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May 9, 2018 - February 1, 2020
places. New Delhi, the national capital, is a good example. It is merely the latest in a series of cities to have been built on the site. Amidst the frenetic pace of modern life, the older Delhis live on in grand ruins, place-names, urban villages, traditions, and sacred sites. Even older are the ridges of the Aravalli Range, arguably the oldest geological feature on Earth.
the ratio 5:4 which implies that the length is a quarter longer than the breadth (1.25 times). This ratio was commonly used in the town planning of Harappan cities in the third millennium BC. The city of Dholavira in Gujarat, for example, is 771 metres by 617 metres. Over a thousand years later, the same ratio appears in Hindu texts like the Shatapatha Brahmana and Shulbha Sutra that use the ratio in their precise instructions on how to build fire-altars for Vedic ceremonies.
So when the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb wanted to praise his vassal Maharaja Jai Singh, he called him ‘Sawai’ (meaning that he was worth a quarter more than any other man).
It appears that most of the earth’s land mass was joined together a billion years ago in a supercontinent called Rodinia. It was probably located south of the equator but there is still a great deal of debate about its exact shape and size, and where India’s land mass fit into it.
visible—the Aravalli range. It is arguably the oldest surviving geological feature anywhere in the world.
Ask to be driven to Balsamand Lake, an eleventh-century lake on the outskirts of the city. The lake is often dry these days due to the wholesale destruction of its water-catchment area.
It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared 230 million years ago. However, the earth remained restless and
Pangea began to break up around 175 million years ago during the Jurassic era. It first split into a northern continent called Laurasia (consisting of North America, Europe and Asia) and a southern continent called Gondwana (Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India). Note that the name Gondwana is itself derived from the Gond tribe of central India.
named Rajasaurus Narmadsensis
The Ganga’s southward drift was arrested only when it nudged into the Vindhyas near Chunar (close to Varanasi). It is the only place in the plains where a hill commands such a view over the river, making Chunar fort a coveted strategic location. It was once said that he who controlled Chunar fort also controlled the destiny of India.
ago. The scientists of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig found that the Asian elephant is more closely related to the mammoth than to the African elephant. It appears that the genetic lines of the Asian and the African elephant separated six million years ago whereas the Asian elephants and the mammoths diverged only 440,000 years ago.
geneticists feel that India may have been the source of a number of important genetic lineages that are now found worldwide.
Bhimbetka in central India is one of the most extensive sites in the world although it was only discovered in the 1950s. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The hilly terrain is littered with hundreds of caves and rock shelters that appear to have been inhabited almost continuously for over 30,000 years.
it, ‘Looking at the dancing deity at Bhimbetka with his bangles and trident, one can’t help but recall the image of the dancing Shiva’. 18
In 2001, however, marine archaeologists identified two underwater locations in the Gulf of Khambat that seem to be remains of large settlements that would have been flooded 7500 years ago.
some of the first crops to be farmed systematically in the subcontinent, around 7000 BC in Mehrgarh, Baluchistan, were West Asian species such as wheat and barley. Thus,
the Harappan cities did not suddenly collapse but suffered a slow decline as a key river dried up and environmental conditions deteriorated.
The first thing that should be clear from the outset is that there are no ‘pure’ races. With the possible exception of some tiny isolated groups, the vast majority of Indian tribes, castes and communities are a mixture of many genetic streams.
India’s population mix has been broadly stable for a very long time and that there has been no major injection of Central Asian genes for over 10,000 years
the study suggests that the population of Dravidian speakers has lived for a long time in southern India and the so-called Dravidian genetic pool may even have originated there.
that the bulk of the Indian population can be explained by the mixture of two ancestral groups—the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) and the Ancestral North Indian (ANI). 25 The ASIs are the older group and are not related to Europeans, East Asians or any group outside the subcontinent. The ANIs are a somewhat more recent
group and are related to Europeans.
Indians are a mongrel lot who come in all shapes, sizes and complexions. Genetics has merely confirmed what we can all see.
Unfortunately, the toilet design did not survive quite as well as the lota.
the problem with slums is a recurring theme in India’s urban history and we find them in Mughal Delhi, colonial Bombay and in virtually every modern Indian city.
the political leadership of Dholavira responded by expanding the urban limits and incorporating the slums into the city.
them. Thus, Dholavira ended up with three sections—the Citadel, a Middle Town (i.e. the old Lower Town) and a new Lower Town (the new extension).
Thus, the picture is not the popular one of a rigidly pre-planned city but of an evolving urban settlement that was responding in various ways to natural and human challenges.
The numerous rivers of the region would have been useful waterways for ferrying goods and people. A dry dock has been discovered at Lothal in Gujarat where vessels would have docked.
However, the dock—the world’s earliest known—is an impressive structure. It was connected by a canal to the estuary of the Sabarmati river and a lock-gate system was used to regulate water flow during tides. Next to the dock are the remains of warehouses.
Excavations in Mehrgarh, near Quetta in Balochistan, show the gradual evolution from Neolithic village to an increasingly more sophisticated culture from around 7000 BC. The earliest recognizably Harappan sites date to 3500 BC. This early phase lasts till around 2600 BC. We then enter the Mature phase from 2600 BC to 2000 BC. This is when the great cities were at their height. Note that this is a Bronze Age culture and there is no systematic use of iron. Then, from around 2000 BC we have a steady disintegration that lasts till 1400 BC—what is usually called Late Harappan.
