The official announcement of the discovery of a new civilisation was made in 1924 in the Illustrated News London by the then director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), John Marshall, who wrote, “Up to the present our knowledge of Indian antiquities has carried us back hardly any further than the third century before Christ. Now, however, there has unexpectedly been unearthed, in the south of Punjab and in Sindh, an entirely new class of objects which have nothing in common with those previously known to us, and which are unaccompanied by any data that might have helped to establish their age and origin. The two sites where these somewhat startling remains have been discovered are some 400 miles apart — the one being at Harappa in the Montgomery District of the Panjab; and the other at Mohenjo-Daro, in the Larkana District of Sind. At both these places there is a vast expanse of artificial mounds, evidently covering the remains of once nourishing cities, which, to judge from the mass of accumulated debris, rising as high as 60 ft. above the level of the plain, must have been in existence for many hundreds of years. Such groups of mounds abound in the plains of the Indus, just as they do in Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile”.

It is notable that while Marshall wrote the public announcement the actual discovery had been made because of the zeal of three Indian officials of the ASI: Rakhal Das Bannerjee, Daya Ram Sahni who became the first Indian head of the ASI, and Madhav Saroop Vats.

The discovery of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro was a jolt to colonial theories about the Indian sub-continent’s lack of an ancient civilisation. Since then, excavations at Harappa and at new sites like Dholavira, Kalibangan and Rakhigarhi have shown that at its peak this civilisation may have covered a vast region covering over a core area of 1500 km from Balochistan in the west, to western UP, north-eastern Afghanistan and coastal Gujarat in the south.

Tim Dyson writes in A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day: “Mohenjo-daro and Harappa may each have contained between 30,000 and 60,000 people (perhaps more in the former case). Water transport was crucial for the provisioning of these and other cities. That said, the vast majority of people lived in rural areas. At the height of the Indus Valley Civilisation, the subcontinent may have contained 4-6 million people”

Today, the IVC sites number well over 900. Out of these only 10% have been excavated, and, therefore it cannot be scientifically concluded that all these places were an integral part of independent sites, which were connected with Harappan cities.

One of the most interesting discoveries about IVC has been the evidence of intercontinental trade and relations with distant lands. “Tons of Harappan barley, cotton, rice, and wheat, as well as untold amounts of turquoise and agate, left annually from port cities such as those found near the modern villages of Lothal and Dholavira. These goods travelled to the cities of Dilmun (Bahrain) and Magan (possibly Oman) and further on to Mesopotamia, whose inhabitants knew the lands of the Indus Valley as Meluhha (identified with IVC). Indus Valley pottery has already been found in Oman, where a recently discovered cuneiform inscription offers services to those who need a translator of the language of Meluhha. This suggests that ports in ancient Bahrain and Oman may have served to facilitate trade between the two civilizations”, writes Marc Jason Gilbert in South Asia in World History.

Claims over Harappa

The rise of Hindu majoritarianism has meant that in India archaeology and history have become tools for portraying India as the cradle of civilisation, leading to persistent demands by certain quarters to rename the IVC to Saraswati Civilization based on the mythical river Saraswati. Noted archaeologist of Indus Valley sites, Shireen Ratnagar writes, “If in an ancient mound, we find only one pot and two bead necklaces similar to those of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, with the bulk of pottery, tools and ornaments of a different type altogether, we cannot call that site Harappan. It is instead a site with Harappan contacts.”

The end of the IVC was possibly due to a series of earthquakes and other tectonic-movement-related phenomena that uplifted land and shifted river beds between 1900-1500 BCE. The migration of the IVC population has been a subject of much speculation in which Dravidian scholars too have taken part.

Marshall himself had speculated: “The Indus civilization was pre-Aryan, and the Indus language or languages must have been pre-Aryan also. Possibly, one or other of them (if, as seems likely, there was more than one) was Dravidic. Because Dravidic-speaking people were the precursors of the Aryans over most of Northern India and were the only people likely to have been in possession of culture as advanced as the Indus culture; secondly, because on the other side of the Kirthar Range and at no great distance from the Indus Valley the Brahuis of Baluchistan have preserved among themselves an island of Dravidian speech which may well be a relic from pre-Aryan times”

The Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin’s recent announcement about erecting a commemorative statue of Marshall seeks to underscore this link between Harappa and pre-Aryan Dravidians.

HistoriCity is a column by author Valay Singh that narrates the story of a city that is in the news, by going back to its documented history, mythology and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal