Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  To build large houses and solid granaries, the Indus cities needed strong, tall timber from trees which did not grow in the moist jungles of the plains. Cedar was as important to the Indus valley cities as it was to King Gilgamesh on the banks of the Euphrates (who made an epic pilgrimage up into the mountains to kill the demon of the cedar forest). The best and nearest cedar was grown in the Himalayas–hence the importance of the Indus and its tributaries. In order to manage this vital trade, a Harappan satellite settlement was established in the north on the banks of the Chenab, a river that flows from the wooded highlands down to the Punjab and into the Indus. This was Manda, the midpoint on my journey from Harappa to Srinagar in Indian Kashmir.

  Manda now stands in the hills above Jammu in India, only a few kilometres from the border with Pakistan. It too is an army town. Perhaps because of its strategic location in a sensitive border area, tourism is not encouraged, and today this dramatic site is difficult to locate beneath the overgrown weeds. During the eighteenth century, a fort was built over the third millennium BCE city; and since then the whole area has been encroached upon by the police and by the state government. The office of the local archaeological department, inside the fort, is a sedate mess of decomposing files.

  I step into the battlements of the fort and look down through the castellations at the fast-flowing river. A wooden boat is bringing twelve passengers over the water to the Kali temple below the fort, and as it reaches the landing stage, the small craft spins in the current. Unlike at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, where the river has shifted away, the Chenab still flows in its original channel and, for the first time, I am able to stand in the middle of an Indus valley city and witness with my own eyes the convenience afforded to these ancient cities by a riverbank location.

  Archaeologists believe that Manda’s own trading post was Burzahom, over one hundred kilometres away to the north, in the valley of Kashmir. The journey from Jammu to Srinagar takes ten hours in a small bumpy jeep. After a day of climbing through steep conifer forest, the jeep reaches the lip of the valley, and there Kashmir opens up like the wings of a green and yellow butterfly on a dull brown rock. It only takes this journey and this vista to understand the devotion Kashmir has inspired in emperors and poets throughout India’s history. Haunted by Islamic militants, policed by the Indian Army–whose soldiers stand like tense scarecrows in every mustard field and orchard–Kashmir has not yet been destroyed by the clashing martial power of Pakistan and India. But it has come very close.

  In 2600 BCE, Burzahom and Manda were separated by a cultural void. Unlike the sophisticated urban settlement at Manda, Burzahom was a Neolithic community, lifted out of its Stone Age context only by the luxury goods which it received from the people downstream–agate beads, black-painted pots, copper pins, bangles and arrowheads. While the merchants from Manda, who bought Burzahom’s wood, built brick houses in the plains, the people of Burzahom continued to live in square, rectangular, circular or oval pits. Their tools were made of stone or polished bone, they fired pottery, and smeared the skeletons of their dead with red ochre. On the land adjacent to their wattle and daub pit-houses they erected menhirs in a semicircle. It was an impulse they shared with prehistoric people from northern Pakistan to England, from Ireland to Tibet. At Burzahom, as at other places, the huge stone menhirs may have been a form of solar worship. (The name of Srinagar, nearby, means City of the Sun.)

  Like today’s tall, rosy-cheeked Kashmiris, Burzahom’s Neolithic community was unusually healthy. Skeletal remains show that the people were tall–if not nine foot, as the modern villagers tell me, six foot at least–and well nourished. They ate venison and goat; pigs and rice were introduced from China around 2000 BCE; and wheat and barley, winter crops, grew easily, needing no irrigation.

  Burzahom was occupied by Neolithic humans until at least 1000 BCE, some nine hundred years after the decline of Mohenjodaro and Harappa. Whatever calamity suddenly rendered the cities of the plains uninhabitable, it appears not to have affected the Stone Age humans. Enclosed by the mountains, on the edge of the lake, circled by tall cedars, they had everything they needed. The site was never completely abandoned and today there is a small village nearby. A Muslim graveyard abuts the menhirs.

  Down in the plains it was different. There, around 2000 BCE, the Indus cities were suddenly deserted. Archaeologists still disagree over the causes of this abrupt exodus. Perhaps resources dried up in the mountains; maybe deforestation caused disaster in the plains. Some blame the Aryans (presumably the lightly fortified Indus cities would have been unable to defend themselves from attack by horse-riding invaders–a fate militarized Pakistan hopes never to repeat). Others suggest that it was the river, with its flooding and meanderings, which caused their destruction.

