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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Don’t reduce Harappan Civilisation to Indus vs Saraswati. No city grew in isolation

Many on social media may not even know that RGR 6, a mound at Rakhigarhi, has been completely destroyed. Every day, a site is levelled to make way for a new apartment building.

With the Harappan Civilisation trending on social media throughout the last week of May, a familiar set of arguments resurfaced. What began as a conversation about a seal excavated at Mohenjo-Daro soon developed into a wider debate about who gets to define India’s archaeological past and what constitutes legitimate archaeological interpretation. The arguments ranged from iconography to nomenclature. However, when the discussion turned to the spatial distribution of the Harappan sites, it often stopped at the size of the settlements. The debate quickly became an Indus versus Saraswati contest, with one side arguing that all major urban centres were located along the Indus and the other pointing to sites such as Rakhigarhi as a counter.

Yet, these debates missed a more fundamental archaeological question: what makes a settlement a city? And how do cities evolve with time? The significance of Harappan urbanism cannot be reduced to identifying the largest sites or claiming the earliest settlements. Archaeological evidence points to a complex network of settlements: some were big, while a majority were small rural settlements that developed over centuries. These settlements were linked through trade, resources, traditions, and shared inheritance.

However, the overall evolution of Harappan traditions as reflected in urban centres such as Rakhigarhi, Harappa, and Mohenjo-Daro, was often presented through oversimplification, a result of selective readings of archaeological evidence. It is not easy to interpret archaeological data, especially as the context is either lost or misunderstood. But the interpretation is neither black nor white but exists in shades of grey, constantly refined through new discoveries and fresh analysis

The challenge, therefore, is not to decide whether the Indus or the Saraswati hosted the largest cities, but to understand the processes that gave rise to one of the world’s largest civilisations. Before we debate in which river valley the largest cities were located, it is necessary to ask what archaeologists mean by a city in the first place. It is equally important to ask whether the modern location of these cities should matter, as the political boundaries that divide the........

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