A simple map of Harappan sites would be enough to illustrate that the largest concentration of settlements is not centred around the Indus but around the dry riverbed of the Ghaggar. It is
However, surveys and satellite photographs confirm that it was once a great river that rose in the Himalayas, entered the plains in Haryana, flowed through the Thar–Cholistan desert of Rajasthan and eastern Sindh (running roughly parallel to the Indus) and then reached the sea in the Rann of Kutchh in Gujarat. Indeed, the strange marshy landscape of the Rann of Kutchh is partly due to the fact that it was once the estuary of a great river.
Romila Thapar, an eminent historian, is of the opinion that the ‘material culture shows no continuities’. 9 In contrast, B.B. Lal, a former Director General of the Archaeological Survey and one of India’s most celebrated archaeologists, argues that ‘many of the present day cultural traits are rooted in the Harappan Civilization.’ 10
They also had a standardized system of weights and measures, many of which are echoed two thousand years later in the Arthashastra, a manual on governance and political economy written in the third century BC. Danino calculates that the standard length used by the planners at Dholavira was 1.9 metres which is the same as the unit called dhanush (i.e. bow) used in the Arthashastra. He then shows that this unit was divided into 108 sub-units of 1.76 cm each. This fits with the 108 angulas (i.e. finger-widths) that made up a dhanush.
The streets of Kalibagan, a large site in Indian Punjab, are laid out with widths in a progression of 1.9 m, 3.8 m, 5.7 m and 7.6 m—the same as those prescribed in the Arthashastra. In short, the Harappans did not just disappear; they live on amongst us. They merged with the wider population and seeded what we now know as the Indian civilization. However, Indian civilization has parallel roots, in particular the Vedic tradition and its continuous history to this day. It is to this that we now turn.
The geography of the book, by contrast, is very clear. To the east, the book talks of the Ganga river and, to the west, of the Kabul river. It also shows awareness of the Himalayan mountains in the north and the seas to the south (i.e. the Arabian Sea). This is a very well defined geographical area and, interestingly, roughly coincides with the Harappan world.
Admittedly, the Rig Veda does not obviously reflect the Harappan obsession with municipal order but then it is a religious book and should not be expected to delve into the intricacies of sewage systems.
the Sapta-Sindhu was a much smaller area covering modern Haryana and a few of the adjoining districts of eastern Punjab. Incidentally, this area also corresponds to what ancient texts refer to as Brahmavarta—the Holy Land—where Manu is said to have re-established civilization after the flood.
The real genius of the Bharatas, however, may lie in the fact that the Vedas do not confine themselves to the ideas of the victors but deliberately include those of sages from other tribes, including some of the defeated tribes. Thus, the hymns of the sage Vishwamitra, the great rival of Vashishtha, are given an important place in the compilation. In doing so, the Bharatas created a template of civilizational assimilation and accommodation rather
than imposition. It was a powerful idea and would allow, over time, for people in faraway places like Bengal and Kerala to identify with this ancient Haryanvi tribe.
Later texts such as the Puranas would define it as ‘The country that lies north of the seas and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharatam, there dwell the descendants of Bharata’. It remains the official name of India even today. Note that the name is also echoed outside India. In the Malay language, for instance, ‘Barat’ means West, signifying the direction from which Indian merchants came to South-East Asia.
The Avesta, the oldest and most sacred text of the Zoroastrian religion, is written in a language that is almost identical to that of the Rig Veda. The older sections of the Avesta—called the Gathas—are said to have been composed by the prophet Zarathustra himself. They can be read as Rig Vedic Sanskrit by making a minor phonetic change. The Avestan ‘h’ is the same as the Sanskrit ‘s’. Thus, the word Sapta-Sindhu becomes Hapta-Hindu. 29 A
Unlike the
Vedas, the ancient Persians also talk of an original ‘Aryan’ homeland and even name the river Helmand in Afghanistan after the Saraswati (i.e. Harahvaiti). Indeed, the Persian identity as ‘Aryans’ was so strong that their country would come to be known as the Land of the Aryans or Iran.
In 1380 BC, the Hitties signed a treaty with a people called the Mittani. This treaty is solemnized in the name of Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and Nasatya.
During the early Iron Age, the Dakshina Path probably began near Allahabad where two navigable rivers, the Ganga and Yamuna, flowed into each other. It then went in a south-westerly direction through Chitrakoot and Panchavati (near Nashik) and eventually to Kishkindha (near Hampi, modern Karnataka).
The place is still sacred to the devotees of Shiva. In fact, the name Sarnath is a short form for Saranganath (meaning ‘Lord of the Deer’) which is another name for Shiva.
includes the famous ‘rhinoplasty’ operation that took place in Pune in March 1793 that would change the course of plastic surgery in Europe and the world. Cowasjee was a Maratha (more likely Parsi) bullock-cart driver with the English army during its campaigns against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. He was captured and had his nose and one hand cut off. After a year without a nose, he and four others submitted themselves to an Indian surgeon who used skin from their foreheads to repair the noses. We know little about the surgeon but two senior British surgeons from Bombay Presidency witnessed this
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them includes fantastical tales about giant ants that were used to dig for gold.
