The Story of India Read online

  Huge crowds jostle for a glimpse as fires send sparks high into the night sky. There are two specially built enclosures with altars, covered by rattan roofs. The biggest contains a large brick altar constructed in the shape of a bird with spread wings. Among a dozen officiating priests – young and old, fathers and sons – the chief priest sits on a black antelope skin, his head covered. He and his wife (here, unlike in mainstream Hinduism, women play a role), along with the other priests, may not leave the enclosure for the duration of the ritual. There are blood sacrifices, milk offerings to the Asvins (the divine boy twins who ride the winds), and a sacred drink called soma is consumed, which is pressed from a mountain plant. For thousands of years these Brahminical rituals have been zealously guarded and never shared with the outside world; and this is especially true of the mantras. These magical formulas can take days to recite, only Brahmins can utter them, and they have been passed down orally from father to son, with exact accuracy, over a vast period of time.

  Mantras still exist in many societies. They have spread in historical times from India to China, Tibet, the Far East and Indonesia. They are a part of the archaic past of mankind, but no culture has assigned more importance to them than that of India. They work on the emotions, the physiology and the nervous system; along with yoga, they are a way of achieving a heightened mental and physical state. Representations of figures on seals from the Bronze Age show men sitting in a yogic posture: it is probably one of the oldest obsessions of Indian culture.

  Westerners were first able to get close to these practices and record them at a performance in 1975. But when they sat down to analyse them, to unpick their mystery, scholars were perplexed. During parts of the ritual there was no communication through ordinary language. The patterns of sounds that were recited – patterns that took years to learn and days to recite – clearly followed elaborate rules, but they had no meaning. In fact, meaning was something on which the Brahmins could offer no light. This was ‘what was handed down’. The doing was all. What could be the purpose? How had they developed?

  Two important ideas from other forms of human creativity can perhaps help us to approach this problem. The first is music: another way of organizing sounds into an experience to create emotion. For music also has no meaning in itself; in other words, it is not capable of expressing anything. The second is ritual, which also need have no meaning. Hence, meaning need not have been important in the early roots of religion. It was only later in human history, through sacred texts and stories, that humans tried to give a rational explanation, a system, for their most archaic practices.

  When experts analysed recordings of the mantras they were mystified. The patterns had no analogue in human culture. Not even music in the end was helpful, although mantras do have refrains, cycles and triplets. The breakthrough was only made possible by the development of computer technology. Patterns of mantras from the twelve-day Agni ritual recorded in 1975 were put on to a computer, and computer analysis showed that the nearest analogue of these sound sequences was birdsong. An astonishing conclusion might follow: the possibility that the performance of such patterns of sounds is older than human language, a remnant of a pre-linguistic stage when sound was used in a purely syntactical or ritual manner. Homo sapiens, it is now suspected, developed speech only in the last 50,000 years, since the migration from Africa, and perhaps much more recently. But we know from the animal kingdom that there was ritual before there was speech – when sound and gesture are combined in ‘ritual’ behaviour. If so, the combination of ritual with pre-speech sounds perhaps takes us to the dawn of humanity, the beginning of ritual and religion and science.

  At the end of the great ritual, the two specially constructed houses are set alight and crumple into their own flames. Red fire licks up the bamboo scaffolding, consuming the thatch and flaring into the night sky. Swirling showers of sparks fly as the structures crash down, firelight catching dark fronds of palm forest. At the start of our journey, then, it’s clear that India may be leaping ahead in the global economy, predicted to overtake the United States in the 2030s, but here is a modern state in the twenty-first century that has preserved habits from its deepest past, and from that of humanity as a whole. It is nothing less than a laboratory of the human race.

