The indus saga, p.6
The Indus Saga, page 6
The fourth significant fact is that the prosperity of the cities was not supported by any significant irrigation network. We also know that the deep-digging heavy plough, already current on the Nile and in Mesopotamia, had not yet been introduced on the banks of the Indus.10 The Indus cities were not given to absorbing and adopting new technologies.
Though the Harappan cities lasted a little over 1,000 years, they remained stagnant. They sprang up as well-planned settlements and throughout their existence they displayed little evidence of growth and development.11 Successive buildings and houses were built exactly upon the foundations of the old. There is an eerie continuity throughout the period of the Indus civilization. There is no expansion and very little innovation. And then the cities suddenly vanished without a trace. As Kosambi points out: ‘The Indus region seems to have been called the Meluhha by the Mesopotamians. All mention of Meluhha ceases by about 1750 BC.’12
The question that comes up is obvious: Was this stagnation the product of mere sloth and conservatism, or was it due to more fundamental causes? The most likely answer is poignantly relevant to the present-day world, confronted with its own challenges from militant fundamentalism and obscurantism. Two large mounds, one each at the twin cities, and the Great Bath have a telltale significance. Perhaps they provide the clues to the answer.
Temple-like, the citadel mounds indicate the existence of a priestly order in the cities. This is further attested to by the Bath. Since each house was equipped with its own excellent bathrooms, the Great Bath could not have been designed merely for bathing. The fresh waters of the Indus also flowed close to Mohenjodaro, and river-bathing has always been considered a health potion in the subcontinent (though more so in India than Indus). The Bath, with all its adjoining rooms and the split levels connected by staircases, must, therefore, have been the focus of rituals of purification and anointment. Its elaborate structure indicates the importance of the priest.
The pre-eminence of the priest is also established by the fact that the city granaries lay proximate to the citadel mound and were part of the complex of the priestly precincts. Priests extracted and distributed the Indus surplus.
Priests, not kings, thus governed the Indus cities. Dogma not monarchy ruled. Religious doctrine, not the force of arms, expropriated the product and crops from the primary producers. The surplus was yielded to the state by the producer not out of fear of the sword, but for fear of some kind of divine retribution. A minimum of violence was thus involved. Kosambi observes that: ‘The weapons found at Mohenjodaro are weak as compared with the excellent tools. The spears are thus, without a rib; the spearhead would have crumpled up at the first good thrust. There are no swords at all.’13
The clergy were characteristally conservative and opposed to development and change. Fundamentalist priests and dogma held sway over the Indus cities. While they ruled, there was no initiative, no science, no invention. The agriculturist did not take to the heavier plough, nor was the surplus expended on building large public works like canals. Development and innovation were anathema, as these have the natural potential of weakening the hold of the obscurantists. The area under agriculture could not expand. There was no further growth. The highly developed urban civilization stagnated. A change in the course of the rivers was capable of destroying the cities that lacked the support of an irrigation system. But for the twentieth-century archaeologists, there may still have been no trace or evidence whatsoever of the great and rich civilization that had atrophied and disappeared under the dead weight of the Indus sands, coupled with the orthodox, debilitating dogma of a retrogressive and extremely conservative priesthood.
III. Indus rejects fundamentalism
It seems that the Indus people learnt their lessons early. They learnt these lessons from the ghosts of those cities of their primordial past, of which they had no evidence until recently, and with which they have no recognizable links. Fundamentalism, henceforth, would never be a popular creed among the Indus people. Indus had destroyed fundamentalism then. Its people continue to reject it today. This is evident from the result of every general election held in this area since 1946. That is consistent and irrefutable statistical evidence that the Indus person (the Pakistani of today), with a liberal and tolerant frame of mind, by nature abhors dogmatic and fundamentalist politics. Even today, despite a greater strength in parliament than ever before, the religious fundamentalist parties remain the marginal choice of the electorate and received only a fraction of the total votes cast in the elections in which their showing was better than ever before.
