The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  Let us now turn to these ‘cultural and religious traditions’ and see how much of a ‘substratum’ we find in them.

  {10}

  The Intangible Heritage

  Beginning with Marshall, many archaeologists and scholars have drawn parallels between traits of Harappan religion and culture and those of later, classical India. At times, subtle considerations make one feel that a certain ‘Indianness’ is at play. We saw, for example, how Jarrige noted the absence of a royal iconography in the Indus world to be ‘already an Indian trait’, or how Wright detected in Harappan society a ‘community-related organization’, which is in tune with the later common Indian pattern. When we combine such traits with the parallels noted earlier in the fields of architecture (fortifications, the absence of palaces, etc.) and governance (multiple kingdoms or city-states), the sense of a thread running through these two ages becomes inescapable.

  Suggestive as this approach may be, there is much more to be said on the intangible aspect of the archaeological record. In the following pages, I will supplement the work of many scholars with my own research in the field.

  SYMBOLS

  Symbols and motifs conveniently bridge the gap between the tangible and the intangible: their survival is easy to document, but the concepts they illustrate are often debatable.

  The most obvious example is perhaps the symbol known as the ‘swastika’ (Fig. 10.1), incised on hundreds of Harappan tablets, generally single but occasionally double (and with no preferred direction, let it be added to answer a frequent question). The swastika continues to be depicted on pottery at several early historical sites,1 on punch-marked coins, on some of Ashoka’s edicts and other early inscriptions,2 where it symbolizes auspiciousness, harmony and growth. We cannot be sure whether it had the same significance for the Harappans, though that is not unlikely. At any rate, its graphic survival is beyond question.

  Another typical Harappan symbol is the ‘endless knot’ (Fig. 10.2): it reappears unchanged in Gujarat in several inscriptions of the ninth century CE, and can still be seen today in some of the rangolis (or kolams in South India) drawn by Hindu women in front of their houses, where it often represents the child Krishna’s footprint.

  The motif of ‘intersecting circles’ is a frequent one on Harappan pottery, also found on floor tiles at Balakot and Kalibangan (Fig. 7.4), some 800 km apart. Dilip Chakrabarti points out that ‘an identical design occurs on top of the Boddhi throne’4 at Bodh Gaya, which dates from the third century BCE, some two millennia later.

  About three-quarters of all Indus seals depict a single-horned bull-like creature generally called a ‘unicorn’. Almost invariably, this majestic animal faces a ‘ritual stand’ (Fig. 10.14) whose enigmatic significance has been much debated: Marshall saw in it an incense burner while, more recently, I. Mahadevan closely argued in favour of a sacred filter for Soma, the Vedic elixir.5 Regardless of the symbol’s actual significance, Mahadevan showed that the stand itself, or an object resembling it, was portrayed on historical coins, with a bull or an elephant facing it,6 and this important case of continuity has been generally accepted. Fabri, as we saw in the preceding chapter, had also pointed to one such instance (Fig. 9.15). I must add that some of the cups used in Vedic rituals for the offering of libations have a curiously similar shape.7

  A host of other symbols are common to Indus seals or pottery and punch-marked coins or other historical artefacts: concentric circles, the hollow cross, the tree on a raised platform or enclosure (‘tree in railing’, Fig. 10.3), the fish, the peacock, the antelope . . .

  Also the pipal leaf, and the tree itself, regarded as sacred in the Vedas, where it is called ashvattha;8 it continues to be revered as the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha attained illumination, and remains among the most sacred trees in India today.

  ART AND ICONOGRAPHY

  Harappan art is disappointingly frugal if we compare it with that of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or ancient China; at times one wonders if the motto of the Harappan artists was ‘Small is beautiful’! Their artistic ability is beyond question, as the exquisite jewellery or the carefully incised seals demonstrate; but the small scale of most artefacts and their limited output does contrast rather glaringly with the artistic exuberance of classical India. (Of course, wood carving, painting on cloth and other art forms dependent on perishable material disappeared forever, leaving us with a truncated view of Harappan art.)

  Despite these limitations, we have unmistakable examples of transmission of artistic concepts to the historical period: classical art motifs frequently evoke Harappan ones.