  THE LONG, SLOW RISE OF HUMANITY

  The story of early humanity is still to be written, but with the new genetic discoveries, dramatic changes in our view of the human past are being made even as I write. What we can say is that over the first tens of thousands of years we are dealing with tiny numbers of people – the hunter-gatherers circling the fringes of the subcontinent and moving up river valleys to avoid the arid, fissured massif of the Deccan that dominates India’s geography. The gene pool was replenished by several later migrations. The world that emerged in the Middle Stone Age already had many language families. The population of India at that time had a hard existence. Excavations at Mahada have turned up the skeletons of one community of hunter-gatherers; they were almost all around twenty years of age, one was around thirty, none was over forty. Their material life, though, is depicted with brilliant vivacity on Late Middle Stone Age paintings in the caves at Bhimbetka, which show the communal animal hunts, the killings and propitiatory ceremonies of these hunter-gatherers.

  Of the early gods we know little, but looking at the dancing deity at Bhimbetka with his bangles and trident, one can’t help but recall the image of the dancing Shiva seen on pilgrim posters today. The mother goddess too, with her full figure and ‘eyes like fish’, represents an ancient and irrepressible current in the Indian imagination, which has never been forsaken in the face of the monotheisms of Islam and Christianity, nor by the Westernization of modern times. What is certain too is that the symbols of procreative power – the stone lingam and yoni (male and female principles) – that are found in the worship of Shiva come out of the deep past. Not so long ago, when archaeologists excavated a shrine near Allahabad, south of the Ganges valley, a broken yoni stone from around 14,000 years ago was instantly recognized by today’s villagers. These aspects of the indigenous culture of India are part of the givenness of the deep past, which is shared by all Indians, whatever their ancestry, language or religion.

  My beginning is necessarily impressionistic. The passage of time is vast, and there are hundreds of generations about which, as yet, little is known and much is still to be discovered. The tale of the hunter-gatherers is the tale of the long, slow rise of humanity, the gradual, imperceptible tracing of India’s early languages, beliefs, ritual traditions and gods. A period of tens of thousands of years has left its legacy in the indigenous peoples who still live all over the subcontinent. But then, starting in western Asia about 10,000 years ago, the first signs of settled cultures emerged in villages with agriculture, trade, metalworking and handicrafts. Whether changes in the monsoon regime helped bring this about is not yet clear, though it is suspected that climate change and a much wetter annual cycle helped bring migrants into the subcontinent from the west. In the culture of this time, on the edge of the Afghan plateau around 7000 BC, are the seeds of Indian civilization. And among the most important archaeological discoveries of the last hundred years was the breakthrough made out in the wilds of Baluchistan.

  BALUCHI DAWN

  The road from the Indus at Sukkur heads northwest towards Quetta and the Afghan border up the Bolan river. This is an ancient travel route between Iran and India, used by migrants for thousands of years. It is more ancient, so the archaeology suggests, than the Khyber Pass. You go through Jacobabad, now the site of a fortified US base for the war in Afghanistan. Founded by a British general, John Jacob, in 1847, it was famously the hottest place in India – nearly 54°C (130°F) in June before the monsoons hit. From here the route leads more than 90 miles into the hills, where it meets the Bolan river snaking across the Kachi plain. This is still a world where you see nomads in their black tents on spring migration, their camels and mules loaded with tent cloths, matting and cooki
ng pots. Women trail behind on foot, their dresses splashes of bright red and orange against the monochrome desert. Up into the hills for summer, down into the plain for winter: it’s a scene from prehistory, the old routine of transhumant humanity.

