back to 3 Seconds To Midnight | JFK | ratville times | rat haus | Index | Search | tree
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from The Dawn Of Everything.

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHETHER THE INDUS CIVILIZATION
WAS AN EXAMPLE OF CASTE BEFORE KINGSHIP

Fast-forward now 1,000 years from the Uruk expansion to around 2600 BC. On the banks of the Indus River, in what is today the Pakistani province of Sindh, a city was founded on virgin soil: Mohenjo-daro. It remained there for 700 years.83 The city is considered the greatest expression of a new form of society that flourished in the valley of the Indus at the time; a form of society which archaeologists have come to know simply as the ‘Indus’ or ‘Harappan’ civilization. It was South Asia’s first urban culture. Here we will find further evidence that Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence of ruling classes and managerial elites; but those of the Indus valley also present some uniquely puzzling features, which archaeologists have debated for more than a century.84 Let’s introduce both the problem and its key locus – the site of Mohenjo-daro – in a little more detail.

On first inspection, Mohenjo-daro bears out its reputation as the most completely preserved city of the Bronze Age world. There’s something staggering about it all: a brazen modernity, which was not lost on the first excavators of the site, who didn’t hesitate to designate certain areas ‘high streets’, ‘police barracks’ and so on (though much of this initial interpretation, as it turned out, was fantasy). Most of the city consists of the brick-built houses of the Lower Town, with its grid-like arrangement of streets, long boulevards and sophisticated drainage and sanitation systems (terracotta sewage pipes, private and public toilets and bathrooms were ubiquitous). Above these surprisingly comfortable arrangements loomed the Upper Citadel, a raised civic centre, also known (for reasons we’ll explain) as the Mound of the Great Bath. Though both parts of the city stood on massive artificial foundations of heaped earth, lifting them above the floodplain, the Upper Citadel was also encased in a wall of baked bricks made to standard dimensions which extended all the way round it, affording further protection when the Indus broke its banks.85

In the wider ambit of Indus civilization, there is only one rival to Mohenjo-daro: the site of Harappa (whence the alternative term ‘Harappan civilization’). Of similar magnitude, it lies about 370 miles upstream on the Ravi River, a tributary of the Indus. Many other sites of the same date and cultural family exist, ranging from large towns to hamlets. They extend over most of the area of modern-day Pakistan, and well beyond the floodplain of the Indus, into northern India. For instance, perched on an island amid the salt flats of the Great Rann of Kutch lie the striking remains of Dholavira, a town equipped with over fifteen brick-built reservoirs to capture rainwater and run-off from local streams. The Indus civilization had colonial outposts as far as the Oxus River in northern Afghanistan, where the site of Shortugai presents a miniature replica of its urban mother-culture: ideally placed to tap the rich mineral sources of the Central Asian highlands (lapis, tin and other gemstones and metals). Such materials were prized by lowland artisans and their commercial partners as far away as Iran, Arabia and Mesopotamia. At Lothal, on Gujarat’s Gulf of Khambhat, lie remains of a well-appointed port town facing the Arabian Sea, presumably built by Indus engineers to service maritime trade.86 The Indus civilization had its own script, which appeared and vanished together with its cities. It has not been deciphered. What survives to us are mainly short captions, stamped or incised on storage jars, copper tools and the remnants of a lonely piece of street signage from Dholavira. Short inscriptions also feature on tiny stone amulets, captioning pictorial vignettes or miniature animal figures, carved with striking precision. Most of these are realistic depictions of water buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, tiger and other local fauna, but they also include fantastic beasts, most often unicorns. Debate surrounds the amulets’ function: were they worn as personal identifiers, for passage through the city’s gated quarters and walled compounds, or perhaps to gain entry to ceremonial occasions? Or were they used for administration, to impress identifying signs on commodities passing among unknown parties: a Bronze Age origin of product-branding? Could they be all of these things?87

Aside from our inability to make sense of the Indus script, there are many puzzling aspects of Harappa and Mohenjo- daro. Both were excavated in the early twentieth century, when archaeology was a large-scale and broad-brush affair, with sometimes thousands of workers digging simultaneously. Rapid work on this scale produced striking spatial exposures of street plans, residential neighbourhoods and entire ceremonial precincts. But it largely neglected to chart the site’s development over time, a process that can only be disentangled with more careful methods. For instance, early excavators recorded just the baked-brick foundations of buildings. The superstructures were of softer mud-brick, often missed or unwittingly destroyed in the course of rapid digging; while the upper storeys of large civic structures were originally of fine timber, rotted or removed for reuse in antiquity. What seems in plan to be a single phase of urban construction is, in reality, a false composite made up of different elements from various periods of the city’s history – a city inhabited for over 500 years.88

All of which leaves us with plenty of known unknowns, including the city’s size or population (recent estimates suggest up to 40,000 residents, but really we can only guess).89 It’s not even clear where to draw the city boundaries. Some scholars include only the immediately visible areas of the planned Lower Town and the Upper Citadel as part of the city proper, yielding a total area of 100 hectares. Others note scattered evidence for the city’s extension over a far greater area, maybe three times this size – we’d have to call them ‘Lower, Lower Towns’ – long since submerged by floodplain soils: a poignant illustration of that conspiracy between nature and culture which so often makes us forget that shanty dwellers even exist.

But it’s this last point that leads us in more promising directions. Despite all its problems, Mohenjo-daro and its sister sites in the Punjab do offer some insights into the nature of civic life in the first cities of South Asia, and into the wider question that we posed at the start of this chapter: is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies?

Let’s consider, for a moment, what archaeology tells us about wealth distribution at Mohenjo-daro. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no concentration of material wealth on the Upper Citadel. Quite the opposite, in fact. Metals, gemstones and worked shell – for example – were widely available to households of the Lower Town; archaeologists have recovered such goods from caches beneath house floors, and bundles of them are scattered over every quarter of the site.90 The same goes for little terracotta figures of people wearing bangles, diadems and other flashy personal adornment. Not so the Upper Citadel. Writing, and also standard weights and measures, were also widely distributed across the Lower Town; so too evidence for craft occupations and industries from metalworking and potting to the manufacture of beads. All flourished down there, in the Lower Town, but are absent from the city’s Upper Citadel, where the main civic structures stood.91 Objects made for personal display had little place, it seems, in the most elevated quarters of the city. Instead, what defines the Upper Citadel are buildings like the Great Bath – a large sunken pool measuring roughly forty feet long and over six feet deep, lined with carefully executed brickwork, sealed with plaster and bitumen and entered on either side via steps with timber treads – all constructed to the finest architectural standards, yet unmarked by monuments dedicated to particular rulers, or indeed any other signs of personal aggrandizement.

Because of its lack of royal sculpture, or indeed other forms of monumental depiction, the Indus valley has been termed a ‘faceless civilization’.92 At Mohenjo-daro, it seems, the focus of civic life was not a palace or cenotaph, but a public facility for purifying the body. Brick-made bathing floors and platforms also were a standard fixture in most dwellings of the Lower Town. Citizens seem to have been familiar with very specific notions of cleanliness, with daily ablutions apparently forming part of their domestic routine. The Great Bath was, at one level, an outsized version of these residential washing facilities. On another level, though, life on the Upper Citadel seems to negate that of the Lower Town.

So long as the Great Bath was in use – and it was for some centuries – we find no evidence of industrial activities nearby. The narrowing lanes on the acropolis effectively prevented the use of ox-drawn carts and similar commercial traffic. Here, it was the Bath itself – and the act of bathing – that became the focus of social life and labour. Barracks and storerooms adjacent to the Bath housed a staff (whether in attached or rotating service, we cannot know) and their essential supplies. The Upper Citadel was a special sort of ‘city within the city’, in which ordinary principles of household organization went into reverse.93

All this is redolent of the inequality of the caste system, with its hierarchical division of social functions, organized on an ascending scale of purity.94 But the earliest recorded reference to caste in South Asia comes only 1,000 years later, in the Rig Veda – an anthology of sacrificial hymns, first committed to writing around 1200 BC. The system, as described in later Sanskrit epics, consisted of four hereditary ranks or varnas: priests (brahmins), warriors or nobles (kshatriyas), farmers and traders (vaishyas) and labourers (shudras); and also those so lowly as to be excluded from the varnas entirely. The very top ranks belong to world-renouncers, whose abstention from trappings of personal status raises them to a higher spiritual plane. Commerce, industry and status rivalries may all thrive, but the wealth, power or prosperity being fought over is always seen as of lesser value – in the great scheme of things – than the purity of priestly caste.

