Discovering and Interpreting the Indus Valley Civilization
Civilizations today can exist across a wide range of geographies, thanks to modern transportation. The basic unit of human life, food, can be produced and transported almost anywhere. However, before such methods existed, ancient civilizations sprung up along river valleys. Ancient Egypt sat along the Nile, Mesopotamia was bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates, Ancient China spread across the Yellow River and Yangtze drainage basin, and the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) lay in the Indus river basin, as the largest of all. Containing over five million people and stretching across 1,500 km of the Indus at its peak, the IVC flourished so greatly because of the rich silt deposited by biannual floods. As agriculture became widespread, the inhabitants of the Indus Valley were able to take advantage of this rich silt, reproducing and growing faster than any contemporaries.
However, the IVC was the last to be discovered of the major river civilizations. The town of Harappa was unearthed in 1829 by Charles Masson, an avid coin collector, and a British deserter who changed his name from James Lewis to avoid authorities. Although he initially attributed it to Alexander the Great, British authorities leading the Archaeological Survey of India began to draw similarities between Harappa and the newly unearthed site of Mohenjo-daro. After excavations at the latter began in 1924, the Indus Valley Civilization was uncovered as far more widespread than previously thought.
A few key traits led to the realization that the IVC was both a unique and advanced civilization. First, Harappan architecture differed greatly from that of contemporaneous civilizations in its lack of stratification and monarchism. No temples and palaces were present, nor were huge, imposing structures that towered over houses. Although most houses were small and made of brick, this does not indicate simplicity or homogeneity; a citadel and complex gridded street patterns, along with hygienic elements like a communal bath, sewer, and drainage systems, all demonstrate unparalleled meticulous urban planning and implementation. City construction, from bricks to streets, was almost ubiquitous among sites, suggesting both immense urban planning and some sort of centralized government that could coordinate such planning.
Still, the discovery was viewed through many different lenses by archaeologists, some of which were pervaded by racialized sentiments. This has led to a plethora of interpretations of the same physical evidence, many of which are motivated by ideology. As recently as the 1990s, archaeologists who looked solely for empirical evidence often displayed motives that were decidedly not empirical. Taking the physical evidence they found on its own, without a chain of reasoning, led to reaching speculation, which was then easily permeated by ideology. Many such archaeologists even ignored evidence, making ideologically driven conclusions far easier to reach.
The first case of this speculation came in the 1920s and 1930s, as the sites of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were first excavated and interpreted. By 1925, it was widely accepted that the IVC had a society vastly different from any other one on the subcontinent, but then the question remained — where did it come from? John Marshall, the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India at the time, wrote that the two sites contained “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 origin…” (1924). Thus, archaeologists turned to civilizations outside the subcontinent.
Rakhal Das Banerji, who led the 1922 excavation of Mohejo-Daro, found intuitive similarities in his findings, from metalwork to a complex society, with the Minoans of Greece. Still, the idea of cultural overlap between the two was eclipsed by contemporary discoveries. Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922, and a palace and library of tablets were unearthed in 1924. With the fervor these discoveries generated about Bronze Age civilizations, the proposal of cultural overlap was nearly inevitable. A.H. Sayce, an Oxford researcher, found similar seals in the Mesopotamian city of Susa, Harappa, and Mohenjo-Daro, which he believed was the result of a deep cultural connection during the 1000s BC. Throughout the decade, archaeologists found more and more supporting evidence for Sayce’ theory.
Although there was certainly evidence of cultural overlap between the Indus and the Sumerians, anthropologists reached past this evidence, towards the idea that the two civilizations were at some point the same. Mortimer Wheeler, a prominent archaeologist and the eighth Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, extrapolated the findings of his contemporary Leonard Wooley, who excavated Ur in Mesopotamia. He believed that the IVC consisted of immigrants, perhaps Egyptians or Sumerians, who had established their own civilization, a reflection of the prevailing ideologies at the time. These ideologies merged with a distinct form of scientific racism, as the Aryans (European migrants into India from around 1500 BCE, to which many modern North Indians can trace much of their lineage to), were considered culturally and physically superior, due to their caste hierarchies and fair skin. Thus, Hinduism was considered solely an Aryan creation, including the Vedas (founding Hindu texts). The discoveries of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa were repurposed to add fuel to the idea of Aryan superiority — one prominent explanation for the IVC’s cultural complexity was an Indo-Aryan invasion, bringing their own cultural characteristics to improve upon those of the natives. Mortimer Wheeler, for one, used six sets of skeletons and what seemed to be a distinct culture, Cemetery H, to support this theory. Still, it is important to note that these theories were a shifting of evidence to fit beliefs, not blatant myths. Although Wheeler’s interpretation of the skeletons was disproved 20 years later, because they were from different times and thus not from a single invasion, it is unlikely that Wheeler was directly lying. Ideologies mixed to create a convoluted picture of the past, and colonial societies looked to anthropology to support the benefits of colonialism.
This pattern, of corrupting anthropology to support beliefs, was repeated in the far more recent past, with the rise of Hindutva in the 1990s and 2000s — Hindu nationalism, specifically the idea that the only true Indians were Hindus. Archaeologists with this view took up a contradicting, but equally unfounded, perspective, to the Aryan invasion theory. Gupta, a prominent supporter of Hindutva, posited the idea that Aryans were indigenous, so the Indus religion was the same as modern Hinduism, with little change over time. These ideas fed into anti-Muslim and nationalist sentiments following the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya. Proponents of Hindutva found more support for their cause with evidence of a destroyed temple to Rama, a hero and avatar of Vishnu in Hindu mythology, at the site. In both cases, by allowing their ideologies to color discoveries of the IVC, archaeologists made flawed assumptions about its history. Though one’s beliefs cannot be completely separated from the field, and perhaps should not be separated, such purely ideological interpretations have the potential to cause immediate strife.
References
Jarrige, J., & Meadow, R. (1980). The Antecedents of Civilization in the Indus Valley. Scientific American, 243(2), 122–137. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24966394
Guha, S. (2005). Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation. Modern Asian Studies, 39(2), 399–426. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x04001611
Wheeler, M. (1968). The Indus Civilisation: supplementary volume to The Cambridge History of India. University Press.
James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India and the attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. The Complete Review Quarterly. (2004, February). https://complete-review.com/quarterly/vol5/issue1/laine0.htm.
