The pen might be mightier than a sword but, as Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, one of India’s leading historians of the 20th century, put it in 1970, the spade of the archeologist can be mightier than the pen. In 1924 – a hundred years ago – the Sanskrit and Persian-text-centric historiography of India received a body blow when the spade of archeologists unearthed a civilization in the Indus River Valley so old that even the oldest Indian texts, the Vedas, speak nothing about them.
John Marshall, the then-director general of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI), delivered the news to the world in a six-page report published in the Illustrated London News on September 20, 1924. He was cautious not to jump steps and go too far into speculations, but what he wrote was cause enough to trigger curiosity among the world’s historians and many more people interested in human achievements.
Marshall reported that the ASI was on the threshold of discovering a long-forgotten civilization that may well be compared – subject to further excavations – to those ancient ones that rose on the banks of the Nile, Danube, Tigris, and Euphrates in ancient times. This, certainly, was the oldest urban civilization in the Indian subcontinent.
Marshall’s brief, preliminary report was based on the findings of archeologist Daya Ram Sahni’s excavations in Harappa (1921) and Rakhaldas Banerji’s in Mohenjo-Daro (1922) – two sites over 600 km apart in the Indus River Valley in northwestern South Asia (now in Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan).
Marshall wrote that of all the antiquities found in the two Indus Valley towns, the most valuable were the stone seals, “not only because they are inscribed with legends in an unknown pictographic script, but because the figures engraved on them, and the style of the engraving, are different from anything of the kind hitherto met with in Indian art.”
He added that “the strange pictographs which do duty for letters” bore “no resemblance whatever to any ancient Indian alphabet known to us.”
As of then, Indian civilization’s antiquity had been traced up to the 3rd century BCE – in Mauryan Buddhist Emperor Asoka’s stone edicts – but it was rather young compared to the civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Now, Marshall and his colleagues were thinking at least 2nd millennium BCE.
Apart from pushing the antiquity of South Asian history by several centuries, the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization also deeply impacted internal politics in colonial India.
Following the discovery of a common root to the Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin languages in the late 18th century, a theory developed about a race of Aryan (Indo-European)-speaking people who, migrating from the central Asian steppe region, produced civilizational excellence in different parts of Eurasia at the dawning years of human societal achievements. They included the Vedic Aryans.
It had multiple implications for India, where Hindus formed the overwhelming majority of the population. Some Hindus took pride in the Europeans’ showering of praises on the culture of the Sanskrit-speaking people. Some found comfort in sharing a common ancestry with their modern rulers, the Europeans. To some, the point of the Aryans’ Central Asian origin caused discomfort.
This discomfort was to an extent because, in 1816, British civil servant Francis Whyte Ellis pointed out that not all Indian languages were Indo-Aryan. The people in southern India spoke an entirely different group of languages, which shared no original kinship with the Indo-Aryan languages or any language spoken outside India. He named it the Dravidian group of languages.
By the 1870s, when many of India’s early nationalists were looking to the Vedic past in search of ancient glory, speakers of Dravidian languages as well as Hindu low caste leaders objected to Aryan glorification, particularly on the ground that the Vedic-Aryan society created the discriminatory practice of caste divisions among the Indian people.
Marshall’s 1924 paper came as a shot in the arm of southern India’s Dravidian identity politics, which is rooted in anti-Aryanism. It triggered a series of articles by historians, linguists, archeologists, and anthropologists in different journals in India and Europe. In India, it found strong backing from Suniti Kumar Chatterji, one of India’s leading linguists of the time.
While the Aryan superior race theory had its own terrible consequences in Europe, Germany in particular, Harappa dealt a bloody blow to the Aryan superiority theory in India by presenting pre-Vedic/Aryan civilizational excellence. At that time, the early Hindu nationalists were dreaming of restoring the glory of the Vedic-Aryan civilization after ending British rule.
Marshall’s 1931 work, titled, “Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization, the official account of Archaeological Excavations at Mohenjo-Daro Carried Out Between 1922 and 1927” – often called a “classic book” – pointed out that relics of a religious character were remarkably few, whether at Mohenjo-Daro or Harappa. This was significant, as the Vedic society was highly religious and dominated by the priestly caste, the Brahmins
He noted that among the materials the first that demanded attention were a large number of female figurines made of terra-cotta, a great majority of which portrayed “a very distinctive and generally uniform type, viz. a standing and almost nude female, wearing a band or girdle about her loins with elaborate head-dress and collar, and occasionally with ornamental cheek cones and a long necklace.”
He suspected them to represent “Mother Goddess” or “Mother Earth.” What he wrote next bore great significance: “In no country in the world has the worship of the Divine Mother been from time immemorial so deep-rooted and ubiquitous as in India.”
In contrast, he pointed out, there was no example of the ancient Aryans, whether in India or elsewhere, having elevated a female deity to the supreme position occupied by these Mother Goddesses.
“In Vedic mythology, goddesses played only a subordinate part; the principal deities were exclusively male, and it was solely by virtue of their position as consorts of these male gods that the female deities acquired their influence,” Marshall wrote.
He concluded that the religious beliefs of the Harappan people as emerging from archeological evidence were distinctly different from the Vedic culture of the Indo-Aryans, as their own voluminous literature had nothing similar to the Harappan.
Marshall’s role in placing the Indus Valley on the global civilizational map has been widely acknowledged. To quote archeologist Sourindranath Roy’s famous words in the 1961 book “The Story of Indian Archaeology,” “Marshall will always be remembered as the man, who, archaeologically speaking, left India three thousand years older than he had found her.”
But for Hindu nationalists, it posed a perennial problem, as Harappa emerged as the biggest weapon in the hands of the leaders of Hindu low-caste social movements in challenging the Vedic social system.
Besides, linguists have tended to connect the Harappan script more with Dravidian scripts, even though none of these hypotheses have convinced the wider scientific community. The Indus script remains undeciphered, but there is a broad consensus on its lack of association with Sanskrit.
“Indian civilization began with the Harappan culture, whose inheritors are the present-day Shudras, Dalits, and Adivasis,” scholar and Dalit (Hindu low caste) rights activist Kanchha Ilaiah wrote in 2022 while debunking the Aryan-Vedic claim of superiority. Shudras are the untouchables of the Vedic society, while Dalits refer to the lower castes and Adivasis refer to tribal people.
Since India’s independence, Hindu nationalists, including historians and archeologists, have made repeated attempts to claim the Indus Valley as a Vedic civilization. They are also trying to push its age as far back as possible. While Harappan culture is generally posited between 3,300 BCE and 1,300 BCE, a recently revised history textbook in India put the period from 6,000 BCE to 1,300 BCE.
As part of renaming, in 2023, a government of India publication on the occasion of the G-20 summit in New Delhi referred to the Indus Valley Civilization as the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization. Sindhu is the Sanskrit name for Indus. Saraswati has been an enduring mystery. It is referred to in the Vedas as the mightiest of the rivers, but no trace of such a mighty river has ever been found. Even though the speculation that the dry, seasonal channels of Ghaggar-Hakra are the remnant of the ancient, perennial, and snow-fed Vedic Saraswati has not been convincingly proved, Hindu nationalists, evidently, could not wait for the renaming.
Since Saraswati has been mentioned in the Vedas, the naming brings the Indus Valley civilization under the fold of Vedic culture. In this case, even though the spade has not unearthed anything Vedic related to the ancient Harrapan-era sites found in India, they seem to consider the pen still mightier than the spade.