The varna system is about as ‘unequal’ as any social system can possibly be, yet where one ranks within it has less to do with how many material goods one can pile up or lay claim to than with one’s relation to certain (polluting) substances – physical dirt and waste, but also bodily matter linked to birth, death and menstruation – and the people who handle them. All this creates serious problems for any contemporary scholar seeking to apply Gini coefficients or any other property-based measure of ‘inequality’ to the society in question. On the other hand, and despite the great gaps in time between our sources, it might allow us to make sense of some of Mohenjo-daro’s otherwise puzzling features, such as the fact that those residential buildings most closely resembling palaces are not located on the Upper Citadel but crammed into the streets of the Lower Town – that bit closer to the mud, sewage pipes and paddy fields, where such jostling for worldly status seems to have properly belonged.95

Clearly, we can’t just project the social world evoked in Sanskrit literature indiscriminately on to the much earlier Indus civilization. If the first South Asian cities were indeed organized on caste-like principles, then we would immediately have to acknowledge a major difference from the system of ranks described over a millennium later in Sanskrit texts, where second-highest status (just below brahmins) is reserved for the warrior caste known as kshatriyas. In the Bronze Age Indus valley there is no evidence of anything like a kshatriya class of warrior-nobles, nor of the kind of aggrandizing behaviour associated with such groups in later epic tales such as the Mahabharata or Ramayana. Even the largest cities, like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, yield no evidence of spectacular sacrifices or feasts, no pictorial narratives of military prowess or celebrations of famous deeds, no sign of tournaments in which anyone vied over titles and treasures, no aristocratic burials. And if such things were going on in the Indus cities at the time, there would be ways to know.

Indus civilization wasn’t some kind of commercial or spiritual arcadia; nor was it an entirely peaceful society.96 But neither does it contain any evidence for charismatic authority figures: war leaders, lawgivers and the like. A small, cloaked sculpture made of yellow limestone from Mohenjo-daro, known in the literature as the ‘priest-king’, is often presented as such. But, in fact, there’s no particular reason to believe the figure really is a priest-king or an authority figure of any sort. It’s simply a limestone image of an urbane Bronze Age man with a beard. The fact that past generations of scholars have insisted on referring to him as ‘priest-king’ is testimony more to their own assumptions about what they think must have been happening in early Asian cities than anything the evidence implies.

Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley. Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense? If the Upper Citadel at Mohenjo-daro really was dominated by some sort of ascetic order, literally ‘higher’ than everyone else, and the area around the citadel by wealthy merchants, then there was a clear hierarchy between groups. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization, or that ascetics and merchants had a greater say than anyone else when it came to matters of day-to-day governance.

Now, you might at this point be objecting: ‘well, yes, technically that may be true, but honestly, what’s the chance that they weren’t hierarchical, or that the pure or the wealthy did not have greater say in running the city’s affairs?’ In fact, it seems very difficult for most of us even to imagine how self-conscious egalitarianism on a large scale would work. But this again simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together (and, by implication, that something called ‘democracy’ emerges only much later, as a conceptual breakthrough – and most likely just once, in ancient Greece).

Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.97 We could speculate about where this habit of thought comes from, but it wouldn’t help us to decide if the everyday governance of early Indus cities could have proceeded on egalitarian lines, alongside the existence of ascetic social orders. It is more useful, we suggest, to level the interpretive playing field by asking if there are cases of such things happening in later, better-documented periods of South Asian history.

In fact, such cases are not difficult to find. Consider the social milieu from which Buddhist monasteries, or sangha, arose. The word sangha was actually first used for the popular assemblies that governed many South Asian cities in the Buddha’s lifetime – roughly the fifth century BC – and early Buddhist texts insist that the Buddha was himself inspired by the example of these republics, and in particular the importance they accorded to convening full and frequent public assemblies. Early Buddhist sangha were meticulous in their demands for all monks to gather together in order to reach unanimous decisions on matters of general concern, resorting to majority vote only when consensus broke down.98 All this remains true of sangha to this day. Over the course of time, Buddhist monasteries have varied a great deal in governance – many have been extremely hierarchical in practice. But the important thing here is that even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe or Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote); that these forms of governance were based on an ideal of equality; and that there were entire cities governed in what was seen to be exactly the same way.99

We might go further still and ask: are there any known examples of societies with formal caste hierarchies, in which practical governance nonetheless takes place on egalitarian lines? It may seem paradoxical but the answer, again, is yes: there is plenty of evidence for such arrangements, some of which continue to this day. Perhaps best documented is the seka system on the island of Bali, whose population adopted Hinduism in the Middle Ages. Balinese are not only divided by caste: their society is conceived as a total hierarchy in which not just every group but every individual knows (or at least, should know) their exact position in relation to everyone else. In principle, then, there are no equals, and most Balinese would argue that in the greater cosmic scheme of things, this must always be so.

