The IndusCivilization

^^Sudeshna Guha looks at the archaeology of the Indus

Civilization, the Bronze Age phenomenon of SouthAsia, whose study began under the British and has

continued since independence and partition of thecountry. She considers how the interpretations for thiscivilization have shaped and been shaped by notions of

an authentic 'Indian civilization'.

HisiTmvToDAY OCTOBER 2007

THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

'Not often has it been to archaeologists,as it was given to Schliemann at Tirynsand Mycenae, or to Stein in the desertsof Turkestan, to light upon the remainsof a long forgotten civilization. It looks,however, at this moment, as if we wereon the threshold of such a discovery inthe plains of the Indus.'

I N THESE WORDS Sir John Mar-shall, the British Director-(k'ncnil (li>02-28) of the

colonial Archaeological Surveyof India , chose to annotnice thediscovery of 'the prehistoric civi-lization of the Indtis Valley' in The¡llustrated London Nm>s (September24th. 1924).

The first finds of the oldestknown urban civilization withinSouth Asia were made at Harappa(1920) and Mohenjodaro (1922)- both sites now in Pakistan - bytwo officers of the ArchaeologicalSurvey, Daya Ram Sahni and RakluilDas Banerji. The discovery wasindeed, as Marshall implied, sensa-tional. For, these retnains of a seem-ingly city-orientated and preliieratecivilization liad no references withinthe ancient indigenous literature ofthe Indian subcontinent. Theunique Bron/e Age phenomenon ofihe Indus \'alley. now also known asthe- llarappan Civilization after thesite where it was first exposed, thus'appeared' as an enigma.

Yet, like many dramatic archaeo-logical discoveries, the Indus (j\ili/a-tion was recovered from sites thathad long been known to contain his-torical remains. These had beeninterpreted variotisly. The first Euro-pean to record the ancient motmdsat Harappa was Charles Masson, adeserter from the East India Compa-ny army, who visited tlie site in 1824and wrote about it in his Narrative ofVariou.s Journeys in Balochistan,

Afghanistan and thePunjab 0H42). Mas-

,son mistook theruins (in Mont-gomery district ofthe Punjab ofBritish India) foi the

ancient city of Sangala,the capital of King Porus,

who was defeated by the ruler ofMacedonia, Alexander, wben ihe lat-ter invaded the Indian stibcontinentin 327 BC. Five years after Masson, in1831, Lieutenant Alexander Btirnsvisited Harappa dtiring a historicjourney up the River Indns andfound a 'ruined citadel on the riverside of town', which he noted in bisTravels into Bokhara (1834). Subse-quently, Sir Alexander Cunningham,the first bead of the ArchaeologicalSur\'ey (Director 1861-65, and Direc-tor-General 1871-85), visitedHarappa three times, in 1853,1856 and 1872-73. Cunninghamcondncted small excavations ainferred that the ruins of thebrick mounds representedPo-fa-to, a city with slupas,monks and templesdescribed by the Chinesepilgrim Xuanzang who hadtouied northern Indiadtiring tbe seventh centu-ry .\D to trace tbe Buddha's

Left: The Harappan seal foundby Alexander Cunningham,which he published in 1875.

Right: A bronze 'dancing girl',found at Mohenjodaro.

Above: Skeletons found in Mohenjodaro(opposite, main picture) in 1925-26;such discoveries led Mortimer \Mieelerin tlie 1950s to suggest that the IndusCivilization had come to a violent end.Seals such as that shown opposite .showan as yet undeciphered script. The silver,gold and steatite hrooch (left) was foundat Harappa.

earthly trail. The 'sione implements'and •numert)us specimen of ancientpottery' whicb Cunningham un-earthed were to disappoint him inbis search for palpable Bnddbistremains, although he did acquire a'curious thing' - a stamp seal, wbosedrawing he published in 1875.