1. The two ancient cities that thrived during the third and the second millennia BC. Mohenjodaro was situated on the banks of the river Indus in the present-day district of Larkana. Harappa was situated on the banks of the river Ravi in the Sahiwal district.
2. K. Antonova, et al., A History of India, R. A. Jairazbhoy, Ancient Civilizations, 99.
3. Kosambi, Culture and Civilization, 60.
4. See ‘Mohenjodaro: A Civilization Without Kings’, Muneeza Shamsie, Dawn Magazine, (Friday, 22 May 1987) for the views of Dr Michael Jansen.
5. Antonova, 27.
6. Kosambi, Culture, 55; Antonova, 27; Basham, 31.
7. Kosambi, Culture, 62.
8. Subsequent finds of other cities, such as at Kot Diji, relate to an earlier period.
9. See Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1975) 54, where he points out that even the structure that earlier archaeologists had identified as the palace at Mohenjodaro ‘is merely a merchant’s house, about 180 feet x 70 feet, only a little larger than the other merchants’ houses that surround it.’
10. Kosambi, Culture, 62.
11. Kosambi, Introduction, 55: ‘All essential features of the urban cultures remained unchanged almost all through their existence.’
12. Kosambi, culture, 59.
13. Ibid., 64.
2
The Man on Horseback
I. Aryan matriarchalism
While the pre-Aryan Indus cities flourished in all their Bronze Age splendour, the rest of the subcontinent was very thinly occupied by food-gatherers who went their own several ways in tiny Stone-Age tribal units.1 It is obvious that in prehistoric times Indus was closer in social development and intercourse to Central Asia than to India. For a few centuries after the Harappan cities had disappeared, Indus lay desolate and bare. But the rich soil, rejuvenated each year by alluvial floods, could not lie fallow for long. The produce of the soil and the surplus that it could yield eventually gave birth to another vastly dispersed urban civilization. Cities were again sustained by the surplus produce of the Indus peasant. It is at this time that the Aryans began to move into the Indus region.
Knowledge about the Aryans remains incomplete, but it is no longer inadequate. The linguistic evidence and the evidence available in the Rig Veda2 have by now been found sufficient to discard the theory that the Aryans are a myth.
Although the dispute about the original home of the mother-nation of the Aryans continues, (variously being located in Bactria, Anatolia, Central Asia and even the Danube valley), some facts have received a sizeable consensus from scholars. Traces of the mother-nation are discernible in the Greeks, the Latins, the Celts, the Germans, the Lets and the Slavs, besides certain Asiatic peoples.3
Some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, a major part of the Aryans were settled in Central Asia bordering the Oxus (Amu Darya) the Jaxartes (Syr Darya), and the Aral and Caspian Seas. The pressure of surplus population upon productive forces, perhaps on account of a long dry spell which depleted the pastures, compelled them to migrate. Bifurcating into the Indian and the Iranian Aryans, they migrated respectively to the areas of present-day Pakistan and Iran. This was not in the shape of just one mass migration, there were endless waves of migrations, spanning several centuries, from 1500 BC onwards. They set about perpetuating, for all times, the distinction between Indus and India.
The development of the aboriginal Dravidian tribes in India had not been uniform. With primitive means of communication, separated by impassable forests, inhospitable deserts, rivers and mountain ranges, the food-gathering tribes were in several different stages of development. In the Indus cities, with their resources dependent upon agriculture and their society based on the urban unit, the level was sufficiently advanced and society had transformed into a patriarchal hierarchy. But many tribes in northern India were as yet at the earlier, matriarchal stage of social organization. Nomads, forests-dwelling food-gatherers, urban centres, agrarian villages, patriarchal tribes, matriarchal societies - all coexisted in the vast Indus plains, shrublands and forests.
The Aryan invasion destroyed this diversity of Indus cultures. Many food-gathering tribes succumbed to the Aryan onslaught. Most resisted for several centuries, but were driven out, and moved towards the south, preferring to migrate rather than surrender.
