Discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization

Until September 1924, India’s history was considered to have begun not more than 2500 years (500 BC max) ago. That month, John Marshall, the Director General of the ASI, in a piece published in the Illustrated London News, announced to the world the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization based on excavations in Harappa and Mohenjadaro, that pushed back India’s history by a further 2500 years!

Until the late nineteenth century, Indian monuments were prime objects for gold-diggers and fortune hunters. Even before the discovery of the IVC, the British museum already had in its possession seals from Harappa that reached it through such characters. The 1857 revolt and the transfer of India to the Crown brought about the realization that preserving India’s ‘culture and heritage’ would bolster the credentials of the British as enlightened rulers.

The ASI was soon setup with Alexander Cunningham as its first DG. Cunningham was an archaeologist with no formal training. Under the tutelage of James Prinsep (who cracked the Brahmi script and correctly identified Devanampriya Piyadasi as the one and only Ashoka thus throwing light on one of the greatest emperors of India), Cunningham himself was responsible for a few landmark discoveries such as the identification of Samudragupta and the discovery of Taxila. His approach to surveying India’s monuments was based on tracking the path of the Huien Tsang who travelled across India for fifteen years in the seventh century. Thus, though he visited Harappa, the mounds failed to impress him as his lens of analysis was Gautam Siddharth’s influence in India’s built landscape.

Curzon’s appointment as India’s viceroy gave a fillip to archaeology in India thanks to his lifelong fascination with history. This culminated in the appointment of Marshall as the next DG of the ASI.  He was 25 when he took charge. Marshall had his hands full and was busy with a series of discoveries along the length and breadth of India happening those days. In fact, it was only after the announcement of the IVC, that he visited the excavations in Harappa and Mohenjadaro. The prime movers in the field were Dayaram Sahni and R.D Banerji respectively. Their heroic efforts and leadership led to the culmination in the announcement by Marshall. (Marshall called all his team along with the objects discovered to Shimla where over four months, the hypothesis was confirmed.) Another unsung contributor was an Italian, Luigi Pio Tessitori, who discovered an IVC site in Kalibangan, Bikaner. Imagine the quality of Indology in European universities that fired up young men to move to India. Tessitori died due to the Spanish Flu.

Nayanjot Lahiri’s ‘Finding Forgotten Cities’ is a great work covering the saga of this discovery. I also picked up the superb graphic non-fiction ‘The People of the Indus‘ for my daughter, only to realize that the work is a detailed analysis of the IVC’s society, trade relations and most importantly, the raging debate as to whether they were the originators of the Vedas. On that, some other day.

Devdutt Patnaik also has a new non-fiction title on the IVC titled Ahimsa which looks interesting.