Characteristically of the time,Cunningham saw this seal, which isnow regarded as a typical artefact of

the nrban phase ol" tbe IndusCivilization, as an archaeologicalctiriosity. He pronotniced the

specimen to be 'foreign toIndia', since it depicted a

hump-less btill and not thebiunped Indian

/I'bu; and ani 11 sc I i p t i o n

which, he wascertain, contained

'Indian letters'. Twooilier seals from Harappa

were published, in 1886 and in1912, by which time all threehad found tbeir way inio theliiitisli Mu.seum.At a lime when systematic exca-

\ations were a novelty and physi-cal dating techniques iniknown,collections of comparable arle-

I OCTOBER 2007 HISTORY TODAY 51

•MODERN REFINEMENT?! IN ANCIENT INDIA, ARTS /Mb CRAFTS OF A NEWLÏ DISCWEREn PREHrSTORlC RACE.

facts offered the only means of deter-mining cultural and chronologicalaffinities between settlements ofuncertain antiquity. So althotigh pot-tery, stone tools and other objectsfrom sites now classified as 'Harap-pan' - such as Amri (Sind, Pakistan),Dabar Kot (Loraiai district, Pak-istan), Suktagen-dor (Dasht valley ofMakran. Pakistan Iranian border)and Kalibangan (Rajastliaii, India) -were known by the beginning of thetwentieth century, their historicalconnections were not investigated.This is perhaps not surprising sincethe objects varied remarkably, andthe sites were at great dis-tances from oneanother.

Within thefirst year ofhis long anddistinguishedcareer in In-dian archae-ology, John Mar-shall was informed of the'prehistoric' potentials of Nal ((ha-lawan Division of the former KalatState, Central Baluchistan), which isnow known to have belonged to theearly, pre-urban phase of the IndusCivilization. Nal had been cursorilyprobed in 1903, and had yieldedpainted and plain potterv-, specimensof which Marshall published in hisAnnual Report of thf Archaeologiral Sur-vey of India, 1904-05. Marshall alsorequested his SuperitïtendentArchaeologist of Northwest FrontierProvinces, Aurel Stein, tt) excavate

Above: A compcsite animal in terracottafrom Moheiijodaro, Right: John Marshallin 1926, photographed within thearchitectural feature he defined as the'Great Bath', Mohenjodaro.

the site for 'two or three weeks".Stein undertook a rudimentaryexploration of the Quetta District in1904 as part of his 'trans-frontier'explorations to locate Alexander's'Mahaban' and 'Aornos', but waskeen to get started on his ambitiousexploration of Chinese Turkestan.He therefore found the 'visit [toNal] impracticable within availabletime owing to great distances fromQuetta'.

It is unlikely that Stein, or indeedMarshall, would have detected early

clues for the exis-'rnct of theIndus Civiliza-

I (ion at Nal inl!)04, had they

i x c a v a t e dthere. Even the

next archaeolo-gist to look at the site,

Harold Hargreaves, whocxca\ated at Nal in 1925

Marshall's behest, insearch of interactions between Bal-uchistan, Mesopotamia and theIndus Valley during the third and

at

The spread from the Illustrated Ijyndo»News of September 1924 in whichMarshall announced the finds atHarappa and Mohenjodaro lo the Britishpress; but he withheld the images frompublication in India.

fourth millennia BC, failed to see iht-ways in which the artefacts from the'necrópolis' he unearthed related tothose from Mohenjodaro and Hara]>pa. Hargreaves. who also excavatedat Mohenjodaro in 1925-26, couldonly postulate that, 'when the Nal(ulture nourished the greater partsof its inhaljitants, like those of today,were nomadic and lived for half theyear outside its highlands. This couldnot fail tt) bring them into contactwith the more highly developedIndus civilization". The contributionof what is now termed the 'Amri-Nalculture-complex' io the urban ctil-ture oi the Indus Valley remainsunclear to this day, although modernscholars have the advantage oi aknowledge of the Indus Civilizationto help them classify this culturecomplex as an 'Early Harappan pre-urban' phase. In 1904. Nal wouldhave heen classified as just anotherprehistoric settlement.

Mohetijodaro (Larkhana Districtof Sind. Pakistan) provides a classicexample of the manner in which his-torical values of archae<ïlogical siteswere often misjudged. The Superin-tendent Archaeologist, Western Cir-cle, Devadatta Ramakrishna Bhan-darkar, who visited the site in1911-12 and was the first to recordfindings there, reckoned the brickshe saw there were modern. He ac-cepted the locals' view that themounds were not more than 200years old, and made a superficial

5 2 HISTORY ToD.AV OCTOBER 2007

THE INDUS CIVILiZATION

reference to them in his report. Itwas only when the 'mystery of theseals' of Harappa could be solved atMohenjodaro in 1922-23, that thelatter's "hoary' antiquity was dis-covered.

