Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography

by Sanyal, Sanjeev

  WHERE DID THE HARAPPANS GO?

  The archaeological evidence suggests that they slowly drifted east and south, and that their culture and genes lived on in India. However, archeologists and historians disagree bitterly on this. Romila Thapar, an eminent historian, is of the opinion that the ‘material culture shows no continuities’. 9 In contrast, B.B. Lal, a former Director General of the Archaeological Survey and one of India’s most celebrated archaeologists, argues that ‘many of the present day cultural traits are rooted in the Harappan Civilization.’ 10

  We have already discussed the similarity between modern-day bullock carts and those used by the Harappans. However, B.B. Lal puts forward a formidable body of evidence that the Harappan legacy is not just visible in later Indian civilization but is present in everyday life to this day. Take for example, the ‘namaste’—the common Indian way to show respect to both people and to the gods. There are several clay figurines from Harappan sites that show a person with palms held together in a namaste. There are even terracotta dolls of women with red vermilion on their foreheads. Is this the origin of the ‘sindur’ used by married Hindu women? All of these are intriguing thoughts but we cannot be absolutely sure that these had the same meaning for the Harappans.

  In his recent book, Michel Danino has collected even more examples of continuity. We have already discussed the persistence of the ratio 5:4 in the previous chapter. We see the use of such ratios in many facets of Harappan life. They also had a standardized system of weights and measures, many of which are echoed two thousand years later in the Arthashastra, a manual on governance and political economy written in the third century BC. Danino calculates that the standard length used by the planners at Dholavira was 1.9 metres which is the same as the unit called dhanush (i.e. bow) used in the Arthashastra. He then shows that this unit was divided into 108 sub-units of 1.76 cm each. This fits with the 108 angulas (i.e. finger-widths) that made up a dhanush. 11 In fact, the old systems appear to have survived in a few places into the twentieth century. Till India switched a few decades ago to the metric system, the traditional weights and measures used in some parts of the subcontinent bore a striking resemblance to those used by the Harappan people. According to John Mitchiner, the difference was less than 1.8 per cent—not bad for a time lapse of over four thousand years!

  Most interesting of all, chess pieces that look remarkably like modern equivalents have been found at Harappan sites. It has long been known that chess originated in India but it is extraordinary that the game, or something similar, was being played more than four thousand years ago. Even the famous town planning of the Harappans may have survived in later times. The streets of Kalibagan, a large site in Indian Punjab, are laid out with widths in a progression of 1.9 m, 3.8 m, 5.7 m and 7.6 m—the same as those prescribed in the Arthashastra. In short, the Harappans did not just disappear; they live on amongst us. They merged with the wider population and seeded what we now know as the Indian civilization. However, Indian civilization has parallel roots, in particular the Vedic tradition and its continuous history to this day. It is to this that we now turn.

  THE RIG VEDA

  The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of the Hindu tradition and consist of four books—Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva. They consist mostly of prayers, hymns and instructions on how to conduct rituals and fire sacrifices. They were composed and compiled over several centuries by poet-philosophers (or rishis). The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four and organized in ten sections. It is the oldest extant book in the world and remains in active use. Indeed, it is considered by most Hindus to be the most sacred of texts and one of its hymns, the Gayatri Mantra, is chanted daily by millions. It has been variously translated by scholars over the centuries. Here is my interpretation: ‘As you light up the Heavens and the Earth, O Radiant Sun, So light up my Mind’.

  The Rig Veda is composed in a very archaic form of Sanskrit and is undoubtedly very old. However, there is a great deal of disagreement about exactly how old. The dates range from 4000 BC to 1000 BC. 12 Dating it is no easy task since it was probably compiled over decades or even centuries and remained a purely orally transmitted tradition till the third century AD. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Rig Veda belongs to the Bronze Age as it does not mention iron. 13 The earliest possible mention of iron comes in the Atharva Veda which was compiled many centuries later and talks of a ‘krishna ayas’ or dark bronze. Since we know that iron was in use in India by 1700 BC, 14 this would roughly date the Atharva Veda. Allowing for a few centuries between the composition of the first and last Veda, it would not be unreasonable to say the Rig Veda was compiled no later than 2000 BC.