At the same time, however, practical affairs such as the management of communities, temples and agricultural life are organized according to the seka system, in which everyone is expected to participate on equal terms and come to decisions by consensus. For instance, if a neighbourhood association meets to discuss repairing the roofs of public buildings, or what to serve for food during an upcoming dance contest, those who consider themselves particularly high and mighty, offended by the prospect of having to sit in a circle on the ground with lowly neighbours, may choose not to attend; but in that case they are obliged to pay fines for non-attendance – fines which are then used to pay for the feast or the repairs.100 We currently have no way of knowing if such a system prevailed in the Indus valley over 4,000 years ago. The example merely serves to underscore that there is no necessary correspondence between overarching concepts of social hierarchy and the practical mechanics of local governance.

The same is, incidentally, true of kingdoms and empires. One very common theory held that these tended to first appear in river valleys, because agriculture there involved the maintenance of complex irrigation systems, which in turn required some form of administrative co-ordination and control. Bali again provides the perfect counter- example. For most of its history Bali was divided into a series of kingdoms, endlessly squabbling over this or that. It is also famous as a rather small volcanic island which manages to support one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture. Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of ‘water-temples’, through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.101

  1. Recent work attributes the eventual decline of the Indus civilization to changes in the flood regime of the major river systems, prompted by alterations in the monsoon cycle. This is most evident in the drying-up of the Ghaggar-Hakra, once a major course of the Indus, and a shift of human settlement to more easily watered areas where the Indus meets the rivers of Punjab, or to parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain which still fell within the catchment of the monsoon belt; Giosan et al. 2012.
  2. For a review of the debates see Green (2020), who develops an argument that the Indus civilization was a case of egalitarian cities, but along rather different lines to our own.
  3. For general overviews of the Indus civilization, and further description of the major sites, see Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 2002; Ratnagar 2016.
  4. For an overview of the Indus valley’s far-flung commercial and cultural contacts in the Bronze Age see Ratnagar 2004; Wright 2010.
  5. For the Indus script in general see Possehl 1996; for the Dholavira street-sign, Subramanian 2010; and for the function of Indus seals, Frenez 2018.
  6. See Jansen 1993.
  7. Wright 2010: 107-10.
  8. See Rissman 1988.
  9. Kenoyer 1992; H. M.-L. Miller 2000; Vidale 2000.
  10. ‘The Indus Civilization is something of a faceless sociocultural system. Individuals, even prominent ones, do not readily emerge from the archaeological record, as they do in Mesopotamia and Dynastic Egypt, for example. There are no clear signs of kingship in the form of sculpture or palaces. There is no evidence for a state bureaucracy or the other trappings of “stateness”.’ (Possehl 2002: 6)
  11. Daniel Miller’s (1985) perceptive discussion of these points remains important.
  12. As discussed by, among others, Lamberg-Karlovsky 1999. It is sometimes objected that viewing the Bronze Age civilization of the Indus valley through the lens of caste means painting an artificially ‘timeless’ picture of South Asian societies, and thus slipping into ‘orientalist’ tropes, because the earliest written mention of the caste system and its basic social distinctions or varnas occurs only around a millennium later, in the hymns of the Rig Veda. In many ways, it’s a puzzling – and to some extent self-defeating – objection, because it only makes sense if one assumes that a social system based on caste principles cannot itself evolve, in the same way that, say, class or feudal systems undergo important structural transformations over time. There are, certainly, those who have explicitly taken this position (most famously, Dumont 1972). Obviously, however, that is not the position we are taking here; nor do we see any continuity in this context between caste, language and racial identity (another false equation, which has hampered these kinds of discussions in the past).
  13. On this point see Vidale’s important (2010) reassessment of Mohenjo-daro and its archaeological record.
  14. The general scarcity of weapons from Harappan sites remains striking; but as Cork (2005) points out, in other Bronze Age civilizations (e.g. Egypt, China, Mesopotamia) weaponry tends to be found in burials rather than settlements; so – he reasons – the visibility of weapons and warfare in the Indus valley may be greatly reduced by an overall lack of funerary remains. As he also points out, though, there is no evidence that weapons were used as symbols of authority (by contrast with Mesopotamia, for instance) or in any way formed ‘a significant part of elite identity’ in the Indus civilization. What is definitely absent is the glorification of weapons and the kind of people who employ them.
  15. Obviously, it’s partly just the desire to preserve the credit for having ‘invented’ democracy for something called ‘the West’. Part of the explanation might also lie in the fact that academia itself is organized in an extremely hierarchical fashion, and most scholars therefore have little or no experience of making democratic decisions themselves, and find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so as a result.
  16. Gombrich 1988: 49-50, 110 ff. See also Muhlberger and Paine 1996: 35-6.
  17. As with all such cases, just about everything on the topic of early Indian ‘democracy’ is contested. The earliest literary sources, the Vedas, assume a society that’s entirely rural, and that monarchy is the only possible form of government – though some Indian scholars detect traces of earlier democratic institutions (Sharma 1968); however, by the time of Buddha in the fifth century BC the Ganges valley was home to a host of city-states, small republics and confederations, many of which (the gana-sangha) appear to have been governed by assemblies made up of all male members of the warrior caste. Greek travellers like Megasthenes were perfectly willing to describe them as democracies, since Greek democracies were basically the same thing, but contemporary scholars debate how democratic they really were. The entire discussion seems to be premised on the assumption that ‘democracy’ was some sort of remarkable historical breakthrough, rather than a habit of self-governance that would have been available in any historical period (see, for example, Sharan 1983; Thapar 1984; our thanks to Matthew Milligan for guiding us to relevant source material, although he bears no responsibility for the use we’ve made of it).
  18. On the seka principle see Geertz and Geertz 1978; Warren 1993.
  19. Lansing 1991.

