HISTORY

Subject : History
(For under graduate student)

Paper No. : Paper-I

History of India

Unit, Topic & Title : Unit- 4

Topic- 2
Indus Civilization

Lecture No. & Title : Lecture 1

Extent, Nomenclature and Origin

Indus Civilization: Extent, Nomenclature and Origin

The rising sun over the Indus seems to defy the soft mist
spread over it as a blanket, so that the sleeping splendor of
the past is not disturbed. Here lay the remains of a civilization
that thrived for about three millennia. This is the Indus
Civilization, knowledge of which began with the discovery of
two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. It had a deep impact
not only on history but on the entire Indian civilization.

The discovery of these two cities, namely Harappa and

Mohenjo Daro, linked by the river Indus actually pushed back
the origins of the Indian Civilization to the fourth millennium
BC. Commenting on this, historian Irfan Habib has said that
along with the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the
Indus Civilization emerged as the third great civilization in the
whole world.

The Indus civilization marks the first phase of urbanization in

India as it was essentially confined to the cities. The first
civilization that the Indian sub-continent witnessed was thus
urban in nature. The earliest evidence of this civilization was
accidentally discovered by Alexander Cunningham, who was
neither an archaeologist nor a historian but a British engineer.

1853 was a momentous year in the history of our country

because railway lines were being laid for the first time. The
process involved a lot of digging, and it was while this work
was going on that Cunningham accidentally stumbled across
the first Harappan seal, inscribed with a bull and six letters of
a script that has still defied attempts at deciphering by
scholars. (He obviously did not know it was a Harappan seal
till it was identified as one later on).
But Cunningham undoubtedly deserves credit for discovering
the earliest specimen relating to the Indus Civilization.
Although the Archaeological Survey of India had been
established in 1896, it was not before 1921 that excavation
work at Harappa was carried out by Dayaram Sahni. Around
about the same time Mohenjo Daro was discovered by
Rakhaldas Banerjee. Since then (1921-22), for the rest of the
British colonial period (twenty-five years), many
archaeologists were engaged in excavation work in this area.
The earliest historians or archaeologists connected with the
study of the Indus Civilization were Dayaram Sahni,
Rakhaldas Banerjee, John Marshall, E. Mackay and Mortimer
Wheeler.

Excavations continued methodically and meticulously, in the

post colonial, post-partition period, (ie. after 1947), both by
archaeologists of the newly founded state of Pakistan and
India. The Kot Diji and Amri sites in the Dadu district of the
Lower Indus were discovered in 1958, followed by
excavations in Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Lothal,
believed to be a major sea port in Gujarat was discovered in
1964. A hundred and sixty kilometers to the south, Malawan
(close to Surat) was also identified as an Indus site. The next
discovery was the extremely important site of Dholavira,
located on Khadirabet, an island in the Great Rann of Kutch
(Gujarat) between 1989 and 1990. Excavations at Kalibangan
(North Rajasthan, 200 miles west of Delhi) Banawali and
Rakhigarhi, have revealed further sites that bear testimony to
the spread of the civilization towards the east. Alamgirpur in
the Meerut district in the central Ganges-Yamuna Doab is
considered as marking the farthest extension of the Indus
culture in the east. Towards the north, in Punjab, lay the site
of Rupar, (in the foothills of the Himalayas), marking possibly
the farthest outpost in northern India. Another similar site
was Manda in Jammu and Kashmir. The Indus Civilization
appears to be essentially a culture of the plains, as it does not
seem to have crossed the sub Himalayan foothills. In the
west, the civilization penetrated to Baluchistan upto Sutkagen
Dor, close to Pakistan's border with Iran.

The extent of the Indus Civilization on the whole, in terms of

modern territorial boundaries, may be assumed to have
covered almost the whole of Punjab (both in the Indian Union
as well as in Pakistan), Haryana, parts of Western UP,
northern Rajasthan, Sindh, most of Gujarat and parts of
North-eastern and southern Baluchistan. This gives one an
idea of the large area covered by the Indus civilization.

There exists some confusion regarding whether it would be

preferable to term this civilization as the ‘Harappan
civilization’, or as the ‘Indus Valley Civilization’. As Harappa
happened to be the first site to be excavated by Dayaram
Sahni, the entire culture came to be called the Harappan
culture. There is an unwritten understanding among scholars
that a civilization is designated by the earliest site to be
discovered. It was Mortimer Wheeler who in his report on the
excavations at Harappa way back in 1946, and again in 1953
in his book titled ‘The Indus Civilization used the term ‘Indus
civilization’ to denote this particular civilization. Even we, as
children had studied this civilization as the ‘Indus Valley
Civilization’. The explanation for the change in nomenclature
lies in the fact that over a period of time numerous
excavations have revealed to us, that the civilization was
spread out even beyond the Indus valley, thereby making it
inappropriate to refer to it as the Indus Valley Civilization any
longer. The eminent historian, Prof. D.K. Chakraborty
constantly reminds us why it is wrong to use the term "Indus
Valley Civilization", and emphasizes that it would be far more
accurate to call it the Indus Civilization or even as Harappan
Civilization. He himself prefers using the term Harappan
Civilization as he feels that it being a geographically non-
committal term is the most suitable. He also says that it is
only out of deference to its long usage, that the term Indus
Civilization may be used.