  Since the nineteenth century, the Rig Veda has been used to reconstruct early Indian history. At the outset, let me point out that this is fraught with difficulty. The book is mainly concerned with religion and philosophy, and is not meant as an encyclopaedia of social and political conditions. It is a bit like guessing the history of the Roman Empire by reading the New Testament. Nonetheless, it does provide an interesting glimpse of a Bronze Age society, its social customs, its material and philosophical concerns, its gods and its tribal feuds. With one exception, however—it is difficult to discern actual historical events from the hymns.

  The geography of the book, by contrast, is very clear. To the east, the book talks of the Ganga river and, to the west, of the Kabul river. It also shows awareness of the Himalayan mountains in the north and the seas to the south (i.e. the Arabian Sea). This is a very well defined geographical area and, interestingly, roughly coincides with the Harappan world.

  Most interesting of all, the Rig Veda speaks repeatedly of a great river called the Saraswati. It is described as the greatest of rivers. Forty-five of the Rig Veda hymns shower praise on the Saraswati. No other river or geographical feature comes close in importance. The Ganga is barely mentioned twice and the Indus, although referred to as a mighty river, is not given the same reverence. In contrast, the Saraswati is called the mother of all rivers and ‘great among the great, the most impetuous of rivers’. It is even called the ‘inspirer of hymns’ suggesting that the Rig Veda was composed on its banks.

  The problem is that there is no living river in modern India that fits the description. This has led some historians to argue that the Saraswati is a figment of poetic imagination. Others have tried to identify it with the Helmand river in Afghanistan. However, the Rig Veda itself describes the geographical location of the river. In the Nadistuti Sukta (Hymn to the Rivers), the major rivers are enumerated from east to west starting with the Ganga. The hymn clearly places the Saraswati between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. There is no room for doubt. There is only one river that could fit this description—the Ghaggar. Its river bed may be dry today but satellite and ground surveys unequivocally tell us that it was once a mighty river. It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that the Rig Vedic people and the Harappans were dealing with the same river.

  There is a further twist. Unlike later texts, the Rig Veda does not mention a drying Saraswati. Instead, it mentions clearly that the Saraswati entered the sea in full flow. This would suggest that the text was composed before 2600 BC! Even more intriguingly, the Rig Veda mentions poets and compositions from an even earlier age, although their works have not survived. So, we could be dealing with a culture that coincides with the early Harappan age. I know that not all scholars would agree with this—but it is important to keep this possibility in mind.

  CAN ONE RECONCILE THE TWO ACCOUNTS?

  The Harappan civilization and the Rig Veda coincide on many things—their time frames, their geography, the Bronze Age technology and even on the existence of the Saraswati river. Were they the same people? Combined with the genetic data discussed in the earlier chapter, it would seem that we are dealing with a population and culture that has continuously inhabited the subcontinent for a very long time. For some, especially archaeologists like B.B. Lal, the matter is settled. However, there are many scholars who remain sceptical. Le
t us look at many of the arguments usually put forward against identifying the Harappans with the Rig Vedic people. We will start with the weaker arguments and make our way to the more serious ones.

  One of the oldest arguments is that the Rig Vedic people were nomads from Central Asia who could not have built the sophisticated cities of the Indus Valley. This is why, so the argument goes, the Rig Veda shows little knowledge of India’s geography beyond the North West. This is a spurious argument because the Rig Veda neither mentions an invasion nor does it show any knowledge of Central Asia. All we can garner from the text is that these people were living in the area that corresponds roughly to modern Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab (including Pakistani Punjab). They also knew about the Himalayas in the north, the seas in the south, the Ganga to the east and eastern Afghanistan to the west. It is entirely possible that they may have known about South India and/or Central Asia but the text tells us nothing about this.

