2
People of the Lost River
As we move from prehistory to history, we are immediately confronted by a problem of plenty. The early history of India has two parallel sources, but there is a great deal of disagreement about how they fit together. On one hand there is the archaeological evidence of the sophisticated cities of the Harappan Civilization (also called Indus Valley or Indus–Saraswati civilization). On the other hand, there is the literature of the Vedic tradition. Their geographies and timelines roughly overlap but archaeologists and historians have long had difficulty reconciling them. Indeed, this has remained a hot topic of discussion among scholars and often deteriorates into a political debate. I do not claim to have resolved the debate. Therefore, I will tell the two stories separately. I will then focus on the one thing that the two sources agree on: the drying of a great river that the Rig Veda calls the Saraswati. No matter which way one looks at it, the drying of this river was an important geographical event that defined early India.
THE HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION
Till the early twentieth century, as already discussed in the previous chapter, it was believed that Indian civilization began with the ‘Aryan Invasions’ that were supposed to have taken place around 1500 BC. These European-like Aryans were supposed to have come from Central Asia and to have conquered the subcontinent and then ‘civilized’ the native population. It should not be lost on the reader that this theory evolved in an intellectual milieu in which Rudyard Kipling was composing poems such as The White Man’s Burden. The theory was based on the discovery of some linguistic affinities between European languages and Sanskrit. The date of 1500 BC was mostly arbitrary. It ignored the fact that both ancient texts and folk traditions have always maintained a much older timeline, but these were considered mythical and dismissed. To be fair, there were no known archaeological equivalents of Egyptian pyramids or Sumerian cities to prove an older history.
However, new discoveries would radically challenge this view in the early decades of the twentieth century. When the Lahore–Multan railway line was being built in the late nineteenth century, wagon-loads of bricks were removed from old mounds to be used as ballast. The bricks were of exceptionally good quality and most people assumed they were of relatively recent origin. In the winter of 1911–12, D.R. Bhandarkar of the Archaeological Survey of India decided to visit one of the sites in Sindh called Mohenjodaro (which literally means Mound of the Dead). He came away unimpressed. In his view, the bricks were of a ‘modern type’ and the locals had told him that they were from a town that had been abandoned just two hundred years earlier. He could not have been more wrong. Fortunately, in the 1920s, Rakhal Das Banerji and Sir John Marshall of the Archaeological Survey decided to revisit the site. Another team led by Daya Ram Sahni began to excavate another site called Harappa in Punjab (both these sites are now in Pakistan). They soon realized that mounds of bricks scattered along the Indus Valley were the remnants of a much older civilization, a contemporary of the Sumerians, the Minoans and the ancient Egyptians. It was named the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization.
Soon, more and more sites began to be discovered. The reason that the Harappan sites were ignored for so long is that they lack grand structures like the Pyramids of Giza that stare out at a visitor. There are large buildings that have been given names like ‘granary’, ‘assembly hall’, ‘citadel’ and ‘college’ but these designations are essentially arbitrary. We do not know what these buildings were really used for and, in most cases, we have little more than foundations and lower walls. There is nothing that is obviously a great palace or a temple. One of the few major buildings that we can definitely identify is the ‘Great Bath’ in Mohenjodaro but even in this case we do not know if the structure was used for religious rituals (as in later Hindu temples), a bathing pool for the royal family or some completely different purpose.
Yet, the Harappan sites are remarkable for their attention to urban design and active municipal management. At its height, the Harappan civilization was very consciously urban. A large city like Mohenjodaro (now in Pakistan) may have had a population of around 40–50,000 people. Furthermore, we see meticulous town-planning in every detail—standardized bricks, street grids, covered sewerage systems and so on. Similarly, a great deal of effort was put into managing water. The solutions varied from city to city. Mohenjodaro alone may have had 600-700 wells. At Dholavira in Gujarat, water was diverted from two neighbouring streams into a series of dams and preserved in a complex system of reservoirs. 1 Many houses, even modest ones, have their own bathrooms and toilets connected to a drainage network that emptied into soak-jars and cess pits. The toilet commodes were made up of big pots sunk into the floor. Most interestingly, as historian Upinder Singh points out, the toilets came equipped with a ‘lota’ for washing up. 2 This must count as one of the most important and enduring of Harappan contributions to Indian civilization. Unfortunately, the toilet design did not survive quite as well as the lota.
