The landscape is magical. It shimmers with myriad crystals embossed with scrub-covered hillocks. No one also knows exactly how, or why, this happened. Archaeologists speculate that it was not always so. Uncovering the past with their picks, shovels and delicate brushes, they see a time when the Rann held a superbly sophisticated civilisation.
On a hillock called Dholavira, rising out of the glittering plains, they have uncovered a geometrically planned city, sustained on harvested rainwater. It also had an underground sewerage system, a sports arena, zonal planning and an export-oriented industry. It drew its raw materials from as far away as the distant Dravidian lands of our sub-continent. Its potters, smelters and skilled artisans transformed these into household artefacts, toys and jewellery, and exported them as far away as Sumeria. While their furnaces belched smoke from the wood of the felled forests that surrounded them, their farmers tilled the cleared land to feed their burgeoning population.
And then, seemingly as suddenly as it had emerged, the entire civilisation snuffed out, leaving nothing but intriguing ruins and the world’s first street-sign behind. But, apparently, it was not so sudden.
One morning in March, we stood under a scraggy thorn tree and looked across a stretch of arid land pocked with rodent burrows. Beyond rose the ancient remains of the 4,600-year-old industrial complex of Dholavira. Massive brick walls hunched in receding terraces to an exclusive citadel high above. Reservoirs with wedge-shaped, water-tight bricks encircled the base of the city, conserving the scanty rainfall, providing enough water for the entire population. The four-and-a-half-millennium-old reservoirs are dry now, but a self-appointed guide said, “This is why it was called ‘Dholavira’, the White Brother. Our women refer to wells as ‘brothers’ because they help them survive in this dry land. We get only 300 to 400 mm of rain, and it all comes over a very short period, filling the nullahs. Then the land dries up.”
He led us across the arid landscape, the dust puffing under our feet. We stopped at one of the two shallow ravines that become raging torrents when it rains in the distant hills. Using check dams, the mysterious Dholavirans had diverted the water of the torrents into enormous reservoirs. Those deep, wide tanks were served by flights of steps cut into their walls. In our mind’s eye we saw long lines of slim women walking up and down the steps of the reservoirs, balancing pots of water on their heads.
But who were these urban people? All we know is that they had created a city-civilisation long before the cattle-herding, Aryan-speaking people had established their hegemony over North India.
As the mystery unfolds...
We clambered up to the citadel. Clearly, this is where the leaders lived, sequestered by thick stone walls and gates. It was a ‘gated community’. It struck us that Dholaviran society was a technocracy, and the world’s first street sign had stood here, permitting the entry of hand-pulled hawkers’ carts carrying fresh supplies, but prohibiting heavier animal-drawn vehicles.
The citadel’s privileged technocrats oversaw the craft units working on the next level. There, skilled artisans crafted jewellery out of seashells and semi-precious stones, and also carved seals: the exclusive trademarks of Dholavirans. Then, from the smoke-fogged forges of the lower town came copper to be fashioned into ornaments and implements. The technicians probably also supervised the potters of the lower town who moulded the small votive figurines for family shrines and crafted jars and other pottery.
We stepped down past pillars into the enormous stadium. Covering 193 m by 49 m, it had tiered seating all around. This unique place could hold 10,000 people, with special seating for VIPs. In all likelihood, one of the activities staged here was the dangerous skill of bull-leaping where agile, naked young women grabbed the horns of a bull and somersaulted over the enraged animal. It was an extreme sport popular in parts of the Mediterranean at that time.
Fitness and hygiene seemed to be an obsession with the people of Dholavira. Every house had a bathroom with its waste draining into a cesspit. This was a tightly controlled civic society. The Middle Town was the residential area of the middle-class traders: the solid, stolid burghers of most stable societies. The stone foundations of their houses showed dwellings of regimented similarity set in streets laid out in a disciplined grid pattern. The uniform sizes of bricks and dressed stones, the unerring accuracy of weights and measures, the design of edge-stones at the angles of walls, all these were exactly the same everywhere in Dholavira. This enforced conformity could have led, eventually, to its inevitable downfall.
It was only in the Lower Town that the civic planners seemed to have allowed a relaxation from their rigid formality. This was the factory and labour-lines area. Here, the brick kilns and forges had stood, belching out smoke that the winds off the Rann had carried away from the elite areas of Dholavira. The kilns and the forges had had a voracious appetite for wood, and so the forests had been felled. With the loss of green cover, the bay had silted up; rising levels of saline water had destroyed the fields. Sadly, long generations of conformity had robbed them of their ability to think out of the box. This was about the time, in 2,000 BC, that the great markets of Sumeria began to decline because of political upheavals. When their export markets had withered away, the impoverished urbanites of Dholavira had abandoned their city.
Smart folks
We had still not discovered who these Dholavirans were. Some archaeologists believe that they were seafaring urban immigrants who had set up their sophisticated city in what was, then, a rural area. Here, they had found a people ‘who were unfamiliar with advanced technology of pottery making, use of copper and other attributes of the civilised world.’ They had chosen this location because it was central to their sources of raw materials like shells, crystals, glass sand, coloured clays and minerals, and the availability of cheap labour. Their main overseas market was the advanced empire of Sumeria.
The Dholavirans were probably Indians of Mediterranean stock, descendants of ancient Dravidian immigrants of the same race as the Sumerians. Because of their racial affinity, they found it as easy to establish commercial bonds with the Sumerians as the Brits did with the Americans. Sadly, their stubborn refusal to adapt, to find new products, new markets had led to the downfall of these pre-Aryan people.
Dholavira died. Dust and soil covered its ruins, shrubs spread. Rodents built their burrows in the abandoned cities. Then the Arabian Sea swept in, and out, inexorably creating the magical, crystalline, landscape of the Rann.