and extensive culture but, barring some not very helpful bones, no people, indeed without a single name.
Names, on the other hand, were precisely what that Sanskrit literary tradition of the Vedas provided – in mind-boggling abundance. Kings and heroes, gods and demons, places and peoples, tumble from the Vedas, Brahmanas, Puranas and epics as if ready-made for the compilation of a historical index. Although no single site, no potsherd or artefact, can certainly be identified with the people who composed these verses, and although their chronology remains shrouded in that maddening uncertainty, we know that they called themselves arya – hence ‘Aryan’ – and we know of their lifestyle, their social organisation, their beliefs and their innumerable antecedents and descendants. Here, in short, was a people proudly obsessed with the past, who defined themselves in terms of lineages reaching back through the generations to Manu, and whose records might therefore provide for the enigmatic Harappan civilisation precisely the human detail that it so notably lacked.
Would that it were so. In fact, as will be seen, though the two civilisations – the Harappan and the Aryan – overlapped in geography and possibly also in chronology, no shred of coincidence certainly connects them. India’s history starts with the apparently irreconcilable. Only in the last few years have sustainable connections between its Harappan and Aryan constituents been tentatively proposed. These connections, though tantalising, remain few and far from conclusive. India’s history as currently understood must be seen as beginning with two woefully unconnected cultures.
This state of affairs may, however, serve as a warning. Despite the pick-and-preach approach of many nationalist historians, geographical India is not now, and never has been, a single politico-cultural entity. In fact, its current three-way division between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, far from denying some intrinsic unity, is a notable simplification of its traditional plurality. Analogies should be drawn, if at all, not with Egypt or with Greece but with regional constructs of a similar size like the Middle East or Europe. And just as in the Middle East those early civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia flourished simultaneously yet quite independently, or just as later in Europe the Byzantine and Carolingian empires could both claim pre-eminence without necessarily coming into conflict, so it is in India.
Sadly, though, this is not a situation which makes for fluent narrative history. In a global landmass as vast and varied as the South Asian subcontinent an orderly linear progression from one cultural flowering to another, one dynasty to another, or one empire-builder to another will prove elusive. Only a still far from certain chronology, and not any sequential progression, demands that the Harappans and their archaeology take precedence ahead of the Aryans and their literature.
A VERITABLE EMPIRE
To anyone familiar with the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the warren of dun diggings which is an excavated Harappan site may seem unimpressive. It is hard not to sympathise with the first archaeologist to survey Mohenjo-daro. ‘I was greatly disappointed,’ wrote Mr D.R. Bhandarkar in his report. He was visiting the largely desert province of Sind in the winter of 1911–12 as Superintending Archaeologist of the Western Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India. ‘Mohenjo-daro’, he noted, meant ‘the Mound of the Dead Men’. There was one big mound and six smaller ones. And in words that must subsequently have haunted him, the Superintending Archaeologist dismissed the lot as ‘not representing the remains of … any ancient monument’.
According to local tradition, these are the ruins of a town only two hundred years old … This seems not incorrect, because the bricks here found are of the modern type, and there is a total lack of carved terra-cottas amidst the whole ruins.3
Wrong in every detail, this statement must rank amongst archaeology’s greatest gaffes.
Today’s less qualified visitors, though willing to forgive the absence of ‘carved terra-cottas’, tend to bemoan that of more obvious features. For at Mohenjo-daro no pyramids or ziggurats, no sculpted towers or mighty henges frown over the deep and dusty thoroughfares. On first acquaintance it is as if the most extensive of the Harappan sites was never really a city at all, merely the footings and foundations of one.
This, though, is decidedly not the case. Deep in ‘the Mound of the Dead Men’ there was once activity and industry. Behind the extant façades of blank featureless wall families lived, craftsmen plied their trades and vendors sold their wares. If there was an absence of eye-catching memorials it was not, as will appear, through any lack of civic pride or direction. It may tell us something about the nature of authority in the Harappan state and the organisation of its society; more certainly it indicates the limited materials available to the city’s builders.
Four thousand years ago stone was as scarce in the lower Indus region as it is today. Even the local timber, though more plentiful than now, and possibly able to meet the need for roof joists, seems not to have been sufficiently well-grown for major construction purposes. Instead, it was used as fuel to fire brick kilns. The Harappans built almost entirely in brick, both sun-baked and kiln-fired, and the excellence of their firing is well attested by the survival, albeit underground, of so many structures in such a comparatively friable material. In assuming their bricks to be ‘of a modern type’, Bhandarkar was unwittingly paying the Harappan brickmakers a generous compliment.
Brickwork, however, has its limitations, as the Harappans were no doubt aware. Large areas can be easily enclosed and conveniently partitioned; groundplans of some of the Mohenjo-daro houses compare favourably with those of today, while larger individual structures, presumably public buildings, cover areas equivalent to half a football pitch; some walls, obviously for defence, are as thick as thirteen metres. On the other hand bricks, unlike dressed stone, must be kept small for good firing and are therefore less suitable for towering elevations and long-lasting monuments. Sun, salt and wind play havoc with a mortar of mud; weight stresses cause bowing and buckling. Few if any buildings at Mohenjo-daro were of more than two storeys. Even supposing the Harappans had aspired to the monumental extravagances of their Egyptian contemporaries, it is hard to see how they could have achieved them.
Of unremarkable profile, then, the mud-and-rubble mounds of the Harappan cities and settlements nevertheless made an impression on Bhandarkar’s successors in the Archaeological Survey. Happily ignoring his report, R.D. Banerji and Sir John Marshall resumed explorations at Mohenjo-daro in the late 1920s. Ernest Mackay and Sir Mortimer Wheeler continued their work and also re-examined Harappa, a collection of mounds in the Panjab whence in the nineteenth century bricks similar to those at Mohenjo-daro had been removed by the wagonload as ballast for a 160-kilometre section of the Lahore – Multan railway line. After Independence and the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 B.B. Lal, J.P. Joshi, S.R. Rao, M. Rafique Mughal and a host of others extended operations to numerous other sites with outstanding results. What amazed all these pioneers, and what remains the distinctive characteristic of the several hundred Harappan sites now known, is their apparent similarity: ‘Our overwhelming impression is of cultural uniformity, both throughout the several centuries during which the Harappan civilisation flourished, and over the vast area it occupied.’4
The ubiquitous bricks, for instance, are all of standardised dimensions, just as the stone cubes used by the Harappans to measure weights are also standard and based on a modular system. Road widths conform to a similar module; thus streets are typically twice the width of side lanes, while the main arteries are twice or one and a half times the width of streets. Most of the streets so far excavated are straight and run either north – south or east – west. City plans therefore conform to a regular grid pattern and appear to have retained this layout through several phases of rebuilding. In most cases the ground plan consists of two quite separate settlements, one apparently residential and commercial (‘the lower town’), and the other elevated on a massive brick platform (‘the citadel’) and endowed with more ambitious structures. ‘The citadel’ invariably lay to the west of ‘the lower town’. Clearly Harappan settlements were not just India’s first cities and townships but its first, indeed the world’s first, planned cities and townships. Town-planning not being conspicuous in the subcontinent’s subsequent urban development, they have been hailed as the only such examples until, in the eighteenth century AD, Maharajah Jai Singh decided