On September 20, 1924, 'The Illustrated London News' carried an article and multiple supporting photographs that would change the way the world saw and understood India. For, the photos and text pointed to a sophisticated and vast ancient civilization on the banks of the Indus river going back several millennia. The article, sent by the then director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall, was a culmination of the work of dozens of researchers. Some, like Rakhal Das Banerji, KN Dikshit and Madho Sarup Vats, were present at digging sites in Mohenjo-Daro in the Punjab district of undivided India and first hinted at the antiquity of the sites, and others like Luigi Pio Tessitori (nicknamed Indian Louis) helped to determine that this same civilization extended far and wide.
To be sure, those of us who went to school in India in modern times read about the civilization in textbooks - including their grid-like construction, and the granaries and toilets our ancients built. But for these pioneers to make sense of the archaeological finds, and to put forward the theory that they came from one continuous civilization rather than smaller or even sporadic human settlements, would have been a huge leap of scholarship.
Historian Nayanjot Lahiri has been following the work of these pioneers in her own studies, piecing together how they made the most important discoveries surrounding Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, as well as the larger civilization they were part of. Lahiri has been on the faculty of Ashoka University since 2016. In an interview to Moneycontrol, she spoke about the debate around whether the civilization should be called Harappa or Sindhu-Saraswati, how she wanted to write a biography of John Marshall but ended up following the archival materials to write three very different books, and what to make of it all a century after Marshall reported those stunning findings. Edited excerpt:
There's so much to unpack. Let's start with where you began your research.
I planned to write a biography of (John) Marshall. But then I found all this material in the file room of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) which made me feel that I could actually use this as a peg to write a lot about Marshall, but to also write about other people and above all to write about the discovery of India's antiquity, the Indian subcontinent's antiquity. So what I started off with changed, and that's exactly how a lot of historical research happens.
When and why did you write 'Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered'?
It was published in 2005 and even at that point, my publisher had actually told me that there's all this other material that you have, and you might want to put it, but at the moment, let's keep it to the point when it (the civilization) is discovered. So I did that. But now, with the centenary year, I sat down and started thinking about it. I had also done research - some of which had been published - which I felt could be integrated into a long afterword. So that's what I've done. The afterword is in three parts.
First of all, I tried to broaden it to see that are archaeological discoveries like scientific discoveries... discovery sagas, which intelligent readers are so interested in, are not confined only to archaeology. So what is it that an archaeological discovery shares with scientific discovery?
Now, if you've read this book, you get a sense of a kind of intuition that John Marshall had that there was this antiquity which Indians attributed to their own land which required archaeological moorings. And he got this sense even before he came to India, when he saw the Indus seals. He remembered that many years later that they had interested him. And for that reason, a few years after coming as the ASI's director general, he began the process for the excavations at Harappa from where the seals in the British Museum (came).
It just so happened that the landowners wanted a particular amount of money, several thousand rupees. And the ASI, it was a non-commercial department, so they had limitations in terms of funds. In that scenario, Marshall decided, well, before I actually do this, let me get it vetted. Let me see if there is stuff there. It had already been excavated by Alexander Cunningham in the 19th century, who hadn't understood its significance because he looked at everything from the point of view of texts. If you're looking at things from texts, you can't imagine a past which is beyond the text. But I think John Marshall did.
Was he looking for manuscripts here?
(By texts we mean were these places mentioned in travelogues or other extant texts from earlier periods, not manuscripts.) So when he looked at Harappa, he thought it was a place where (Chinese Buddhist traveller) Xuanzang had come and stayed for a few months. Because a lot of his (Cunningham's) discoveries happened and his excavations happened because those places were mentioned in Xuanzang's texts.
Cunningham couldn't actually visualize a past that was beyond written sources. There's nothing written that we have for the Harappan civilization. The seals haven't been discovered, so everything we know is archaeological. I think somewhere Marshall had this intuition in 1902. Eventually the discovery is announced in 1924; it's a long process.
Coming back to the similarities between archaeological and scientific discoveries...
