INDIANS | A History Web Series

The story of India is one of profound and continuous change. It has been shaped by the dynamic of migration, conflict, mixing, coexistence, and cooperation. In this ten-part web series, I’ll tell the story of Indians and our civilization by exploring some of our greatest historical sites, most of which were lost to memory and were dug out by archaeologists. I’ll also focus on ancient and medieval foreign travellers whose idiosyncratic accounts conceal surprising insights about us Indians. All along, I’ll survey India’s long and exciting churn of cultural ideas, beliefs, and values—some that still shape us today, and others that have been lost forever. The series mostly mirrors—and often extends—the contents of my book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Bibliography and transcript appear below. Go ahead and watch!   —Namit Arora

The ruins of the Harappan (aka Indus Valley) Civilization were unearthed a mere hundred years ago. And what a discovery it was! It greatly expanded India's civilizational past. The Harappans built the first cities in the Indian Subcontinent and a material culture that included advanced urban design, city-wide sanitation, and the first indoor toilets in the world. In this episode, I'll explore its mature period, 2600–1900 BCE, at sites across western India and Pakistan. I'll compare it with other Bronze Age civilizations, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and consider what distinguishes the Harappans from others—such as a much flatter social class hierarchy, and no clear evidence of temples, priests, big statues, palaces, weapons of war, or standing armies.

I'll look at Harappan lifestyles and the stories that emerge from surviving artifacts: pottery, seals, figurines, toys, jewellery, sartorial fashions, social organization, dietary norms. I’ll discuss their metallurgy, tools, textiles, ships, trade, and burial customs. Their monumental work was the city itself, a marvel of engineering. In the excavated city of Dholavira in Gujarat, I’ll wander its streets and homes laid out on a grid-like plan. I'll look at their achievements in water harvesting, storage, and drainage systems, as well as what may be the first stadium anywhere in the world! I'll consider the languages the Harappans likely spoke, their undeciphered script, theories about their demise, and how their legacy still shapes us today.

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY / FURTHER READING

1. Abraham S., et al (editors), Connections and Complexity, New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia, Left Coast Press, 2012

2. Bisht, R.S., Excavations at Dholavira 1989–2005, ASI, 2015

3. Bisht, R. S., 'How Harappans honoured death at Dholavira', Proceedings of Conference held at L.M.U, L.A, USA, 2011

4. Farmer, Steve, et al, The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS), Vol. 11, Issue 2, 2004

5. Green, A.S. Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization, J Archaeol Res 29, 153–202 (2021)

6. Green, A.S, Why Are Archaeologists Unable To Find Evidence For A Ruling Class Of The Indus Civilization?, Eurasia Review, 23 June 2023

7. Habib, Irfan, The Indus Civilization, Tulika Books, 2002

8. Joseph, Tony, Early Indians, Juggernaut, 2018

9. Kenoyer, J.M., Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, OUP, 1998

10. McIntosh, Jane R., The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives, ABC-CLIO, 2007

11. Parpola, Asko, The Roots of Hinduism, OUP, Kindle Edition, 2015

12. Petrie, Cameron A., et al. ‘Adaptation to Variable Environments, Resilience to Climate Change: Investigating Land, Water and Settlement in Indus Northwest India’, Current Anthropology, 2017

13. Possehl, Gregory L., The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective, AltaMira, 2002

14. Robinson, Andrew, The Indus: Lost Civilizations, Reaktion Books, Kindle Edition, 2015

15. Shinde, Vasant S., et al., Archaeological and anthropological studies on the Harappan cemetery of Rakhigarhi, India, Plos One, February 21, 2018

16. Thapar, Romila, et al, Which of Us Are Aryans?, Aleph Book Company, 2019

17. Wright, Rita P. The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society, Cambridge, 2010

18. + Several scholarly articles and notes on Harappa.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

The story of Indian Civilization begins nearly 5,000 years ago. It’s a vast and complex story, full of twists and turns. So how does one begin to tell it?

Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.

The story of India is one of profound and continuous change. It has been shaped by the dynamic of migration, conflict, mixing, coexistence, and cooperation. This story is also a long and exciting churn of ideas, beliefs, and values, some of which continue to shape us today, while others have been lost forever. // In this series, I will revisit the story of Indians and our civilization by exploring six of our greatest historical sites—most of which were lost to memory and were later dug out by archaeologists. I’ll also focus on what foreign travelers said when they visited India in those days. As outsiders, they noticed things that Indians took for granted, and many of them have left behind surprising insights about our land and its people. I won’t dwell much on boring dates and battles and kings—the sort of stuff that turned you off history in school. Instead, I’ll focus on the deeper cultural and social ideas that have made us who we are.

The Harappan Civilization
When historians talk about ‘Civilization’, they usually refer to the rise of urban life enabled by agricultural surpluses, a range of specialised occupations, writing, monumental architecture, and social hierarchies. Based on this definition, the first civilization that arose in India was the Harappan Civilization, also called the Indus Valley Civilization. And that’s where I’ll begin my story of Indians.

The Harappan Civilization arose almost 5000 years ago, covering a large area across western India & Pakistan. It arose along the banks of two major rivers—the mighty Indus and the now-seasonal Ghaggar-Hakra—but also on other rivers, seacoasts, and islands. Although this civilization began around 3300 BCE, its social and technological pinnacle—what archaeologists call its ‘mature phase’—happened between 2600–1900 BCE, for about 700 years.

The ruins of the Harappan Civilization were discovered in 1921 [announced in 1924]—a mere hundred years ago. And what a discovery it was! It dramatically expanded our civilizational story. The first city discovered was named Harappa, and following a custom common in archaeology, the entire civilization was named after it. The British archaeologist, John Marshall, announced the discovery with great flourish in the Illustrated London News. ‘A forgotten age revealed’, he declared. Since then, over a thousand settlements have been found—mostly small hamlets, a few towns, and five cities, of which three are in Pakistan, two in India.

The City of Dholavira
Dholavira, in northern Gujarat, was one of the five cities of the Harappan Civilization, and its ruins are perhaps the best excavated in India. It’s located across a dazzling landscape of salt marshes and the barren land of the Great Rann of Kutch. We don’t know what Dholavira’s Harappan name was. Archaeologists gave it the name of a nearby village. In its day, Dholavira was a port city on a small island. Back then, the Arabian Sea covered a significant part of Gujarat, including the Rann of Kutch.

Unlike other major Harappan cities, Dholavira was in an arid region and received little rainfall. So its people focused on capturing and storing water. They innovated and built amazing water harvesting systems, city-wide drains, and giant reservoirs. Early archaeologists divided the city into three residential sections, led by patterns they had seen elsewhere. They named them the citadel or castle, middle town, and lower town. A thick wall surrounded the entire city. These areas do differ a little in terms of the size of homes and civic amenities but not by much. They also represent how the city grew over time, starting with the citadel.

The reservoirs surrounded the city center, which must have made a pretty sight, as you can imagine from this artist’s reconstruction of the city. They harvested rainwater from two stormwater drains. One of their reservoirs was nine times larger than an Olympic sized swimming pool! The reservoirs and the stone walls of the city are so massive that they must’ve required enormous engineering effort to plan and execute.

Today, Dholavira is a lovely site to wander through. Streets and homes are laid out on a grid-like plan. Their urban workshops for pottery, metallurgy, and jewelry were located within their residential areas, which means most of them didn’t have to commute to work. Astonishingly, one can still find on the ground shards of their painted pottery, bits of stone bangles, and semi-precious stones they used in their jewelry. One can see greenish copper slag from their smelting process for purifying the ore, as well as bone fragments of some of the animals Dholavirans ate. From these bones as well as pottery residues, it’s clear that these Harappans had a meat-heavy diet, which included beef and pork. They kept dogs as pets, and much like the stray dogs we see in our own neighborhoods today, Dholavirans had them too!

One surprising find in Dholavira was its stadium—perhaps the first stadium anywhere in the world! Spectators sat in the stands, which had three rows. Scholars think this stadium hosted ceremonies, major markets, and perhaps even bullock cart races and other sports. The northern gate to the citadel overlooks the stadium and it once carried the famous Dholavira signboard with ten symbols, though we have no idea what it says. For all we know, it might have said “Save Water”. It seems the city’s administrators allowed only pedestrians into the city center. Many global cities do the same today, but our own urban planners are yet to catch on!

International Trade
The people of Dholavira, and Harappans in general, were seagoing. They traded across a vast region, by oxcart and boat. They made excellent boats that sailed as far as Mesopotamia in modern Iraq and the Persian Gulf, where they were called ‘the people of Meluhha’. There is also evidence of an expat community of Harappans in Mesopotamia. In those days, no one had a money economy, and all of their trade was done through the barter system.

Urban Design and Sanitation
The Harappans were excellent urban architects. Mohenjo-daro was one of their largest cities with up to 50,000 people. Dholavira may have had 15,000. The Harappans were the first people to build public baths in the ancient world. Its best-known example is the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro, which may have been a site of ritual significance as well. Here’s an artist’s reconstruction of the Great Bath, along with four other reconstructions of Harappan sites.

The Harappans built the first planned cities with urban sanitation, the first indoor toilets in the world, brick-lined wells and pucca roads … all very impressive achievements for its day. This private bathroom and toilet structure comes from Lothal, another Harappan site in Gujarat. Urban life in these cities must have attracted youngsters from rural areas where most Harappans lived. Their urban design and civil engineering works reveal the Harappans as rather skilled, creative, and pragmatic techies!

All Harappans shared a common material culture. This includes their seals, which were made from soft stones and were most likely used in trade to indicate proper packaging, brand, or identification. These seals are quite artistic, and they depict all sorts of real and mythical animals, though the horse, camel, and donkey are notable by their absence. These three animals were yet to arrive in the subcontinent. The horse, in particular, would come with the Aryans from central Asia, in the centuries after 2000 BCE. The Harappan seals also depict their script, which was written from right to left. Some seals show dynamic action too, such as a buffalo hunting scene, a woman apparently strangling two tigers, a woman standing between two fighting men; who knows, maybe they were fighting over her? Or was she the referee?

Fabric, Fashion and Materials
Across the entire Harappan realm, the people wore finely woven cotton, spun on textile looms and dyed for color. They made beads, bangles, combs, razors, mirrors, and other household objects. They wore jewelry made of semi-precious stones and they liked big hairdos and headdresses.

We find similar copper implements and tools everywhere, made in furnaces with controlled heating up to 1200 C. They had a uniform set of standardized weights, creating which must have required a centralized authority or trade organization of some kind. They used similar principles of urban planning, including things like standardized bricks.

But for all this commonality, the Harappans also had a fair bit of internal diversity—which we see in their pottery styles. Different settlements differed in their diets, funerary practices, ecological challenges, coastal or inland orientation, and other variables.

Death Rituals
Take for instance, the differences in their death rituals. Burials for the dead were common but apparently not universal. Other practices likely co-existed, such as consigning the dead to the river or the sea. Of cremation, there is limited evidence. Burying household items with the bodies implies belief in life after death. But Dholavira provides a twist: what dominates in Dholavira are cenotaphs. They have burial goods but no human remains, suggesting different cultural beliefs.

Contemporary Civilizations
We know that the Harappans were contemporary with two other civilizations of the Bronze Age: The Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. But compared to these, the Harappans seem rather unique. One difference is that the Harappans did not build the sort of stuff that dazzles most people today, such as giant stone statues of gods or kings, palaces, or enormous burial chambers, like the pyramids. Nobody knows why the Harappans did not build such things—they could have. Their two best-known statues are the so-called ‘dancing girl’ and ‘the priest-king’, though both ‘priest’ and ‘king’ now seem unlikely descriptors for him. Both of these statues are below 7 inches tall. A lot of small figurines in clay have also been found, most of which are female. Why did the Harappans not make giant statues?

The answer might be related to the other ways in which the Harappans were fascinatingly different. For example, the Harappans haven’t left behind any evidence of temples, priests, palaces, weapons of war, or standing armies. This really jumps out when compared to other civilizations. There is simply no evidence of royalty, aristocratic burials, or a warrior class.

Social Equity
There isn’t much of a difference in the size of their homes, or in the level of public goods like wells and sanitation that everyone had access to. From the bones of the dead, it appears that everyone enjoyed similar nutrition. Even the quality of the grave goods is similar across people. To be clear, there is enough evidence of a social hierarchy, but it happens to be much flatter than in other ancient civilizations. Across the entire Harappan realm, no evidence of an overarching authority has been found. Its regional centers seem to have been fairly independent and decentralized, suggesting that they took the idea of federalism seriously. The Harappans appear to have built an unusually peaceful and egalitarian social order. And that’s something!

Enduring Legacy
Indians would later abandon the idea of social equality that the Harappans apparently valued, but many other Harappan legacies are still with us. One is the apparent imagination of “mother goddesses”, with their curvaceous bodies and a mekhala belt around the hip—a style that later shows up on the yakshis of the Sanchi stupa—two thousand years later. The Harappans apparently revered the peepal tree, which many Indians still do today; several seals depict figures in meditative-yogic poses. Other Harappan finds include the swastika, the game dice, and pieces for what seems like an early form of chess. Who knows, maybe they used the dice for gambling too, using beads or metal objects as wagers. They wore a variety of bangles, including the kind that are still worn in some rural communities in Gujarat. Some female figurines even have a red paste like substance in the middle parting of their hair, which recalls the custom of sindoor. The Harappan bullock cart, matka, lota, thali, and other domestic objects are still in use today. They even ate round balls made of high-protein grains & seeds—essentially, ladoos! They grew lentils, wheat, and millets like jowar and bajra. It has been estimated that one sixth of the Harappans lived past the age of 55, which was quite good for agricultural societies of the day.

At the onsite museum at Dholavira, you can see their children’s toys and evocative game boards carved on stone slabs. Indeed, the Harappan continuity in our lives is still quite pervasive, especially in what we might call ‘folk Hinduism’, with its reverence for certain trees and animals, “mother goddesses”, and perhaps even spiritual-meditative practices. They were also a dark-skinned people—darker, on average, than modern south Indians.

The Harappans live deep inside us! Scholars rightly urge caution that there is still immense mystery that surrounds them. They continue to be very enigmatic, and many of our assessments are partly speculative. But here’s some friendly advice: never go to Bollywood to learn about the Harappans. They’ll show you horses, light skinned people, this sort of dancing, and countless other horrors.

Undeciphered Script
Unfortunately, their written script remains undeciphered. Many have tried to decipher the Harappan script; in fact, over a 100 people have even claimed to have deciphered it, but so far, they’ve not managed to convince anyone other than themselves.

A minority view is that the Harappan script may not be linguistic, that is, it may not encode a spoken language and may be another form of symbolic communication, like traffic signs. That’s possible, though it’s worth remembering that the Harappans traded with others who had a linguistic script, so the idea of writing down their language would not have been alien to them. Their script has just over 400 unique symbols whereas, Mesopotamian Cuneiform, a linguistic script, has around 600. Not that different!

Spoken Language
But while the jury is still out on the script, there are good reasons to believe that the Harappans spoke a proto-Dravidian language. Evidence for this comes from at least three sources: First, the closeness between two language families: Dravidian and Elamite, which was spoken by the western neighbors of the Harappans. Second, the discovery of many early Dravidian loanwords in early Vedic Sanskrit prevalent in north India. And third, the survival of Brahui, a Dravidian language that’s still spoken by a small population in the Balochistan province of Pakistan. Yes, a pocket of Dravidian is still out there, and it has had its own parallel and independent evolution for many millennia.

The Demise of the Harappan Civilization
So what happened to the Harappans? Several theories have been offered for the demise of their civilization. The leading one blames regional climate change, in which the local monsoon dried up and farming became unviable. This is doubly tragic because, unlike modern humans, they did little to cause their climate change. We also know that the Ghaggar-Hakra river dried up by about 2000 BCE, impacting all the settlements along it. Whatever the combination of causes, the Harappans began migrating out of their towns and cities. For Dholavira, some scholars suggest that it might have been hit by a tsunami, which may have devastated its freshwater reservoirs and caused depopulation. For centuries, Dholavirans had bravely tackled their ecological challenges, but nature seems to have defeated them in the end.

After the collapse of their civilization, the Harappans began migrating to the south and east. City dwellers dissolved back into the rural life from which they had emerged. The great cities of the Harappan Civilization were abandoned and forgotten.

The Genius of the Harappans
Today, it seems reasonable to say that the unique genius of the Harappans lies in building planned cities, and in forging what seems a significantly equal and non-warlike society. Those are impressive achievements. The Harappans’ greatest monumental work was the city itself, a marvel of urban design and engineering. Their achievements in water management and sanitation were not exceeded until Roman times, 2000 years later. Later Indians apparently forgot about this toilet technology and took to the fields with the same Harappan lota.

Ever since their discovery a hundred years ago, the Harappans have invited us to ponder the deepest questions about human nature and culture. They transport us back to the very birth of Indian civilization. What can we learn from them? Facing ecological challenges, Dholavirans, in particular, responded with immense creativity and resolve. Perhaps it is their vulnerability and struggle that make them even more endearing to us. Given the looming climate crisis today, will our own modern civilization outlast their mature period of 700 years?

In the next episode, I’ll continue the story of Indians with the coming of the Aryans and the rise of the Vedic Age. See you next time!