The Indus Quotes

“Evidently Nehru, though a nationalist at the political level, was intellectually and emotionally drawn to the Indus civilization by his regard for internationalism, secularism, art, technology and modernity.

By contrast, Nehru’s political rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, neither visited Mohenjo-daro nor commented on the significance of the Indus civilization. Nor did Nehru’s mentor, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, India’s greatest nationalist leader. In Jinnah’s case, this silence is puzzling, given that the Indus valley lies in Pakistan and, moreover, Jinnah himself was born in Karachi, in the province of Sindh, not so far from Mohenjo-daro. In Gandhi’s case, the silence is even more puzzling. Not only was Gandhi, too, an Indus dweller, so to speak, having been born in Gujarat, in Saurashtra, but he must surely also have become aware in the 1930s of the Indus civilization as the potential origin of Hinduism, plus the astonishing revelation that it apparently functioned without resort to military violence. Yet, there is not a single comment on the Indus civilization in the one hundred large volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The nearest he comes to commenting is a touching remark recorded by the Mahatma’s secretary when the two of them visited the site of Marshall’s famous excavations at Taxila, in northern Punjab, in 1938. On being shown a pair of heavy silver ancient anklets by the curator of the Taxila archaeological museum, ‘Gandhiji with a deep sigh remarked: “Just like what my mother used to wear.”
― Andrew Robinson, The Indus

“In the absence of a decipherment of the script, religious explanations have conveniently filled some yawning gaps in scholarly understanding. But is this wise? To my mind, the current Indus situation is uncomfortably reminiscent of the situation in ancient Mayan studies before the decipherment of the Mayan script in the 1980s and 1990s. According to the leading Mayanist of the 1970s, Eric Thompson, the ancient Maya rulers of Central America were a theocracy with a deeply spiritual outlook. Their ideal was ‘moderation in all things’, their motto ‘live and let live’ and their character had ‘an emphasis on discipline, cooperation, patience, and consideration for others’.12 Theirs was a civilization unlike any other, said Thompson, who looked to the Maya as a source of spiritual values in a modern world that placed far more importance on material prosperity. Only thanks to the Mayan decipherment did Mayanists come to know that Thompson had been utterly wrong. The real Maya relished internecine war and the extended torture of captives; and both the Mayan rulers and their gods liked to take hallucinogens and inebriating enemas using special syringes.”
― Andrew Robinson, The Indus

“As for the foundations of these settlements, it appears that even some of the smaller ones, such as Kalibangan and Lothal, were built on anti-flood platforms, like the one at Mohenjo-daro. This platform, constructed out of mud brick faced with a wall of burnt brick, required a massive investment of labour and time. If we accept Possehl’s estimate, on the basis that a labourer can move about a cubic metre of earth in a day, the platform at Mohenjo-daro would have entailed four million days of labour. With a really substantial labour force of ten thousand men, the task would have taken four hundred days, or just over a year; with a quarter this number of labourers, almost four-and-a-half years. What drove the labourers, in the apparent absence of any Indus equivalent of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh? According to Marshall, writing in 1931 (though he was unaware of the platform, which was discovered only in 1964 by Dales), ‘If there is one fact that stands out clear and unmistakable amid these ruins, it is that the people must have lived in ever-present dread of the river.”
― Andrew Robinson, The Indus

“As for religious worship, there is no shortage of evidence for what may be religious imagery on the Indus seals, in addition to certain objects, such as the ‘priest-king’ statuette, numerous female figurines and a few phallic objects, which together imply the existence of deities and religious practices. But there are no buildings clearly dedicated to worship –”
― Andrew Robinson, The Indus

“What type of authority held together such an evidently organized, uniform and widespread society, if it truly did manage to prosper without palaces, royal graves, temples, powerful rulers and even priests? Why does the Indus civilization offer no definitive evidence for warfare, in the form of defensive fortifications, metal weapons and warriors – a situation without parallel in war-addicted ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, not to mention all subsequent civilizations? Was”
― Andrew Robinson, The Indus