Exploring Society · Chapter 6 — The Beginnings of Indian Civilisation

Think about your town or city. Someone plans its roads and drains, someone collects taxes and keeps records, farmers send in food, shops sell goods from far away, artists paint, and people celebrate festivals together. A society that works in all these ways at once has reached a stage we call civilisation.

A working definition. The word civilisation is used for an advanced stage of human society. In this chapter, a society counts as a civilisation if it has at least these features:

Which feature comes first? Many people argue that productive agriculture is the most basic one. Only when farmers grow more food than they themselves need can others work full time as builders, traders, craftspeople or officials.

Metallurgy. One important technology of early civilisations was metallurgy: the skills of getting metals out of rocks, purifying or mixing them, and the study of metals and their properties.

The first civilisations. Civilisations began at different times in different places. In Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) civilisation began about 6,000 years ago, around 3500 BCE. Civilisation in ancient Egypt followed a few centuries later, around 3100 BCE. Humanity owes a great deal to these early civilisations.

Our story. In the Indian Subcontinent, the story of civilisation begins in the northwest, in the plains watered by the Indus and the Sarasvati, between about 2600 and 1900 BCE.

Activity. For each feature in the table, list some jobs people might have had, such as town planner, potter, trader, scribe or farmer.

About a hundred years ago, archaeologists digging at a mound in Punjab found something astonishing: the remains of a carefully planned city more than 4,000 years old. That city was Harappa.

The land. The wide plains of Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan) and Sindh (in Pakistan) are watered by the Indus and its tributaries, rivers that flow into it. A little to the east, a few thousand years ago, another river, the Sarasvati, flowed from the Himalayan foothills through Haryana, Punjab, and parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat.

Villages become cities. In this region, from about 3500 BCE, villages grew into towns. With more trade and exchange, some towns grew into cities around 2600 BCE. This first growth of cities in the Subcontinent is called the First Urbanisation of India. The civilisation lasted till about 1900 BCE and is one of the oldest in the world.

Many names. Archaeologists call it the Indus, Harappan, Indus-Sarasvati or Sindhu-Sarasvati civilisation. Its people are called Harappans, because Harappa, in Pakistan's Punjab, was the first of its cities to be excavated, in 1920-21. The old name 'Indus Valley civilisation' is no longer used, because we now know the civilisation spread far beyond the Indus valley.

Major cities.

The Sarasvati River. Many sites lie along a river now called the Ghaggar in India and the Hakra in Pakistan, so it is also called the Ghaggar-Hakra. Today it is seasonal, flowing only in the rainy season. It is identified with the Sarasvati, which the Rig Veda praises both as a goddess and as a river flowing from the mountains to the sea; later texts describe it drying up. Its basin has a high density of sites: big cities like Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala, and smaller ones like Farmana, Kalibangan, Bhirrana and Banawali.

Many modern towns grow in a jumble, with lanes twisting in all directions. Harappan cities were different: their streets were laid out to a plan more than 4,500 years ago.

Planned streets. The larger Harappan cities were built to precise plans. They had wide streets, often running along the cardinal directions, north-south and east-west, so that streets crossed at right angles like a grid. Smaller lanes led off the main streets.

Walls and two towns. Most cities seem to have been surrounded by fortifications, massive walls built for protection. They usually had two parts:

Dholavira was special: it had three zones instead of two, and the foundations of most of its buildings were made of stone.

Houses and buildings. Houses of different sizes lined the streets and lanes. Interestingly, the quality of construction was the same for small and big houses. Buildings were generally made of bricks. Some large buildings were used for shared purposes, for example warehouses where goods waiting to be transported were stored.

The Great Bath. In Mohenjo-daro stands a famous structure called the Great Bath. It is a tank about 12 m long and 7 m wide, made of carefully laid bricks and made waterproof with natural bitumen, a kind of tar. Small rooms surrounded it, one of which had a well, and a drain in one corner let the tank be emptied and refilled with fresh water.

A puzzle. What was the Great Bath for? Archaeologists have suggested a public bath, a bath for the royal family only, or a tank for religious rituals. The public-bath idea is now ruled out, because most houses in Mohenjo-daro had their own bathrooms. Since there is no inscription, text or traveller's account to tell us, the question remains open, a good example of how historians must reason from objects alone.

Activity. Hold a class debate: was the Great Bath for the royal family or for rituals? What evidence would help decide?

Even today, many towns struggle with blocked drains and dirty water. Over 4,000 years ago, Harappan cities had already worked out clever systems to bring in clean water and carry dirty water away.

Bathrooms and drains. Harappans cared a lot about cleanliness. Houses often had separate bathing areas. These were connected to a larger network of drains, which usually ran below the streets and carried waste water away from the houses. Remains of such drains have been found at sites like Lothal in Gujarat.

Wells. In Mohenjo-daro, people drew water from wells lined with bricks. About 700 such wells have been counted there, and they seem to have been looked after and used for several centuries.

Reservoirs. In other places water may have come from ponds, streams or human-made reservoirs, large places where water is stored. Dholavira, in the dry Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, had at least six large reservoirs, built with stones or even cut into the rock. The largest was about 73 m long; another rock-cut one was about 33 m long. Most were connected by underground drains, so that water could be harvested and shared efficiently.