DEALING WITH SLUMS AND TECTONICS
Dholavira is a good example of a large Harappan urban centre. It is on an island in the strange salt-marsh landscape of the Rann of Kutchh. At the centre of the settlement is a ‘citadel’ which consists of a rectangular ‘castle’ and a ‘bailey’. It is thought that the citadel contained the homes of the elite as well as public buildings. The castle, which is the oldest part of the city, was heavily fortified with thick walls and was probably meant to withstand military attack. Early scholars had a belief that the Harappan civilization was uniquely peaceful and that there are no signs of military activity. I disagree. As the citadel at Dholavira suggests, defence was a key consideration. The times and technologies may have been different, but human nature was the same.
In front of the citadel there is a large open ground that could have been used for many purposes—military display, sport, royal ceremonies or perhaps the annual parading of the gods. Archaeologists have found tiered seating for spectators along the length of the ground. Beyond the ceremonial grounds was the planned area where the common citizens lived. This division into a Citadel and Lower Town is quite common in larger Harappan settlements. Interestingly, as the city grew, it continued to attract migrants who could not be fitted into the planned city. This led to the growth of informal settlements just to the east of the original Lower Town. As we shall see, the problem with slums is a recurring theme in India’s urban history and we find them in Mughal Delhi, colonial Bombay and in virtually every modern Indian city. The difference is that the political leadership of Dholavira responded by expanding the urban limits and incorporating the slums into the city. According to Dr R. S. Bisht, who led the excavation of the site, we can still discern how the civic authorities redeveloped the slums and imposed Harappan municipal order on them. Thus, Dholavira ended up with three sections—the Citadel, a Middle Town (i.e. the old Lower Town) and a new Lower Town (the new extension).
The city also had to respond to the vagaries of nature. Dr Bisht mentions earthquakes that repeatedly affected Dholavira, including a particularly severe one around 2600 BC. 3 We were violently reminded of the tectonic instability of the region when an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale killed 20,000 people in the state of Gujarat on 26 January 2001. The epicentre was not far from Dholavira.
Thus, the picture is not the popular one of a rigidly pre-planned city but of an evolving urban settlement that was responding in various ways to natural and human challenges. When one visits an archaeological site, one tends to admire the ancient masonry in isolation. In reality, Dholavira was a living city that would have been crowded with soldiers, traders, artisans, and bullock-carts. Imagine the heat and dust, the sound of children playing, and street-vendors haggling with their customers.
Given the geographical spread of the civilization, it is not surprising that there are regional variations. Nonetheless, there is an extraordinary level of standardization including weights and measures, the characteristic terracotta seals and so on. Th
is has led many commentators to argue that there was a centralized empire that imposed order over the whole system. Unfortunately, we know nothing about the political structure and, as already mentioned, we have yet to find any building that can be definitely identified as an imperial palace or a political centre. In fact, we know almost nothing for sure about historic events, political leaders, religion and language. The Harappans did have a script but it has not yet been deciphered.
THE MERCHANTS OF MELUHHA
Despite our near-total ignorance about the political history of the civilization, we now know a great deal about its geography. Over the last century, thousands of sites have been found and several new sites are being discovered every year. It appears that the subcontinent was very populous even at this early stage. The core of the Harappan civilization extended over a large area, from Gujarat in the south, across Sindh and Rajasthan and extending into Punjab and Haryana. Numerous sites have been found outside the core area, including some as far east as Uttar Pradesh and as far west as Sutkagen-dor on the Makran coast of Baluchistan, not far from Iran. There is even a site in Central Asia called Shortughai along the Amu Darya, close to the Afghan-Tajik border. Thus, the geographical spread, the number of sites and implied population of the Harappan civilization dwarfs that of contemporary Egypt, China or Mesopotamia. What the Harappans lack in grand buildings, they make up for in the sheer scale of their civilizational reach and in the extraordinary municipal sophistication of their cities.
