By contrast, they do not seem to have found female animals very interesting, and significantly, no figurines of cows have been found.37 Marshall even comments on this absence, the cow that does not moo in the night, as it were: “The cow, even if it was regarded as sacred, was for some reason, at present unexplained, not represented in plastic form or carved in stone.”38 Of course they must have had cows, or they couldn’t very well have had bulls (and indeed there is material evidence of cows in the IVC), but the art-historical record tells us that the Indus artists did not use cows as cultural symbols, and why should we assume, with Marshall, that they were sacred? Why, in fact, do archaeologists reach for the word “sacred” every time they find something for which they cannot determine a practical use? (This is a question to which we will return.)
The seals depict animals that have been characterized as being “noted for their physical and sexual prowess—bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, and tigers—or, as is true of snakes and crocodiles . . . widely regarded as symbols of sexuality, fertility, or longevity.”39 Of course we don’t really know how good crocodiles are in bed; our culture thinks of them (or at least their tears and smiles) as symbols of hypocrisy; why should they be symbols of sexuality, and to whom (other than, presumably, other crocodiles)? It has even been suggested that “the present untouchability of dogs could originate from their being sacred [in the IVC] and thus untouchable.”40 The equation of sacrality and untouchability is as unjustified as the assumption that the attitude to dogs did not change in four thousand years.
THE UNICORN (AND OTHER POSSIBLY MYTHICAL BEASTS)
This question of symbolic valence becomes more blatant in the case of more fantastic animals, like unicorns.
The most commonly represented Indus animal, depicted on 1,156 seals and sealings out of a total of 1,755 found at Mature Harappan sites (that is, on 60 percent of all seals and sealings), is “a stocky creature unknown to zoology, with the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, from which head a single horn curls majestically upwards and then forwards.”41 What is this animal? Is it just a two-horned animal viewed from the side or a kind of gazelle with a horn on its nose? Is it a horse with a horn? (It doesn’t have the proportions of a horse.) Or a stylized rhinoceros?42 Or is it, by analogy with its European cousin, a mythical beast? The quasi unicorn always (like other Indus animals sometimes) has a manger in front of him. The manger is sometimes said to have “religious or cultic significance,” since one seal shows an image of a unicorn being carried in procession alongside such a manger.43 Often the manger is called sacred (presumably on the basis of the sacrality of mangers in Christianity).
The unicorn lands us on the horn of a dilemma: Are the animals represented in the art of the IVC religious symbols? Though many Indus animal figurines are simply children’s toys, with little wheels on them, scholars persist in investing them with religious meanings. Some of the fossil record too has been invoked as religious testimony. The excavation, in 1929, of twenty severed human skulls “tightly packed together,” along with what the excavator interpreted as ritual vessels and the bones of sacrificed animals, has been taken as evidence that human heads were presented to a sacred tree,44 a scenario reminiscent of the novel The Day of the Triffids or the film The Little Shop of Horrors (“Feed me! Feed me!” cried the carnivorous plant). And why should an archaeologist have identified the image of a dog threatening a man with long, wavy hair as the hound of Yama, the god of the dead,45 simply because the dog appears on the burial urns at Harappa? Why can’t it just be a dog faithful in death as in life?
Unicorn Seal from Harappa.
And why are the two figures in front of a pair of cobras “a pair of worshipers”? 46 Why not just two, probably nervous blokes? Yet the rest of the scene does indeed suggest something other than common or garden-variety snake charming. The couple with the cobras is kneeling beside a seated figure; another human figure holds back two rearing tigers; a monster half bull and half man attacks a horned tiger. This is not a snapshot of everyday life in the IVC. Scenes and figures such as these may give us glimpses of rituals, of episodes from myth and story, yet we have “nothing to which we can refer these isolated glimpses to give them substance.”47
Other seals too seem to be telling a story that we cannot quite make out. One scene depicts what has been called “a three-horned deity” (but may just be a guy, or for that matter a gal, in a three-horned hat) apparently emerging from the middle of a tree, while another figure outside the tree is bent “in suppliant posture” with arms raised; a bull stands behind it, and seven girls below them.48 (This is one of a small number of scenes that occur on seals found in four different cities: Harappa, Kalibangan, Mohenjo-Daro, and Chanhujo-Daro). Another seal depicts a similar scene, this one involving a fig (pipal) tree:at A nude figure with flowing hair and “a horned headdress” (or his own horns?) stands between the upright branches of a pipal tree; another figure, much like the first but seen from the side, kneels at the base of the tree; a huge goat towers over him from behind. On yet another seal a figure squats among a group of animals on his left, while on his right a tiger is looking upward at a tree in which a man is seated.49 Something is certainly going on here, but what? A folktale, perhaps? A ritual? These wordless scenes remind me of those contests that magazines run, inviting readers to supply the caption for a cartoon. But a lot more is at stake here than a cartoon.
