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Looking
beyond Indus Valley
VIJAYA PUSHKARNA in Chandigarh
http://www.the-week.com/98jul26/life1.htm
The Week
Civilisation: New
archaeological evidence suggests that the history of civilisation dates to the Rig Vedic
people who lived on the banks of the Saraswati long before the Indus Valley.
You are on board a flight over Corbu-sier's Chandi-garh. You see a square-shaped city with
perfectly parallel and perpendicular roads. The high-rise secretariat to the north gently
blends into the lower government buildings which in turn merge with the single and double
storey residential houses.
Leading to the vedic past: A storm water drain in the castle at Dholavira which existed
5,300 years ago in Rann of Kutchchh The Shimla hills and the azure Sukhna lake are on the
northern end, and there is greenery on all other sides. Now close your eyes and replace
the high-rise secretariat with a fortified castle, and the other high government buildings
with a fortified middle castle. There are only single storey houses on roads that are
almost no different from those in Chandigarh.
In place of the mountains, the Sukhna lake and the green belt, imagine huge water
reservoirs. And then, paint a mental picture of a solid fortification around this
spectacular city. The second town is not a blueprint of a town
planner's improvement of India's only wholly planned city. It is a real town that would
have been bustling with activity some 5,300 years ago, about 250 km from modern-day Bhuj
in the Rann of Kutchchh in Gujarat.
The
archeologists call it the 'Dholavira excavation'. Archeologists and historians have hailed
Dholavira as a Mohenjodaro on this side of the Indo-Pak border, and use it to show the
expanse of the Indus Valley civilisation believed to have been destroyed by invading
Aryans from Central Asia. But Ravindra Singh Bhist of the Archaeological Survey of India,
who led the excavation, saw much more than just another big Harappan city. "It is a
virtual reality of what the Rig Veda, the world's oldest literary record, describes,"
says Bhist, who is also a Sanskrit scholar.
He calls the three levels of the ancient Dholavira city parama, madhyama and avama,
meaning highest, middle and lower towns, on the basis of the Vedic concepts,
parameshthina, madhyamesthina and avameshtina. He is currently doing a 'compare and
contrast study' of what is in the Rig Veda and what he excavated at Dholavira and
Banawali. Less than a year ago another archaeologist, Amarendra Nath, exposed an ancient
township under Rakhigarhim in the Hisar district of Haryana. Besides typically Harappan
features, the experts also found circular and triangular fire pits or altars on the mud
floor. "Whether it has Vedic relevance or not I don't know yet, but traditionally
they're associated with the Rig Veda," he says. Archaeologist Madhav Acharya who
excavated Kunal in Haryana is categorical that it is the Vedic people, and not
light-skinned outsiders, who created the Indus Valley civilisation.
The dry Saraswati, which formed a part of the Indus river system, flowed barely 500 yards
from the Kunal site. Interestingly, in the site there is a cut in the soil with a V-shaped
embankment all the way from what was the
river bank, to where the settlement ends. It was probably a moat with four gates built
during the final phase of this habitation, and skirts the whole settlement. Of the 226
pottery pieces excavated in Kunal, 131 bear 44 of the
417 known Harappan letters. These finds, says Acharya, prove that the pre-Harappan culture
was the mother of the matured Harappan culture.
That is, the people of the Rig Veda, which is replete with references to the
Saraswati and Sapta Sindhu, were the people of the Harappan civilisation. Archaeologists
like Jagat Pati Joshi, who excavated Surkotda in Gujarat,
Bhagwanpura in Haryana and Dhadheri in Punjab, and S.P. Gupta, who has worked on
practically all Indus sites in India, no longer prefer to call the Indus Valley
civilisation as the Indus-Saraswati civilisation because there are more settlements of the
Harappan kind along the Saraswati than along the Indus.
They are among the increasing tribe of archaeologists who have noticed that Harappan sites
bear a similarity to what is described in the Vedas, and are suggesting that it is the
Vedic people who created the Indus-Saraswati civilisation.
These conclusions not only turn conventional wisdom on its head but make history textbooks
sound almost silly. Prof B.B. Lal, former director-general of the ASI, agrees that it is
time for a rethink. He refutes the theory of Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated Mohenjodaro
and Harappa, that invading light-skinned Aryans from Central Asia destroyed the Indus
civilisation. Lal disproves the disparity some historians have pointed out between the
Harappan civilisation and the Vedic civilisation. The Rig Vedic society was not so utterly
rural in contrast with the highly urbanized
Harappan civilisation, he maintains.
The
horse-of the Indo Aryans-was not missing from the Harappan excavations (the evidence comes
from Lothal, Surkotda and Kalibangan) and the Vedic geography coincides with the very
domain of the Harappan civilisation. Add
to that a biological continuity within the Indus valley from 4500 BC to 800 BC, and
"how can one envisage the entry of hordes of Vedic Aryans who are supposed to belong
to an alien, non-Harappan biological group, around the middle of the second millennium
BC?" Lal asks. Bhagwan Singh, an avid writer on the Indus Valley civilisation, sees
the entire Harappan ecology in the Rig Veda.
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