Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (6 page)

This is a simplified timeline. In
reality, cities rose and fell and were sometimes rebuilt on older sites. Some areas
flourished when others were in decline. Nonetheless, there are clear signs that the
overall civilization was in severe stress after 2000
BC
.
We see steady deterioration in municipal governance till one by one the great cities
are abandoned. What went wrong?

It was once believed that Aryan
invasions from Central Asia had caused the collapse of the Indus Valley
Civilization. However, there is no sign that Harappan cities were laid waste by
invaders. The evidence strongly points to the wrath of nature. A number of studies
show that the area which is today the Thar desert was once far wetter and that the
climate gradually became drier. However, the exact trajectory of this change is
somewhat disputed. It is possible that the process of drying was already under way
when the Mature Harappan period began. However, around 2200
BC
, we find that the monsoons had become distinctly weaker and there
were prolonged droughts. In fact, this is a widespread phenomenon that also affected
Egypt and Turkey.
⁷
By itself, this would have caused an agricultural crisis for a heavily
populated region. However, the Harappans were hit by an even bigger
problem—the drying up of the river system on which the civilization was
based.

A simple map of Harappan sites would be
enough to illustrate that the largest concentration of settlements is not centred
around the Indus but around the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar. It is now little more
than a dry riverbed that contains
water only after heavy rains
(it saw an exceptional flow after the heavy monsoons of 2010). However, surveys and
satellite photographs confirm that it was once a great river that rose in the
Himalayas, entered the plains in Haryana, flowed through the
Thar–Cholistan desert of Rajasthan and eastern Sindh (running roughly
parallel to the Indus) and then reached the sea in the Rann of Kutchh in Gujarat.
Indeed, the strange marshy landscape of the Rann of Kutchh is partly due to the fact
that it was once the estuary of a great river. Although much of this course is now
dry desert and often hidden under sand, satellite photographs show that there is
still a substantial amount of underground water along the old channels. This has
been confirmed by drilling wells that have given fresh water at shallow depths even
in the middle of the Thar desert!

The Ghaggar emerges from hills just east
of Chandigarh but is joined by a number of other seasonal rivers in the plains of
northern Haryana. There is evidence that the Ghaggar and/or some of these rivers
were perennial in ancient times. Moreover, satellite images show that both the
Sutlej and the Yamuna once flowed into the Ghaggar, which would have made the
Ghaggar a mighty river. However, at some point the Ghaggar appears to have lost its
main sources of glacial melt from the Himalayas even as the Sutlej and the Yamuna,
its largest tributaries, abandoned it for the Indus and the Ganga respectively.
Tectonic shifts appear to have played a role in this. As a result, we find that the
river no longer flowed to the sea. The Ghaggar may have struggled on with the help
of rain-fed seasonal tributaries but even these failed as the climate changed. The
sequence of events may have taken decades or centuries to play out and different
parts of the
Harappan world would have experienced different
sub-cycles. Cities on the banks of the Indus, for instance, may have suffered floods
as Sutlej waters suddenly entered their ecosystem. The Pakistan floods of 2010
provide a glimpse of what this may have felt like—especially if such an
event had caused the Indus itself to shift course.

Dry Bed of the Saraswati River
(source:
The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati
by Michel Danino)

What does the drying of the Ghaggar tell
us about the fate of the Harappans? It appears that the climate was wetter and the
Ghaggar was in full flow during the early phase of the civilization. Perhaps the
earthquakes of 2600
BC
, attested both at Kalibangan and
Dholavira, were related to the tectonic shifts that affected either the Yamuna or
the Sutlej. Interestingly, we find that the mature Harappan phase takes off only
after the Ghaggar was already drying. One wonders if the drying weather and the
dying river created a climatic sweet-spot that allowed the urban centres to
flourish. This may explain why there is a dense concentration of mature Harappan
sites in the Thar desert, around the time we think that the Ghaggar may
have already started to dry. Unfortunately, around 2000
BC
, conditions again took a sharp turn for the worse.

Eventually, the lack of water began to
weigh against the Harappans. Their carefully managed cities began to disintegrate
and they began to migrate. This would not be the last time that cities in the
subcontinent would suffer from the vagaries of too much or too little water. One can
imagine long lines of bullock-carts, heavily laden with personal belongings, leaving
their old villages and cities in search of a more secure future. The scene was
replayed in 2010 when Pakistan was devastated by floods. In the north, the Harappans
moved north-east to the Yamuna and Ganga. In Gujarat, the cities in Kutchh were
abandoned in favour of new settlements in the Narmada and Tapti valleys to the
south.
⁸
The late Harappan sites show a degree of cultural continuity but there is a
clear shift towards smaller settlements. The old urban sophistication has clearly
broken down. Thus ended India’s first experience of urbanization.