  Furthermore, the Rig Vedic people are clearly aware of settled agriculture and of cities—both inhabited by themselves and those inhabited by their enemies. They are not wild nomads from the Steppes as has been suggested. Admittedly, the Rig Veda does not obviously reflect the Harappan obsession with municipal order but then it is a religious book and should not be expected to delve into the intricacies of sewage systems.

  The second spurious argument is that the Rig Vedic people were iron-wielding ‘Aryans’ who were at constant war with their enemies called ‘Dasas’ (the latter being identified as the Harappans or aboriginal tribes). The term ‘Arya’ is commonly used in Sanskrit literature, but is never used in a racial sense. It refers to a cultured or noble person—which means that all groups like to refer to themselves as Aryan and to their enemies as non-Aryan. The use of the word in a racial sense occurs in ancient Iran and modern Europe, but not in India. Similarly, we need to be careful with the use of the word Dasa to denote non-Aryan enemies, especially when the greatest of the ‘Aryan’ chieftains mentioned in the Rig Veda is a Dasa himself: Sudasa, son of Divodasa (more on him later). 15

  In other words, the Rig Veda hardly gives us a consistent picture of Arya–Dasa conflict. It is rather a mish-mash of tribal feuds between clans whose ethnic background can no longer be discerned. Their technology is decidedly Bronze Age and the use of iron appears many centuries later in the Atharva Veda if at all. 16 By all accounts, iron smelting was an indigenously developed technology that arose in Central India from the plentiful iron ore found there. It could not have been an imported technological advantage that the invaders exercised over the locals.

  In my view, the more serious argument against identifying the Vedic Indians with the Harappans relates to the use of horses. The Rig Veda frequently mentions the bull and the horse. The former is a common theme in Harappan art but the horse appears to be conspicuously missing. I have not yet found a full explanation for this and perhaps the answer lies in the hundreds of unexcavated sites littered across India and Pakistan or in the thousands of bags of animal bones from earlier excavations that have not been examined for decades. Nonetheless, I would like to add two qualifications.

  First, it is very likely that Harappans were at least familiar with the horse, even if it was not a commonly used animal. The horse was domesticated in Central Asia around 4000 BC and we know that a millennium later, the Harappans had a trading outpost on the Amu Darya. Surely they would have noticed how the locals had tamed an animal that could be so useful. In fact, it would not be surprising if they were there to procure horses. After all, the importation of horses remains a common theme throughout later Indian history. Thus, one could argue that it was the horse and not the Aryan who was imported. Indeed, there is independent evidence to suggest horses were familiar animals even in Central India from a very early stage. The stone-age rock paintings of Bhimbetka show horses. The Neolithic site of Mahagara on the Belan river has yielded horse bones—which may indicate a familiarity with the animal from a pre-Harappan era! 17 In short, there may have been plenty of horses about, which fits with the fact that the so-called non-Aryan tribes in the Rig Veda also appear to have horses of their own.

  Second, it is not entirely true that there are no signs of the horse in Harappan sites. While the horse is not depicted in any of the seals, there are at least two terracotta figurines that depict a ‘horse-like’ creature. The set of ‘chessmen’ found in Lothal, too, has a piece that looks like a horse’s head. There are even claims that horse bones have been found in a few places and have been positively identified by leading scholars 18 although critics still argue that these remains are of asses/donkeys and not of horses. I am not qualified to judge this but merely want readers to know that the absence of horses can no longer be evoked quite so easily to debunk the idea that the Harappans and the Vedic people were somehow related. In my view, the really interesting debate relates to lions and not horses. We will visit it in the next chapter.

  On balance, the evidence appears to have tipped in favour of the archaeologists rather than the historians. New information—including genetic data—appears to be strengthening their hand. Over time, it is possible that the remaining controversies will be ironed out including that of the horse and the lion. My own sense is that the Harappans were a multi-ethnic society, rather like India today. The Rig Vedic people could well have been part of this bubbling mix.

