The Indus Civilization

by Gregory L. Possehl

  There are several structures at Mohenjo-daro proposed to have been buildings used by the Indus religious establishment. Marshall lists several candidates, which fail the test, on detailed examination.55 The best candidates include four buildings on the Mound of the Great Bath (see figures 11.3, 11.4, and 11.9): the Bath itself, the so-called College of Priests, a temple said to be below the stupa, and the Assembly Hall in L Area. House XXX in HR-B, House I in HR-A, and two buildings in DK-G Area (Blocks 11 and 8A) have also been discussed in this context. The structures that have been called fire altars at both Lothal and Kalibangan, along with the “ritual structure” at the latter site and the bathing platforms at Lothal, should also be mentioned. Harappa is conspicuous for the absence of architectural remains associated with religious activities.

  Structures on the Mound of the Great Bath

  The Great Bath

  The Great Bath is the only convincing example of a ritual structure in the Mature Harappan. It does not look like a temple, but it does very strongly suggest a place of ritual (see figure 11.3). There is a discussion of the function of this important structure in the tour of Mohenjo-daro offered in this book, but the following points serve to justify the judgment just made. First, the building in which the bath is housed is elevated and secured away from the Lower Town, both highly symbolic. The bath was, in fact, filled with water and was a place of bathing or taking one’s ablutions, in part evidenced by the bathing rooms on the eastern side of the building. The symbolic nature of water (especially at Mohenjo-daro) and cleanliness, both physical and ritual, seems to apply here, especially given the Great Bath’s elevation and location. Thus, the notion that the bath was a place for ritual bathing makes a great deal of sense.

  The College of Priests

  The College of Priests, across Main Street from the Great Bath, is a very large building and might have functioned as a complement to the Great Bath (see figure 11.9). But there is no compelling evidence for this, save for its size and location. The thought that this building was a temple has no corroborating evidence.

  A Temple under the Buddhist Stupa

  Wheeler has referred to “the pious hope, often repeated but entirely unbased, that a temple may underlie the stupa on the (Mound of the Great Bath)” (see figure 11.3)56 Mackay was the most outspoken proponent of this idea, and in his popular book, he said: “When further excavations are made on this site, the axiom will probably once more prove true that once a site becomes sacred it remains so, even to the followers of other religions who may occupy it later.”57 This is a good idea and one that is often true, but we have reason to believe that it may not be true at Mohenjo-daro.

  So far as can be judged from the plans and sections of the buildings exposed around the stupa, there is nothing that sets the area apart from the rest of the city. There are “well-paved rooms and courtyards, bathrooms, drains, water-chutes, and the like—all well made though not better made than in some other buildings, and all seemingly in conformity with the standard patterns, but with no features out of the common. This is no proof, of course, that the few remnants exposed did not form part of some temple or other sacred edifice, or perhaps I should say, series of such edifices, since they belong to several strata and to various ages.”58 The prevailing view is that a detailed examination of excavation records shows that there has been sufficient digging around the stupa to ensure that there is no large building under it, an observation corroborated by M. Jansen.59

  Other Buildings at Mohenjo-daro Proposed to Have Been Religious Architecture

  House I in HR-A Area

  House I in HR-A Area is an unusual, even exceptional structure, almost certainly not a domestic building (figure 8.8). A large number of seals and other finds came from it, along with two major pieces of sculpture: the Bearded Man and the Sad Man. The original description of the building leaves much to be desired, and it is not clear that Marshall knew exactly what to do with the finds.60 Wheeler has said of the building:

  Amongst the other buildings attention may be drawn again to the HR Area, and more especially to the so-called House A1, bounded on the north by “South Lane” and on the west by “Deadman Lane.” The significance of the plan is not brought out by the published record, which amalgamates walls of very different periods and is in several respects incomplete.61

  Some portion of this inadequacy has been corrected in an excellent article by M. Jansen 62 Access to original field records has enabled him to plot the find spots for twelve seals found in House I, all of which are unicorns or bar seals.

  This structure is actually three buildings, interlinked into a single, integrated whole by staircases flanking the entrance. The elevated northern portion of the building has parallels in other structures, notably the Great Bath and House VIII in HR-A, the significance of which is not fully understood.63 It cannot be demonstrated that this house was a temple or even associated with the religious institution. But it does not fit the pattern for an ordinary house: “From every point of view, House 1 is an extraordinary structure.”64

  House XXX in HR-B

  There is a massive building, designated House XXX, in HR-B Area (figure 8.9). The exterior dimensions are approximately 24 by 11 meters. Most of the building, as we see it, is of the Intermediate Period; but Late Period walls also seem to be present, and the plan as published should not be relied on to settle detailed issues of interpretation. The outer walls are approximately 1.37 meters thick and preserved to a height of over 2 meters in places. Many of the interior rooms have no apparent entrances but are solid podia of mud-brick packing. Except for the southern rooms, associated with a well, the whole seems to have been a very solid understructure for another building, either vanished or never built, which would have been very substantial indeed.