So if you look at scientific discoveries, you think of (18th century scientist Joseph) Priestley and the whole question of the relationship of plants and oxygen and so on, again, as a kid, he used to seal spiders in glass jars in order to understand what is it that happens to organisms? But it was a question of keeping that intuition alive.
So that's the first part of my afterword, which is to look at the similarities and differences between archaeological discoveries and scientific discoveries.
Now, the second thing was to try to put out in the public domain what the files tell us about the first few years of excavation. When you have publications, everything is put there very pucca-pucca, all neat and clean. But when the work is going on, frequently you don't understand and you're giving out all kinds of ideas which eventually turn out sometimes to be wrong. So the second part of the afterword is about some such vignettes. So, for example, you have this type of sculpture in Mohenjo-Daro, in Harappa, where you have people with beards but very fine features. In one instance, this scholar from Sri Lanka working on the excavations at Mohenjo-Daro said it's a woman, not a man. We now know it's a man. Or think of the great bath of Mohenjo-Daro: Marshall didn't think of it, he thought it was in a palace. He didn't understand what it was. And that's what was published in the newspapers to begin with. Then there was a lot of bickering and fighting among the scientists looking at the skeletons, for example. People from Calcutta (now Kolkata) who dealt with skeletons came and the skeletons were in a terrible situation. Some had been sent to Calcutta; they had all got broken and so on. So you don't get a feel of any of this. You just think of all the grandeur of Mohenjo-Daro, but you don't get sense of what was happening at that level. So the second part, what is to do with this.
And the third part is about the man from Mohenjo-daro: Rakhal Das Banerji. Now, he disappeared from the Survey within a few years after the excavations of Mohenjo-Daro. In any case, after doing that (excavation), he had been transferred to Calcutta. He was a very brilliant but very controversial man. What happened, and I discovered this in a file which I've had since then (my research for the 2005 book), was he was dismissed from the Survey basically because when he went to do some work in the Chausath Yogini temple in Bedaghat on the edges of Jabalpur, one image (sculpture) was taken by this party. And eventually many people created a fuss, the pujari created a fuss, the mahant created a fuss, saying look, we thought the party was taking it for official cause. It (the image) was discovered by his nephew in one of the lanes of Calcutta - clearly, he knew that this had been taken away.
So he had been suspended from the survey. And today we only remember him as the Mohenjo-Daro man. But in the aftermath of the discovery, the story of what happened to Rakhal Das Banerji - I tell that story in the third part.
All this was happening for 20-22 years. So what happened in 1924, for Marshall to be able to report it?
My own sense is that two things happened: Harappa came to be excavated a few years before the discovery was announced. And then in 1922, Mohenjo-Daro was excavated by Rakhal Das. Now, Rakhal Das found these seals and he was an archaeologist, so he immediately saw that there was similar to the ones at Harappa. Some months after that, in March 1923, he told Marshall this. Marshall was very excited, and he said, look, try to work out the antiquity. Daya Ram Sahni, who has excavated Harappa, thinks they're Pre-Mauryan.
Now Rakhal Das has made this great discovery, but as I say in the book, to be able to build on that is another thing. And he wasn't able to do that.
Now Marshall went off on a long leave to England. He did that, came back, went off to excavate Taxilla. On his orders, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were excavated in quick succession. And then in April 1924, the person who had excavated Mohenjo-Daro for just one month, Madhav Swarup Vats, wrote...
It was excavated for just one month?
They didn't have the money. Can you imagine, such an important city site was being excavated only for a month? He wrote a letter to Marshall where he said that 'Look, it's not just the seals which are the same, the terracotta art is the same, the brick size is the same, the bangles are the same. So, you're looking at a kind of kindred similarity and these are two sites which are hundreds of kilometers away from each other.' I think it's when that letter reached John Marshall, he finally decided he had to try to come to grips with this enigma.
Most archaeologists would go on the sites. He (Marshall) was the director-general of the ASI, he was the raja of the archaeological universe. But he didn't do that (visit sites). He got all these guys, including Rakhal Das and Daya Ram Sahni, along with the material, including some of the bricks and things, to Shimla, which is where his head office was in June. And when he saw for himself that the material was similar and when he saw the drawings and understood the structures, he realized what they were looking at: this was urban, these were cities, there was writing, these were pre-Iron Age. It's then that he realized that they were looking at something which was very old and antique.
