by John Keay
Some Primitive Vigour
A peculiarity of India’s classical past was that its origins invariably defied research. Ajanta art, Mauryan sculpture, even the classics of Sanskrit drama, all seemed to emerge as already mature art forms. They must clearly have had behind them many centuries of development and experiment; but all evidence of these was missing. The dawn, indeed the long morning, of Indian civilization was shrouded in mystery; and the earliest evidence all related to a period close to its high noon.
The incorporation of wooden beams and screens in some of the earliest cave temples suggested that they had been preceded by a long tradition of wooden buildings, all of which had long since rotted away. Stone sculpture, too, was probably a development from more perishable carvings in wood and ivory. An interesting relic of this art, though unfortunately not a pre-classical one, is the little ivory handle of a mirror which was found amongst the ruins of distant Pompeii. The handle is carved into the shape of a highly provocative female figure unmistakably related to the yakshis of Bharhut and Sanchi. The eruption of Vesuvius, which fortuitously preserved this one fragment of what was certainly a major craft, occurred in AD 79, a date which incidentally provides a useful cross-reference for the dating of the Buddhist reliefs.
But other aspects of the problem were less easily explained. What, for instance, about the origins of India’s religions? The yakshi figures are evidence of early Buddhism seeking to accommodate ancient fertility cults associated with tree and snake worship. Hence Fergusson’s conviction that Buddhism and Jainism had been more popular with the non-Aryan peoples of north India, the Dasyus or aboriginals. But who were these aboriginal inhabitants of the subcontinent, and to what extent were they responsible, not only for the iconography of early Buddhist art, but also for its execution?
What, too, of the origins of Hinduism? India’s prehistory was generally thought to begin with the arrival, about 1500 BC, of the Aryan peoples. On the strength of their literary traditions, the Aryans were credited with the awakening of Indian civilization. They brought with them to India a strong racial consciousness which, through the developing caste system, provided a society capable of absorbing outsiders without becoming swamped by them. They also brought Sanskrit, their Indo-European language of such immense potential; and they brought Hinduism – or at least a religion to which the origins of Hinduism are usually traced. But Vedic Hinduism (i.e. the religion of the early Aryan invaders as revealed in their vedas), was a far cry from medieval Hinduism. Its gods were stern, elemental, all-powerful — lords of fire and thunder, of the sun and the waters and the wind. They were worshipped by sacrifice, invoked by hymns, but never represented by idols or enshrined in temples. The Aryans were an outdoor people — horsemen and graziers; their religion was essentially a wooing of the elements.
But what changed all this? Whence came the softening of this harsh-sounding people, the civilizing of their lifestyle, the lulling of their fear-stricken fantasies? Virtually the whole pantheon of Hindu gods, from the jolly Ganesh to the ghastly Kali — and including Vishnu and Siva — were later additions. So, too, were such fundamental concepts as deities represented in human form, the personal devotion paid to them, and the hallowing of places of worship. Clearly there must have been some other vital ingredient in the development of Hinduism.
Another intriguing subject was the origin of the Indian scripts. Ashoka Brahmi had been successfully identified as the earliest precursor of most north Indian writing. But when found in its earliest form, in the column and rock inscriptions of Ashoka, it was already well developed and fairly standardized. The idea of carving inscriptions on stone seems to have been a Mauryan innovation; but the script itself must have been in use for a long time before that. Some authorities suggested that, like Kharosthi, the script used in ancient Gandhara, Ashoka Brahmi originated in western Asia. Others maintained that it was indigenous to India; and none with more conviction than Alexander Cunningham. For, in the course of his travels as the Archaeological Surveyor, he had located a single and unique piece of evidence.
In the winter of 1872–3, while touring the Punjab, he investigated Harappa, on the Ravi river. It was ‘the most extensive of all the old sites along the Ravi’, and, according to Charles Masson who discovered it on his way to Afghanistan, it boasted the ruins of a vast brick castle. Cunningham found plenty of bricks, several mounds of them in fact, but no castle. Nor was he altogether surprised. Standing amongst the mounds, he could hear the trains rattling along the new Lahore-Multan line. More than a hundred miles of track had been ballasted with bricks from Harappa.
