Above: Daya Ram Sahni at Harappa, Mound AB 1924-25
The 1924-25 excavations at Harappa, together with those that year at Mohenjodaro, were considered of “preliminary character but with most promising results” (Marshall 1927: 60). They followed the publication, on 20 September 1924, of Sir John’s announcement of the finds of ‘an unknown ‘prehistoric past in India’ in The Illustrated London News. Notably, the sum spent on the excavations at Harappa that year was much higher than the previous year, viz., Rs. 13,000 as against Rs. 3000 (Sahni 1927: 74), and “valuable sidelights of the Indus culture” were sought through an “expedition” to Baluchistan, which was undertaken by Harold Hargreaves (Supdt. Archaeologist, North West Frontier Province) and “an experimental aeroplane survey” over “some fifty miles of the old bed of the Ravi, on which Harappa stands” (Marshall 1927: 60). Both brought to light several unknown sites.
Baluchistan, as Hargreaves noted in ARASI 1924-¬25, was an “unsurveyed land”. With the discoveries of the “allied” civilizations in Mesopotamia and the Indus Basin its importance was then being recognized as “across which lies the routes by which this [Indus] culture might have made its way either eastward or westward” (Hargreaves 1927: 55). Hargreaves recorded a large number of potential archaeological mounds, and excavated at Sampur (Matsung, near Quetta). His excavations at Nal, Sohr Damb the following year (1925-26) ascertained the likelihood of finding sites in Baluchistan that would show the antecedents of the Indus Culture. The air surveys illuminated “what may be expected along other river beds … that some three or four thousand miles of these beds have still to be examined” and “how almost limitless is the field awaiting the excavator” (Marshall, ibid).
The excavations of 1924-25 at Harappa proved to be a milestone in revealing some of this Bronze Age city’s unique features. Among them, the area of Parallel Walls in Mound F was subsequently identified, provisionally, and mistakenly, as the Great Granary (see Vats 1940, especially pp. 17-20), and the evidence of large scale funerary practices which Sahni hypothesized from his excavations at area B of Mound AB [e.g. photos Mound F, A burial structure resembling a modern samadhi, Later Sepulchre in Trench A, Mound F, A burial structure, Large Collection of Animal Bones, Sculptures in western portion, Pot insitu filled with Bones and Pot Lying East of Earlier Sepulchre], appear, in retrospect, anticipatory of the finds of the Cemetery H, four years later in 1929-30, by Madho Sarup Vats. John Marshall set the tone of high expectations from the mounds F and A-B in his essay on ‘The Prehistoric Civilization’, which appeared before the excavation reports of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, by K.N. Dikshit and Sahni respt. Marshall mentioned a ‘large edifice’, with reference to the discoveries of the area of Parallel Walls, and “brick structures resembling Hindu samadhis (1927: 62). With respect to the latter, he followed Sahni’s terminology.
Sahni extended excavations near Mound F through a long trench A, and cut trenches Ae, Af and Ai from where he reported “overwhelming evidence” of cremation. He stated that the “ancient inhabitants” of Harappa invariably cremated the dead. They first burnt the body on a funeral pyre and then deposited a part of the cremated bones in earthen vessels or brick structures, like the modern Hindu samadhis (Sahni 1927: 74). He found large heaps of cremated human bones, a stone obelisk resembling a Siva linga and near it a “tiny brick structure” which he speculated was a temple (ibid: 78). Thus, analogies with Hindu ritual practices appear quite prominently in his excavation report.
Possibly, because of the evidence of funerary practices at Harappa, and Mohenjodaro, Marshall drew attention to the people of the Indus Civilization in his essay. He asserted that this “great civilization … was no mere provincial offshoot of Mesopotamian culture, but was developed for countless generations on the banks of the Indus itself”, and speculated that the inhabitants “were the pre-Aryan probably Dravidian people of India”, who the Vedas mentioned as Dasyus (Marshall 1927: 63). His note of the destruction of the Dasyus by “invading Aryans from the north … just as the Aegean Culture of the Mediterranean … was largely overwhelmed by the invading Achaens” is noteworthy, as he derived many inferences about the Indus Civilization, including the function of some of the unique looking structures, through his knowledge of the Bronze Age Aegean Civilization. The prominent example that relates specifically to the 1924-25 excavations at Harappa was his inference of the Great Granary, which is how the area of the Parallel Walls came to be documented by Madho Sarup Vats in his full report of the Excavations at Harappa. See the note by Vats of a letter from Marshall to him (Vats 1940: 16).