  Such is the case with the most famous Indus seal (Fig. 10.4): the ‘Pashupati’ seal found at Mohenjo-daro, so called by Marshall because he saw in it the ‘Lord of the Beasts’ (pashupati) of Vedic literature. Let us momentarily leave aside that interpretation and concentrate on the iconography. At the centre is an impressive figure seated in a yogic posture on a low platform; it strikes any Indian eye as being familiar: it is a common motif in Buddhist* and Jain iconography, and Shiva is also often represented in the same posture. The god—he must be one, since he is reproduced on many seals and tablets—has three faces, heralding the depiction of three-headed Hindu gods (such as the trimūrti). His tricorn headdress is also not unfamiliar: it evokes classical symbols such as the nandipada or the triratna common in Buddhist art (at Bharhut and Sanchi for instance), and is depicted on punch-marked coins, as T.G. Aravamuthan pointed out in 1942.10

  Next to the mythical unicorn, a majestic bull, generally humped, is among the animals frequently depicted on Indus seals (Fig. 10.5), and must have been an object of special reverence. Many scholars have seen in it a precursor of Nandi, Shiva’s mount.

  In the Harappan statuary, a category of figurines represents what archaeologists have identified as a mother goddess, basing themselves on the heavy ornamentation of most figurines (Fig. 10.6, left), and also on a pair of pannierlike cups on both sides of the head, which were used as oil lamps (as proved by stains of soot). Curiously, statuettes of the mother goddess made two millennia later, in Mauryan times (Fig. 10.6, right), often bear similar traits: both have the same extravagant wreath of large flowers around the face, the same double necklace (the lower one with a pendant), a similar girdle, often a short skirt, sometimes also similar huge earrings.11 Stylistic considerations apart, the chief difference between the two is the loss of the side cups (although it appears that they are preserved in some traditional Gujarati art); the fan-shaped headdress is also gone, but other historical figurines still display it.12

  Another Harappan deity is a kind of female ‘centaur’ (Fig. 10.7); it is striking that the same concept reappears in classical Hindu art in the form of the kinnarī or gandharvī.

  Finally, a standing Harappan god often appears between two open branches of a pipal tree; on some of the tablets the branches close up at the top and we have a full arch, plainly a device intended to exalt the god (Fig. 10.8). The same device is used in classical art, where an arch surrounds a seated Buddha13 or a standing Shiva, enhancing their glory.

  It could be objected that in none of the above cases do we have an unbroken chain of transmission from Harappan times—we rather have a chain of missing links!—and that these parallels may, in reality, be nothing more than independent artistic creations occasionally coming up with similar concepts. The objection is theoretically valid, but in practice, there is little likelihood that such a variety of highly specific iconographic devices could have had wholly independent origins. And it is precisely the totality of these devices of Harappan art that gives it an intangible yet unmistakable air of ‘Indianness’: thus Stella Kramrish, one of the most distinguished experts on Indian art, felt that ‘in certain respects some of the Mohenjo-daro figurines can be compared with the work by village potters and women made to this day in Bengal’.14 At a more formal level, she was convinced that ‘the beautiful Maurya sculpture presupposes continuity in the artistic traditions since the Harappa period’.
15 The French Vedic scholar Jean Varenne also noted how ‘several of these [Harappan] themes (figures seated in the “lotus posture”, mythical animals, celebration of dance) appear as constants in Indian art’.16

  Harappan art holds occasional surprises. At Lothal, S.R. Rao17 found two pottery sherds which appear to narrate folk tales well known to many Indian grandmothers: in one of them (Fig. 10.9), two crows perched high on a tree hold fishes in their beaks while a fox-like animal below seems to be craftily concocting some way to get at that succulent food. La Fontaine, who attributed the origin of his Fables to India, would have been surprised to learn that ‘the Crow and the Fox’ was a 4500-year-old tale—with the fish turning into cheese somewhere between the protohistoric Gulf of Khambat and the elegant salons of seventeenth-century French literary circles . . .

  RELIGIOUS LIFE

  The religious life of the Harappans has often been the object of comparisons with later Indian religions, at both the external level of customs and traditions and the conceptual level reflected in Vedic and post-Vedic literature. Here also, archaeologists and scholars of religion have broadly concurred that a Harappan ‘substratum’ remains perceptible, but there is much disagreement regarding the mechanism of transmission. Before we discuss this, let us survey objectively the salient parallels in the field.