  The site lies above the road, on a low hill below the entrance to the Bolan Pass – a little, mild climatic zone free of the winter snow that blankets the plateau. The site spreads along the Bolan river, where the water comes down steel blue and cold across a gravel bed a couple of hundred yards wide. A century ago the river changed course, cutting through the site and exposing a cliff-like cross-section of cultural deposits. The first examination thirty years ago brought mind-boggling results. Charcoal from one of the early levels gave a carbon date of the sixth millennium BC, and there were 30 feet more debris underneath it! To their amazement, the French team realized they had a site going back to before 7000 BC, not just centuries, but millennia earlier than anything yet known in the subcontinent. One of the biggest surprises was the scale of the place. The site at Mehrgarh extended a mile along the river, nearly 750 acres in all. One place remained where the mud-brick walls, 100 yards long and 10 feet thick, still stood to a height of seventeen courses. One of the precious gifts of archaeology is that from so far back in the human past it can reveal such intimate details of the life lived. Seldom on Earth can one so closely inspect the dwellings of such distant ancestors. The packed, rectangular houses were roofed with cut branches, and walled with wattle reed and mud, just as houses are still made in these hills today. The people of Mehrgarh made beautiful pottery patterned with geometric lines and given a lustrous burnished sheen like polished walnut. There were numerous handmade terracotta figurines, female figures, some holding a child. The people here domesticated goats, sheep, cattle and water-buffalo, though not the horse. From the sixth millennium BC cattle were the cornerstone of their economy, but the river valley also teemed with gazelle, spotted deer, blackbuck and wild sheep, the Indian elephant and the rhino. Their chief crops were barley and wheat. From the rampart of mountains on the western horizon, tipped with snow in the spring, the waters of the Bolan river flowed down into the plain and on to the Indus, providing a secure environment in which to sustain human life; and, incredibly, human life lasted in this one small place for over 4000 years.

  The Mehrgarh excavation proved that there was settled, continuous occupation in the Indus region dating back to approximately 7000 BC, 4000 years before the flowering of India’s first cities. During this same period agricultural communities were forming across the ancient Near East, from Anatolia through Palestine to Iran. Looking at it now, it is extraordinary to think that as late as the 1970s there was no evidence of agriculture in India much before 3000 BC, underlining what a revolution these new finds have brought about. And this was not only a farming economy; there was craft specialization, including steatite cutting and long-distance trade in turquoise and lapis. In the fifth millennium BC builders at Mehrgarh used the long plano-convex brick found later in Indus cities, and cotton was already cultivated as a mainstay of India, as it is to this day.

  These new discoveries show beyond doubt that the rise of civilization in the Indus was an Indian phenomenon; it did not, as was previously believed, arise from the diffusion of cultural ideas from Iraq. Indeed, there are recognizable traits in today’s culture going back to the Mehrgarh world.

  Mehrgarh (and twenty villages like it are now known) was already long lived when changes arrived around 4500 BC, perhaps with the arrival of new migrants from the Iranian plateau. These were possibly, as we shall see, speakers of an early form of the Dravidian languages still spoken widely over southern and eastern India. During the last period of its life (3500–2500 BC), Mehrgarh was part of a wider cultural zone extending into Iran, whose people used stamp seals in terracotta, constructed a large, brick-platform monumental complex, made figurines of the mother goddess with pendulous breasts and fantastical headdresses, and bore some similarity to the brilliant culture then thriving in Iraq. Then, in 2500 BC, the place was abandoned to be replaced by a new settlement, Naushero, 5 miles away, with massive brick fortifications and impressive buildings, including what may be a temple. This settlement would last all the way into what we call the Harappan age – the age of cities and writing.

  So at last archaeologists have been able to trace Indian civilization to one of its roots. The root went back to 7000 BC, and it was indigenous. Until then hunter-gatherers had lived all over the subcontinent, as they still do, though now being squeezed out by post-Independence nation states. In these villages of Baluchistan direct continuities can be traced with the world of historical times, when, in the third millennium BC, huge cities arose, with writing, architecture and long-distance commerce, heralding the birth of Indian civilization.

  THE DISCOVERY OF HARAPPA

  On Pakistan’s N5 national highway in the Punjab, the ‘land of the five rivers’. The sun sets in a ball of fire over Sahiwal as headlights sweep the rainy highway. ‘Take a rest – speed kills’ says the big billboard. Huge red banners strung across the lanes proclaim the new act for the protection of women: women’s rights are the next big battle in a country caught between its Islamic heritage and its burgeoning modernity. Huge new motorway service stations stand like palaces in great, glistening pools of light, and sprawling industrial towns dot the road from Lahore to Multan. This is the new Pakistan, where dramatic modernization has occurred in the ten years since I last came this way. Pakistan is now the sixth most populous country in the world. It was divided from India in 1947 by nationalism and religion, but it is still a part of the subcontinent, still an inheritor of Indian civilization.