Cunningham tentatively identified the ruins with a populous city visited by Hsuan Tsang. But he thought the site itself was much older. The pottery had a very archaic character; he described some gigantic stones ‘very peculiar in shape’ like ‘undulating rings of stone’; and he paid particular attention to a colleague’s recent find.
The most curious object discovered at Harappa is a seal belonging to Major Clark, which was found along with two small objects like chess pawns, made of dark brown jasper&. The seal is a smooth black stone without polish. On it is engraved very deeply a bull, without hump, looking to the right with two stars under the neck. Above the bull there is an inscription in six characters which are quite unknown to me. They are certainly not Indian letters; and as the bull which accompanies them is without hump, I conclude that the seal is foreign to India.
Four years later, when writing a book about the inscriptions of Ashoka, Cunningham recalled the odd little seal with its unknown script and wondered whether it was quite as foreign as he had once thought. Could these unknown hieroglyphics (or, more correctly, pictographs) be some archaic form of Ashoka Brahmi? He reexamined the impression he had taken from the seal and decided that they could.
Taking the characters from the left, the first may be an ancient form of the letter ‘I’ as it approaches very closely to the shape of the Ashoka character. The third seems to be an old form of ‘chh’, and the fourth a true archaic ‘m’, the shape of a fish, matsya. The fifth must be another vowel, perhaps ‘i’ and the sixth may be an old form of ‘y’. The whole would thus read ‘Lachmiya’ [presumably ‘Lakshmi’, the Hindu goddess of wealth].
Cunningham was thus the first to attempt to decipher what is now known as the Indus Valley script. He had just six characters to go on, and he guessed that they were ancient forms of Ashoka Brahmi. Today we know of several hundred different characters; yet the script, in spite of computer research, remains undeciphered, and the possibility of some connection with Ashoka Brahmi is still wide open. Cunningham’s identification of the individual characters is surely wrong and the word is not Lakshmi. Yet, again, he seems to have been on the right track. By intuition, the general had sensed that the little seal held the key to many of the problems surrounding the origins of Indian religion and civilization.
The seal itself eventually found its way into the British Museum, where it was joined by one or two others which came to light during the late nineteenth century. But no further progress was made in probing their significance. It seemed likely that they would forever remain the unclassifiable jetsam of some forgotten people, pieces of an archaeological jigsaw that had been packed in the wrong box.
Certainly Sir John Marshall attached no immediate importance to them. Knowing Cunningham’s reports intimately, he must have realized that Harappa was a prime site for research into India’s prehistory. But for twelve years after his appointment as Archaeological Director, no one visited the place. The new Department’s first priority was conservation; excavation and research had to wait their turn and, if the Department was to justify its existence, could be undertaken only in places where there was a good chance of noteworthy finds. Hence early excavations were concentrated on Taxila, Sarnath, Sanchi and other Buddhist sites where sculptures and readable inscriptions could be guaranteed.
When one of the Department’s staff finally visited Harappa in 1914, it was just to survey it. He did
indeed recommend that the main mound be excavated, but it was not until 1921 that work started. In that year, more pottery and more seals were discovered, as well as a number of stone implements. But still the significance of these finds was doubtful. They were too few and too trifling to suggest a whole new civilization and, though apparently belonging to some chalcolithic culture (i.e. stone and bronze but no iron), they gave no hint of their true age.
But the breakthrough was imminent. A year before, R. D. Banerji, one of Marshall’s Indian recruits, had been travelling in the sandy wastes of Sind 400 miles south of Harappa and near the mouth of the Indus. At a place called Mohenjo-daro, he stopped to investigate a ruined Buddhist stupa and monastery, both built in brick, and he noticed in their vicinity several other promising-looking mounds. He thought they represented ‘the ruins of a village or township which had grown up around the stupa’ and, knowing the Archaeological Department’s interest in Buddhist sites, recommended excavation.