  An easy method would be to transport a Hindu villager of today to a Harappan city. He would perhaps first note the importance of cleanliness in daily life and observe, in accordance with archaeologists, that beyond mere hygiene, ritual purification through water was a trait of Harappan religion as it is of later Indian religions;18 he would marvel at such ceremonies as the Great Bath and would not miss the structure’s obvious likeness to the ritual bathing tanks of later Hindu temples.19 He might mingle with a religious procession through the streets of Mohenjo-daro (a few tablets depict such events20), and watch as oil lamps are lit and libations poured with conch shells (whose mouths were sawn open), or as priests blow through their conches (whose tips were sawn off) to announce a holy moment or invoke a god.21 He would feel at home with sacred symbols like the swastika, the pipal leaf or an occasional trident (trishūla), and would find that some lingas have much the same shape as those in his village temple (Fig. 10.10). The worship of the pipal tree or of a mother goddess would surprise him in no way.

  Our villager’s experience might be best summarized by John Marshall’s stimulating observation made in 1931:

  Taken as a whole, [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism.22

  But commonalities do not stop with the folk aspect of religion; they run deeper, and despite the general opinion (including Marshall’s) that Indus culture is ‘pre-Aryan’ and therefore non-Vedic, it is tempting to probe the Vedic texts for echoes of themes evoked on Harappan seals and tablets.

  Harappan gods and goddesses have been the objects of numerous studies, most of them partly speculative in nature: since the script remains mute, their pictorial representations alone guide us. The bull (Fig. 10.5), for instance, is omnipresent on Harappan seals and pottery, and it is also the animal that the Rig Veda exalts above all others: great gods such as Indra or Agni are frequently lauded as ‘the Bull’ in an obvious symbol of might. Harappan figurines depict a mother goddess often enough, and again the Vedic hymns implore various aspects of the Mother : Sarasvatī, Ushas, Ilā, Aditi, Prithivī, Bhāratī . . . But such parallels, though interesting, are inconclusive, since both the bull and the mother goddess were worshipped in many other ancient cultures. In central India, for instance, the cult of a mother goddess is attested as early as 8000 or 9000 BCE!23 The issue is, therefore, whether we can establish stronger connections resting on a group of specific traits.

  PROTO-SHIVA AND THE BUFFALO

  Let us return to the ‘Pashupati’ seal (Fig. 10.4). Four wild creatures in the background—tiger, buffalo, elephant and rhinoceros—appear dwarfed by the imposing god seated at the centre in a yogic posture, who indisputably exudes a powerful sense of mastery. His three faces gaze to the left, ahead, and to the right.

  Marshall saw in him a ‘proto-Shiva’ because one of the latter’s names is Pashupati or ‘lord of the beasts’. I believe that he was basically right in his identification, but for the wrong reason: the term ‘Pashupati’, which appears in the Yajur and Atharva Veda as a name of Rudra, applies to cattle (pashu) rather than wild beasts.† But in a series of praises of Soma, the divine nectar, the Rig Veda presents the striking image of a ‘Buffalo of wild beasts’24 (mahisho mrigānām), a designation that seems to suit this godhead wearing buffalo horns and surrounded by wild beasts. Moreover, in the Veda, Soma is often associated with Rudra,25 sometimes even fused with him,26 and Rudra is Shiva’s terrible form. If we remember that Shiva is also Yogīshvar, Yoganāth, that is, the ‘lord of yoga’, as well as Mahākāleshwar, the lord of Time—represented on the seal, I suggest, by the three faces for past, present and future—this impressive seal from Mohenjo-daro presents us with a series of concepts and attributes consonant with those classically associated with Shiva.

  This identification finds further support in the symbol of the trishūla, which the head-dress, as a whole, evokes; the trident is independently depicted on a few seals, and is one of the signs of the Indus writing system. Finally, we have just seen the presence of linga-shaped objects of worship. Altogether, the evidence of the cult of a Shiva-like (‘proto’ or not) deity in the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization does build up into a consistent whole.

  As an aside, I must disagree with Marshall and other scholars who labelled Shiva a ‘Dravidian’ god, since Shiva first appears in the Rig Veda as Rudra and in the Yajur Veda under his own name.27 Also, in an attempt to connect the seal’s deity with some hypothetical ‘pre-Aryan’ phallus worship, several scholars have described him as ithyphallic, but that is doubtful: what appears to be an erect phallus is more likely the folds of a loin cloth; other seals of the same god in the same posture (Fig. 10.11) confirm this.

  A few other scenes evoke familiar themes.