The archaeological evidence suggests
that they slowly drifted east and south, and that their culture and genes lived on
in India. However, archeologists and historians disagree bitterly on this. Romila
Thapar, an eminent historian, is of the opinion that the ‘material culture
shows no continuities’.
⁹
In contrast, B.B. Lal, a former Director General of the Archaeological Survey
and one of India’s most celebrated archaeologists, argues that
‘many of the present day cultural traits are rooted in the Harappan
Civilization.’
¹⁰

We have already discussed the similarity
between modern-day bullock carts and those used by the Harappans. However, B.B. Lal
puts forward a formidable body of evidence that the Harappan legacy is not just
visible in later Indian civilization but is present in everyday life to this day.
Take for example, the ‘namaste’—the common Indian way
to show respect to both people and to the gods. There are several clay figurines
from Harappan sites that show a person with palms held together in a namaste. There
are even terracotta dolls of women with red vermilion on their foreheads. Is this
the origin of the ‘sindur’ used by married Hindu women? All of
these are intriguing thoughts but we cannot be absolutely sure that these had the
same meaning for the Harappans.

In his recent book, Michel Danino has
collected even more examples of continuity. We have already discussed the
persistence of the ratio 5:4 in the previous chapter. We see the use of such ratios
in many facets of Harappan life. They also had a standardized system of weights and
measures, many of which are echoed two thousand years later in the
Arthashastra
,
a manual on governance and political
economy written in the third century
BC
. Danino
calculates that the standard length used by the planners at Dholavira was 1.9 metres
which is the same as the unit called
dhanush
(i.e. bow) used in the
Arthashastra
. He then shows that this unit was divided into 108
sub-units of 1.76 cm each. This fits with the 108
angulas
(i.e.
finger-widths) that made up a
dhanush
.
¹¹
In fact, the old systems appear to have survived in a few places into the
twentieth century. Till India switched a few decades ago to the metric system, the
traditional weights and measures used in some parts of the subcontinent bore a
striking resemblance to those used by the Harappan people. According to John
Mitchiner, the difference was less than 1.8 per cent—not bad for a time
lapse of over four thousand years!

Most interesting of all, chess pieces
that look remarkably like modern equivalents have been found at Harappan sites. It
has long been known that chess originated in India but it is extraordinary that the
game, or something similar, was being played more than four thousand years ago. Even
the famous town planning of the Harappans may have survived in later times. The
streets of Kalibagan, a large site in Indian Punjab, are laid out with widths in a
progression of 1.9 m, 3.8 m, 5.7 m and 7.6 m—the same as those prescribed
in the
Arthashastra
. In short, the Harappans did not just disappear; they
live on amongst us. They merged with the wider population and seeded what we now
know as the Indian civilization. However, Indian civilization has parallel roots, in
particular the Vedic tradition and its continuous history to this day. It is to this
that we now turn.

The Vedas are the oldest scriptures of
the Hindu tradition and consist of four books—Rig, Sama, Yajur and
Atharva. They consist mostly of prayers, hymns and instructions on how to conduct
rituals and fire sacrifices. They were composed and compiled over several centuries
by poet-philosophers (or rishis). The Rig Veda is the oldest of the four and
organized in ten sections. It is the oldest extant book in the world and remains in
active use. Indeed, it is considered by most Hindus to be the most sacred of texts
and one of its hymns, the Gayatri Mantra, is chanted daily by millions. It has been
variously translated by scholars over the centuries. Here is my interpretation:
‘As you light up the Heavens and the Earth, O Radiant Sun, So light up my
Mind’.

The Rig Veda is composed in a very
archaic form of Sanskrit and is undoubtedly very old. However, there is a great deal
of disagreement about exactly how old. The dates range from 4000
BC
to 1000
BC
.
¹²
Dating it is no easy task since it was probably compiled over decades or even
centuries and remained a purely orally transmitted tradition till the third century
AD
. Nonetheless, it is clear that the Rig Veda
belongs to the Bronze Age as it does not mention iron.
¹³
The earliest possible mention of iron comes in the Atharva Veda which was
compiled many centuries later and talks of a ‘krishna ayas’ or
dark bronze. Since we know that iron was in use in India by 1700
BC
,
¹⁴
this would roughly date the Atharva Veda. Allowing for a few centuries between
the composition of the first and last Veda, it would not be unreasonable to say the
Rig Veda was compiled no later than 2000
BC
.

Since the nineteenth century, the Rig
Veda has been used to reconstruct early Indian history. At the outset, let me point
out that this is fraught with difficulty. The book is mainly concerned with religion
and philosophy, and is not meant as an encyclopaedia of social and political
conditions. It is a bit like guessing the history of the Roman Empire by reading the
New Testament. Nonetheless, it does provide an interesting glimpse of a Bronze Age
society, its social customs, its material and philosophical concerns, its gods and
its tribal feuds. With one exception, however—it is difficult to discern
actual historical events from the hymns.