Following Bhandarkar, Raklial DasBaticiji visited Mohenjodarij in 1919-20 to assess the antiqttarian remainsin the area and to search for Bud-dhist remains, something with whichall archaeologists of India of his gen-eration were engaged. He was able toidentify the presence of a Buddhist

Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976), in 1955.

stupa of the early first niilleuniiun ADon one of the mounds. On a hunchthat a flint scraper he collectedcould be vety ancient, Baneiji askedMarsball for permission to excavate.His excavations yielded stamp sealsbelow the level of the Buddhist struc-tures, and affinities between Mohen-jodaro and Harappa, more than 400miles away, could now be drawn. Pro-fessor A.H. Sayce, the Oxford Assyri-ologist who saw photographs of theseals in Marshall's article in The Illus-trated London Neïos, immediatelydated them to the third millenniumBC, pointing out that they were 'prac-ticalK identical with the proto-K.laniitf tahlettes de œmpatablité discov-ered by Morgan at Susa'. Thus, anapproximate chronology - one thatlias proved remarkably accurate -was vested upon the remains, foundin different contexts, of what Mar-shall had correctly guessed to be a'pre-Vedic' civilization.

Research on the Indus Civilizationhas now gone on for over eighty

'Funerary* vesselfrom Harappa.

years, and hasshown this to havebeen the largestBronze Age civiliza-tion of Asia, witbremains found overvast area, from the Pakistan-Iraniati border in tbe west to theCanga-Yamuna Doab (beyond NewDelhi) in the east and includingmost of Pakistan, sottthern Afghan-istan, and virtually all of Gujarat andparts of Rajasthati, Haryana, UttarPradesh and Punjab in India. A par-ticular domain, known as theGreater Indtis Region, has beenidentified, where the tirban phasefirst appeared. This included twomajor river systems, the Indus andwhat is now referred as the 'extinct'Ghaggar-Hakra. Archaeologists haverecently suggested that the latter isthe river Saraswati, mentioned in theRig Veda, the first among the Vedas,the oldest indigenous textual corpusof the Indian subcontinent and dat-ing from the early first millenniumBC. However, this identification is byno means conclusive.

Tbe geography of Indus Civiliza-tion region comprises many diverseenvironmental niches, within whicha particular type of painted pottery,bead forms, seal types, script, brickproportions, cubical weights, andunique non-domestic architecture -such as the 'Great Bath' at Mohenjo-daro and "the Great Hall' (longknown as the Granar)) at Harappa -distinguish a particular pbase, theurban. This phase is now dated to2fiOO-1900 BC. Enquiries into its ori-gin and decline led archaeologistsfirst into Baluchistan and Sind (inBritish India in the late 1920s), andsubsequently from the 1950s intoother areas of Pakistan, Gujarat andnorthern India, Afghanistan, easternIran, Oman, Bahrain and the Arabi-an Gulf subsequently. The long histo-ry of this exploration has exposedthe immense regional variationswithin this Civilization, and hasencouraged innovative researchstrategies for excavating its regionalparticularities.

A culture-history framework forperiodizing the Civilization was putforward in the 1970s notably b)Mohammad Rafique Mughal, the

Pakistani archaeolo-gist. Mughal was to

substantiate tlie classifl-catory scheme for thisCivilization into fourphases: Pre-early(S.̂ iOO-SOOO Rc), Early

(:i()OO-2(iO() iu:). Matureor urban (2600-

2000/1900 lie), and Lateuappan (2000-17(10 BC). By the

198()s it was realized that these tlifïer-t'lit phases had different tegionalexpressions and chronologies. ManyMature Harappan sites in tbe Cholis-tan weie fottndt-d on virgin soil;many Early Harappan sites in Sind,including Rot Diji (the site 40 milesnortheast of Mohetijodaio whereMughal had studied shctds that hadhelped him establish the notion ofthe Early Harappan phase) wereabandoned and never re-occupied;and tlu- 'Late Harappan', seen inexcavations in Harappa, did not fol-low as a necessary sequel in manyregions. The density of" settlementpatterns dilTeied across regions, andthe pottery ol the Early and Latephases showed remarkable regionalvariations. By the 1980s it was alsoclear that urbanization had botbappeared and disappeared earlier inthe Indus Valley than in Gujarat andnorth India. Despite these qualifica-tions, Mughal's periodization hasallowed scholars to foctis on sitesother than the cities,and on the longuedurée of a civi-lization.