  A motif encountered on several tablets is that of the slaying of a buffalo. In a two-sided moulded tablet found at Harappa a few years ago (Fig. 10.12),28 one side depicts a figure pinning the buffalo down with his leg and spearing him, while another figure seated in a yogic posture looks on, wearing a tricorn head-dress—clearly our ‘proto-Shiva’ again, and a presence that lends a ritual dimension to the slaying (as does the fact that this is one of the very rare ‘violent’ scenes depicted on the Indus seals). The Veda alludes to the sacrifice of a buffalo,29 but as many scholars have remarked, this Harappan motif rather calls to mind that of goddess Durga slaying the buffalo-demon Mahishāsura. This theme likely has Harappan origins, although a more diffused origin cannot be ruled out (the Todas of the Nilgiris, for instance, practise the ritual sacrifice of the buffalo, though not through spearing).

  Another seal, often called the ‘Divine Adoration’ seal (Fig. 10.13), narrates a ritual that has been the object of many differing interpretations. The figure standing between two branches of a pipal tree and the kneeling figure wear an identical tricorn head-dress and plait of hair: could they be one and the same? Are the seven figures at the bottom female (the seven mothers) or male (the seven rishis)? Is the noble-looking, human-faced ram being led to sacrifice, or does it stand for another deity? Could the object on the stool, which appears to have two hair buns on the side, be a human head? Or does its arched handle point to a kamandalu? There are no easy answers to these questions, but we do find the worshipper’s physical attitude precisely described in the Rig Veda: thus the poet prays ‘with uplifted hands’30 or with ‘bended knees’;31 Agni is to be approached ‘kneeling with adoration’,32 and so are Indra33 and Sarasvatī.34

  On a seal from Chanhu-daro, we witness an unusual scene: a gaur (the Indian ‘bison’) with a human-like face mates with a woman lying supine, from whose head a plant emerges.35 As Raymond and Bridge
t Allchin point out, this motif ‘may be compared with the Vedic theme of the union of heaven and earth (dyavaprithivi), the latter represented as the Earth Mother (mata bhumi) and the former by the bull of heaven (dyaur me pita)’.36 Indeed, throughout the Rig Veda, heaven and earth constitute a constant couple, representing our ‘father and mother’,37 as it were, sometimes fused into a single deity;38 and an important hymn39 entreats God Parjanya as the Bull to ‘deposit his seed in the plants’, in an almost perfect evocation of the seal’s motif (including the gaur’s human face).

  THE UNICORN

  No attempt to make sense of themes depicted on Indus seals can afford to ignore the unicorn motif (Fig. 10.14). What could be its significance? And if it bears some relation with Vedic symbolism, why is the unicorn absent from classical iconography? The bull, elephant and buffalo perdure, but not this graceful one-horned creature.

  Nevertheless, the notion of a ‘unicorn’ does not end with Harappan culture : in later Hindu mythology, Vishnu’s first avatar, the fish who saves Manu when the Great Flood engulfs the earth, wears a single horn on his head, to which Manu ties his boat. Also, as the historian A.D. Pusalker40 noted long ago, another avatar of Vishnu, Varāha or the Boar, is sometimes called ekashringa or ‘one-horned’. In the Mahābhārata, Krishna himself expounds to Arjuna a long list of his incarnations and names; coming to the same avatar, he says, ‘Assuming, in days of old, the form of a boar with a single tusk . . . I raised the submerged Earth from the bottom of the ocean. From this reason am I called by the name of Ekasringa.’41 The motif of a one-horned deity is therefore not foreign to Hindu mythology.

  But to my mind, it is again the Rig Veda that helps us most here. Harappans depicted horned tigers, horned serpents and horned composite animals, and many Vedic deities have one, two, three, four horns (or more!). In the Veda, the horn is more than a mere glorifying device : thus Agni or Indra destroys the enemy’s den ‘like a bull with sharpened horn’;42 Soma, also likened to a bull, ‘brandishes his horns on high and whets them’.43 The horn (shringa) is not always mentioned explicitly: thus Indra is ‘like a bull who sharpens [his horns]’44 or tears his enemies apart ‘like a sharp bull’.45 Moreover, Indra’s weapon is the vajra or thunderbolt, which he ‘whets for sharpness, as a bull [whets his horns]’;46 it is a ‘sharpened’ weapon.47 Thunderbolt or horn, therefore, has the same function—that of the aggressive, pointed divine power concentrated on a hostile point. Obligingly, as often, the Rig Veda gives us the key to its own symbolism : it describes Savitar, the sun god, as ‘spreading his horn of truth’48—ritasya shringa, with ‘ritam’ signifying ‘truth’ or the ‘cosmic order’, the Rig Vedic antecedent of dharma.