A question arises in this connection as to why this civilization

was not named after Mohenjodaro. The simple answer to this
is that Harappa was the first site to be discovered and in
terms of chronology Mohenjodaro came a little later. Anyway,
according to the practice of naming a civilization by the name
of the first site where it has been discovered, this civilization
should be referred to as the Harappan Civilization and not by
any other name.

There is a difference of opinion among scholars regarding the

genesis of this civilization. While some claim that it originated
indigenously, others say that it was a colony of some other
civilization. Historians like John Marshall, V.Gordon Childe,
Stuart Piggot, and Nani Gopal Majumdar, belonged to a
school who empasized categorically the indigenous origin of
the civilization. V.Gordon Childe further explained that it
formed the basis of modern Indian culture, which then leads
to the question of whether the civilization is still evident at
present, and if so what the features were those links the
present with the Harappa Civilization. Nani Gopal Majumdar
who carried out extensive work in the region of Amri in Sindh
between 1929 and 1931 came to the conclusion that the
pottery he discovered in Amri had a very distinct style of its
own, and should be looked upon as the earlier stage of the
Chalcolithic Civilization that is represented by Harappa and
Mohenjo Daro.

On the other hand we have Sir Mortimer Wheeler who

believed that the civilization of the Indus Plain actually came
from Mesopotamia, and that the Indus civilization was nothing
but an extension of the Mesopotamian Civilization. There were
others like Heine-Geldern (writing in 1956), and Gordon
(writing in 1958),who agreed with him, and considered the
cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro to be colonial cities. They
claimed to have detected some amount of foreign influence in
the architectural designs of these two towns, strengthening
their theory that these citadels were actually colonial towns,
and that they were definitely an extension of the
Mesopotamian civilization.

However as more excavations were carried out in the 1950’s

and 1960’s further data poured in that changed the entire
perspective of the Indus Civilization. These excavations
pushed the period of the civilization far back into history.
Between 1955 and 1957, extensive excavation work at Kot
Diji, revealed a fortified citadel castle below the Harappan
level of the site. J.M. Casal who wrote between 1959 and
1962 lent support to Nani Gopal Majumdar's find of a pre-
Indus level, which he identified as a transitional stage
between the early Amri culture and later Indus civilization.
Nani Gopal Majumdar termed it as pre-Indus, and pointed out
that Amri pottery had a very distinct culture of its own.

The third major excavation was carried out in Kalibangan by

B.B. Lal and B.K. Thapar. The excavations here threw up
similar results, -a fortified and pre-Indus settlement- towards
the western sector of this site. Basically these three major
excavations served to indicate that the Indus culture was of
indigenous origin. The debate was thus finally resolved in
favour of those who put forth the theory of indigenous origin.
Along with this began the use of new terminology regarding
the periodisation of the Indus civilization. Whereas earlier
historians would speak of just three periods, - the Early, the
Mature and the Late Harappan period, now they began
speaking about a pre- Harappan period, necessitated by the
findings at Kot Diji, Kalibangan and other sites. Scholars were
becoming aware that the whole process of the germination,
maturity and end of the Harappa civilization spanned a long
period of 2200 years between 3500 B.C. and 1300 B.C. Three
stages of evolution may be identified as, -- the pre-Harappan
or the Early Harappan, followed by the Mature Harappan
stage and finally the Late Harappan stage.

Archaeologists also made the significant discovery that the

ground for the Indus Civilization was prepared by the early
Neolithic and Chalcolithic culture of the 8th and 7th
millennium B.C. which denotes that it had not just cropped
up all of a sudden. Just as ‘Rome was not built in a day’, so
also the Indus civilization was not built in a day. The gradual
evolution of this civilization began with the Chalcolithic culture
which preceded it and was regarded by scholars as the Early
Harappan culture. Then followed the Mature Harappan stage
when urbanization had reached a fully developed form, and
then the Late Harappan Stage denoting the stage of decline.

The Harappan Civilization was the most ancient civilization in

South-east Asia. This extinct civilization according to some
historians is perhaps the third major civilization after Egypt
and Mesopotamia. In the beginning it was thought that this
civilization existed only in the Indus river valley but over a
period of time further archaeological discoveries pushed its
boundaries to Surat in the south, Meerut in the east, Kashmir
in the north and the border of Pakistan and Iran in the west.
Therefore, it is now called the Indus Civilization rather than
Indus Valley Civilization. There were controversies about its
origin earlier but later, extensive archaeological excavations
proved beyond doubt that these civilizations were indigenous
in nature and not colonies of other civilizations.