GENDERED FIGURES
THE LORD OF BEASTS
Marshall began it all, in 1931, in his magisterial three-volume publication, Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, which devotes five pages of a long chapter entitled “Religion” to seal 420: “There appears at Mohenjo-Daro a male god, who is recognizable at once as a prototype of the historic Siva. . . . The lower limbs are bare and the phallus (urdhvamedhra) seemingly exposed, but it is possible that what appears to be the phallus is in reality the end of the waistband.”50 (Urdhvamedhra [“upward phallus”] is a Sanskrit term, like the Greek-based English euphemism “ithyphallic,” for an erect penis.) The urdhvamedhra-or-is-it-perhaps-just-his-waistband-or-the-knot-in-his-dhoti? has come to rival the Vedantic snake-or-is-it-perhaps-just-a-rope? as a trope for the power of illusion and imagination. The image suggested to Marshall an early form of the Hindu god Shiva, and Marshall’s suggestion was taken up by several generations of scholars. This was to have far-reaching ramifications, for if this is an image of Shiva, then an important aspect of Hinduism can be dated back far earlier than the earliest texts (the Vedas).
Much was made of this tiny bit of soapstone (remember, the whole seal is barely an inch high); the millimeter of the putative erection on this seal has, like the optional inch of Cleopatra’s nose, caused a great deal of historical fuss. Scholars have connected the “big-nosed gentleman . . . who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals”51 with well-known images of the ithyphallic Shiva.52 The discovery at Indus sites of a number of polished, oblong stones, mostly small but ranging up to two feet in height, and probably used to grind grain, has led some scholars53 to identify these stones as replicas of the erect phallus (linga) of Shiva and the vagina (yoni) of his consort, and to link these stones with “the later aniconic representations” of Shiva in the form of the linga.54 Other scholars have suggested that “the Vedic criticism of ‘those who worship the phallus’” may refer to this “early Indus cult.”55 There are so many assumptions here that it makes your head spin: that the Indus had a “cult” (a rather pejorative word for a religious sect), that the people of the Veda knew about it, that they disapproved of it instead of assimilating it to their own worship of the phallic Indra—no lawyer would go into court with this sort of evidence.
These all are arguments from hindsight. Marshall identified the figure as Shiva because (1) the Indus figure is seated on a low stool with knees pointed to the sides, feet together at his groin, and arms resting on his knees, a posture that many have identified as yogic (though it is the way that South As
ians often sit), and Shiva is the god of yogis; (2) the Indus figure wears a horned headdress (or has horns), perhaps a buffalo mask as well as buffalo horns,56 just as Shiva wears the horned moon, or a trident, in his hair; [3] in two examples of this scene the Indus figure has faces (or masks?) on the sides as well as the front of his head, while Shiva is often “Five-faced” (Pancha-mukha); (4) the figure is flanked by an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a water buffalo; smaller horned animals—antelope or goats—huddle beneath his stool, and he wears a tiger’s skin on his torso, while Shiva is called the Lord of Beasts, Pashupati, and wears an animal skin, sometimes of a tiger, sometimes of an elephant;57 and (5) both figures are ithyphallic.