But even then he didn't have a date. If you read the 1924 announcement, it's a very provisional kind of dating. It's within a week after that you have Archibald H. Sayce, this big philologist who had worked in different sites in West Asia write in to say that what Marshall has discovered - and his letter was also published in the 'Illustrated London News' - is far more important and older than what he imagines. And he said we have found this material, the seals, etc., in a 3rd millennium BC context, and that's how the date got fixed one week after the announcement was made.
Often in the sciences, you talk about the networking of knowledge, how important it is for people to be interacting with each other. Scientists do it all the time; they have laboratories and so on. But in archaeology you don't have this. That is the reason why Marshall actually published this in the 'Illustrated London', so that people from other parts of the world who dealt with the ancient civilizations could possibly give insight. And he was just extraordinarily fortunate that Sayce replied.
You also write about excavations in other parts of the world at this time, as the British Empire looked to understand the different places it was colonizing. What are some of the important discoveries that are happening around the same time, and did they have any impact on how Marshall was approaching his own work in India?
No, actually. One of the big problems, and this is what Marshall, the big limitations was, that nobody in the Archaeological Survey, not even Marshall for decades, had kept up with what was happening in different parts of the world. So the Indian archaeological universe in that sense did not have an idea - John Marshall had an idea that this should be put out there so that people who are working in other parts of the world (can start a discussion). But it is only after the discovery that he applied for permission to go and visit, especially places in what was ancient Mesopotamian and ancient Iran - to visit those areas. Immediately, he was not given the permission. But a year after that, after he finished the excavations of Mohenjo-Daro, he did go with the purpose of doing this.
And that's the reason why E.G.H. Mackay was brought to India on a special contract. Mackay had excavated in places like Kish and other sites. He had a lot of experience in West Asia. And so he was brought to do further excavations at Mohenjo-Daro. He also later, many years later, came and excavated as part of the American team the mound of Chanhu-daro.
We can say, 'Oh well, this is happening here, this is happening there.' But the question is, were our guys aware of this? They weren't.
What were some of the challenges that they faced? For example, you mention in your book 'Finding Forgotten Cities' that some of the riverbeds that the civilization was built around had dried up, making it harder to imagine what that stretch of civilization might have been like hundreds of years ago. What were some of the things that were being discussed in terms of what happened, how big this place was or how important or how prosperous?
To begin with, in 1924 itself, there is a sense in John Marshall that this civilization actually goes beyond the Indus area. He gets work done in Baluchistan; he thinks that they may be stuff as far as Bihar. What I'm trying to say in other words is, and I discuss this again in the new afterword, that there is a clear sense that he imagines the civilization to be much larger in terms of its geographical area than just Mohenjo-Daro, which is in Sindh, and Harappa, which is in Punjab.
But it takes time for all of this to develop, and to begin with the concentration really is on work in the Sindh area. But over time, prior to Partition, you have some sites which have been discovered in Punjab, in Gujarat and so on. So the idea was there that this is much larger than just the Indus area. But in archaeology, you have to prioritize, otherwise you can just be all over the place. And remember it's a small organization. It's only because of the discovery of the Indus civilization that they got a reasonable amount of money from the government to excavate Mohenjo-Daro and then later Harappa properly. I can understand why it was done like that, that although in your vision you have a much bigger geographical spread, you decide to concentrate on one area.
What were some of the things that got Marshall very excited in the early stages? You've seen his papers, some of the letters, etc., that he was maintaining. What is he writing at this time about what is getting excavated from both sites?
He's very excited about the sorts of structures that are emerging, including the great path, for example, the range of jewellery, the range of raw materials that are used here which are not available in this area. So the idea of a long-distance trade. Above all, I think that's what really captures - and he really underlines this in his excavation reports of Mohenjo-Daro, which were published in three volumes in 1931 - (his attention is) the fact that there is an emphasis in this civilization on the civic needs, there's attention paid to the civic needs of citizens.