  Figure 8.8 Plan of House 1 in HR-A (after Marshall 1931i)

  House XXX’s massive character and its unusual configuration have led to its consideration as a religious structure, and the proposal that it was a temple has no more merit than these two factors.

  House L in HR-B Area

  House L in HR-B is another massive structure, near House XXX. There is no more reason to believe that it was a temple than there is for House XXX.

  Block 11, DK-G Area

  This is a building of the Intermediate II Phase (figure 8.10). It is irregular in shape and associated with Loop and Long Lanes in DK-G Area.65 The structure has not been completely excavated, but it contains a courtyard and three wells, a culvert, and water chute. There were many modifications in the Late Period. Mackay stated in the Marshall report:

  This building seems to approximate more closely to our idea of a temple than any building yet excavated at Mohenjo-daro. The three wells, which are almost in a straight line, probably provided water for ablutions in the temple precincts. Not many antiquities were found within this complex beyond a few baked pottery figurines in the chambers on the south of the courtyard.66

  It was later cleared more completely by Mackay, who gave four reasons for identifying this building as a “great khan,” or hostel, rather than a temple. His reasons include such things as the block’s propinquity to a gateway he thought was present, but never found, as well as an undocumented open-air market.67

  Block 8A, DK-G Area

  Located at the southwestern corner of the intersection of Central Street and Low Lane in DK-G Area is an L-shaped structure with very solidly built walls and interior buttresses (figure 8.11). The buttresses are unusual features at Mohenjo-daro and may have carried a second story or a continuous gallery around the building. The entrance off Low Lane is in the southeastern corner of the building, with a well room adjacent to the north. A later modification of the building led to the creation of a new entrance in about the center of the northern wall on Central Street, and the blocking of the one off Low Lane. This remodeling seems to have also involved the creation of a double drain and the emplacement of a soak jar, connected with a terra-cotta pipe from the upper levels of the building. A separate
latrine with its own entrance from Central Street and a drain into a cesspit on Low Lane also appears at about this time. The general level of this neighborhood was rising and this necessitated the construction of a set of stairs down into the well room off Low Lane.68 While Block 8A is an unusual structure, not like a private home or domestic structure at Mohenjo-daro, there is really no evidence that it was a temple.

  Figure 8.9 Plan with Houses XXX and L, in HR-B Area, with privies (after Marshall 1931i)

  Figure 8.10 Plan of Block 11 in DK-G Area (after Mackay 1937—38)

  Figure 8.11 Block 8A in DK-G Area (after Mackay 1937—38)

  Fire Altars

  Small pits filled with ash and other debris have been identified as fire altars at the following Mature Harappan sites: Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan, Lothal, Vagad, and Nageswar, the latter three are in Gujarat. Similar structures were identified at Navdatoli on the Narmada River and Dangwada, a site near Ujjain in western Madhya Pradesh.69

  There is little merit to the proposal that there are fire altars associated with the Indus Civilization. The case for fire altars at Kalibangan is by far the strongest, and it includes the so-called ritual structure to the east of the Lower Town. The rest of the evidence is weak, including that from Nageswar, where the “fire altar” is in all likelihood a regular Indus funnel-shaped updraft kiln.

  Religious Architecture: Summary

  The only building, or building complex, that can be associated with the Indus Civilization that is religious or ritual in nature is the Great Bath. Its location and size suggest that it was used by a small number of people in an exclusive way. The importance of water, cleanliness, and elevation all contribute to the notion that this was an important element in the Harappan religious establishment, perhaps even preeminent. The remainder of the buildings falls short of the mark, especially those in DK Area. House I in HR-A Area is an intriguing structure, but it could be seen as the seat of a political potentate as easily as a temple or seat of religious authority. Buildings XXX and L in HR-B are simply massive structures.

  HARAPPAN FUNERARY PRACTICES AND RELIGION

  We have a strong sense that there was a diversity of Indus funerary practices, suggesting the kind of ethnic diversity that other observations tend to support. There is evidence for extended supine burial in pits and coffins, in line with modern practices of Muslims and Christians. The best evidence for this comes from Cemetery R-37 at Harappa, the Kalibangan cemetery. Fractional burials, for which the human remains were exposed to the elements and reduced to skeletons before being gathered for final inhumation, also exist. Good evidence for this practice comes from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in the Mature Phase and from Nal during the Early Harappan. The evidence for cremation is not particularly robust, but then, ash is ash, and if the practice is properly done, the resulting material does not survive well, especially if the teeth and residual bone are crushed. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa both produced evidence for “postcremation urns” that contain Mature Harappan artifacts—mostly pottery and some ash and bone, but almost none of it human. There is a Mature Harappan crematory located in western Rajasthan at Tarkhanwala Dera.70

  There is also a sense that, for some Indus persons, the care they received at death was somewhat casual. Stray human bones and teeth are a part of the excavation records at a number of sites, for example, Rojdi. Moreover, many of the fractional burials have remains from more than one person in them, sometimes mixtures of adults and children.

  The Indus dead are discussed more in the next chapter.

