An imaginative, beautifully illustrated, and ethically motivated fiction about what life in ancient times may have been like. Written by a leading social justice activist and intellectual tied to Dalit-Bahujan politics, the story frames the Indus civilization as the work of pastoralists and producing groups. Its descriptions of how innovations came about, by accident or cleverness, and then spread from village to village are a persuasive way of imagining how societies, if not civilization, developed. Certainly there was time—many thousands of years in the Indus Valley and surrounding areas—for new ideas and practices to germinate, spread, and take root.
The focus on animals, and on the close interactions that would have developed between them and humans, is a welcome change from the usual emphasis on agriculture and creates rich opportunities for storytelling.
The author eschews the usual social categories like caste and religion, which is refreshing, especially since we know so little about what people believed so long ago, let alone what they called their religion. That said, traditional male and female roles are largely maintained, and one is struck by how harshly young animals are taken from their mothers; possibly this was how animal husbandry developed, or not. One might also question the use of names like Harappa and Mohenjo for characters. They do evoke something for us today, though I’m not sure it works. The story also ends somewhat abruptly, something the narrative frame acknowledges explicitly when it resolves the battle between the indigenous inhabitants and the “aliens” (presumably Aryans), as the author calls them.
The Epilogue summarizes the story’s hopeful motivation: “As the Western world claims that they are the descendants of Abraham, we are the descendants of Harappa and Maisamma. We are descendants of both father and mother, not just father alone. Many Kathammas [the storyteller] will write, not just tell stories of our ancestors of this land and its civilisation and culture. That will again make India a nation that will lead the world in so many spheres, as the city civilisation and culture of Harappa did in ancient times.”
The illustrations are excellent and feel authentic to the material culture as we know or suspect it from the limited evidence we have today. As a visionary story to expand children’s ideas of how early society may have come together around animals and the earth, Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation is a compelling work.