I bought into the identification with Shiva in 1973,58 as most scholars have continued to do right up to the present day. Yet many other candidates have also been pushed forward,59 another good example of the Rorschach (or Rashomonau) phenomenon that produced such rich fantasies about the decipherment of the script. A list of just a few of the figures with which the so-called Lord of Beasts has been identified, a list that the reader should not take seriously but merely skim over to see how creatively scholars can run amok, might run like this (in more or less chronological order):
1. A goddess, on whom the bulge previously identified as an “erect phallus” is nothing but a girdle worn by female IVC figurines.60
2. Mahisha, the buffalo demon killed, in later mythology, by the goddess Durga, who is often represented as a riding on a tiger61 (or a lion).
3. Indra, the Vedic king of the gods,62 a conclusion supported by taking the first syllables of the Sanskrit words for three of the animals (eliminating the tiger, because it was much larger than the other animals, and the deer, because they are seated apart from the others, and repeating the first syllable of the word for “man,” because he was twice as important as the others), so that they spell out ma-kha-na-sha-na, an epithet of Indra (though also of Shiva), “destroying the sacrifice.”av
4. Rudra, a Vedic prototype of Shiva, surrounded by animals who are incarnations of the Maruts, the storm gods who serve Indra and Rudra.63
5. Agni. The pictograms are read to mean “burning in three ways” and so to identify the figure as Agni, the god of fire, who has three forms.64
6. A chief named Anil, who ruled over the clans whose totems were the animals on the seal.65
7. A “seated” bull.66
8. A sage (named Rishyashringa [“Antelope-horned”]) who had a single antelope horn growing out of his forehead (his mother was a white-footed antelope; it’s a long story); he appears in the earliest layers of Hindu and Buddhist mythology.67
9. Part of “a bull cult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.”68
10. A yogic posture,69 even if the link with Shiva is tenuous.70
Most, but not all, of these fantasies assume that the image is a representation of either a priest or a god, more likely a god.71 In each case, the interpretation was inspired or constrained by the particular historical circumstances and agendas of the interpreter, but I’d love to know what the scholars who came up with these ideas were smoking.
There is, in fact, a general resemblance between this image and later Hindu images of Shiva. The Indus people may well have created a symbolism of the divine phallus, or a horned god, or both. But even if this is so, it does not mean that the Indus images are the source of the Hindu images. We must keep this caution in mind now when we consider the images of women in the IVC.
MOTHERS AND MOTHER GODDESSES
The widespread depiction of women in the IVC artifacts suggests that they were highly valued. In contrast with the predilection for macho animals (includingmen) on the seals, the many terra-cotta figurines are mostly women, some wearing a wide girdle, a necklace, and an elaborate headdress. They are “Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometimes mini-skirted.”72 Some of them seem to be pregnant, or to hold, on their breasts or hips, small lumps that might be infants, “evidence perhaps that they expressed a concern for fecundity,” a reasonable assumption;73 they may have been symbols of fecundity in a “loosely structured household cult.”74
But why assume any cult at all? Why need they symbolize fertility? Or even if they do, why should fertility have to be ritual? (I must confess to having fallen for this too more than a quarter of a century ago: “[S]trong evidence of a cult of the Mother has been unearthed at the pre-Vedic civilization of the Indus Valley [c. 2000 B.C.].”75 Live and learn.) But not every image is symbolic; not every woman is a goddess. The “prominent and clumsily applied breasts” of these figures have been taken as evidence that they were “fertility symbols,”76 but they may have been valued simply for what P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster used to refer to as a “wonderful profile.” Big breasts are as useful to courtesans as to goddesses. Are the buxom centerfolds of Playboy magazine fertility symbols, or the voluptuous women that Rubens loved to paint? One seal shows a woman, upside down, with a child (or is it a scorpion?) coming out of (or into?) her, between her spread thighs.77 This has been taken to refer to “a possible Mother Earth myth,”78 but what was the myth, and is the upside-down woman a goddess, let alone an earth goddess? Why is she not simply a woman giving birth?