  It is dark by the time we pass Sahiwal and leave the main road. We cross a huge irrigation canal as wide as a river, the air suddenly cold now, then on to a deserted country road, the occasional bus rattling past, horn blaring. We are now on a much more ancient road. This is the old main highway between Lahore and Multan, the artery of the Punjab for thousands of years, right back to when the Punjab was the heartland of Indian civilization. Along this stretch of the plain the mounds of ruined ancient cities are as abundant as they are in Iraq. Then the road sign appears in Urdu and English: Harappa.

  Our headlights momentarily light up a ruined Mughal caravanserai and a mud fort. A bunch of sleepy camels chews patiently. This was the road taken by a British deserter, James Lewis, aka Charles Masson, the first outsider to describe Harappa. On his way south one night in 1828 he camped at dusk and saw 3 miles of walls along undulating wooded mounds by an old bed of the river Ravi. Amid thick ‘jangal’ – the tangled forest of rakh trees that once covered all this part of the Punjab – he noticed ancient pipal trees, which were sacred in the old Hindu religion. Masson saw that dominating the site, was ‘a ruinous brick castle … an irregular rocky height crowned with the remains of buildings’, walls and towers still ‘remarkably high, though long deserted, that exhibit the ravages of time and decay’. What he had found was a ruined medieval city in the last stage of its life, built on a great, ancient mound 50–60 feet high, with a core of giant brick defences, berms and revetments, huge ruinous bastions like the mud-brick qalats (fortified villages) still to be seen in Afghanistan and the Khyber region. The last major construction on the site had been a Sikh fort in the eighteenth century. Making his way up on to the mound, Masson inspected an abandoned brick mosque of the Mughal period, with pointed windows. The city had largely died out when the Ravi moved its bed in the Middle Ages. But Masson heard another story from his local guides – the legend of ‘a great city that was destroyed by a particular visitation of Providence, brought down by the lust and crimes of the Sovereign’. What he could not know was that the city in fact went back over 5000 years.

  Finally, we reach the site. The dig hut is in a grove of trees, nestling under a giant banyan. Muffled figures come out and help to unload our gear. The joint US–Pakistani archaeology team are not here at the moment, and the site custodian has let us take over the b
edroom, with its three bedsteads. Wisps of pale mist curl across the garden on to the veranda, and Tanweer, the expedition cook, has swathed himself in a blanket against the cool, dank night air. In the kitchen we wolf down some rice, vegetables and daal, and hot black tea. Hassan, the archaeologist in charge of the site, has stayed to greet us and comes over in a quilted jacket, hands stuffed into his pockets: ‘Welcome to Harappa!’

  We make the dormitory as comfy as possible, stacking the camera gear and unrolling our sleeping-bags, while we try to swat the mosquitoes. Masson was plagued with them in 1828, ‘swarms of tiny antagonists’ he called them, to the point where he got up in the middle of the night and rode 12 miles to Chichawatna, abandoning his camp after his tantalizing first glimpse of Harappa. A pity, because he never had time to sketch it and leave us one of the excellent drawings he did of other lost sites in the Indus region and Afghanistan. Less than thirty years later what Masson saw was destroyed by British railway contractors, who were laying the track from Multan to Lahore, spreading the tentacles of empire. Finding a ready supply of burnt bricks, they demolished the citadel, quarrying the bricks for ballast for hundreds of miles of track. From the debris they retrieved fine pottery and strange seals, which eventually came into the hands of the head of the newly formed Indian Archaeological Survey, General Alexander Cunningham. On the seals Cunningham saw an unknown system of writing. Although he could not have known it then, they came from a lost civilization. This would only be revealed in the 1920s. Then, in just a few years, the history of Indian civilization would be entirely rewritten. As the British archaeologist John Marshall wrote:

  Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at the moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus …