On September 20 1924, The Illustrated London News published a 3 full-page article announcing the discoveries of Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
The announcement might not have seemed particularly exciting to the layperson in London in 1924. England was enjoying the roaring twenties. The post-war economic boom was peaking (before the decline that ultimately became the Great Depression). Hemlines shrank, the bob came into fashion and jazz and flappers were the rage. But a bunch of nerdy men who weren’t going to be invited to parties anyway pored over the black-and-white pictures of archaeological digs. For the lay Indian and the British academician, the announcement was significant because Sir John Marshall, director general of the ASI, was telling the world that his team had found an ancient civilization – a civilization that he could not specifically date, but which he thought might be as old as 1000 BC. That was all he could dare to imagine.
The following week, the newspaper printed a response to this article from a Reverend Sayce – areputed linguist and Professor of Assyriology (an actual subject, by the way) at Oxford and one of the aforementioned non-flapping nerds. He wrote in to say that he had seen the seal with a unicorn (you are welcome, JK Rowling and My Little Pony) and peculiar script before. An identical seal in fact. It was found in the city of Susa in Iran. And guess what! He said that the seal was confidently dated – they knew for a fact that the seal was from around 3000 BC. Three. Thousand. BC. As a kid this number made no difference to me. But as an adult now, I understand the significance.
- Marshall and team had been 2000 years off target – that’s like thinking Jesus Christ was born in 2023.
- In 3000 BC, if Indus seals were showing up in places like Susa, it meant that this civilization was trading far beyond its borders even before the Iron Age. It was clearly more successful than previously imagined.
- And perhaps, most importantly, this means that the Indus Valley Civilization/Harappan Civilization was as old as what the Western World considered the cradle of civilization – Mesopotamia.
To cut a long story short – the world (for archaeologists and Indian nationalists) shook. Marshall sent his announcements to Indian newspapers like Amrita Bazar Patrika, Statesman, The Times of India, The Hindu, and other local newspapers a few months after his article was published in London. In a private letter to an ex-ASI official, Marshall wrote, “I cannot conceive of a discovery more likely to appeal to Indian national sentiment”. He was right. This colonial official was handing Indian nationalists justifications for being proud of their history and culture and increased their confidence in their demands for self government. He also shared the discovery of Ashoka’s stupa that later became our national emblem. Independent India’s history was being put together under the supervision of a British colonialist who had sympathy for Indian nationalism.
70 years later, Indian nationalists would have been disappointed with this Indian (me) as I struggled to stay awake through the chapter on Indus Valley Civilization. I could feel no pride because these Harappans were far removed from the 1990s. Ancient history always bored me since it has always felt completely irrelevant to my current experience of the world. My less-than-enthusiastic attitude towards the ancients continued to adulthood, and even when I got to go to grand museums, both in India and abroad, I would zip past the antiquities to come to the Renaissance or Mughal period – as close as I could get to the 20th century.
This June, however, a pair of ambivalent teenagers and I headed to the National Museum of India specifically for the Harappan collection (for a separate project). Before we went inside, I promised that we would not linger on for too long beyond the Harappan section. It would be a quick visit. My son and niece had acknowledged the unnecessary reassurance with an indifferent nod. As it turns out, their indifference and my worry were short-lived. Almost as soon as we entered, eyes popped out of sockets, hands exited pockets and jaws needed to be scraped off the floor.
What makes the Harappan collection incredible is that it isn’t fancy. Instead, it is surprisingly relatable. A collection of kitchen utensils that dated back to the 3rd millennia BC (millennia, not century) looked almost identical to things we would find in a kitchen today. Check out the tavas and pots. What about that grinding stone for masalas? I was looking for something similar on Amazon just weeks before.
The jewellery collection, with bead necklaces, thick ceramic bangles, coiled finger rings, looks like things the head of an artsy NGO or anthropology professor would wear to a book festival. Talk about fashion repeating itself!
But that wasn’t all. Junior Harappans were entertaining themselves in much the same way our children did with Harappan Hot Wheels and Harappan chess.
And Harappan mothers preserved little clay pinch pots and figurines that they got for Mother’s Day, just like modern mums.
I think I danced a little jig in front of a display on various standardized weights used across the civilization. My son had to shoot me a killer glare that he reserves for when I am being unforgivably embarrassing in public.
You might say, calm down girl – it’s just a beam balance. But, here’s the deal – standardized weights means that each of those cubes of rock/ivory weighed the same across all the major cities and towns in the Indus civilization – a shopkeeper in Mohenjadaro (Sind), a shopkeeper in Dholavira (Gujarat) and a shopkeeper in Harappa (Pakistan-Punjab) all agreed that one little cube of green rock was the same weight. It raises all kinds of delicious questions, like: How did that become the norm? Did they have some governing body that published standardized weights and conversions? (If you are wondering how we got the metric system, here is an interesting article). What kind of government empowered such a body to issue such standardized weights? Clearly, they didn’t have an emperor since we haven’t found an enormous palace or any other grand structure. Kings usually find their way onto seals and other official materials, but no sign of a monarch anywhere. So if not a king, then what? Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum! The juiciest bits of the story are in all the gaping holes of our knowledge.
Before this visit to the National Museum, the Harappans felt so unimaginably old that I could not help thinking of them as “another”. But isn’t the study of history a practice in humility? Is there ever such a thing as an original idea?
The Harappan world is so familiar, especially the kitchen. Harappans primarily ate wheat and barley as the civilization was being established, but during the peak of the civilization, the climate changed, and the Harappans faced a crisis like we do now.
In history books, we think of the Harappans failing in the face of climate change, but it wasn’t such a dramatic end. The Harappans adapted. They built infrastructures to collect water because the rains were now unreliable. And now, along with wheat and barley, they grew drought-resistant millets. The adaptable Harappans lived on and prospered for a few hundred years. Eventually, when the course of the rivers changed and the drought settled in more deeply, most people migrated in the opposite direction – leaving urban centres for rural areas. Those who stayed behind left evidence of their difficulties on their bones. Archaeologists who are studying city cemeteries found that towards the end of the Harappan Civilization, people were dying from leprosy, TB and other infectious diseases as well as violence. These circumstances must have hastened the abandonment of these cities in favour of better climate and safety.
In 2023, as the world goes through another round of significant climate change, and millets are enjoying a revival of sorts. For 5000 years, aside from rice, our major carbohydrates have remained the same. We also have seen the rise in disease and intra-personal violence in the wake of the stresses laid on by climactic events. There is a lesson for us in the story of Harappa, I suspect, although at the moment we do not know the full story of what happened then.
In any case, in a time where climate change and AI makes everything seem so fragile, I feel strangely reassured by the constancy of certain designs – the tawa, the pots, the pickle jars (martabaans), the bead necklaces and ivory bangles, the toys and wheat, barley and millets.
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For more information on the Harappan Civilization:
Check out Harappa.com because it has great pictures and the latest discoveries being made in the field right now.
You can also read:
Nikhil Gulati’s The People of the Indus – a well researched graphic novel which makes it so much easier to relate to.
Nayanjot Lahiri’s Finding Forgotten Cities about how the Indus/Harappan civilization was discovered in the early 20th century.
Am currently reading Rita P. Wright’s The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy and Society – and it is a fascinating slog (if you know what I mean).
The Untaught Historian 