  SYNTHESIS

  There are two themes that come through to me in this review of Indus religion. The first is diversity of practice; the second is the absence of a robust representation of the religious institution in monumentality.

  The diversity theme is seen at Mohenjo-daro in a number of ways. First, Marshall’s Great Mother Goddess and Great Male God, synthesized in a body of iconography that plays on the plant/animal dichotomy—with the importance of water worked in—in a way that is not well understood. I include the water theme because of the magnitude of its presence (the Great Bath, drains, wells, bathing platforms) at so many Indus sites. But there are other themes as well: Shaktism, zoolatry, lingas and yonis, ritual discipline, even Mesopotamian ideas that complement the first theme.

  As seen at Mohenjo-daro and to some extent other sites, the “big” theme, perhaps as close as the Harappans got to a Great Tradition, is the one that deals with the dichotomy of female/male and plant/animal and the importance of water. This is complemented by the “little tradition” of Shaktism, zoolatry, lingas and yonis, and the like.

  There is geographical diversity as well. Harappa has no Great Bath, and the water theme there may be more muted than it is at Mohenjo-daro. The same is true for Kalibangan. If the fire altars there are in fact ritual facilities, perhaps we have a fire theme that contrasts to the water theme at a place like Mohenjo-daro. Such a north-south opposition would fit well with the provinces that have been suggested for stamp seals and the human population. There is nothing at a place like Rojdi to suggest much of anything about religion.

  The absence of ostentatious buildings and facades says nothing of a priesthood, which may or may not have been present. We could even consider the possibility of an individual anointed as the supreme religious leader, a kind of Harappan Pope. But it is just as possible that this, too, was a weakly developed part of the institution and that priests, if present at all, were not organized into their own hierarchy, but functioned more individually, as in Islam or Buddhism. As a further alternative—and this is not an exhaustive treatment of possibilities—some category of “respected elder” might have been the source of religious leadership, training, and inspiration. We just do not know how the Indus peoples organized themselves in this area, and there does not seem to be a class of evidence in the remains of the Harappan Civilization that will answer the question, as intriguing as it may be.

  It appears that the practice of religion may have been a rather individualized obligation, possibly done in the home by family members without significant amounts of paraphernalia. This is perhaps the most appealing suggestion to emerge from this study of the Indus system of beliefs because it is so harmonious with the artifactual and architectural evidence. The terra-cotta figurines, lingas, baetyls, and yonis could all be very nicely accounted for in this view of Indus beliefs. The same is true for the fire altars at Kalibangan and perhaps Lothal; although at Kalibangan there is a suggestion of some civic level of use as well. If fire was used as a part of Indus ritual, and there is no reason to say that it was or was not, many of the hearths that have been found in Indus settlements might have been used for such daily worship. The Indus practice might even have involved using the household cooking hearth as the ritual hearth in some very sensitive expression of household renewal linked to the preparation of food, sustenance, and continued well-being. This speculation has gone well beyond the ability of the evidence to support it, but the key point is that the ordinary domestic hearth should not be ruled out as a possible center for daily worship.

  There is some direct evidence for public performances of a somewhat religious nature. This comes from the two sealings from Mohenjo-daro that show a procession with participants carrying banners, statues of cattle, and what may be models of the “standard” that is generally found in front of the unicorn on the stamp seals (figure 8.5).

  If the primary expression of worship in the Indus Civilization was an individual or family matter, there is still some sense that devotion was carried out at some higher institutional or civic level as well. The best evidence for this comes from the Great Bath and possibly the bathing floors at Lothal as an extension of the practice.

  The raison d’être for the Indus Civilization was an ideology, an Indus Great Tradition, fashioned in part from the heritage of the Early Harappan Stage, in part from the genius of the Harappans themselves. This would have been a distinctively Indus way of looking at the world, an all-encompassing p
hilosophy of life. The inhabitants of the settlements clearly within the Indus fold, such as Mohenjo-daro and Kalibangan, would have shared significantly in at least these core beliefs. If this hypothesis is anywhere near correct, the Indus ideology would have been both universalistic and powerful, capable of molding the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.

  LATER INDIAN TRADITION BEGINS IN THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

  The proposed historical links between the Indus Civilization and later Indian civilization is a difficult, complex, sometimes contentious, even politicized topic. There is evidence from Mature Harappan times for a female/male duality, something like Shaktism, the importance of water and possibly fire in worship, the presence of yoga-like ritual discipline, and Allchin’s proposed representation of heaven as a male and earth as mother. These are all reasons for us to suspect that the Indus Civilization provides a logical, if somewhat arbitrary, starting point for some aspects of the later Hindu tradition. Wheeler touches on this when he notes:

  And finally the importance—not necessarily the deification—of water in the life of the Harappans is stressed by the Great Bath on the citadel of Mohenjo-daro and by the almost extravagant provision for bathing and drainage throughout the city, and may provide yet another link with the later Hinduism. The universal use of “tanks” in modern Indian ritual, and the practice of bathing at the beginning of the day and before principal meals, may well derive ultimately from . . . the Indus civilization.71