Scholars have seen connections between the alleged Lord of Beasts and a goddess, particularly the Hindu goddess who rides on a lion; some (casually conflating lions and tigers) connect the tiger on the seals with Hindu goddesses of a later period or with goddesses of ancient Egypt, the Aegean, Asia Minor, and the whole of West Asia, who were thought to consort with lions, leopards, or panthers.79 The assumption that the figures of women found at the Indus sites are goddesses is then used to support the argument that the goddesses in later Hinduism—or the minor Vedic goddesses, Yakshinis and Apsarases, associated with trees and water80—may be traced back to this early period.81
Hindsight speculations about fertility sects associated with female figurines, the bull, the horned deity, and trees like the sacred fig (pipal) are tempting. The seal with the person emerging from the middle of a fig tree may or may not prefigure the later Indian iconography of fig trees and banyan trees.82 But it is going too far to interpret something so straightforward as a grave containing a male and female skeleton as “possibly the first indication of the well-known Hindu custom of sati” (live widows burning themselves to death on their dead husbands’ cremation pyres or entombing themselves in their husband’s graves).83 The couple may simply have been buried side by side, whenever they died.
Some of the figures of well-endowed women are “curiously headless,” and in some cases of actual adult burial the feet had been deliberately cut off, a fascinating correspondence, perhaps joined in a Procrustean syndrome. These headless female figures84 may foreshadow the headless goddesses who people later Hindu mythology, such as the Brahmin woman who exchanged heads with the Pariah woman. (Or is it just that the neck is the thinnest part of such figures and most likely to break?) The prevalence of images of women may well indicate “a greater social presence of the female than in later times, which may also have been a generally more assertive presence.”85
One tiny (ten-centimeter) bronze image supports the hope that some Indus women did in fact have an “assertive presence” and that is the so-called dancing girl of Mohenjo-Daro, in whom Marshall saw a “youthful impudence.” John Keay describes her wonderfully well:
Naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles, this minuscule statuette is not of the usual Indian sex symbol, full of breast and wide of hip, but of a slender nymphet happily flaunting her puberty with delightful insouciance. Her pose is studiously casual, one spindly arm bent with the hand resting on a déhanché hip, the other dangling so as to brush a slightly raised knee. Slim and attenuated, the legs are slightly parted, and one foot—both are now missing—must have been pointed. . . her head is thrown back as if challenging a suitor, and her hair is somehow dressed into a heavy plaited chignon of perilous but intentionally dramatic construction. Decidedly,
she wants to be admired; and she might be gratified to know that, four thousand years later, she still is.86
Others too admired her “gaunt and boyish femininity,” her provocative “foot-less stance, haughty head, and petulantly poised arms,”87 and found “something endearing” in “the artless pose of an awkward adolescent.”88 She is said to have “proto-Australoid” features that are also attested in skeletons in the Indus Valley.89 This native girl mocks us, perhaps for our clumsy and arrogant attempts to figure out what she, and her compatriots in bronze and clay and soapstone, “mean.”
IS INDUS RELIGION A MYTH?
The larger archaeological remains are equally ambiguous. Consider the very large swimming pool or bathing tank or public water tank in the citadel at Mohenjo-Daro, approximately forty feet by twenty-three feet and eight feet deep. There are wide steps leading down to it at each end and colonnaded buildings with small rooms around it. From this some have concluded that it was the site of a “Great Bath” where ritual bathing took place as part of a state religion.90 But all that this structure tells us is that the IVC people liked to bathe, just to get clean or to cool off on hot days or to splash about, same as we do. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but not synonymous with it. The great attention paid to the sewage system in the IVC suggests a hard-headed approach to hygiene (unless, of course, one wants to view the sewers as sacred underground chambers). Why does the bath have to be a ritual bath?aw
Bronze Dancing Girl from Mohenjo-Daro.
The answer is simple enough: because the so-called Great Bath resembles the ritual bathing tanks of Hindu temples that began to appear in the subcontinent in the first few centuries CE91 and because such a tank reflects a concern with ritual purification through water, an important idea in Hinduism.92 Four thousand years later, indeed, every temple has its tank. Therefore, the argument goes, the tank must have served the same function in the IVC. Similarly, the so-called College of Priests in Mohenjo-Daro has been taken as evidence for the existence of a widespread priesthood.93 Well, it’s a big building, true, but why couldn’t it be a dorm, or a hotel, or a hospital, or even a brothel?
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