Two years later a trial dig got under way. Banerji quickly discovered more ruins but, since everything was built of the same small bricks, he had no reason to assume that they pre-dated the stupa. Then some engraved pieces of copper and some seals were found. One of the seals depicted what was thought to be a unicorn; and all bore pictographic letters which Banerji immediately recognized as belonging to the same class as those on the Harappa seals. The hot weather was just beginning and nowhere in India is hotter than Sind. Banerji himself was feeling the strain and would in fact have to retire after this arduous season. But his curiosity was aroused. His small party redoubled their efforts, and two new mounds were excavated. Below the stupa he identified four different strata. The top one he dated to the second century AD; the bottom one must therefore be of very considerable antiquity. Studying the seals and their script, and recalling what he had learnt from Marshall of the excavations in Crete, Banerji boldly suggested that there appeared to be similarities with the Minoan world. He was later proved wrong; but here at last was a hint that they were dealing with a true civilization, and that it might be one of the world’s oldest, antedating the earliest events in India’s reconstructed history by two or three thousand years.
In 1924, Marshall compared the finds from Mohenjo-daro with those from Harappa, and recognized that they belonged ‘in the same stage of culture and approximately to the same age, and that they were totally distinct from anything known to us in India’. The date of these ‘somewhat startling remains’ was still a complete mystery, but in a report to the Illustrated London News in 1924, Marshall could not conceal his excitement.
Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we are on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus. Up to the present our knowledge of Indian antiquities has carried us back hardly further than the third century before Christ&. Now, however, there has unexpectedly been unearthed, in the south of the Punjab and in Sind, an entirely new class of objects which have nothing in common with those previously known to us, and which are unaccompanied by any data that might have helped to establish their age and origin.
His report was illustrated with photographs of clay toys ‘to amuse little prehistoric people of the Indus Valley’, jewellery and trinkets ‘as worn by prehistoric Indian beauties’ and of course the famous seals with their ‘unknown picture writing’.
After a further season of digging trial trenches at Mohenjo-daro, Marshall was prepared to go further. An aerial survey had been made of Harappa; another chalcolithic site had been found in Baluchistan; and there was a report of a further find in Rajasthan.
From these and other researches it has now become evident that this Indus civilization must have developed and flourished in western India for untold centuries and that it extended over an immense area.
Instead of Minoan Crete, Marshall suspected parallels with the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia which was now coming to light. It seemed possible that these two chalcolithic cultures were contemporary; and when an Indus Valley seal was found in Iraq amongst debris of the third millennium BC, an approximate date could at last be inferred. For a time Marshall called his new discovery ‘the Indo-Sumerian civilization’, though he adopted this ‘merely as indicating the close cultural connection between the prehistoric civilization of the Indus and that of Sumer, not as implying that the peoples of these two regions were of the same stock or spoke the same language’. In fact, he was already certain that the Indus culture was quite distinct from any other and, to avoid confusion, soon preferred to call it simply the Indus Valley civilization.
Of the two principal sites, Harappa appeared the larger, but it was far from being the better preserved. Mohenjo-daro, on the other hand, was comparatively undisturbed: silt brought down by the Indus river had smothered the ruins deep enough to hide them from railway contractors, but not so deep as to make excavation prohibitive. Here, then, Marshall would concentrate his resources. Eight hundred labourers, a team of technical assistants, and six officers of the Department, including Marshall himself, descended on Mohenjodaro for the 1925–6 season. A road to the site was hastily constructed; offices, workrooms and living quarters mushroomed; a museum was laid out. Mohenjo-daro was to be the Indus Valley’s showpiece – India’s Knossos.
