The Hindus (13 page)

The civilization of the Indus is not silent, but we are deaf. We cannot hear their words but can see their images.
^ap

Most of the seals, which are found throughout the Indus Valley Civilization, are engraved with a group of signs in the Indus script, or a drawing or design, or a combination of these.
¹⁶
There are well over two thousand inscriptions, using about four hundred graphemes, and many people have claimed to have deciphered them, often demonstrating truly fantastic flights of imagination, but no one has definitively cracked the code.
¹⁷
The individual messages are too short for a computer to decode, and since each seal had a distinctive combination of symbols, there are too few examples of each sequence to provide a sufficient linguistic context. The symbols that accompany a given image vary from seal to seal, so that it’s not possible to derive the meaning of the words from the meaning of the images. Many people have speculated that it is an Indo-European language, or a Dravidian language, or a Munda or “Austro-Asiatic” language
¹⁸
(supported by the plate tectonics narrative), or not a language at all.
^aq
19
The seals may well have been nothing but devices to mark property in the manner of a signet ring, a stamp of ownership, rather like a bar code,
²⁰
probably made for merchants who used them to brand their wares, signifying nothing but “This is mine.” Perhaps the writing is a form of ancient shorthand. Because they present a vivid, highly evocative set of visual symbols, but no text, these images have functioned, for scholars, like Rorschach shapes onto which each interpreter projects his or her own vision of what the hypothetical text should be and should say.
^ar
The ambiguity and subjectivity of the interpretation of visual images are yet another aspect of the shadow on the moon that is, for some, a rabbit, and for others, a man.

But the images on the seals do make a more general statement that we can decipher, particularly in the realm of flora and fauna. The vast majority of Indus signs can be directly or indirectly related to farming: Typical signs include seeds, fruits, sprouts, grain plants, pulses, trees, farm instruments (hoes, primitive plows, mortars and pestles, rakes, harvesting instruments, etc.), seasonal/celestial or astral signs, and even at times anthropomorphized plowed fields. The images, as well as other archaeological remains, tell us that the winter Indus crop was barley and wheat; the spring crop, peas and lentils; and the summer and the monsoon crops, millets, melons, dates, and fiber plants.
²¹
They also probably grew rice.
²²
They spun, wove, and dyed cotton, probably for the first time on the planet Earth, and may also have been the first to use wheeled transport.
²³
They ate meat and fish.
²⁴

Animals, both wild and tame, dominate the representations from the IVC, both on the seals, where they seem to have been drawn from nature, and on figurines, paintings on pottery, and children’s toys. These images tell us that tigers, elephants, and one-horned rhinoceroses, as well as buffalo, antelope, and crocodiles, inhabited the forests of this now almost desert region, which then had riverine long grass and open forest country, the natural habitat of tigers and rhinoceroses.
²⁵
(A rhinoceros, a buffalo, and an elephant, all on wheels, were found in a later site in northern Maharashtra, perhaps connected with Harappa.)
²⁶
There are also animal figurines of turtles, hares, monkeys, and birds, and there is a pottery model, 2.9 inches long, of an animal with a long, bushy tail, perhaps a squirrel or a mongoose.
²⁷

But it is the representations of domesticated animals, as well as the archaeological remains of such animals, that tell us most about the culture of the IVC, in particular about the much-disputed question of its relationship (or lack of relationship) with later Indian cultures such as that of the Vedic peoples. Millennia before the IVC, people in South Asia had hunted a number of animals that later, in the IVC, they bred and domesticated (and sometimes continued to hunt). Before the IVC, they had also domesticated two distinct species of cattle—the humped zebu (
Bos indicus
), with its heavy dewlaps, and a humpless relation of the
Bos primigenius
of West Asia.
²⁸
Zebu and water buffalo (
Bubalus
) were used as draft animals, and elephants (domesticated, more or less) were used for clearing and building.
²⁹
Elephants are not native to the lands found west of central India, but they might have been imported into the Indus Valley.
³⁰

They had dogs (which may already have been domesticated at Bhimbetka). Marshall, who participated in the first excavations of the site, commented on them at length:

He also noted a figure of a dog with its tongue hanging out, “a detail seldom shown in a pottery model.”
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The particular breeds of dogs depicted in small statues at the IVC include pariah dogs and, surprisingly, dachshunds.
³³

They had also domesticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. This may have been the first domestication of fowl,
^as
a major contribution to world civilization.
³⁴
Apparently they did not have, or at least think it worthwhile to depict, cats. On seals and pottery, and depicted as figurines, the favorite subject is male animals—most frequently bulls with pendulous dewlaps and big pizzles. There are also short-horned bulls,
³⁵
but in general they went in for horned males: bulls, water buffalo, rams, and others. One scene even depicts a tiger with horns.
³⁶

By contrast, they do not seem to have found female animals very interesting, and significantly, no figurines of cows have been found.
³⁷
Marshall even comments on this absence, the cow that does not moo in the night, as it were: “The cow, even if it was regarded as sacred, was for some reason, at present unexplained, not represented in plastic form or carved in stone.”
³⁸
Of course they must have
had
cows, or they couldn’t very well have had bulls (and indeed there is material evidence of cows in the IVC), but the art-historical record tells us that the Indus artists did not use cows as cultural symbols, and why should we assume, with Marshall, that they were sacred? Why, in fact, do archaeologists reach for the word “sacred” every time they find something for which they cannot determine a practical use? (This is a question to which we will return.)