Even as the aborigines resisted, they left a deep and lasting imprint upon the culture of the invaders. An entire complex of norms, customs and rituals attests to the enormous effect the matriarchal inhabitants had upon the lifestyles and culture of the patriarchal Aryans. The strong arm of the Aryan invader had the capacity to choose and take his bride, but this was never without resistance. That the matriarchal society resisted is commemorated to this day in marriage rituals. In marriage ceremonies, the shoes of the bridegroom are taken off and kept by the sisters of the bride. He has to pay a price in cash for their return before he can take his bride away with him. The bride’s superiority, even though the status of woman sank with the passage of the centuries, is still established and made known to all with the customary and ostentatious display of dowry before all the guests at the wedding ceremony.4
The matrilineal and matriarchal aboriginal culture also continues to be reflected in the literature and the idioms of Indus right up to the present day. Shah Hussain5 was appealing to this very mother-figure when he cried out:
MAA-EY NEE MAIN KINNOON AAKHAN
DARD VICHHORRAY DA HAAL NEE
Oh my mother, who should I tell
The pain that I feel on account of separation from my beloved.
The appeal to the mother is emotive, as in the modern-day Punjabi poet, Afzal Ahsan Randhawa’s superb use of the ancient call:
MAIN DARYAWAN DA HAANI SAAN
TARNAY PAI GAYEY KHAAL NEE MAA-EY
I used to swim the mighty rivers,
I am now paddling in tiny water-courses, oh mother.
OANAY PHATT TAIRAY JUSSAY WICH
JINNAY MAIRAY WAAL NEE MAA-EY
I have as many gashes in my body
As the number of hair on your head, oh mother.
HUNN NA DUDH PIAWEEN POORA
WADDAY HOAN NA BAAL NEE MAA-EY.
Henceforth do not suckle the newborn,
Let him starve and die, oh mother.
II. The Aryan vehicle
Bronze implied some significant advances. It meant a superior quality of weapons, lighter than those of the preceding Stone Age. Bronze weapons were also tougher, stronger and more durable than those made earlier with copper. Tin was, however, crucial to the bronze alloy, and deposits of tin were not widespread. Bronze, therefore, remained in short supply and could be possessed only by a small minority. It thus brought with it a division of society into classes, while the premium on tin induced long distance campaigns and fighting for control of deposits.
As the first Aryans poured into Indus, the armies that met them and attempted resistance were also the armies of the Bronze Age. In many ways, the defenders were, in fact, superior. They represented, for instance, a superior urban culture. The Harappan civilization had of course vanished by then.6 But it had been replaced by a widely spread agrarian civilization covering the entire Indus. It also supported some cities though these were not as large as Harappa or Mohenjodaro. The age of big urban centres would henceforth come only after the introduction of iron.
It is true that the structural organization of the Indus cities, ruled as they were by priestly conservative orders, was perhaps incapable of resisting the Aryan waves as they descended upon such smaller cities as had survived the decay and disappearance of the twin capitals. Yet it was no cakewalk for the Aryans. We learn from the Vedas, for instance, of many battles. One of these was the Battle of the Ten Kings.7
The cause of the battle is stated to have been the attempt by a confederacy of ten invading kings to divert the river Purushni (present-day Ravi). They were, of course, the Aryans. The civilization under assault was, in the main, agrarian. It depended upon flood waters and irrigation by rudimentary ‘dams’ or spurs. These, in turn, became obstacles in the invaders’ movement and debilitated their main vehicle, the horse.