Needless to say, Marshall was now sure of his ground. The finds themselves had not been sensational, and he warned that nothing like the royal tombs of Egypt could be expected. All the indications were that they were dealing with a less flamboyant, more practical people. He was already impressed by their drainage system, a subject beloved by archaeologists and a not inappropriate indicator of the prevailing life style. The houses, which were unexpectedly roomy, had each its own well and bathroom, from where a waste pipe connected with covered conduits which ran the length of every street and alley. They were built of finely chiselled brick ‘laid with a precision that could hardly be improved upon’. This implied a ‘social condition of the people much in advance of what was then prevailing in Mesopotamia and Egypt’.
He was also now aware that the Indus Valley civilization was far more extensive than those of Sumeria and Egypt. Besides covering the whole of what is now Pakistan, a westwards extension along the Arabian Sea to Iran seemed possible. This suspicion was soon confirmed, but more impressive are recent discoveries of its eastward extent. Indus Valley sites have now been found round the Arabian Sea coast almost to Bombay, beyond the deserts of Rajasthan to near Delhi, along the banks of the Jumna, and north to the edge of the Himalayas near Chandigarh.
During the years 1926–31, Mohenjo-daro was systematically excavated. Harappa followed later, and many other Indus Valley sites have since been explored. The subject, though, is far from exhausted and new discoveries could yet overturn current interpretations of what has proved to be the most enigmatic of civilizations. In recent years, speculation seems to have overtaken the flood of finds: Sir Mortimer Wheeler has complained of the available evidence being ‘flogged to death’. For every ingenious suggestion from the archaeologists, the historian could raise a dozen objections and the layman as many counter-suggestions.
So little is known for certain. The great bath at Mohenjo-daro may not be a bath at all, the dock at the port of Lothal not be a dock – Lothai itself not a port. The citadels may not be citadels, the vast granaries not granaries. No building has been positively identified as a temple, the distinction between ‘toys’ and ‘cult objects’ is far from clear, and the purpose of the seals, which seem to tell us so much about the Indus Valley religion, is still not certain.
Nevertheless, there are certain fundamental characteristics of the Indus Valley civilization which are even more intriguing. The first thing that strikes every visitor to Mohenjo-daro or Harappa is the extraordinary regularity of their street plans. The streets are all straight, and they all cross one another at right an
gles. In other words, these are planned cities and represent not only the earliest known examples of town planning but, until recent times, virtually the only ones known in India. This regularity of lay-out applies to all the Indus Valley sites, giving the whole civilization an archaeologically disappointing, but not insignificant, uniformity. The seals show no local peculiarities, and in houses iooo miles apart the bricks used are identical, even in size. No other ancient civilization, and very few modern ones, has followed such a consistent building pattern.
Another peculiarity was the apparent inflexibility and conservatism of the Indus Valley people. For perhaps iooo years, there is virtually no evidence of change. The script does not develop, tools remain the same, and architecture is as regimented as ever. At Mohenjo-daro, the silt brought down by the Indus floods meant frequent rebuilding. But the opportunity this offered was never taken: houses were built with exactly the same ground plan as those they replaced.
This apparent conservatism has led archaeologists to infer either that the Indus Valley people were very unimaginative, or that they were at the mercy of firm government or orthodox religion. Often all three explanations are advanced, creating the image of a dour and down-trodden people, prosperous in their way, but devoid of noble aspirations and obsessed with domestic comfort, order and cleaniness. Not a single building shows any decorative effects; the outside walls are blank and windowless, giving the cities a grim and soul-less aspect. It is hard to imagine a people and a civilization less Indian.
To some extent this is also borne out by the artefacts that have been recovered. Indus Valley pottery is well made but remarkably plain. There are many rather clumsily-made terracotta figures and simple but primitive jewellery. In a totally different class, though, are a handful of figurines and some of the engravings on the seals. Here one suddenly comes face to face with a degree of artistic skill and awareness which belies every other generalization about the Indus Valley people. It is as if these were the work of a totally different culture; but though controversy has raged around the origin of some of them, there can be no argument, for instance, about the seals. And not only do these few examples exhibit a tantalizingly advanced art, but they also clearly anticipate important features of the later religious and artistic life of India.