We also know that the people of the civilization were actively engaged in domestic and international trade. For land transport, the Harappans used bullock-carts that are almost exactly the same as those that can still be seen in rural India. Cart ruts from Harappa show that even the axle-gauge was almost exactly the same as that of carts used in today’s Sindh. The streets of Mohenjodaro, Harappa and Dholavira would have been full of these bullock-carts ferrying goods and merchants. Thousands of years later, French traveller Tavernier would speak of how seventeenth-century Indian highways were clogged by bullock-cart caravans that could have as many as 10,000–12,000 oxen. He goes on to describe how, when two such caravans met on a narrow road, there would be a traffic jam and it could take two or three days for them to pass. One can imagine Harappan highways would have been quite similar. 4 Perhaps it was one of the great continuities of Indian history.
The numerous rivers of the region would have been useful waterways for ferrying goods and people. A dry dock has been discovered at Lothal in Gujarat where vessels would have docked. It is a short drive from modern Ahmedabad and is worth a day-trip. Little more than foundations and drains have survived of the urban settlement and the visitor may need help from the friendly staff of the archaeology museum (across the car park) to make sense of it. However, the dock—the world’s earliest known—is an impressive structure. It was connected by a canal to the estuary of the Sabarmati river and a lock-gate system was used to regulate water flow during tides. Next to the dock are the remains of warehouses. Standing on the brick blocks of the warehouses, I imagined the humourless customs officials who would have peered suspiciously at the merchandise being unloaded from the boats.
There is strong evidence that the Harappans traded actively with the Persian Gulf. The merchant ships likely hugged the Makran coast, perhaps with a pit stop at Sutkagen-dor and then sailed on to the ports of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamian tablets mention a land called Meluhha that exported bead jewellery, copper, wood, peacocks, monkeys and ivory 5 . These sound like goods that Indians would have exported. It is also likely that they exported cotton textiles since the Harappans were the world pioneers in the spinning and weaving of cotton. 6 To this day, the Indian subcontinent remains a major exporter of cotton textiles and garments.
Strangely, we have no idea what the Harappans imported. Hardly any object of Mesopotamian origin has been found at Harappan sites. Perhaps they imported consumables like dates and wine but we really do not know. The same can be said about trade with Iran and Central Asia. As already mentioned, archaeologists have found a Harappan outpost in Shortughai on the Afghan–Tajik border. What were they doing there? One intriguing possibility is that they were there to buy horses. The inability to breed good-quality horses would plague India right into the nineteenth century and force Indian rulers to import large numbers from Central Asia and Arabia. Marco Polo would comment on this in the thirteenth century. We will return to this issue later.
WHAT HAPPENED TO INDIA’S FIRST CITIES?
We now know that this civilization did not suddenly appear or disappear. Excavations in Mehrgarh, near Quetta in Balochistan, show the gradual evolution from Neolithic village to an increasingly more sophisticated culture from around 7000 BC. The earliest recognizably Harappan sites date to 3500 BC. This early phase lasts till around 2600 BC. We then enter the Mature phase from 2600 BC to 2000 BC. This is when the great cities were at their height. Note that this is a Bronze Age culture and there is no systematic use of iron. Then, from around 2000 BC we have a steady disintegration that lasts till 1400 BC—what is usually called Late Harappan.
This is a simplified timeline. In reality, cities rose and fell and were sometimes rebuilt on older sites. Some areas flourished when others were in decline. Nonetheless, there are clear signs that the overall civilization was in severe stress after 2000 BC. We see steady deterioration in municipal governance till one by one the great cities are abandoned. What went wrong?
