Shaffer, ‘a continuous series of cultural developments links the so-called two major phases of urbanization in South Asia’, the Harappan and the historical. His conclusion is plain: ‘the essential of Harappan identity persisted’.34
I must, therefore, disagree with Shereen Ratnagar’s assertion, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that the Harappan architectural tradition disappeared; the above examples demonstrate that quite a few of its aspects survived, even if new styles and structures did appear in the Gangetic plains.
THE CODE BEHIND DHOLAVIRA
An unexpected case of continuity in the urban field emerges from Dholavira in the Rann of Kachchh. As we noticed when we visited the extraordinary site (Fig. 7.8), this city presents us with a unique town plan. Looking at it, US astrophysicist J. McKim Malville was impressed by ‘the apparent inte
nt . . . to interweave, by means of geometry, the microcosm and the macrocosm’.35 But how did this ‘interweaving’ actually work?
When the excavator, R.S. Bisht, measured the city’s fortifications36 (Table 9.1), something odd alerted him: he found that the various enclosures respected specific proportions rather than random ones (we have noted often enough the Harappans’ love for precise ratios). The overall city’s proportions (771 x 617 m) are very precisely in the ratio 5: 4 (that is, the length is five-fourths of the width, or 1.25 times the width, or again 25 per cent longer than the width). As if to make it clear that this is not the mere play of chance, Dholavira’s planners applied the same ratio to the castle’s dimensions, both inner and outer. In fact, just before the Mature phase, the castle, which was the earliest part of the city, had slightly different proportions: it was subjected to alterations so as to bring its dimensions in line with the desired proportions—one more clue that they were consciously chosen.
Table 9.1. Dholavira’s principal dimensions (rounded off to the nearest metre).
Dimension Measurement (in metres)
Length Width
Lower town (entire city) 771 617
Middle town 341 290
Ceremonial ground 283 47
Castle (inner) 114 92
Castle (outer) 151 118
Bailey 120 120
Table 9.2. Main ratios at work at Dholavira, with margins of error.
Dimensions Ratio Margin of Error (%)
Castle, inner* 5:4 0.9
Castle, outer* 5:4 2.4
Bailey* 1:1 0.0
Middle town* 7:6 0.5
Ceremonial ground* 6:1 0.7
Lower town (entire city)* 5:4 0.0
The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati Page 16