Bibliography

Cork, Edward. 2005. ‘Peaceful Harappans? Reviewing the evidence for the absence of warfare in the Indus Civilization of north-west India and Pakistan (c.2500- 1900 BC).’ Antiquity 79 (304): 411-23.

Dumont, Louis. 1972. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Frenez, Dennys. 2018. ‘Private person or public persona? Use and significance of standard Indus seals as markers of formal socio-economic identities.’ In D. Frenez et al. (eds), Walking with the Unicorn: Social Organization and Material Culture in Ancient South Asia. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 166-93.

Geertz, Hildred and Clifford Geertz. 1978. Kinship in Bali. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Giosan, Liviu et al. 2012. ‘fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization.’ PNAS: E1688-E1694. Gombrich, Richard F. 1988. Theravāda Buddhism. A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo. London and New York: Routledge. Green, Adam S. 2020. ‘Killing the priest-king: addressing egalitarianism in the Indus civilization.’ Journal of Archaeological Research.

Jansen, Michael. 1993. ‘Mohenjo-daro, type site of the earliest urbanization process in South Asia; ten years of research at Mohenjo-daro Pakistan and an attempt at a synopsis.’ In A. Parpola and P. Koskikallio (eds), South Asian Archaeology. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, pp. 263-80.

Kenoyer, J. M. 1992. ‘Harappan craft specialization and the question of urban segregation and stratification.’ The Eastern Anthropologist 45 (1-2): 39-54.
–. 1998. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley. Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Lamberg-Karlovsky 1999

Lansing, J. Stephen. 1991. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscapes of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Miller, Daniel. 1985. ‘Ideology and the Harappan civilization.’ Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 4: 34-71.

Miller, Heather. M. L. 2000. ‘Reassessing the urban structure of Harappa: evidence from craft production distribution.’ South Asian Archaeology (1997), pp. 207- 47.

Muhlberger, Steven and Phil Pain. 1996. ‘Democracy’s place in world history.’ Journal of World History 4 (1): 23- 45.

Possehl, G. L. 1996. Indus Age: The Writing System. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
–. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Ratnagar, Shereen. 2004. Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
–. 2016. Harappan Archaeology: Early State Perspectives. Delhi: Primus Books.

Rissman, Paul. 1988. ‘Public displays and private values: a guide to buried wealth in Harappan archaeology.’ World Archaeology 20: 209-28.

Sharan, M. K. 1983. ‘Origin of republics in India with special reference to the Yaudheya tribe.’ In B. N. Mukherjee et al. (eds), Sri Dinesacandrika – Studies in Indology. Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, pp. 241-52.

Subramanian T. S. 2010. ‘The rise and fall of a Harappan city.’ Frontline 27 (12).

Thapar, Romila. 1984. From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium BC in the Ganga Valley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Warren, Carol. 1993. Adat and Dinas: Balinese Communities in the Indonesian State. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.

Wright, Rita P. 2010. The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Vidale, Massimo. 2000. The Archaeology of Indus Crafts: Indus Crafts-people and Why We Study Them. Rome: IsIAO.
–. 2010. ‘Aspects of palace life at Mohenjo-Daro.’ South Asian Studies 26 (1): 59-76.



back to 3 Seconds To Midnight | JFK | ratville times | rat haus | Index | Search | tree