E X c a \' a -tions at Mehr-garh, in theKachi plainsof BaUu histannear the Bolau

Necklace of gold,agate, jasper,steatite and greenstone beads. This isonly half of (heoriginal necklacefound in a silvervessel in Mohenjodariin 1926. The originallonger neeklaee uitli tseven-beaded pendant /was divided into two 'in 1948. one for Pakistanand the other for India.

\

OCTOBER 2007 HISTORY TODAY 53

THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

O Modern cities

• Major sices

D Other sites

Maior trade routes

i AFGHANISTANi

'••̂ I R A N Shahtvi-Sokh

Quetfafl BDabarKot

• P A K«I S T% "'1 MohehJoda)PO

V * ' ' si

'•" \ O M A N \ ' \ ..-'Al Juna/z i '

Arabian Sea0 kSomtmt 300

200 u^of Khamthi

Pass, have extended this longue durée,by providing the first evidence oflocal domestication processes ofcereals such as barley and animalssuch as sheep and goats within SonthAsia in the seventh/ sixth millenni-um Bc:. The site was occupied fromthe seventh to the third millennium,and shows u continuous sequence oflocal developments from the'aceramic Neolithic' (without pot-tery) to the 'Chalcolithic' (copper-using). This has aroused expecta-tions of similar sequences from otherareas of the Indus region. Finds fromMehrgarh also have also alertedresearchers to local histories of socio-economic transformations, and thesehad repercussions on theories invogue until the 1980s of the 'originand decline' of the Indus Civiliza-tion.

The nineteenth-century grandtheory of the invading 'ar^ans' (fromWest Asia) controlled the historiog-raphy of 'ancient India' well into thela te-twentieth centtiry\ Discovered ata time when the civilizatioiial historyof South Asia was presumed by schol-ars to have begun with the 'Aryans'and their 'Vedic Age', the Indus Civi-lization was typecast as 'non-aryan',whose atuhors were astutelydescribed by John Marshall as 'born,perhaps rather of the soil itself andof the rivers than of the varyingbreed of men which they sustained',

By the early 1960s, Marshall's stoiyof the 'origins' of Indian civilizationwas considerably altered, mainly dueto the conviction with which Sir Mor-timer \\Tieeler presented his views.

Wlieeler, the last Director-General(1944-48) of the colonial Archaeo-

logical Survey, excavated Harappa in1947, and was subsequently invitedby the Pakistan government to exca-vate at Mohenjodaro in 1950. He wasalso Marshall's fiercest critic. Ignor-ing the latter's view that the 'ciilttirerepresented [at Harappa andMohenjodarol must ha\e had a longantecedent history on the soil ofIndia', as well as the many 'pre- andpost-urban phase' settlements thathad been discovered. Wheeler pro-claimed his own innovative tlieory ofdiffusion. According to him, 'In thethird millennium BC, India

Major Harappan urban settlements androutes of interaction within the GreaterIndus Region and with regions to thewest, during the mid 3rd millennium BC.

(Pakistan) received from Meso-potamia the already established ideaof the city-life or civilization b\iitransmuted that idea into a modesubstantially new and congenial': ilwas only when the indigenous 'non-Aryan' people of northern SotuhAsia took a leap into 'civic life' byemulating their materially advancedwestern neighbotirs, thai ihc ethi)s ofa civilization appeared in ilie IndusValley. Wheeler's theory of 'stimultisdiffusion' had no substantive evi-dence, but it was based, ironically, onMarshall's contentions, substantiatedthrough the presence of Harappanartefacts in Sumerian andMesopotainian sites, that there wastrade 'inleicotii"se between the hidusValley, Mesopotamia and Elam' dur-ing the third millennium BC.

W'hceler also filled in a chronolog-ical 'gap' between the Indus Civiliza-tion and its successor, by proposingthat the 'invading Aryans' had massa-cred the population of Harappa andMohenjodaro. By creating evidencefor this bloody encounter ihrouglihis narrative of thrskeletal remains at

The sculpture ol the .so-called priest-king fromMohenjodaro (C.21Ü0BC) has hecome the hest-known .single image ofthe Indus Civilization. Itwas found (left) duringthe dig of 1925-26.

