On the Road to Harappa

But Harappa had yielded in the 19th century itself indications of its separateness. Seals displayed in London’s British Museum carried a script not found elsewhere in the subcontinent, a fact noted by Cunningham. Charles Masson, an East India Company deserter, had earlier left accounts of the majesty and uniqueness of Harappa’s constructions. Marshall, before leaving for India to take charge of the Archaeological Survey of India, had certainly viewed those seals.

Pieces of the Indus Civilization were, in other words, well on display, prominently proclaiming their dissimilarity from everything else, long before their antiquity was gauged. In a brilliantly narrated story of how the civilization was “discovered”, Lahiri shows that along with excavating northwest India’s “forgotten cities”, historians and archaeologists had to break free from received ways of imagining the past. Cunningham, for instance, based his investigation on Hsuan Tsang’s accounts, using them to identify monasteries and stupas in the course of his surveys. Masson made his way with Alexander the Great’s 326 BC route in mind. Harappa demanded a different grid.

It also required a more professional and exacting archaeology. On Marshall’s watch the ASI — with many hiccups, of course — asserted greater responsibility in its mission to conserve and to investigate. In the first quarter of the 20th century — from the time Marshall first saw Harappan seals in the British Museum in 1901 on the eve of his departure for India till he wrote an almost nationalist account of discovery in 1924 — that change in Indian archaeology was overlaid with repeated instances of the Indus civilization revealing tantalising aspects of itself. The overlay was less fortuitous than it was a necessary condition for the discovery of India’s past. In any case, it gives Lahiri’s narrative a compelling momentum.

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Finding India’s lost cities, she shows, was as much an endeavour to mine the length and breadth of the subcontinent for its secrets as it was the result of the contributions of some remarkably committed individuals. There was, of course, Marshall — inducted into India’s colonial bureaucracy at just 25, with a kindred soul as viceroy at the time (Curzon), but later left to battle it out with London and Calcutta for funds and personnel, personally driven by the race for the riches at Taxila but forever guiding his subordinates back to the lost cities of Punjab and Sind. There was Daya Ram Sahni, diligently assessing the remains at Harappa in 1921. There were D.R. Bhandarkar, who missed the message at Mohenjodaro, and Rakhaldas Banerji, who upon repeated exposure finally gained a sense of awe there. There was earlier Luigi

Pio Tessitori, an Italian maverick in search of bardic fragments but who glimpsed Indus remains at Kalibangam in Rajasthan.

Marshall’s announcement in the summer of 1924 would have two effects. It would, firstly, hasten scholarship on the Indus civilization, which would be rationally dated back 2000 years from his first estimate of the first millennium BC. It would also ground the ASI as an essential administrative organisation, giving archaeology a new sustainability and direction.

But it is the threshold of that change, when Marshall summons to Simla Sahni and Banerji and the artefacts from Lahore and Poona, that is most interesting. It is to Lahiri’s credit that in writing of that assembling of findings, impressions, hypotheses and antiquities she honours her dedication to the ASI by evoking the nobility of intellectual inquiry.