On September 20, 1924, Sir John Marshall, director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, made a historic announcement in the Illustrated London News: “First light on a long-forgotten civilisation: New discoveries of an unknown prehistoric past in India.” What his team stumbled upon was not just a localised culture, but a civilisation that radically pushed back the known history of India.
Before the discovery of the Indus Valley civilisation, the origins of any civilised society in India were always traced back to the Vedic age. The ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro altered this perspective. The discovery pushed back the origins of ancient Indian civilisation far beyond the Vedic period (1500 BCE).
The significance of Marshall's announcement can be fully appreciated when we note that Alexander Cunningham, the first director general of the ASI, had missed the opportunity to investigate the first Harappan seal, discovered by his associate Major Clarke. Cunningham had erroneously concluded in 1872 that the seal was “foreign to India”. In 1902, viceroy Lord Curzon appointed Marshall as the new head of the ASI. Curzon preferred the 26-year-old archaeologist over Vincent Smith, an Irish Indologist and historian, who had suggested in his book, The Early History of India, that “the materials available for the study of early Dravidian institutions are not yet sufficiently explored, and the historian’s attention necessarily must be directed chiefly to the Indo-Aryan institutions of the north, which are much more fully recorded than those of the south”. Had it not been for Marshall, the historic announcement of 1924 might never have been made.
Before revisiting the events, let us consider the undeciphered Indus script, which has been linked to all possible linguistic affinities, including Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. Some have even fancifully linked it to the Easter Islands. The complete absence of information about this vast and complex civilisation in any of the historical records of ancient India, including the Vedic texts, adds to the mystery of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
The first opinion on the authorship of the Indus script came from Suniti Kumar Chatterji, a linguist from Bengal. In his article, “Dravidian Origins and Beginnings of Indian Civilisation”, published just months after Marshall’s announcement, Chatterji argued in favour of Dravidian authorship, citing the presence of the Brahui language and mother goddess worship in the region. He connected the findings at Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi district and categorically denied any Aryan involvement in the creation of the Indus Civilisation.
In addition to Marshall and Chatterji, several scholars, including Piero Meriggi, Henry Heras, Yuri Knorozov, Kamil Zvelebil, Iravatham Mahadevan, Frank Southworth, David McAlpine, Walter Fairservis and Asko Parpola have contributed to the Dravidian hypothesis, taking multiple factors into account and suggesting that the Harappans likely spoke a proto-Dravidian language.
The presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rig Veda, recognised by scholars of Sanskrit and Dravidian languages, was used by Parpola to suggest the strong possibility that Dravidian languages were spoken in the Indus-Harappan regions, where the Rig Veda was composed in the second millennium BCE. Notably, Brahui, spoken in Balochistan, is the only surviving Dravidian language in the region. Parpola also pointed out that retroflex consonants―linguistic features that distinguish languages of the South Asian linguistic area―are not found in Indo-Iranian languages. Some retroflex consonants were exclusive to the Indus Valley and Dravidian-speaking areas, suggesting a linguistic connection.
Furthermore, Parpola noted that the proto-Indo-European language had a dozen related terms for wheeled vehicles, a reflection of the chariot culture that arose in the Eurasian steppes, where horse-drawn chariots were first invented in the third millennium BCE. Horses only arrived in South Asia after 2000 BCE (as confirmed by bone analyses), and they are not depicted in Harappan art. Clearly, the Harappans did not speak Indo-Iranian languages in the third millennium BCE. As a result, Parpola concluded that Indo-European languages could not be used to decipher the Indus script.
However, Chatterji's assertion was challenged by scholars like B. N. Dutta and P. V. Kane, sparking a "scholarly dispute" over the authorship of the Indus script.
The centenary year of the Indus Valley Civilisation, 2024, started with an ironic twist. David Frawley, a US-based author, announced that the civilisation should more appropriately be called the "Vedic Saraswati Civilisation" or the "Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation". He further argued that the term 'Harappan' was misleading, as it did not reflect the true centre of the civilisation, which he believed to be the Saraswati River, along with its Vedic and Indian connections.
Archaeologist Disha Ahluwalia responded to Frawley by pointing out that using the term 'Harappa' to represent the civilisation was not incidental. It was carefully chosen, following the universally accepted 'type-site' convention, and highlighted that a 6,000-year-old civilisation cannot be expected to conform to modern-day political boundaries or disputes.
It is important to remember that 'politics over the past' is not a new phenomenon. There are precedents in the field of Indus script. In 1999, historian N.S. Rajaram and palaeographer Natwar Jha claimed to have “deciphered” over 2,000 Harappan seals. But, as expected, their claims were swiftly dismissed by scholars like Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer. A notable instance of this was the misinterpretation of a "unicorn seal" as a "horse seal", which was ridiculed as the “Indus Valley Piltdown horse”―a reference to the infamous Piltdown Man hoax.
Genetic studies have shed new light on the ancestry of the people of the Indus Valley. DNA analysis of the Rakhigarhi skeleton shows that its people were genetically closer to ancestral South Indian populations. This suggests that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation were distinct from the populations associated with the later Vedic culture, which arrived in India from the Eurasian steppes in the second millennium BCE. The close genetic match between Rakhigarhi’s DNA and South Indian tribal populations further supports the theory that the Indus Valley Civilisation may have spoken an early Dravidian language. International researchers, analysing ancient DNA and genomic data, have shown that steppe ancestry was a significant part of the genetic make-up of present-day South Asians, with steppe populations responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across much of Eurasia.
It is disheartening that leading scientific and technological institutions in the country are risking their reputation by promoting myths as history and pseudoscience as fact.
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History is not a frozen entity, but a flowing river. What we call today the collective cultural history of India is the result of continuous experiences stretching back to prehistory. In this journey, the pre-Harappan, Harappan, and post-Harappan periods, the second urbanisation in the Gangetic valley and the “carried forward memories” of the Indus past as recorded in the Sangam corpus and ancient Tamil texts, must all be considered. Any attempt to build a singular narrative around India's plural identities is fraught with danger.
India’s pluralism cannot be described as a ‘melting pot’ or a ‘salad bowl’. The most fitting metaphor to describe India's pluralism―vibrant, inclusive, interdependent, and functional―is a ‘rainforest’.
The mapping of the past through the construction of a master commemorative narrative is what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls “the pressure of history”. It is crucial that we handle this “pressure of history” with care and responsibility.
Balakrishnan, a former IAS officer, is the author of Journey of Civilisation: Indus to Vaigai.