54 HISTORY TOD.W OCTOBER 2007

THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

Mohenjodaro. Wheeler challengedMarshall's vit'w that the urban civi-lization of the Indus Valley had longfaded by the time the so-called'Aryans' entered the Indian subcon-tinent.

Both Marshall and Wheelei hadestablislu'd their understanding ofthe nature of the Indus Civilizationthrough Mohenjodaro and Harappa,the only two sites that, until the1960s, had been excavated for longperiods of time and were known tocontain a rich range of artefacts.Where Marshall drafted a long list ofwhat he perceived were the 'nationalcharacteristics' of the Indus Civiliza-tion, Wheeler concentrated on the"abstract qualities', which to himwere its 'sameness, isolation and cen-tralization'. Marshall's list includedthe domestication of animals, cultiva-tion of grains, canal irrigation, weav-ing and dying of textiles, river navi-gation, use of wheeled vehicle,working of metals, and fashioning ofornaments; the range reveals thebreadth of his perspective on civiliza-tions. Wheeler's on the other handwas a summation of its 'civic life'.Hence, his appraisal was based oncities whose contents he interpretedthrough his knowledge of theRoman 'militaiy' towns in Wales andEngland which he had excavated inthe 1920s and the 1930s.

Wheeler therefore misjudgedHarappa and Mohenjodaro as 'can-tonment' cities with 'rigid lay-outs','citadel mounds', 'guard rooms','civic granaries' and 'coolie cot-tages'. Having spotted a 'citadel' atHarappa on his first visit in 1944. he'hit upon the idea of a civic granary'at Mohenjodaro. In ascribing unifor-mity and monotony to the Indus Civ-ilization, he ignored Chanhadaro,which had been unearthed in1935-36 and shown to be a small set-tlement of the urban phase with abead-making industry. He also estab-lished a notional political economyfor the Harappans.

Under Marshall's directorship ofresearch on the Indus Civilization,long-distance trade had beena.ssumed to be a precondition for the.siirvival of the Indus urban economy.Working on this assumption, ErnestMackay. who excavated Mohenjo-daro between 1927 and 1931, hadinferred that the Harappans werepeaceful 'burgher' traders. Dismiss-ing Mackay's characterization as 'the

bourgeois complacency of the IndusCivilization', and Marshall's assess-ments of the importance of long-distance trade. Wheeler propo.sed anisolated civilization based on a cen-tralized, militaristic imperialism. Byjuxtaposing the different theoriesthen in vogue of tlie ancient states ofMesopotamia. Egypt. Anatolia andRome, he endowed the Indus citieswith an 'administration [that] wasstraitened by religious sanction; acivic discipline rigidly enforced by aking-god or his priesthood'. Emulat-ing him, and drawing on the prevail-ing notions on Sumerian kingship.Wheeler's colleague Stuart Piggott.the British archaeologist who hadspent the war years in India inter-preting aerial maps prepared by theRoyal Air Force and mastering Indi-an archaeology, conceived for hismagnum opus, Prehistoric India (19ñO),a state 'ruled by priest kings, wield-ing absolute and antocratic powerfrom two main seats of government'.

The political organization of the'Harappans' and, indeed, their ori-gins and beliefs, has continued tohold the attention of archaeologicalresearch on the Indus Ci\ilization. Itis likely that the urban phase mayhave seen state-level organization,although the constitution of thisstate system, namely whether it wasunitary or plural, the nature of gov-ernance, area of influence, and polit-ical ideology, remains unknown.Einds from excavations, especiallyrecently at Harappa, also make itfairly certain that the 'Harappans'were one of the many dilferentcommunities who lived within the

The model oxcarl found at Mohonjo-daro (below) is of a .style similar to cartsstill widelv found across soutliern India.

physical gcugijiphy oí the (.rcatciIndus Region. They may well havepractised various subsistence strate-gies, int luiling agro-pastori\lism, fish-ing and hunter-gathering, and havecomprised of different occupationalgroups, such as traders, specialistand itinerant craftsmen, rulers andbuilders.

In recent years, the concept of an'Indus Cultural Tradition' has beenpromoted by many North Americanarchaeologists of South Asia, in pref-erence to that of the 'Indus Civiliza-tion'. This idea embraces 'Eras' ofRegionalization (.5000-2600 BC). Inte-gration {2600-1900 liC) and Localiza-tion (1900-1300/1000 iic), whichrt'plicate die Pre-. Early, Mature, andLate phases in meaning, but drawattention lo formation processes.