  Let us turn now to the geographical event on which the archaeology and the texts categorically agree—the drying up of the Saraswati. Whichever way one looks at it, one cannot escape the conclusion that the drying up of this river was a major event in the evolution of India’s civilization.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SARASWATI?

  The identification of the Saraswati with the Ghaggar is not new. A number of nineteenth-century British explorers and cartographers identified the dry riverbed with the river mentioned in old texts and legends. However, with modern satellite data, the matter can now be said to be settled. As we have seen, the Rig Veda talks incessantly about the great Saraswati river, echoed by the later Vedas. However, texts of the next generation repeatedly mention how the Saraswati dried up. The Panchavamsa Brahmana tells us that the river disappeared into the desert. There are many legends and folk tales about how the river dried up or sank underground. What was the cause of its downfall?

  As already mentioned, physical surveys and satellite photographs confirm that the Sutlej and the Yamuna were once tributaries of the Saraswati. This would have made the Saraswati a very impressive river with a flow that was larger than that of the Indus and the Ganga. It is not surprising that so many early Harappan settlements were centred around this great river. Unfortunately, the river appears to have lost the Yamuna, perhaps due to a major tectonic event. We have seen how the Himalayas are notoriously unstable and prone to major earthquakes. The earthquakes of 2600 BC may have been especially large but there would have been other tectonics movements as well. The loss of the Yamuna was not the end of the Saraswati’s misfortunes. It then lost the Sutlej, its other major tributary, to the Indus. The Sutlej is a moody river and has had many channels in its past. Its ancient name Shatadru literally means ‘Of a Hundred Channels’. At some point it decided to swing west towards the Indus. The old channels flowing east remain visible in satellite photographs.

  The same process may even have cost the Saraswati its own perennial source of glacial water. A Rig Vedic hymn hints that it may have had three separate sources. 19 There is some research that argues that the Tons river, that is today a major tributary of the Yamuna, may have been one of the original sources of glacial water for the Saraswati, and that it flowed into the plains through the channel of the Markanda, which is yet another of the Ghaggar’s tributaries. 20

  Without a perennial water source, the Saraswati must have become a rain-fed seasonal river. Even this became untenable as the climate became drier. Eventually, the river broke up into a series of lakes and then completely dried up. The dry riverbed of the Ghaggar is all that is now left altho
ugh it does occasionally flow after an especially heavy monsoon season.

  Nevertheless, the river was not forgotten. We find its memory echoed in legends, folk tales and place-names. Modern Hindus still worship the Saraswati as the Goddess of Knowledge, recalling the river’s role as an ‘inspirer of hymns’. In Haryana, one of the seasonal tributaries of the Ghaggar is called the Sarsuti. Farther south, a seasonal river called Saraswati rises in the Aravallis and flows into the Rann of Kutchh, not far from the estuary of the lost river. Deep in the deserts of Rajasthan, the Pushkar lake recalls many legends about the Goddess Saraswati. Where the Yamuna joins the Ganga at Allahabad, there is a legend that the Saraswati flows underground. Perhaps it is a way to remember the fact that the Yamuna was once a tributary of the lost river.

  The shifting of the rivers may explain one of the mysteries of the subcontinent’s wildlife: how the Gangetic and Indus river dolphins came to belong to the same species. Till the 1990s they were considered separate species but now they are classified as sub-species Platanista Gangetica Gangetica and Platanista Gangetica Minor. The problem is that the two river systems are today not connected, and the dolphins obviously could not have walked from one to the other. The sea route too is unlikely since the mouths of the two rivers are very far apart. In any case, the river dolphins are not closely related to the salt-water dolphins of the Indian Ocean and must have evolved separately from them. One possibility, therefore, is that the shifting rivers allowed the dolphins to move from one river system to the other. Sadly, both sub-species are now under severe threat from pollution and the diversion of water into numerous irrigation projects. 21