Who organised it? Imagine how many workers it took to cut and build these reservoirs. Someone must have planned the work, given precise instructions and arranged payment, perhaps in grain or goods, since there was no money as we know it. Someone also had to clean and repair the reservoirs and drains regularly. This suggests a strong local authority, something like a city council or municipal administration.

A civic sense. Keeping drains clean and wells working for centuries needed people to cooperate and follow common rules. That is why the Harappans are often said to have had a high civic sense, a sense of responsibility towards the city and its people.

If a Harappan family invited you to dinner, what might you eat? Archaeologists have found surprising answers by studying burnt grains, bones and even the inside of old cooking pots.

Rivers and farming. Harappans built many settlements on the banks of rivers, big or small. This made sense: rivers gave water and also enriched the soil around them, which made farming easier.

Crops. Excavations show that Harappans grew:

• cereals such as barley, wheat, some millets and sometimes rice;
• pulses, the group of crops that includes beans, peas and lentils (dal);
• a variety of vegetables;
• cotton: the Harappans were the first people in Eurasia to grow cotton, and they wove it into cloth.

Tools. They made farming tools, including the plough. A small clay model of a plough has been found at Banawali in Haryana, and some Harappan tools are similar to ones still used by farmers today.

Villages fed the cities. All this farming was done by hundreds of small rural settlements. Then, as now, cities could survive only if enough food from the villages reached them every day.

Meat and fish. Harappans also kept domesticated animals for meat and caught fish in rivers and in the sea. We know this from the many animal and fish bones found in excavations.

Inside the cooking pot. Scientists have examined the remains left in clay pots. They found expected things like dairy products, and surprising ones like turmeric, ginger and banana. The Harappan diet was clearly varied.

Activity. Plan a Harappan meal using only these ingredients. Would it be very different from a meal at your home?

Harappan beads have been found in Iran, and a Harappan comb on the coast of Oman. How did objects from Gujarat and Sindh travel so far more than 4,000 years ago? The answer is trade.

Skilled crafts. Harappan craftspeople were very skilled:

• Carnelian beads: carnelian is a reddish semi-precious stone found mostly in Gujarat. Craftspeople developed special ways to drill long holes through these hard beads and to decorate them.
• Shell bangles: they carved hard conch shells into beautiful bangles, which needs great skill.
• Metals: they mastered working copper, a soft metal. By adding tin to copper they made bronze, which is harder, and used it for tools, pots and pans, and figurines.

Trade near and far. Harappans traded within their own cities and with other cultures in India and abroad. They exported ornaments, timber, objects of daily use, probably gold and cotton, and possibly some foods. Harappan carnelian beads have been dug up at Susa in present-day Iran, and an ivory comb about 7 cm long was found on the coast of Oman. What they got in return is less clear, but it probably included copper, which was not common in their own lands.

Routes. Goods travelled by land, along rivers and, for distant places, by sea. This was the first intensive sea trade in India's history, and several Harappan settlements lie on the coasts of Gujarat and Sindh.

Lothal's dockyard. At Lothal, a small town in Gujarat, there is a huge basin about 217 m long and 36 m wide, a little longer than two football grounds. It was probably a dockyard, where boats were loaded and unloaded.

Seals. Traders needed to identify their goods and each other. Thousands of small seals have been found, usually made of steatite, a soft stone hardened by heating. They are only a few centimetres across and usually show an animal, such as a 'unicorn', a bull or a horned tiger, with a few signs above it. These signs belong to a writing system that no one has yet been able to read. What is certain is that the seals were connected with trade.

A bronze mirror, a stone gameboard, a clay whistle, a little dancing figure: objects like these let us peek into the everyday life of the Harappans.

Objects of daily use. Archaeologists have found bronze mirrors, clay pots, stone weights for trade, bronze chisels, a gameboard carved on stone and a tiny terracotta whistle. Harappans clearly enjoyed games and toys, for both adults and children.

Cultural and symbolic objects.

• A stone statuette nicknamed the 'Priest King', though no one knows whom it shows.
• Seals showing a swastika and one showing a figure seated on a platform among animals, often called the Pashupati seal.
• The 'Dancing Girl', a bronze figurine from Mohenjo-daro, only 10.8 cm high, wearing bangles along her whole arm, a style still seen in parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan.
• A terracotta figure seated with hands joined in namaste.
• A pot from Lothal with a picture that seems to tell the story of the thirsty crow, who drops pebbles into a pot to raise the water.

Many of these, bangles, namaste, the swastika and old stories, still feel familiar today, showing a long continuity in Indian culture.

The end of the cities. Around 1900 BCE, the Harappan cities began to fall apart. They were abandoned one by one. Any people who stayed took up a village way of life, and the old city administration seems to have disappeared. Gradually the Harappans spread out into hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small rural settlements, where food and water were easier to get.

Why? Long ago it was thought that wars or invasions destroyed the cities, but there is no trace of warfare or invasion. The Harappans do not seem to have had armies or weapons of war; it seems to have been a fairly peaceful civilisation. Two causes are now generally agreed:

An end and a beginning. The cities vanished, but much of Harappan culture and technology survived and passed into the next phase of Indian civilisation. Their story reminds us how much we depend on climate and the environment.