The geography of the book, by contrast,
is very clear. To the east, the book talks of the Ganga river and, to the west, of
the Kabul river. It also shows awareness of the Himalayan mountains in the north and
the seas to the south (i.e. the Arabian Sea). This is a very well defined
geographical area and, interestingly, roughly coincides with the Harappan world.

Most interesting of all, the Rig Veda
speaks repeatedly of a great river called the Saraswati. It is described as the
greatest of rivers. Forty-five of the Rig Veda hymns shower praise on the Saraswati.
No other river or geographical feature comes close in importance. The Ganga is
barely mentioned twice and the Indus, although referred to as a mighty river, is not
given the same reverence. In contrast, the Saraswati is called the mother of all
rivers and ‘great among the great, the most impetuous of
rivers’. It is even called the ‘inspirer of hymns’
suggesting that the Rig Veda was composed on its banks.

The problem is that there is no living
river in modern India that fits the description. This has led some historians to
argue that the Saraswati is a figment of poetic imagination. Others
have tried to identify it with the Helmand river in
Afghanistan. However, the Rig Veda itself describes the geographical location of the
river. In the
Nadistuti Sukta
(Hymn to the Rivers), the major rivers are
enumerated from east to west starting with the Ganga. The hymn clearly places the
Saraswati between the Yamuna and the Sutlej. There is no room for doubt. There is
only one river that could fit this description—the Ghaggar. Its river bed
may be dry today but satellite and ground surveys unequivocally tell us that it was
once a mighty river. It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that the Rig
Vedic people and the Harappans were dealing with the same river.

There is a further twist. Unlike later
texts, the Rig Veda does not mention a drying Saraswati. Instead, it mentions
clearly that the Saraswati entered the sea in full flow. This would suggest that the
text was composed before 2600
BC
! Even more intriguingly,
the Rig Veda mentions poets and compositions from an even earlier age, although
their works have not survived. So, we could be dealing with a culture that coincides
with the early Harappan age. I know that not all scholars would agree with
this—but it is important to keep this possibility in mind.

The Harappan civilization and the Rig
Veda coincide on many things—their time frames, their geography, the
Bronze Age technology and even on the existence of the Saraswati river. Were they
the same people? Combined with the genetic data discussed in the earlier chapter, it
would seem that we are
dealing with a population and culture
that has continuously inhabited the subcontinent for a very long time. For some,
especially archaeologists like B.B. Lal, the matter is settled. However, there are
many scholars who remain sceptical. Let us look at many of the arguments usually put
forward against identifying the Harappans with the Rig Vedic people. We will start
with the weaker arguments and make our way to the more serious ones.

One of the oldest arguments is that the
Rig Vedic people were nomads from Central Asia who could not have built the
sophisticated cities of the Indus Valley. This is why, so the argument goes, the Rig
Veda shows little knowledge of India’s geography beyond the North West.
This is a spurious argument because the Rig Veda neither mentions an invasion nor
does it show any knowledge of Central Asia. All we can garner from the text is that
these people were living in the area that corresponds roughly to modern Haryana,
western Uttar Pradesh and Punjab (including Pakistani Punjab). They also knew about
the Himalayas in the north, the seas in the south, the Ganga to the east and eastern
Afghanistan to the west. It is entirely possible that they may have known about
South India and/or Central Asia but the text tells us nothing about this.

Furthermore, the Rig Vedic people are
clearly aware of settled agriculture and of cities—both inhabited by
themselves and those inhabited by their enemies. They are not wild nomads from the
Steppes as has been suggested. Admittedly, the Rig Veda does not obviously reflect
the Harappan obsession with municipal order but then it is a religious book and
should not be expected to delve into the intricacies of sewage systems.

The second spurious argument is that the
Rig Vedic people were iron-wielding ‘Aryans’ who were at
constant war with their enemies called ‘Dasas’ (the latter being
identified as the Harappans or aboriginal tribes). The term
‘Arya’ is commonly used in Sanskrit literature, but is never
used in a racial sense. It refers to a cultured or noble person—which
means that all groups like to refer to themselves as Aryan and to their enemies as
non-Aryan. The use of the word in a racial sense occurs in ancient Iran and modern
Europe, but not in India. Similarly, we need to be careful with the use of the word
Dasa to denote non-Aryan enemies, especially when the greatest of the
‘Aryan’ chieftains mentioned in the Rig Veda is a Dasa himself:
Sudasa, son of Divodasa (more on him later).
¹⁵