In his report of the Harappa excavations, Sahni recalled the “various points of affinities” which Marshall gauged in ARASI 1923-24 “between the antiquities of the Indo Sumerian period of the Indus Valley and the contemporary antiquities of Mesopotamia” to draw attention to his finds of a number of “objects similar to Kish and other Sumerian sites” (Sahni 1927: 74). “These” he reported, included “earthen jugs with carved handles representing heads of crocodiles which recall similar vessels with handles bearing the head and breasts of the mother goddess. Similarly painted potsherds found at Harappa have patterns resembling those on the pottery vessels found at Kish” (ibid). He also noted 50 new seals and cylinders at Harappa, which he stated, “supply a large number of new pictographs” (ibid). In addition, he excavated a well preserved drain composed of brick with gable roof in Pit I, and a “solidly built house” in Pit II, and a brick built grave to its south east, from where he found a large collection of “earthen and faience bangles” and “large sized funerary urns” (ibid: 79-80).
Following Sahni’s excavations, Harappa was next excavated in 1926-27, and until 1933-34, by Madho Sarup Vats, who wrote the report, which was published in 1940 in two volumes (Vol. I, text, and Vol. II, plates). Vats mentioned Sahni’s excavations in detail, but also refuted some his prominent finds of burial structures, or samadhis and sepulchers.
Of those Sahni reported from Trench Ae [Photo Circular Hearth Harappa], which Sahni saw associations with funerary functions, Vats declared it “highly improbable that cremation platforms or funeral pyres would have been made in the midst of dwelling houses all over the site” (p. 50).
In his excavation report Vats also saw the need to “avoid confusion on the part of the reader” by pointing at the errors in the “method of recording followed during the time of the Rai Bahadur”. Thus, with reference to Sahni’s excavations at area B (in Mound A-B) in the years 1920-21, 1923-24 and 1924-25, he noted that the latter “began by sinking a trial trench … This trench was extended to a length of over 100 ft., and later on, at right angles to it, he sunk two subsidiary trenches”, and then emphasised the arbitrary manner in which “the depth of the antiquities was … recorded sometimes from the highest point in the mound, that is to say from 590 ft. above the sea-level, and at others from the surface of the ground at the point where the find was made, which as already mentioned might be as much as 21 ft. lower” (Vats 1940: 137) [ref. Photo Large Earthen Jar].
Additionally, Vats changed Sahni’s description of a unique find, viz., the “double headed bust of a lion” (Sahni 1927: 76), Photo 17, to a ‘bi-jugate chimaera head springing from a common neck’ (Vats 1940: 308). The object is captioned a jugate Tiger Head in Vats 1940, Vol. II, plate LXXIX, 88.
The critical and conflicting views among Indian officers of the Archaeological Survey, towards each other’s work, which the above examples provide a glimpse of, occasion the reminder to look beyond the unequal ‘native and coloniser’ relationships while writing, and recalling, the histories of archaeologies in South Asia.
- Dr. Sudeshna Guha
References
Hargreaves, Harold. 1927. Explorations, Baluchistan, Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1924-25 (pp. 50-60), Calcutta: Govt. of India Central Publication Branch.
Marshall, John Hubert. 1924. ‘First light on a Long Forgotten Civilisation: New Discoveries of an Unknown Prehistoric Past in India’, The Illustrated London News, 20 September, pp. 528-31, 548.
Marshall, John Hubert. 1927. ‘The Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus’, Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1924-25 (pp. 60-3), Calcutta: Govt. of India Central Publication Branch.
Sahni, Daya Ram. 1927. ‘Harappa, Explorations, Northern Circle’, Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India 1924-25 (pp. 73-80), Calcutta: Govt. of India Central Publication Branch.
Vats, Madho Sarup, 1940. Excavations at Harappa: Being an Account of Archaeological Excavations at Harappa Carried Out Between the Years 1920-21 and 1933-34, Vol. 1. Delhi: Manager of Publications.