[im Shaffer and Dianne Lichten-stein, the main creators of thisscheme, argue that the concept of aCultural Tradition elucidates the pre-sence of different 'ethnic gioups', aswell as the coutinuitics within thehistorical narrative of northern

OCTOBER 2007 HisroRV roD.\Y 55

Someobservers

have .suggestedthat the horned

figure on this sealshows an archaic

Hinduism.

South Asia 'from food production inthe seventh millennium B(. to thepresent". Their stiggestions are, how-ever, both speculative and mislead-ing. Ethnicities, like language, can-not be 'excavated' from potsherdsand other archaeological artefacts,and by focusing on continuities Shaf-fer and Lichtenstein marginalize thetransitions, transformations and rup-tures in history, caused, for exam-ple, by migrations.

The idea that the 'Indus CultureTradition' fed a bigger and nninter-riipted Tndo-Gangetic Cultural Tra-dition', echoes the historiography ofthe 'Indian Tradition' which domi-nated many British colonial historiesof India. Theorizing tipon the conti-nuities within the 'major culturalpatterns' has also contributed tomany spurious histories of essential-ist religious and cultural identities,which are now being written forSouth Asia's past.

Many artefacts of the Indus urbanphase, stich as motifs on potsherdsand seals {the peepul tree and seatedhorned figure), architectural fea-tures such as the 'Great Bath' ofMohenjodaro and 'Fire altars' ofKalibangan, and 'iconic" and 'non-iconic' statues have been arbitrarilycho.sen by Indian archaelogist.s stichas S.P.Gupta (1996) and B.B.Lai(1998) to locate an 'archaic Hin-

duism' withiti the religiousbeliefs of the 'Harappans".Marshall had arguedtbat the religion of tbeIndus Valley was non-Vedic, but that many ofits features were absorbedinto Hinduism; and this argu-ment prefigures the new one.With tbe ascendancy ofHindu national politicswithin India during the1990s, the Indus Civilizationhas been blatantly misused togive a hoary antiquity' to mod-ern-day Hinduism. "Revised* his-tory textbooks were publishedand thrust upon Indianschools by tbe National Coun-cil of Education and Researchin 2002, and in 2005 ihe HinduEducational Eotindaticin and theVedic Foundation demandedtliat the sixth-grade history bookson South Asia in California be'amended'. Although the text-books have been withdrawn, andthe proposed amendments over-ruled by the courts in tbe US,tbese events offer glimpses of thegrand narratives that are beingwritten on the antiquity of a'Hindu India' through the Indus Civ-ilizaüon.

Many archaeologists, Indian andnon-Indian, now comb the IndusCivilization to map a civilizationalheritage for modern India. They sug-

Above: A 'mother-goddess' figurine fromthe Indus Valley. Below: the architecturalfeature whicb was until tbe 1990smistakenly referred to as the 'GreatGranary* of Harappa.

gest that 'all people ofthe subcontinent are. in

one way or atiother,inheritors of theIncius Civilization'

and locate within itsrealms evidence for

caste hierarchy, politicalideologies of early kingship,

specific economic patterns,and most notably mod-ern Hindu religious val-ties. Legacies of suchmagnitude are tisefiilcoiumentaries tipon theleleological aspects ofall nationalist histories.

The sense of owner-

kshij) of a sophisticatedatid 'prebistoric' ci\i-lization by tbe Indianshas a long history. Inl9'¿r-¡ the .Aiiirita Bazar

Patrika, one of India's old-est national newspapers, cap-tured tbe broad implicationsof the finds oían arcliaic civi-lization for the self-image of acolonized nation with tberemark.

What Indian is there who will notfeel proud that the civilization of hiscoünti"y thus reaches up to the hoarv'agt of the third or the fourüimillennium BC?

The sense of ownership of a civi-lization wbich Indians felt was clearlytheirs, was expressed by KhanBahadur Ebrahim Haroon Jaffer, amember of the Imperial Cotmcil ofStates, who questioned Marshall in1925 for announcing tbe discoveries

56 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2007

THE INDUS CIVILIZATION

within a foreign journal, and forwithholding photographs of theexcavations frotn Indian newspapers.

At Partition. India was stripped ofits Harappan sites. Apart fioni KotiaNihang Khan and Ropar, the restwere drawn into the new map of Pak-istan, and therefore, ihe systematicexploration of probable areas forremains of the Indus Civilizationwithin the borders of modern Indiawas mooted as a national policy. Anintensive survey of the dry beds ofthe river Ghaggar, initiated in 1950by Amalananda Ghosh, the DirectorGeneral of the Archaeological Sur-vey of India, establishefl ihe pres-ence of this Giviiization within Indiaitself; and the fact that India nowclaims to possess a larger share is asmuch a success of its fledgling gov-ei nmeiirs historic aim. as it is of thepaih-breaking work of the archaeolo-gists involved. Partition also encour-aged the division of ihe archaeologi-cal spoils*. Both India and Pakistanlaid claim to shares of the Indus Gi\i-li/ation after its fust internationalexliibition closed at the Royal Acade-mv in London in 1948 and the arte-

facts were returned to New Delhi,the headquarters of the colonialArchaeological Survey. The Indiansretained the "proto-Siva* seal, thebest bronze 'dancing girl' fromMohenjodaro, and the red jasperand black stone torso from Harap-pa; Pakistan was given the priestking', and the 'seal of divine adora-tion'.

A spectacular hoard of gold jew-ellery found at Mandi (Uttar Pra-desh) in May 2000. a "signpost' inIndus script within the precinct ofthe 'castle' at Dholavira (Gujarat)excavated in 1990-96, atid a copperseal, terracotta wedges, and distinc-tive pottery with potter's marks col-lected from the surface of Ganweri-wala (Pakistan) in May 2007, aresmall samples of the treasures thatarchaeology- has yet to unearth of acivilization that remains poorlyunderstood. Its script remains unde-ciphered. as is the nature of its poli-ty and the social and religious pnxc-tices of its inhabitants. In theabsence of any sttre clues, analogiesfrom later periods of South Asianhistory are frequently and at times

carelessly drawn. This practice hasonly entrenched the interpretativetatitologies. New archaecïlogical dis-coveries stoke expectations of gain-ing better knowledge. Many recentclaims of unexpected finds, includ-ing those of liorse bones fromSurkotada (India), and of a 9,500-year-old city under water in the Gtilfof Khambat are rightly distnissed,but the quest for the trtith of theIndus Civilization remains reliantupon nurturing a magical world ofsensational chance discoveries.

FOR FURTHER READING

G.L. Possehl, The IndusAgeJhe Beginnings (New

Delhi, 1999);J.M.Kenoyer Ancient Cities of the

IndusValley Civilization {Oxford/Karachi I998);S.

Rainagar 7fie End of the Great Harappan Tradition

(New Delhi. 2002); R.Thapar Early India From the

Origins to AD 1300 (Penguin, 2003);J.H, Marshall

(ed.) Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilizalian

(London I93I);R.E.M. Wheeler FiveThousand

Years of Pokiston (London 1950).

Sudeshna Guha is University Lecturer in South

Asian History at the Faculty of Asian and Middle

Eastern Studies. Cambridge.

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(October 1985)

NAMING ENGLANDA History for England Alan MacColl (January 2006)King Arthur and the Making afan English Britain Alan MacColl(March 1999)

'Not Alere English':The British Perspective 1400-1650 StephenEllis (Dec 1988)For England. See Wales Robin Evans (Sept 2001)British Nationalism and the Nation Keith Robbins (Dec 1983)

GEORGE ill

George /// Steven Parissien (june 2002)The American Monarchy Frank Prochaska (August 2007)

The King and the Kittens of Kew Charlotte Crow (July 2006)Happy Families Stella Tillyard (March 2006)Theatre and Counter-Theatre in Georgian Potitics:The Mock

Elections at Garrat John Brewer (February 1983)

Britannia Roused: Political caricature and the fall of t/ie Fox-Northcoalition David Johnson (june 2001)The Greatest Political Cartoon ofAIITime? Tim Benson (March2005)

The Scourge of Napoleon Mark Bryant (August 2006)

INDUS VALLEY

Reading History: India Judith Brown (September 1982)Archaeology at the Crossroads TonyAldous (lanuary 1998)People and Place Don Henson (December 2001 )One World Archaeology Peter J Ucko (March 1989)

OCTOBER 2007 HISTORY TODAY 57

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