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How Indus Civilisation Was Really Found
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Why don’t you tell us in a nutshell what ‘Finding Forgotten Cities’ was all about?
A:
When I began the research which eventually culminated in ‘Finding Forgotten Cities’, it did not begin as research about how the Indus Civilisation was discovered. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of doing a biography of John Marshall, director general of the Archaeological Survey, who in fact announced the discovery of the Indus Civilisation on Sept 20, 1924. So, you know, just a little over 100 years ago. And I thought it would be in the ‘life and times’ genre. As it so happened, when I began looking at the material which was in the file room of the Archaeological Survey of India, there was so much material which I felt could actually be woven into a story around the discovery of the Indus Civilisation. This is because the story itself covers a large part of Marshall’s career. And what eventually emerged from these files was very different from what the given story that people thought about when they thought about the discovery of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.
Q: What were the firsts that you unearthed during the course of this research
A:
I think there were several. My most favourite bit relates to the Italian Luigi Pio Tessitori. I knew that he had worked in Bikaner and had visited Kalibangan, but I didn’t know the whole story about the fact that he had excavated Kalibangan, a Harappan city as we now know it, the first Harappan city to have been excavated after Alexander Cunningham’s excavations of the 19th century at Harappa. And he had discovered seals there which were exactly like those from Harappa. He could not actually get the credit that he deserved because he passed away in his 30s after having contracted the Spanish flu. He died in Bikaner, and he’s actually buried there.
The second thing, which was very new to me, and this again is around another individual who is much better known. Rakhal Das Banerjee. Rakhal Das Banerjee was the excavator of Mohenjo-daro. But I didn’t realise that when he actually went to excavate Mohenjo-daro in the winter of 1922, he knew that this was his last season in that part of India. That was because he had been involved in all kinds of financial irregularities. So he had got permission to excavate at Mohenjo-daro, but it was just by accident that these seals within the first few days were found below the platform where you have a large historical Buddhist stupa. And he was trained as an archaeologist. So he immediately realised the importance of what he had discovered. This again was a story that I was not aware of. The other thing that came as a big surprise to me was the kind of pressure that the Archaeological Survey worked under. Non-commercial departments in the British Raj were always under threat.
Q: In the hundred years since this research was made visible and more, how is it that archaeological excavations are being made more cost effective? Would new tools of say, AI, help in this way?
A:
I don’t know how AI would help, but I can tell you the post-Independence history of the Indus Civilisation, which will provide some kind of insight into the shifts that have taken place in the way in which archeology is done. Now, when you think of a Mohenjo-daro or Harappa being excavated in the 1920s, you didn’t actually have specialists from elsewhere as a part of the team there. So that, for example, when skeletons were found, they went immediately into disrepair because you didn’t have anthropologists there. So today, on the other hand, you have these large multidisciplinary teams. So I think there has been a change in the way excavations are conducted. I don’t think the problem really has been with money. The problem has been in terms of publications. There are just so many cities where we still don’t have hard copies of reports. So today if you want to learn about a Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, you can go to these fat tomes and get all the details. But we do not have similar volumes that have been published on Rakhigarhi or others.