Bengaluru: The Harappans didn’t need a campaign like Swachh Bharat Abhiyan to stay clean. With this declaration, archaeologist Vasant Shinde grabbed the audience’s attention, while delivering the Seventh CV Sundaram Memorial Lecture at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) on 4 September.
Through the two-hour lecture, he sought to dispel the myths around the Harappan civilisation, while showing how some of the practices from ancient India continue to be followed even now.
“Many of their cultural practices and physical characteristics find continuity in today’s cities and people,” said Shinde, a former vice-chancellor at the Deccan College, Pune, and now an adjunct professor at NIAS. But that should come as no surprise. After all, “20-30 per cent of the Indian population’s genetics come from Harappans.”
Shinde wants to declutter our knowledge of Harappa, stripping it of myths and lore that have aggrandised over the years.
“Their (Harappan people) contribution to the Indic Knowledge System (IKS)— the knowledge of ancient India—in historical texts is often diluted or exaggerated. It’s not authentic,” he said.
So when he decided to rely on archaeological data to reconstruct IKS, the professor found that what we consider to be civilised practices today, like living in well-planned towns with toilets and a sewage system set in stone, were handed down to us by Harappans over 5,000 years ago—proving that people of that time were as advanced as we are today.
With more than 13 books and 200 research papers on the subject to his name, Shinde has also contributed to the groundbreaking DNA analysis and craniofacial reconstruction of Harappan people, which was recognised as a major breakthrough in 2019.
“To this day, many people ask me why I am interested in this subject…they feel it is redundant,” he said. “But it is important to know our roots – where we have come from and how we have progressed”.
Keeping traditions alive
On a quest to preserve existing knowledge about Harappans, professor Shinde and his team have been conducting awareness drives in villages in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Haryana that are located near the excavations.
“For example, the pottery technology that Harappans used was very advanced…so we have been teaching that method to local people,” Shinde said.
But first he and his team had to gain the villagers’ trust. It is not rare for those living near these sites to see researchers walking in and out of their homes. But that can happen only through collaboration.
“Initially, they would be suspicious…they would think we were coming to dig for wealth. But taking them into confidence during the research process is the key to success,” said Shinde.
As part of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the government has taken several steps to incorporate IKS in the education system, such as by including courses in higher education institutions. It was also introduced as a separate department—known as IKS or the Bharatiya Jnana Parampara Vibhaga—under the Union Ministry of Education in October 2020 in a bid to promote interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on all aspects of IKS. Apart from funding the establishment of IKS centres, the department conducts internship programmes for students and workshops for teaching faculty on traditional knowledge systems.
With this re-emphasis on IKS in the education system, Shinde hopes that global recognition of the role of Harappans in the evolution of the Indian traditional knowledge system will get stronger.
Shinde sought to dispel popular beliefs about the evolution of town planning infrastructure, clothing style, jewellery, and other significant day-to-day objects found in India.
“We like to think that the West taught us how to develop and use most of these…but it can be traced back to the Harappan Civilisation,” he said.
To prove his point, he narrated the well-known fable of the thirsty crow — the one about the clever crow dropping pebbles into a pitcher to raise the water level and drink from it. It’s credited to Aesop, an enslaved Greek storyteller who lived around 620-564 BCE.
“But in Lothal, an ancient Indus site in Gujarat, we found drawings of this same story on ceramic pots. This bears resemblance to the story of the crow and cunning fox in Panchatantra that was written much later, ” he said. The origin of the city of Lothal can be traced back to 3,300 BCE.
According to Shinde, at least four phases of excavations at several sites including Rakhigarhi in Haryana and Dholavira in Gujarat over the last few decades have revealed that Harappans “taught the whole world how to live in cities.” These excavations, carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) along with the Deccan College, uncovered evidence of roads, drainage system, rainwater storage facility, storm water drainage system, air ducts, and other signs of a well-planned town.
Even the layout of a bathroom, usually a small rectangular room with a brick pavement slanting toward one corner, was developed by the Harappans in Kalibangan, another ancient site of the Indus valley civilisation in Rajasthan.
“If you visit any of these states today, you will find evidence of people continuing to use these structures,” Shinde said.
Apart from a well-executed urban drainage system, Shinde pointed out that signs of dustbins too were found at several excavated sites.
“But when we compare those sites to the present day, there are no dustbins and the dirt is spilling over onto the road,” he said.
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War and peace
But for all the abundance of material and information, there still are some parts of the Harappan civilisation that are shrouded in mystery.
Apart from the script, the lack of DNA samples can be frustrating for historians and archaeologists trying to reconstruct the past. So far, only one sample of DNA has been extracted from a skeleton, which is of a 5,000-year-old woman. It revealed that “the individual sequenced fits as a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians (the largest component) and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers,” as per a paper published by Shinde and several other archaeologists in Cell in 2019.
Although this feat – achieved by Shinde and team – generated a lot of buzz among historians and anthropologists, the professor mentioned that they were heavily criticised too.
“We were asked how we could declare findings based on just one sample of DNA,” he said.
Shinde was also fascinated by the lack of evidence of the Harappans being a warrior society.
So far, archaeologists haven’t found any evidence of warfare — not in their art, houses, or public spaces.
“Therefore we can come to the conclusion that the Harappans believed in peace, egalitarianism and did not give in to war or aggression,” Shinde said. “Much like Indians today.”
But not everyone in the audience agreed with him—especially his addendum that Indians are peaceful.
“We do witness a lot of violence today, between different communities, be it for a superior status or for ownership of land, food and other basic necessities,” a member of the audience told ThePrint. “I don’t think there are that many signs of peace today.”
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)