The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  These results, which I was unaware of when I researched Dholavira’s system of units, are very nearly identical to the values I calculated there (1.9 m, 1.76 cm). It is extraordinary that Pant and Funo’s work, proceeding from completely independent methods, led them to adopt exactly the same system as the one I worked out at Dholavira, and with almost exactly the same values for the basic units.

  Pant and Funo did not stop at historical cities: they travelled back in time once more and studied Mohenjo-daro’s plan.70 In three different parts of the city, they found that the dimension which frequently occurs in major cluster blocks is 19.20 m—in other words, one rajju again—and also smaller grids of 9.6 m (5 dandas or dhanus). Their conclusion was straightforward:

  There is continuity in the survey and planning tradition from Mohenjodaro to Sirkap and Thimi . . . The planning modules employed in the Indus city of Mohenjodaro, Sirkap of Gandhara, and Thimi of Kathmandu Valley are the same.71

  This continuity is the most eloquent example of the Harappan legacy in the field of town planning and linear measures.

  TECHNOLOGY AND CRAFTS

  Let us briefly turn to other fields. Almost every Harappan technology and craft speaks of continuity. Thus the ingenious bronze casting method known as ‘lost wax casting’, used to cast the figurine of the ‘dancing girl’, for instance, continued to be used later and spread throughout the subcontinent;72 traditional communities of bronze casters using just the same technique can still be found, as at Swamimalai in Tamil Nadu. As regards craft techniques, Dales, Kenoyer, Rao, Lal and several other archaeologists have documented how, from bangle-making to bead-making, from the working of shell to that of ivory, today’s traditional craftsmen often perpetuate Harappan techniques, even if they integrate new materials or new styles. In order to produce blue glazed ceramics, some of them use the same copper oxide pigments as did the Harappans; they drill, bleach and colour long semiprecious beads in the same manner. In fact, when archaeologists want to understand Harappan techniques, they often look around and consult today’s traditional craftsmen—a case in point being today’s bead industry of Khambat, at the top of the gulf of the same name, some 30 km away from Lothal.73

  Techniques apart, many objects of daily use have survived with hardly any change, as B.B. Lal illustrated recently74—be it toiletry articles, the frying pan, the humble kamandalu (a small water pot with a handle), or the wooden writing tablet, the takhti.75 Games too : much like their Harappan predecessors, children of north India still play (or used to play till recently) with rattles, whistles, spinning tops and flat pottery disks; toy carts, crafted by Harappans to keep their children amused, were frequently unearthed in the Ganges cities. As regards the Indus dice (Fig. 9.10), they could easily be confused for the modern ones (except for a different arrangement of the dots). Harappans apparently loved board games, and the set of terracotta pieces found at Lothal (Fig. 5.10) does evoke the modern game of chess, as S.R. Rao pointed out, or at least an ancestor of it.

  Ornaments provide us with arresting cases of survival : the omnipresent bangle to start with, which Indian women have remained as fond of as their Harappan forerunners; even the manner of wearing it—fully over the left arm, for instance, as with the ‘dancing girl’—can still be seen in the rural and tribal parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Anklets76 (Fig. 9.11) and nose or ear studs,77 documented at Mohenjo-daro and other sites, of course constitute an integral part of the finery of today’s Indian woman. Even the married Hindu woman’s custom of applying vermilion at the parting of the hair has Harappan origins: figurines found at Nausharo and elsewhere show traces of red pigment at the same spot.78 Some orthodox Hindu men continue to wear an amulet tied to the upper right arm, exactly where the so-called ‘priest-king’, whom we shall meet presently (Fig. 10.18), displays one; or sometimes they apply sacred ashes or sandalwood paste at the same spot.

  Harappan agriculture was heavily dependent on the ox cart, whose shape remained virtually unchanged till recent times, judging from the many small-scale toy models; even its wheelbase, measured from cart tracks found at Harappa, is the same as that of today’s cart.79 Fields were ploughed, and a terracotta model of ploughshare found at Banawali would arouse little surprise in the peasant of today. We noted earlier that (Fig. 5.9) Kalibangan’s fields were ploughed with a double network of perpendicular furrows; when the excavators tried to understand the reason behind this peculiar arrangement, they turned to the nearby village of Kalibangan and saw peasants ploughing their fields in exactly the same manner—almost 5000 years later!

  As regards navigation, three representations of boats have survived, but none of those of seafaring ships. The depictions (Fig. 9.12) at least show that the boats plying on the Indus in Harappan times had the same shape as today’s traditional Sindhi boat: raised sides and a high central cabin.80

  From the very beginning of their explorations, archaeologists have frequently stressed more such revealing cases of material survival of the Harappan civilization, though they may have sought to explain them in different ways. We may sum up with Kenoyer:

  There appear to be many continuities [between the Indus and later historical cultures]. Agricultural and pastoral subsistence strategies continue, pottery manufacture does not change radically, many ornaments and luxury items continue to be produced using the same technology and styles . . . There is really no Dark Age isolating the protohistoric period from the historic period.81

  Such is the positive verdict of archaeology. It does not mean that there was no change in the post-Harappan age—that would be impossible, given the upheaval that the collapse of the urban order must have caused. The civic administration certainly disintegrated, the standardized brick sizes were gradually abandoned or altered, and long-distance trade and the Indus seals disappeared.

  But one oft-quoted disappearance—that of the Harappan writing system—may have been exaggerated, and it is worth probing the case of the vanishing script.

  THE INDUS SCRIPT

  This writing system remains the most exasperating riddle of this civilization: over 4200 inscriptions, most of them on seals, tablets or pottery, made up of about 400 signs, only 200 of which are used more than five times. Some of these signs appear on pottery a few centuries before the urban phase,82 but generally in isolation. In the present state of our knowledge, the full-fledged script appears to be born with the cities, and fades away with them.

  Well over a hundred candidates—from the most serious experts to a colourful crowd of self-styled decipherers—have offered their key at the feet of this sphinx, which has, however, remained stubbornly mute. Why so many worshippers? Because of the cruel absence, so far, of any bilingual inscription, such as the famous Rosetta stone that enabled Champollion to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Also because the inscriptions are so short: five to six signs on an average (twenty-six for the longest, with many seals having just a sign or two)—such brevity appears to exclude full sentences and makes verification virtually impossible.

  Basing themselves on similarities in the shapes of signs, scholars have compared the Indus script with the Sumerian, proto-Elamite, Old Semitic and Etruscan scripts—even with the Rongo-Rongo signs of Easter Island! Some have read names of godheads, names of kings, cities or regions, while others have opted for administrative titles, communities or clans, goods, metals, agricultural produce, or just numbers. Most would-be decipherers have tried to read a reconstructed ‘proto-Dravidian’ into the script, although serious attempts based on Sanskritic readings have not been lacking. In the end, the only safe statement is that the seals played an important part in trade, and permitted the identification of either traders or their goods.

  Once the Indus script disappears, around 1800 BCE, we have to wait until the fifth century BCE for the first historical script—Brāhmī—to appear in a developed form.83 Brāhmī is the mother of all Indian scripts (and several Southeast Asian ones), but since the nineteenth century, the majority of scholars have regarded it as derivi
ng from, or inspired by, a Semitic script (with Aramaic being the one most often suggested of late). This view, which ultimately remains speculative, may have prevented a serious study of candidates for a possible transmission of the Indus writing tradition to historical times, a few examples of which are intriguing, at the very least (Fig. 9.14).

