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Journalism of Courage
Sometime in the early 1830s, the British East India Company officials in India came to know of the presence of a red-haired, grey-eyed man travelling around in Kabul, with a few maps, a compass and an astrolabe. He wore no stockings or shoes, strung a dervish drinking cup around his shoulder, and identified himself as Charles Masson, an American. It was only in 1835 that the gentleman’s true identity was revealed as James Lewis, an Englishman who had deserted from the East India Company’s Bengal Artillery Regiment in 1827.
Lewis or Masson had spent five months travelling around some of the lands adjoining the northwestern corner of the Indian subcontinent, which was beyond British control. He did this in return for a royal pardon, when the EIC forced him to become an intelligence agent for them in Kabul. It was during his travels, as he journeyed across Punjab on a horseback, that he stumbled upon a small, unremarkable town, ‘Haripah’ — the first time that a European had encountered the great Indus Civilisation site, though nothing about its significance was imagined at the time.
It was almost a hundred years later that Sir John Marshall, the English archaeologist and director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), announced the discovery of the Indus Civilisation. “Not often has it been to archaeologists…to light upon the remains of a long forgotten civilisation,” he wrote in The Illustrated London News on September 20, 1924. “It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of Indus,” he noted.
In the late 1820s though, when Masson first encountered ‘Haripah’, he thought it to be ruins of the ancient city of Sangala, the capital of King Porus, who was defeated by Alexander the Great, when he invaded the Indian subcontinent in the fourth century BCE. As noted by anthropologist Rita P Wright, in her book ‘The Ancient Indus’, Masson was well conversant in classical Greek literature, and Alexander’s campaigns was what had prompted him to explore parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and across the Punjab, where the Macedonian ruler is known to have marched in 326 BCE.
Masson was highly impressed by what he saw at Harappa. Describing the ruins in and around the site he wrote his travelogue later about a ‘large circular mound’, a ‘ruinous brick castle’, the remains of a building on a rocky height, and several old Peepul trees, which he thought, spoke of great antiquity. He also noted the possibility of a city, some 13 coss (about 45 kilometres) in extent, which was “destroyed by the lust and crimes of the sovereign”.
Five years after Masson’s visit, in 1831, Lieutenant Alexander Burns travelled to Harappa during his journey up the river Indus. Subsequently, he was followed by Alexander Cunningham, who, in 1861, had established the ASI, and became its first director-general. Cunningham visited Harappa thrice — in 1853, 1856, and then again between 1872-73.
As noted by archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri in an email interview with indianexpress.com, Cunningham was the first to excavate Harappa. “He gave a fairly precise description of the mounds, also a site plan which graphically illustrates their alignments and visual details of objects that we recognise as Harappan artefacts including archetypal objects such as inscribed stone seal and flint implements,” she said. Cunningham’s plate showing artefacts at Harappa were unlike anything he had encountered in the sites he had been surveying for decades. But as Lahiri noted, when it came to identifying the site, he once again fell back upon textual sources. He believed Harappa to be the place where the Chinese traveller Xuanzang stayed for a few months.
Cunningham’s archaeology was driven by the search for Buddhist sites. He followed closely the travels of Xuanzang and Fa Hien, both Chinese pilgrims, believed to be following Buddha’s footsteps.
Cunningham in fact located a seal that is today regarded as the typical artefact of the urban phase of the Indus Civilisation. “He pronounced the artefact to be ‘foreign to India’, since it depicted a hump-less bull and not the humped Indian zebu; and an inscription, which he was certain contained no ‘Indian letters’,” wrote archaeologist Sudeshna Guha in her 2007 article, ‘The Indus Civilisation’ published in the journal ‘History Today’.
There were several reasons why the first European explorers were falling back on Greek and Chinese sources in their misinterpretation of the Harappan ruins. “From the very beginning, the Westerners saw India through the foreign accounts of India,” explained Guha in an interview with indianexpress.com. “Foreign accounts, they believed, provided a better understanding of India than the ancient texts of India which were considered bereft of a historical chronicle,” said Guha, who specialises in the Indus Civilisation.
While the British explorers were already acquainted with classical Greek, in the case of the ancient Chinese accounts of Xuanzang and Fa Hien that Cunningham followed closely, they were made accessible to the western world precisely in the mid-1800s when they were first translated into French and then to English.
Lahiri contended that these early explorers worked within textual grids alone. “Harappa, after all, had flourished in an age which was beyond such textual traditions and obviously, its antiquity was unlikely to be discovered by explorers and archaeologists who were always in the company of Chinese pilgrims or that of Macedonians who had accompanied Alexander to northwest India,” she said.
Yet another reason why Harappa’s significance as an ancient civilisation was not understood at this time was because the study of prehistory had hardly begun in the 19th century. “The existence of a ‘prehistory’ was widely acknowledged only when the Royal Society, in 1859, validated that humankind had a prehistoric past,” explained Guha, adding that prior to it, “European scholars were guided by the Christian faith of the world beginning only in 4004 BCE.”
John Marshall arrived in India in 1902 to take charge as director-general of ASI. Unlike his predecessors, Marshall was not particularly engrossed with Alexander or Buddhism in India. Rather, his interest lay in the Mediterranean region, and Minoan civilisation of Crete was his initial point of reference. “But he soon dedicated himself wholly to furthering the cause of Indian archaeology, despite his department’s thinly stretched financial resources,” wrote Andrew Robinson in his book, The Indus (2015).