We are told of the Vedic God Indra8 performing the feat of ‘freeing the rivers.’9 With his cosmic club, he unchained the energy of the great streams of the Punjab. This can only mean the destruction of such dams and spurs as the Indus cities had improvised to direct the flood waters to spread upon arable fields and to provide for their temporary seasonal storage. The assault upon the Indus civilization’s mainstay could not go without immense resistance and conflict. The Purus, the local inhabitants, excelled in valour - but not in fortune. After a prolonged and gory struggle, the new migrants won the day.10
The Battle of the Ten Kings establishes the fact that in terms of weaponry and armour the superiority of the invading Aryan was at best marginal. The real superiority lay elsewhere. First, the stagnant urban civilization, decaying where it had not disappeared, and ruled by a torpid priesthood was no match for the unbounded barbarian energy of the invaders. Priestly conservatism and the stranglehold of dogma had, in an earlier age, ensured the burial of the Harappan civilization. This was the second civilization that the grip of dogma and fundamentalism had made fatally vulnerable.
Second, the Aryan’s singularly superior mount, the horse, came from Central Asia. Climatically, Indus and India have never been the home of the horse. In successive periods, the Aryan, Mauryan, Bactrian, Gupta, Rajput, Turk, Mongol, Maratha and British cavalries have drawn almost entirely upon imported stocks.
Astride a horse, the Aryan attained unprecedented speed in tactical and military manoeuvres. He thus had a big advantage in battle. Even where horses were harnessed to chariots, they provided the vehicle and its passengers a speed that was unimaginable in the Indus region. The horse, harnessed to a crude, primitive chariot, was supplemented by sturdy ox-carts for heavy-duty transport. But no cart driven by oxen could strike the enemy with the speed and surprise with which a horse-mounted cavalry charge could attack his ranks. Little wonder that the Rig Vedic hymns praise the horse in glowing verses as, for instance, in the verses quoted by A.L. Basham:
Rushing to glory, to the capture of the herds,
swooping down as a hungry falcon,
eager to be first, he darts amid the ranks of the chariots,
happy as a bridegroom making a garland,
spurning the dust and champing at the bit.
And the victorious steed and faithful,
his body obedient [to his rider] in battle,
speeding on through the melee,
stirs up the dust to fall on his brows.
And at his deep neigh, like the thunder of heaven,
the foemen tremble in fear,
for he fights against thousands, and none can resist him, so terrible is his charge.11
The nomadic lifestyle of the Aryan races had further advantages. They had the facility of a mobile supply of food in the Aryan herds of cattle. Though the taboo on cattle slaughter had not yet been prescribed, the stock was to be valued and protected against death and disease.
His horse, however, remained the Aryan’s primary wealth and pride. The premium on this animal was, in fact, initially to spell disaster for Indus agriculture and, consequently, its urban civilization. When the Vedic God Indra was performing the feat of ‘freeing the rivers’ with his cosmic club, he was actually performing a necessary task for the Aryan’s dearest possession: the horse. Dams that stored extra surface water had to be destroyed to make the land somewhat less inhospitable for the horse.12 And the Aryan did just that. The feat was attributed to Indra because a religious justification had to be found for this policy which destroyed the agrarian base of the Indus cities. They were ruined again. Indus cities disappeared again and, for some time, there was a reversion to the dominance of the pastoral mode of living. Pakistan became one vast pastureland.
III. Iron and the Yamuna ‘highway’
After they break out of their mountain gorges and enter upon the endless, monotonously level plains of the Punjab and Sindh, the tributaries of the Indus display a cruel inconstancy of temperament. For most of the year, they idly snake their way through narrow channels, cut through broad riverbeds of soft alluvial soil, at places several miles wide. Even in the dry season, this rich alluvial soil is fertile. In the two late summer months, when the melting snows add to the torrential monsoon clouds, these rivers suddenly become surging oceans of water moving inexorably towards the Arabian Sea. They carry with them everything in their path. And this path, at such times, is as broad as the endlessly flat plains through which they pass. History so far has been unable to document the number of human civilizations lost in these ravaging flood waters.
Once destroyed, therefore, the urban civilizations were not easy to resurrect. Permanent settlements were impeded in the Indus region by a shortage of metals and the constant change in the courses of the rivers. Society continued to be organized in tribal units, with little or no caste or class differences. Despite the limited availability of bronze, the total destruction of fixed settlements had also eliminated any incipient class system.