It was once believed that Aryan invasions from Central Asia had caused the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. However, there is no sign that Harappan cities were laid waste by invaders. The evidence strongly points to the wrath of nature. A number of studies show that the area which is today the Thar desert was once far wetter and that the climate gradually became drier. However, the exact trajectory of this change is somewhat disputed. It is possible that the process of drying was already under way when the Mature Harappan period began. However, around 2200 BC, we find that the monsoons had become distinctly weaker and there were prolonged droughts. In fact, this is a widespread phenomenon that also affected Egypt and Turkey. 7 By itself, this would have caused an agricultural crisis for a heavily populated region. However, the Harappans were hit by an even bigger problem—the drying up of the river system on which the civilization was based.
A simple map of Harappan sites would be enough to illustrate that the largest concentration of settlements is not centred around the Indus but around the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar. It is now little more than a dry riverbed that contains water only after heavy rains (it saw an exceptional flow after the heavy monsoons of 2010). However, surveys and satellite photographs confirm that it was once a great river that rose in the Himalayas, entered the plains in Haryana, flowed through the Thar–Cholistan desert of Rajasthan and eastern Sindh (running roughly parallel to the Indus) and then reached the sea in the Rann of Kutchh in Gujarat. Indeed, the strange marshy landscape of the Rann of Kutchh is partly due to the fact that it was once the estuary of a great river. Although much of this course is now dry desert and often hidden under sand, satellite photographs show that there is still a substantial amount of underground water along the old channels. This has been confirmed by drilling wells that have given fresh water at shallow depths even in the middle of the Thar desert!
The Ghaggar emerges from hills just east of Chandigarh but is joined by a number of other seasonal rivers in the plains of northern Haryana. There is evidence that the Ghaggar and/or some of these rivers were perennial in ancient times. Moreover, satellite images show that both the Sutlej and the Yamuna once flowed into the Ghaggar, which would have made the Ghaggar a mighty river. However, at some point the Ghaggar appears to have lost its main sources of glacial melt from the Himalayas even as the Sutlej and the Yamuna, its largest tributaries, abandoned it for the Indus and the Ganga respectively. Tectonic shifts appear to have played a role in this. As a result, we find that the river no longer flowed to the sea. The Ghaggar may have struggled on wit
h the help of rain-fed seasonal tributaries but even these failed as the climate changed. The sequence of events may have taken decades or centuries to play out and different parts of the Harappan world would have experienced different sub-cycles. Cities on the banks of the Indus, for instance, may have suffered floods as Sutlej waters suddenly entered their ecosystem. The Pakistan floods of 2010 provide a glimpse of what this may have felt like—especially if such an event had caused the Indus itself to shift course.
Dry Bed of the Saraswati River
(source: The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati by Michel Danino)
What does the drying of the Ghaggar tell us about the fate of the Harappans? It appears that the climate was wetter and the Ghaggar was in full flow during the early phase of the civilization. Perhaps the earthquakes of 2600 BC, attested both at Kalibangan and Dholavira, were related to the tectonic shifts that affected either the Yamuna or the Sutlej. Interestingly, we find that the mature Harappan phase takes off only after the Ghaggar was already drying. One wonders if the drying weather and the dying river created a climatic sweet-spot that allowed the urban centres to flourish. This may explain why there is a dense concentration of mature Harappan sites in the Thar desert, around the time we think that the Ghaggar may have already started to dry. Unfortunately, around 2000 BC, conditions again took a sharp turn for the worse.
Eventually, the lack of water began to weigh against the Harappans. Their carefully managed cities began to disintegrate and they began to migrate. This would not be the last time that cities in the subcontinent would suffer from the vagaries of too much or too little water. One can imagine long lines of bullock-carts, heavily laden with personal belongings, leaving their old villages and cities in search of a more secure future. The scene was replayed in 2010 when Pakistan was devastated by floods. In the north, the Harappans moved north-east to the Yamuna and Ganga. In Gujarat, the cities in Kutchh were abandoned in favour of new settlements in the Narmada and Tapti valleys to the south.8 The late Harappan sites show a degree of cultural continuity but there is a clear shift towards smaller settlements. The old urban sophistication has clearly broken down. Thus ended India’s first experience of urbanization.
Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Page 4