So when you think of Egypt or you think of Sumer, you think of these large, opulent graves and grave goods and so on. When you think of the Indus civilization or the Harappan civilization, what do you think of? You think of a really good drainage system. You think of bathrooms in the houses. You think of drains from houses connecting up to larger drains. You think of wells; Mohenjo-Daro had on an average one well for every three to five houses. If you think about, let's say, a city in Sumer, people would have had to get water bucket by bucket. And that's the kind of difference that captures his imagination that although this civilization is as old, but it is so different in terms of its priorities.
So what changes after 1924, after this discovery is published and people around the world are now becoming aware of it? A couple of things you've already mentioned, including how Sayce responded to the news, and how the ASI got more funding for excavations in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa.
The ASI always wanted to fund more work, but the money had to come from the British Raj, from the government. And I think it was also national pressure - remember it's the height of the national movement. The national movement is very much around; (MK) Gandhi is not a good name in government circles. And if you talk about an indigenous civilization coming up on the banks of India's rivers, and that there is so much that needs to be done and the government doesn't give money, that's again going to be another nail in the kind of hatred that was there for the British Raj by that time.
And over these 100 years how, how are we looking back at John Marshall and some of the archaeological work that the British did at the time? Of course, there are all these stories around what was pilfered and what narratives may have been built around the finds.
We (India) kept 50 percent of the antiquities from Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa (after partition); it was literally divided and some objects were even divided. Half that famous Mohenjo-Daro girdle is with Pakistan, half is with India. And it was done by an archaeologist, by Mortimer Wheeler.
But regardless of that, the fact that we had all this material did not stop archaeologists from feeling that they had actually lost the sites, that those remained in Pakistan. So one of the big priorities became to actually search for Harappan sites in India. And this was done very quickly after partition because it was pointed out by the diwan of Bikaner - that is K.M. Panikkar, who was going on to become the ambassador to China - he was on his way and then he wrote to Nehru and he said that 'Look, I've been told that there are sites of the Harappan civilization in Rajasthan in Rajputana as it was then called. And this needs to be examined.'
The letter to Nehru was immediately sent to the ASI. They drew up a plan, said we need ₹10,000. It was sent to finance. Finance has always acted like a spoiler. In that context, I can they must have thought that you know this is a princely state at the moment, why should the Government of India be doing this, etc.? Nehru's office again put pressure, and that's how the exploration of Amalanand Ghosh happened and Kalibangan came to be excavated. And, of course, Lothal is excavated, different places come into the limelight.
One of the big achievements of post-1947 has been a sense that the whole civilization is actually spread all the way from Baluchistan right up to Uttar Pradesh, and on the other side in all parts of Gujarat. And here I want to say that this whole thing of renaming this as the Sindhu Saraswati civilization is really problematic. For the reason that if you have to change the name, either you should then make it more inclusive. Sindhu Saraswati does not include Gujarat. It does not include Uttar Pradesh. It does not include Baluchistan. So why are we changing the name? For that reason, I think one should stay with the old terminology.
At the end of a partition, like you mentioned, there was this movement to find some of these sites on the Indian side of the new border. Did it become somewhat integrated with what we wanted our national identity to be?
Look, it was an urban civilization, and the idea was to see if this civilization had roots beyond Sindh and Punjab. So I don't know if it had to do with national identity, but it certainly became a priority area for research. And I think national identities are created with a whole lot of other things. And I think the best research is done when you don't actually think in terms of what you want to find. But yes, the state was doing a good thing vis-a-vis archaeology - Nehru's is a good example of that; that it was a state which pushed this research in India.
Tell us about your own research - what were some of the places that you went to? What were some of the things that you found that helped you to get the John Marshall story and therefore also the story of the discovery of Harappa a century ago?
My tryst with Marshall began when I was on a fellowship in England. It happened in the India Office Library. I was looking there for the appointment file of John Marshall. I was doing that because to me it seemed amazing that a man not yet 26 had been appointed as director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).