  The first comes to us from Bet-Dwarka, an island near the northwestern tip of Saurashtra; named after the nearby mainland town of Dwarka, it is traditionally associated with Krishna. At Bet-Dwarka, Late Harappan antiquities have been identified and dated between the nineteenth and fourteenth centuries BCE.84 Two potsherds bearing inscriptions have come to light, one of which is in a script evidently akin to the Indus script but evolving towards simplified shapes.85 It drew the attention of Indian epigraphists, but whether or not it constitutes a ‘missing link’ must remain in suspense until more similar finds come to light. In the same category, the mysterious inscription in the Vikramkhol cave (in Orissa), some 10 m long and 2 m high, was studied by the eminent epigraphist K.P. Jayaswal, who concluded in 1933 : ‘The Vikramkhol inscription supplies a link [in] the passage of letter-forms from the Mohenjodaro script to Brahmi.’86 This inscription does not appear to have received the attention it deserves, although several epigraphists have used it to argue in favour of an indigenous origin for the Brāhmī script.

  Daimabad, a Late Harappan site of the Godavari Valley in Maharashtra, shot into prominence in 1974 with the chance discovery of an unparalleled hoard of massive bronze sculptures weighing 65 kg altogether and consisting of an elephant, a rhinoceros, a buffalo and a standing man driving a light chariot pulled by a pair of bulls. The exact date and provenance of these beautifully crafted sculptures have remained a matter of debate in the archaeological world, but of interest to us here is the find, documented in Late Harappan levels, of button seals and a few potsherds bearing Indus-like signs.87 Again, such finds have not been systematically studied in terms of a possible post-urban evolution of the script.

  Very different is the case of a grey, round terracotta seal found at Vaishali (Bihar), which clearly bears three ‘classical’ Indus signs, two of them slightly simplified.88 But as it happens, this early historical site is a thousand kilometres east of the Harappan homeland and over a thousand years apart! Not only the signs but their very sequence is typically Harappan; as the epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan put it, ‘Had [the seal] been found at Harappa, it would not have attracted special attention.’89 The normal implication would be that around 600 BCE or so (Vaishali’s earliest levels), elements of the Harappan script were in use in the central Ganges Valley—which, of course, runs counter to all received wisdom in the field. Vaishali’s seal therefore represents a riddle—or perhaps a tantalizing clue that all is not well with the accepted disappearance of the Indus script. Only more extensive excavations of sites of the same period can throw light on this (let me repeat that most digs in the Ganges Valley have been very limited horizontally).

  A different approach takes us a little farther. We just saw how the punch-marked coins of the early historical era reflected the Harappan standards of weight. But the connection between the two systems appears to run deeper.‡ In 1935, the archaeologist C.L. Fabri pointed to odd parallels between depictions of animal motifs on the coins and on Indus seals (Fig. 9.15):

  While going through the signs [on the punch-marked coins], I was immediately struck by certain animal representations. The most frequent ones are those of the humped Indian bull, the elephant, the tiger, the crocodile, and the hare. Now all these animals occur also on the seals of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. Not only are the subjects similar, but there are similarities in such small details that one must necessarily suppose that they are not due to mere chance or to ‘similar working of the human mind.’90

  Fabri went on to describe those ‘small details’: for instance, in both cases the crocodile holds a fish that seems to hang in front of its jaws; the bull has a manger in front of it; a typical Harappan motif of a single-horned bull (or unicorn) facing a ritual stand (Fig. 10.14) appears generally preserved (except that the bull now has two horns); and in both cases, all animals face right.

  Fabri added a comparison of Indus signs with symbols on the punch-marked coins, bringing out striking parallels between the two, some of which are reproduced in Fig. 9.16. Overall, Fabri’s conclusion was:

  We are able to recognize a large number of Indus script pictograms among the punch-marks published by previous writers—too large a number, indeed, to ascribe it to mere coincidence.91

  The eminent Vedicist Jan Gonda found that ‘the sum total of [Fabri’s] comparisons is indeed impressive’.92 More recently, the numismatist Savita Sharma, partly building on Fabri’s work, drew a long list of eighty symbols on the punch-marked coins which almost exactly paralleled Indus signs.93 If, as has often been pointed out, simple geometric designs can be expected to be common to many scripts, parallels between more complex shapes, such as the ones illustrated in Fig. 9.17, appear, once again, well beyond the play of chance.

  A third and more ambitious approach seeks to directly bridge the gap between the two scripts. Among the very first scholars who dared to grasp the nettle, Stephen Langdon94 and G.R. Hunter95 independently proposed in the early 1930s, parallels between the signs of these two systems (interestingly, Hunter called the Indus script ‘Proto-Indian’). Quite a few attempts followed suit, but none could make any real progress towards a decipherment: clearly, a few similarities, however intriguing, are not enough. Recently, Subhash Kak, whom we met a little earlier, proceeded differently: without prejudging the nature of the Harappan language, he statistically analysed the ten signs most frequently used in each script (using the text of Ashoka’s famous edicts for Brāhmī).96

  Table 9.4 summarizes Kak’s results: the first three pairs are almost identical (if we turn the second, the ‘fish’, upside down, an inversion frequent enough in historical scripts); three other pairs are also excellent candidates. (Kak proposes two more, but they are less compelling in my view.) As it is, we have six strongly correlated pairs, a high proportion that militates in favour of an organic relationship between the two scripts—if they were wholly unrelated, we should find no particular likeness between their most frequently used signs. Kak goes further and tries to apply the values of the Brāhmī signs to their Harappan counterparts, but this takes us to a more complex question: Brāhmī is alphabetic, while the Indus script, in view of its large number of signs, is probably partly logographic in nature; this means that such correlations of values can only be speculative at this stage.

  Table 9.4. The ten most frequent signs in Indus and Brāhmī scripts, according to Subhash Kak.

  Finally, experts have long pointed to two important structural features of the Indus script: its use of composite signs and modifiers (Fig. 9.18), which respectively call to mind the use of composite letters and diacritical marks in Brāhmī to denote vowels (just as in later Indian scripts). If the Indus script is unrelated to the Brāhmī, we will once again have to invoke a rather remarkable double coincidence. While preferring the dominant view on the Semitic origin of Brāhmī, the epigraphist Richard Salomon was prudent enough to point out that ‘some historical connection between the Indus Valley script and Brāhmī cannot decisively be ruled out’.97

  Dilip Chakrabarti is more positive:

  It may not be illogical to think that the Indus writing tradition lingered on in perishable medium till the dictates of the new socio-economic contexts of early historic India led to its resurgence in a changed form.98

  This was also the opinion of India’s greatest epigraphist of the twentieth century, D.C. Sircar, who wrote in 1953: ‘The ancient [Indus] writing . . . may have ultimately developed into the Brāhmī alphabet several centuries before the rise of the Mauryas in the latter half of the four century BC.’99

  True, the survival of elements of the Indus script and their evolution towards Brāhmī can only be proved once the script is deciphered, or if more mis
sing links between the two come to light; until then, however, there is no reason to accept as final a verdict of complete disappearance of the former and sudden appearance of the latter.

  CHANGE IN CONTINUITY

  What we have seen so far constitutes only a small part of the material aspects of the Harappan legacy. Of course, the historical age threw up its own innovations, from iron technology to new architectural concepts and an efflorescence of art forms. But given the disintegration of Harappan urbanism and the ensuing millennium-long reorganization, it is no one’s case that Harappan culture lived on unchanged: what has been gaining acceptance in recent decades is rather the overarching concept of ‘change in continuity’, which does justice to the situation. As J.-F. Jarrige puts it, ‘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.’100

  D.P. Agrawal sums up the situation with these words:

  It is strange but true that the type and style of bangles that women wear in Rajasthan today, or the vermilion that they apply on the parting of the hair on the head, the practice of Yoga, the binary system of weights and measures, the basic architecture of the houses etc. can all be traced back to the Indus Civilisation. The cultural and religious traditions of the Harappans provide the substratum for the latter-day Indian Civilisation.101