  If the Indus cities’ dependence on water ruined them, then the story today may be mimicking that ancient plotline. Water shortage has reached critical levels in both India and Pakistan. The Pakistani states of Punjab and Sindh are on the brink of war over access to the Indus waters; in India, the neighbouring states of Punjab and Haryana dispute how the waters of the Ravi and Beas should be shared. Both countries need the waters of the Jhelum and Chenab, and many people agree that it is a thirst for water that has caused them to vie for control of Kashmir. Just as Manda and Harappa extracted resources from the distant mountains, so the ongoing war repeats that archaic refrain.

  At Burzahom where the menhirs stand, it is easy to see Kashmir as paradise on earth, as Indians long have. One can only hope that when Pakistan, India and China dam the life out of their rivers–when the brick cities in the plains perish once again–the paradise will survive, as it has done till now.

  11

  Huntress of the Lithic

  Stone Age

  How was the world of humans formed?

  In the beginning there was water and some ice froze

  Some dust settled upon the ice

  Some grass grew upon it

  Then arose three mountains.’

  Mi-Yul Dangpo (Dard song)

  BURZAHOM, WITH ITS semicircle of Neolithic menhirs, has been studied since at least the 1930s. But when Indian archaeologists began to excavate there in 1964, they discovered that its history ran deeper than a mere five thousand years. A large stone menhir had been used as the outside wall of a building occupied in the third millennium BCE. On its underside, in a part buried deep in the mud, was a carving that had been made several thousand years before that.

  The carving, a hunting scene, tells a rare and redolent story. In the middle of the picture is a stag. On the left is a man crouching, taking aim with a bow. In the sky are two rayed discs, possibly the sun and moon or the rising sun, and near them is a dog. The archer, stag and dog all have prominent penises, but there is a second hunter in the carving who does not. Standing to the right, holding a long spear that pierces the stag right through, is a buxom woman dressed in a skirt. This carving was a wonderful find. Were I an Indian feminist, this stone would be my icon.

  The very far north of India, from Kashmir to Ladakh, has been renowned since antiquity for the freedom of its women. The ancient Sanskrit-speakers called this area ‘Strirajya’: Government by Women. The Mahabharata, India’s defining Sanskrit epic, speaks half-nostalgically of the ancient liberty of women, who once ‘roved about at their pleasure, independent’. ‘Such was the rule in early times’ ‘it is still practised among the northern Kurus.’

  Uttarakuru, the land of the Northern Kurus, was known in ancient Sanskrit texts as a paradise. In the Ramayana, the Northern Kurus are described as ‘liberal, prosperous, perpetually happy, and undecaying. In their country there is neither cold nor heat, nor decrepitude, nor disease, nor grief, nor fear, nor rain, nor sun.’ Uttarakuru’s boundary was the River Sila, which turned to stone anything that touched it. It was a land ruled by women, where no man could dwell for more than half a year.

  Foreign visitors to India repeated stories they had heard of Uttarakuru’s legendary women. It is
probably Uttarakuru that became Megasthenes’ ‘Hyperborea’, the Indian land to the north whose inhabitants lived for a thousand years. In the seventh century CE, the Sui Shu (History of the Sui Dynasty) described Ladakh as the ‘Empire of the Eastern Women’. The backpacking monk Xuanzang, who journeyed through the Buddhist lands of India in the seventh century, repeated this lore, noting that Uttarakuru is the ‘kingdom of the women’ where for ‘ages a woman has been the ruler’. The husband of the queen ‘knows nothing about the affairs of the state’, he wrote. ‘The men manage the wars and sow the land, and that is all.’

  According to the twelfth-century Sanskrit history, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, Uttarakuru was north-east of Kashmir, equating to present-day Ladakh. The Kashmiris feared and respected the beautiful mountain Amazons. King Lalitaditya, who ruled Kashmir in the eighth century, only managed to defeat Strirajya by making its queen fall in love with him. The women of Strirajya, meanwhile, seduced Lalitaditya’s warriors by exposing their ‘high breasts’.

  The Sanskrit texts described Uttarakuru as a land where for both men and women, promiscuity was the norm. This was probably a reference to polyandry–when a woman takes more than one husband–which is still practised in Ladakh and Tibet. Polyandry was possibly more widespread throughout India in ancient times than it is today: the five brother-heroes of the Mahabharata share one wife, Draupadi. But in the Mahabharata this arrangement was strange and shocking enough by the time the epic was compiled to need explanation, and was thus probably a last, faint memory of an era when matriarchs still controlled families and polities. North-west of India, however, in what is now northern Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Central Asia, polyandry endured. Alberuni, the eleventh-century Muslim historian of India, observed that polyandry was practised from eastern Afghanistan to Kashmir. An eighteenth-century Chinese text noted that it was prevalent not only in Ladakh and Tibet but also in Baltistan, the Hindu Kush and Central Asia.

  That the freedom of women was integral to the utopia in the Indian texts, says as much about the attitude of the Sanskrit-speakers of the epics, as it does about the Northern Kurus themselves. Other male visitors to Ladakh and Tibet, however, found polyandry disturbing. Alberuni called it an ‘unnatural kind of marriage’. The eighteenth-century Jesuit priest Desideri, one of the first Europeans to visit Tibet, condemned it as an ‘odious custom’. Alexander Cunningham, writing in 1854, speculated that polyandry was responsible for the short stature of the women in Ladakh. In his novel Kim, published in 1901, Rudyard Kipling characterized this area as the ‘lands where women make the love’ and told a cautionary tale of a polyandrous Buddhist woman from Kinnaur (just south of Ladakh). This Woman of Shamlegh, adorned with ‘turquoise-studded headgear’, propositions Kipling’s handsome young hero and disparages her many husbands as ‘cattle’. Kipling’s contemporary, an easily shocked Moravian missionary, the Reverend A. H. Francke, noted that there was a strong strain of archaic mother-worship in the Buddhism practised in Ladakh, and that during British censuses, the children of Tibetan Buddhist families were unable to state who their father was, there were so many possible candidates. Polyandry, he concluded, was ‘one of the ugliest customs’. Chinese scholars writing on Tibet in the 1950s echoed centuries of male consensus, calling polyandry an ‘abnormal form of marriage’ in which women are ‘physically ruined by primitive and barbarous habits’.

  If any of these men had asked the women at the centre of the polyandrous marriages their opinion, they might have been surprised by the response. Adelphic or fraternal polyandry, as the practice of brothers sharing a wife is known, was eventually outlawed in Ladakh by the Maharaja of Kashmir in 1941, and in Tibet by the Chinese in 1959. Nevertheless, some families in Ladakh are still polyandrous, and in Tibet it is once again on the increase. The reason is partly cultural, and partly to do with economic prudence: polyandry keeps the birth rate down, avoids inheritance issues and lessens the pressure on scarce resources. In contrast to the situation among Hindu and Muslim families in India and Pakistan, where properties are subdivided among the new children of each generation, in polyandrous families brothers share a wife, so population does not increase and landholdings remain entire. With multiple fathers contributing to the well-being of their joint children, women also benefit. In marked contrast to other places in the Indus valley, the women of Ladakh are said to be ‘powerful’ and ‘uninhibited’ with a ‘strong position’ in society.

  The pre-Buddhist religion of both Ladakh and western Tibet was Bon, an amalgam of animistic hunting beliefs with a more formalized set of demons, spirits and especially female goddesses and fairies. The Dards, also known as Brokpa (‘hill person’) or Minaro, were living in Ladakh before the arrival in the eighth century of the Tibetans, who today make up the ethnic majority of Ladakh, and they still worship female deities in the form of stones and ibex horns. Today the Dards exist only in that military zone where the Indus flows from India into Pakistan; but once they dominated most of Ladakh, at least as far east as Leh, and possibly as far west as Gilgit and Chitral in Pakistan; the Kalash may be part of the same cultural group. With their diverse marital arrangements–polyandry and polygyny were practised in their villages until recently–the Dards, like the Kalash, have a more relaxed attitude to sexuality than any of their Christian, Muslim or Hindu visitors and neighbours. With their mountain fairies, goddesses of water and hunting, and witches, they still celebrate powerful women. Perhaps it was Dard culture, then, which first earned for northern India its feminist designation.

  The carving at Burzahom thus stands chronologically in the vanguard of an ancient tradition. But if this is the case, it is a theory which has received no attention from Indian archaeologists. Partly this is because the stone has been misinterpreted by later scholars. For forty years now–ever since the original stone carving was taken out of Kashmir by the Archaeological Survey of India and sequestered away from public view–academics have relied for their analyses on photographs, or drawings taken from bad photocopies. And so this carving, after lying unaltered for eight thousand years, has undergone a sex change. The first photographs, taken in 1964, clearly showed the spear-holding figure to be a bosomy woman, wearing (unlike the man) a dress. B. M. Pande–who examined the carving–affirmed in 1971 that the ‘small chip between the legs of the female figure is a natural break and does not represent the genitalia’. A decade later, this chip had become a penis; and in more recent drawings, the woman’s bosom–voluptuous in the original photographs–grew flatter and eventually disappeared altogether. Frustratingly, I am unable to study the stone because the Archaeological Survey of India won’t show the original to the public (I asked them). Are they afraid of the revolution this ancient example of cooperation between the sexes might foment? Or have they forgotten where they put it? I spend a week arranging an interview with the man in charge of the Burzahom carving, and then, thirty seconds after explaining my request, I am ushered out of his office.

  Most archaeologists have been more preoccupied with determining the carving’s age than the social order it represents. The latest Indian interpretation, from ‘archo-astronomers’ in Mumbai, is that the carving is a ‘sky chart’ from the sixth millennium BCE. The discs in the sky are the full moon and a supernova (an imploding star at the end of its life). The stag, dog and human figures (both of which they take to be men) are constellations; and the four penises they see in the carving are plotted as stars in the sky over Kashmir. The archo-astronomers have decided that the Burzahom people carved a picture of Supernova HB9 on the rock, a star which died in a burst of white light in 5700 BCE. If they are right–and this estimate matches earlier guesses as to the antiquity of the settlement, based on the discovery of stone tools–then the carving was drawn by people who lived in Kashmir a full three thousand years before Harappa.

  As I am standing beside the menhirs at Burzahom, the caretaker wanders over. I ask him why there is no museum, even though according to archaeological reports from the time of the excavatio
ns, one was due to be built in the 1970s. I have already visited the State Archaeology Department in one of Srinagar’s heavily guarded government buildings, where clerks sit drinking tea all day long in darkened rooms stacked high with unread files. The people there explained that ‘Funds for a museum were not forthcoming’ and that ‘There is too much tension in the valley.’ But the caretaker has an idea: ‘There is a man who has been working here,’ he says, ‘a man from the University. A good, sincere man.’ ‘Is it Dr Bandy?’ I ask, for I have heard about him from the State Archaeology Department. ‘Exactly,’ says the caretaker. He walks with me down into the village and bangs on the door of his cousin, who drives an auto-rickshaw. ‘Take her to the University,’ he says.

  The University is in northern Srinagar, beyond the Nageen lake and opposite the mosque distinguished by its possession of a hair from the Prophet Muhammad’s head. At the gate I make enquiries and am directed down a long avenue of rose bushes towards the Central Asian Museum where, despite the ‘tension’ of living in a war zone, Dr Bandy and his staff have assembled an absorbing collection of artefacts representing Kashmir’s history over the past ten millennia. Dr Bandy shows me the reconstruction of one of the dwelling pits at Burzahom, and points out a large print of the absentee carving. We sit in his office as he elucidates the different theories about the people who carved the Burzahom hunting scene. ‘You must meet my student, Mumtaz Yatoo,’ Dr Bandy says, picking up the phone. ‘He has just discovered a rock carving even more ancient than the Burzahom one, in the hills near Sopore, his home town.’

  Mumtaz arrives ten minutes later, carrying copies of the articles he has written on the carving and smiling at the spectacle of my excitement. ‘It is probably Palaeolithic, up to twenty thousand years old,’ he says, spreading a drawing of the carving on the office desk. ‘Stone tools were found in the woods nearby which show that the area was occupied by humans even before that.’