I found those files and I wrote an article which was published in 'South Asian Studies' (journal). I was just there for four months. After I came back, I started looking in the National Archives for material. And then this publisher-scholar, he had once been the head of Oxford University Press and then went on to do research, Charles Lewis, he suddenly got in touch with me and he said I've read what you wrote on Marshall and I just want to tell you that there are so many files of the Marshall era in the head office of the ASI. So the building now which is part of the National Museum on the side, that used to be the head office of the ASI. He said I have permission to see the files, why don't you come, I will show you. So I went there and he used to sit in the photo library there and he showed me some of this material. I then applied to the director-general, Ajay Shankar, and I got permission to look at the files. The files were totally unindexed. There was no catalogue, nothing. My work began in the British Library, but the bulk of the work (was done at ASI). And that is why this book is dedicated to the Archaeological Survey of India, because not only did they discover it (the civilization), but they also made my discovery of this discovery story possible.
I used to take out these bundles and there was this a man there called Mohar Singh, old guy who used to come and get me the files. And every time I opened bundles, there were all these things emerging, and I kept making my notes, and then the story started falling in place.
I took two years' study leave from the University of Delhi to do this work. This was one part of it.
Then I was on a holiday while I was doing this, in Khimsar, which is near Jodhpur, and we were there for a few days. I told my husband I must go and see the Bikaner Museum; it's about 2-3 hours from there. So I went there, and I was looking at the collection and there was somebody from the museum there and there were all the stone tools and there were pictures of seals, etc., from Kalibangan. So I asked them what is this? They said this is from the Tessitori collection. Now I always knew of Tessitori as somebody who had done a lot for the study of vernacular dialects; he was a linguist. But as I saw this, I told them, I said you have no idea how important this is because this was done before the Kalibangan was rediscovered post-partition by Amalananda Ghosh. I said this is so important because it just shows you how material relating to the Harappan civilization was out there before Harappa was excavated by Daya Ram Sahni and Mohenjo-Daro by Rakhal Das Banerji.
In any case, it appears that it this got reported in the press there. Unknown to me, this businessman from Kanpur, Hazarimal Banthiya, he got in touch with me, and he said, 'Look I want to talk to you. I'm in Delhi. Come and meet me.' So I went to his son's place and he said, 'Look, I've been deeply interested in Tessitori because of the Jain manuscripts that he worked on. Banthiya was a Jain. He said, 'I went to Italy, and I have got materials Xeroxed. Some of that material pertains to his work in Kalibangan and I donated it to the Bikaner Archives.
After my conversation with him, off I went to the Bikaner Archives, and I found all this material which showed that this linguist had actually become an archaeologist - Because of World War 1, his funds had been cut. John Marshall had told him that while you look for manuscripts, please also explore sites. And he excavated Kalibangan and he found seals which he didn't understand what was the script. But he kept talking about this material as prehistoric, so he had some sense (of its antiquity and importance). It was very unfortunate that he died in the Spanish flu, and we don't give him credit for what is really something that he discovered.
So this is my story. It really starts in London and then bulk of the work was done in the Archaeological Survey daftar, as it were. I really became a Babu. They were so nice in the library, plying me with cups of milk tea. And I discovered so many photographs of the Kalibangan excavations.
So where are the photos now?
They must be in the archives.
So 100 years since Marshall's report, what is it that you hope people know or remember or think about this important discovery?
One thing that one realizes is that great discoveries are not necessarily the result of the vision of one person. The discovery of the Harappan Civilization is a consequence of the work of a large number of archaeologists, most of whom were in some ways attached to the Archaeological Survey of India.
The second thing is that they didn't go about looking for a civilization. Think of Rakhal Das Banerji and his great discovery in Mohenjo-Daro. When he went to Mohenjo-Daro, he was interested in Buddhist Mohenjo-Daro. That's where his excavations began: on the platform on which there's the Buddhist Stupa in Mohenjo-daro. As it so happened, these seals were discovered in those first few weeks, and it changed things. But he was not looking to discover a civilization. So things often happen inadvertently.
But of course, for me, from the point of view of today, if people were to ask me that what is it that you hope can come out of thinking about all of this? I think it is about how the Indus Civilization is as much a product of the Indian and the Pakistani soil. It was just the Indian subcontinent at that point and that this division of artefacts and antiquities that took place in 1947 should have been done in a much better way. And in order to actually honour that joint legacy, there should be a big exhibition, a centenary exhibition where the material is brought together. It can later go to both places, back to where they today belong. But at least give the Indian public and the Pakistani public a chance to appreciate everything together. That would be a good way to honour it.
On the Indian side, do you think people have enough access to some of these sites and these materials if they want to understand more?
I think people do and there are lots of visitors to places like Rakhigarhi, Lothal, Dholavira. Kalibangan is remote and not very well looked after, but it's also desert area.
But the primary failure in India, this is true not just for Harappa, I'm talking in general, is that we seem to have an education system relating to history, which is very kitabi (bookish). So we're not actually taking kids out to see things. If you have children studying in Air Force Bal Bharti (in Delhi), the Lodhi tombs are just on the other side of the road. But do you actually go and explain medieval architecture by looking at them, or do you do it on the basis of what is there in a standard textbook?
Unless you actually inculcate a sense that the material past is actually as important, if not more important than the text, you're never going to get that interest and respect. Also remember, archaeology is not a subject that people who take the civil services exams can opt for. So it is very marginal even today.
You cannot do an undergraduate degree in archaeology, it's only later. And then also in archaeology, in many instances, people will look for jobs. If you can do an undergraduate degree in archaeology, that means you will have to have departments of archaeology just as you have departments of history in colleges. Then there will be an incentive for people to do archaeology and from that many important things will happen.
The one reassuring thing is that there are many scientific institutes with a strong scientific background that are involved now in archaeological research. You think of IIT Gandhinagar, you think of ISER in Mohali; these are places where this is happening. We too have set up in Ashoka University, the Center for Interdisciplinary Archaeological Research for that.
In the centenary of John Marshall's article in 'The Illustrated London News', if you were to build an itinerary for someone who's interested to retrace Marshall steps, what five or six places would you recommend they go?
How to go to Pakistan, that's the issue. Is that possible?
If it were possible, what would you say they need to do?
I think they would need to go to Mohenjo-Daro, they would definitely need to go to Harappa. They could go to Shimla to see Gorten Castle, which is where the Archaeological Survey head office used to be. They could come to the National Museum, because even now there is a great collection from Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in our National Museum (in Delhi). And they should certainly go and see Dholavira in Gujarat, which has nothing to do with Marshall, but which gives you a sense that all the cities were not built of brick. This was a city in which stone mattered.
The Indus civilization is important because it tells you how the past is both different and similar to the present. Just as today, when you think of cities, you think of drainage system, bathrooms and so on in houses, that's what was there in the Indus Civilization. It wasn't there much later: Think of Taxila, or you think of a great city like Kaushambi. In the historical period, you didn't have that. Think of Dharmashastras; the Hindu Dharmashastra say that you should actually defecate much outside the settlement. So it's not as if there's an unbroken tradition of this kind of notion of hygiene. But certainly that notion of hygiene that is there in the in Indus civilization is something we can relate to today and feel quite proud of. But one needs to think also of differences. Think of people in the Harappan civilization who are compulsively carnivorous, eat everything, cattle and so on, and you think of all, you know, the notions today. I think people then were far more tolerant when it came to food habits than, you know, people today. So I think there's a lot 1 can learn by, you know, looking at Harappan Country jewelry, how important jewelry was to the male as much as you know to the female.
The idea that you know what, today everybody talks about the Harappan civilization being seen within the context of a Hindu mould. But remember, cremation is what was practice. Graves have been found, which really has nothing to do with, you know, ancient religions, whether it is a Buddhism or it is Hinduism.
So, it's I think that's why we look at the past. The past needs to be respected as the past, and we shouldn't necessarily try to see it in terms of what should be the priorities of the present from the past. The past is meant to be different. Why would we study the past if it was the same as the present?
What are some of the best sources for information on the Indus Valley Civil today, whether they're online or offline?
Harappa.com is a very good place to go to.
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