The seals depict animals that have been characterized as being “noted for their physical and sexual prowess—bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, and tigers—or, as is true of snakes and crocodiles . . . widely regarded as symbols of sexuality, fertility, or longevity.”
³⁹
Of course we don’t really know how good crocodiles are in bed; our culture thinks of them (or at least their tears and smiles) as symbols of hypocrisy; why should they be symbols of sexuality, and to whom (other than, presumably, other crocodiles)? It has even been suggested that “the present untouchability of dogs could originate from their being sacred [in the IVC] and thus untouchable.”
⁴⁰
The equation of sacrality and untouchability is as unjustified as the assumption that the attitude to dogs did not change in four thousand years.

This question of symbolic valence becomes more blatant in the case of more fantastic animals, like unicorns.

The most commonly represented Indus animal, depicted on 1,156 seals and sealings out of a total of 1,755 found at Mature Harappan sites (that is, on 60 percent of all seals and sealings), is “a stocky creature unknown to zoology, with the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, from which head a single horn curls majestically upwards and then forwards.”
⁴¹
What is this animal? Is it just a two-horned animal viewed from the side or a kind of gazelle with a horn on its nose? Is it a horse with a horn? (It doesn’t have the proportions of a horse.) Or a stylized rhinoceros?
⁴²
Or is it, by analogy with its European cousin, a mythical beast? The quasi unicorn always (like other Indus animals sometimes) has a manger in front of him. The manger is sometimes said to have “religious or cultic significance,” since one seal shows an image of a unicorn being carried in procession alongside such a manger.
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Often the manger is called sacred (presumably on the basis of the sacrality of mangers in Christianity).

The unicorn lands us on the horn of a dilemma: Are the animals represented in the art of the IVC religious symbols? Though many Indus animal figurines are simply children’s toys, with little wheels on them, scholars persist in investing them with religious meanings. Some of the fossil record too has been invoked as religious testimony. The excavation, in 1929, of twenty severed human skulls “tightly packed together,” along with what the excavator interpreted as ritual vessels and the bones of sacrificed animals, has been taken as evidence that human heads were presented to a sacred tree,
⁴⁴
a scenario reminiscent of the novel
The Day of the Triffids
or the film
The Little Shop of Horrors
(“Feed me! Feed me!” cried the carnivorous plant). And why should an archaeologist have identified the image of a dog threatening a man with long, wavy hair as the hound of Yama, the god of the dead,
⁴⁵
simply because the dog appears on the burial urns at Harappa? Why can’t it just be a dog faithful in death as in life?

And why are the two figures in front of a pair of cobras “a pair of worshipers”?
⁴⁶
Why not just two, probably nervous blokes? Yet the rest of the scene does indeed suggest something other than common or garden-variety snake charming. The couple with the cobras is kneeling beside a seated figure; another human figure holds back two rearing tigers; a monster half bull and half man attacks a horned tiger. This is not a snapshot of everyday life in the IVC. Scenes and figures such as these may give us glimpses of rituals, of episodes from myth and story, yet we have “nothing to which we can refer these isolated glimpses to give them substance.”
⁴⁷

Other seals too seem to be telling a story that we cannot quite make out. One scene depicts what has been called “a three-horned deity” (but may just be a guy, or for that matter a gal, in a three-horned hat) apparently emerging from the middle of a tree, while another figure outside the tree is bent “in suppliant posture” with arms raised; a bull stands behind it, and seven girls below them.
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(This is one of a small number of scenes that occur on seals found in four different cities: Harappa, Kalibangan, Mohenjo-Daro, and Chanhujo-Daro). Another seal depicts a similar scene, this one involving a fig (pipal) tree:
^at
A nude figure with flowing hair and “a horned headdress” (or his own horns?) stands between the upright branches of a pipal tree; another figure, much like the first but seen from the side, kneels at the base of the tree; a huge goat towers over him from behind. On yet another seal a figure squats among a group of animals on his left, while on his right a tiger is looking upward at a tree in which a man is seated.
⁴⁹
Something is certainly going on here, but what? A folktale, perhaps? A ritual? These wordless scenes remind me of those contests that magazines run, inviting readers to supply the caption for a cartoon. But a lot more is at stake here than a cartoon.

THE LORD OF BEASTS

Marshall began it all, in 1931, in his magisterial three-volume publication,
Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization
, which devotes five pages of a long chapter entitled “Religion” to seal 420: “There appears at Mohenjo-Daro a male god, who is recognizable at once as a prototype of the historic Siva. . . . The lower limbs are bare and the phallus (
urdhvamedhra
) seemingly exposed, but it is possible that what appears to be the phallus is in reality the end of the waistband.”
⁵⁰
(
Urdhvamedhra
[“upward phallus”] is a Sanskrit term, like the Greek-based English euphemism “ithyphallic,” for an erect penis.) The
urdhvamedhra
-or-is-it-perhaps-just-his-waistband-or-the-knot-in-his-dhoti? has come to rival the Vedantic snake-or-is-it-perhaps-just-a-rope? as a trope for the power of illusion and imagination. The image suggested to Marshall an early form of the Hindu god Shiva, and Marshall’s suggestion was taken up by several generations of scholars. This was to have far-reaching ramifications, for if this is an image of Shiva, then an important aspect of Hinduism can be dated back far earlier than the earliest texts (the Vedas).