In the decades preceding Marshall’s announcement in The Illustrated London News, several Indus sites apart from Harappa had already been explored. In 1911, for instance, Devadutta Ramakrishna Bhandarkar had visited Mohenjodaro in the hope of finding an ancient Buddhist site. Bhandarkar, however, concluded that the ruins in the site were not more than 200 years old. Pottery and other objects from other sites located as far apart as Sutkagen-dor in Makran and Kalibangan in Rajasthan were also dug before 1924. “But no scholar was in a position to connect up these disparate discoveries, because the age of the objects was unknown and they lacked any historical context,” wrote Robinson.
It was only in 1912 that a publication by the British Museum carrying the three seals discovered till then caught Marshall’s attention. Later, when one of his assistants purchased more objects from Harappa, including two seals, Marshall was convinced of the site’s value. “The excavation of Harappa, when it can be arranged, will be productive of most valuable results and open up quite a new chapter in Indian history,” Marshall noted, as cited by Lahiri in her book, Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilisation was Discovered (2006).
Consequently, in 1921-22, Harappa came to be excavated by Daya Ram Sahni, while Mohenjodaro was dug up by Rakhal Das Banerji in 1922-23. Both Sahni and Banerji discovered seals of the kind found by Cunningham decades earlier. But given that they were excavating two very different looking places far away from each other, they were both unaware of the other’s find. “Banerji, for instance, in his first view of an Indus seal saw it as something he was familiar with, namely a sandesh (a Bengali sweet) mould,” says Guha. However, he wrote to Marshall circumspectly, and with foresight saying, “They are exactly similar to Cunningham’s Harappa seals” (as cited in Robinson’s book). Consequent excavations revealed seven more such seals from Mohenjodaro.
In June 1924, Marshall called for a special conference at the headquarters of the ASI in Simla, where the archaeologists of Harappa and Mohenjodaro assembled all the artefacts found by them in these two places. It was soon evident that both these sites belonged to the same culture and civilisation, and Marshall announced his dramatic discovery to the world.
“Remember this was the time when British archaeologists had discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, and Sir Leonard Woolley (also a British archaeologist) was excavating Mesopotamia and had found several ancient Sumerian sites such as Ur, Kish, Lagash, and Susa,” said Guha. “Basically a massive old world civilisation was being discovered there, and Marshall wanted his international colleagues, and particularly those in Britain, to see the spectacular discoveries of an old world civilisation he and his team were making in India.”
Marshall, from the very beginning, was clear on the fact that this was an indigenous civilisation. “He knew that this first announcement would become a seminal starting point for a new kind of archaeological past, one that was more in tune with the ancientness that was ascribed to India. More than anything else, he hoped that his pen would succeed in appropriately projecting the work that had birthed, as it were, a new beginning for India’s ancient past,” said Lahiri. She pointed out that in subsequent newspaper articles, “he emphasised the indigenous character of the civilisation and how it had ‘undergone a development reaching back incalculable centuries on Indian soil’.”
The Partition of India in 1947 ushered in a whole new phase in the history of discovering Indus sites. The new international border between India and Pakistan passed through the eastern part of the Indus Civilisation and consequently all but two (by then unknown) Indus sites went to Pakistan. “With India’s most ancient and sophisticated urban past taken away from it, the new government started digging on their side with hope of finding vestiges of the Indus Civilisation on Indian soil,” explained Guha.
The decision to take up the search for Harappan sites was proactively pushed by Indian leaders, in stark contrast to what was happening under the British. Lahiri pointed out that as early as March 1948, K M Panikkar, a scholar administrator who had just finished serving as the ‘Diwan’ of the princely state of Bikaner, had written to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the necessity of a survey of Bikaner and Jaisalmer. It was based on what had been conveyed to him by archaeologist Aurel Stein:
With the separation of the Pakistan Provinces, the main sites of what was known as the Indus Valley Civilisation has gone to Pakistan. It is clearly of the utmost importance that archaeological work in connection with this early period of Indian history must be continued in India. A preliminary examination has shown that the centre of the early civilization was not Sind or the Indus valley but the desert area in Bikaner and Jaisalmer through which the ancient river Saraswati flowed into the Gulf of Kutch at one time.
Nehru agreed promptly and soon after began the exploration of Bikaner by the ASI under Amalananda Ghosh. Within a couple of months as many as 70 sites were found, 25 among them carrying the same kind of artefacts as found in Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
“Soon enough, the ASI made the search for Harappan sites within the national borders of India a national project – to be carried forward by Indian archaeologists,” explained Lahiri. Ropar in Punjab was excavated in 1953 and 1955, Lothal in Gujarat between 1953 and 1963, Kalibangan in Rajasthan from 1961-69, and Rakhigarhi which continues to be excavated till date.
“In Saurashtra itself, some 40 Harappan sites were discovered,” said Lahiri. “The discovery of Indus sites in India is very much a post-Independence success story.”
Further reading:
Rita P. Wright, The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society, Cambridge University Press, 2010
Nayanjot Lahiri, Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilisation was Discovered , Hachette India, 2012
Sudeshna Guha, The Indus Civilisation, History Today, 2007
Andrew Robinson, The Indus: Lost Civilisations, Reaktion Books, 2015
