Read Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography for Free Online Page B

Kipling was composing poems such as
The White Man’s
     Burden
. The theory was based on the discovery of some linguistic affinities
     between European languages and Sanskrit. The date of 1500 BC was mostly arbitrary. It ignored the fact that both ancient texts and
     folk traditions have always maintained a much older timeline, but these were
     considered mythical and dismissed. To be fair, there were no known archaeological
     equivalents of Egyptian pyramids or Sumerian cities to prove an older history.
    However, new discoveries would radically
     challenge this view in the early decades of the twentieth century. When the
     Lahore–Multan railway line was being built in the late nineteenth century,
     wagon-loads of bricks were removed from old mounds to be used as ballast. The bricks
     were of exceptionally good quality and most people assumed they were of relatively
     recent origin. In the winter of 1911–12,D.R.
     Bhandarkar of the Archaeological Survey of India decided to visit one of the sites
     in Sindh called Mohenjodaro (which literally means Mound of the Dead). He came away
     unimpressed. In his view, the bricks were of a ‘modern type’ and
     the locals had told him that they were from a town that had been abandoned just two
     hundred years earlier. He could not have been more wrong. Fortunately, in the 1920s,
     Rakhal Das Banerji and Sir John Marshall of the Archaeological Survey decided to
     revisit the site. Another team led by Daya Ram Sahni began to excavate another site
     called Harappa in Punjab (both these sites are now in Pakistan). They soon realized
     that mounds of bricks scattered along the Indus Valley were the remnants of a much
     older civilization, a contemporary of the Sumerians, the Minoans and the ancient
     Egyptians. It was named the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization.
    Soon, more and more sites began to be
     discovered. The reason that the Harappan sites were ignored for so long is that they
     lack grand structures like the Pyramids of Giza that stare out at a visitor. There
     are large buildings that have been given names like ‘granary’,
     ‘assembly hall’, ‘citadel’ and
     ‘college’ but these designations are essentially arbitrary. We
     do not know what these buildings were really used for and, in most cases, we have
     little more than foundations and lower walls. There is nothing that is obviously a
     great palace or a temple. One of the few major buildings that we can definitely
     identify is the ‘Great Bath’ in Mohenjodaro but even in this
     case we do not know if the structure was used for religious rituals (as in later
     Hindu temples), a bathing pool for the royal family or some completely different
     purpose.
    Yet, the Harappan sites are remarkable
     for their attentionto urban design and active municipal
     management. At its height, the Harappan civilization was very consciously urban. A
     large city like Mohenjodaro (now in Pakistan) may have had a population of around
     40–50,000 people. Furthermore, we see meticulous town-planning in every
     detail—standardized bricks, street grids, covered sewerage systems and so
     on. Similarly, a great deal of effort was put into managing water. The solutions
     varied from city to city. Mohenjodaro alone may have had 600-700 wells. At Dholavira
     in Gujarat, water was diverted from two neighbouring streams into a series of dams
     and preserved in a complex system of reservoirs. 1 Many houses, even modest ones, have their own bathrooms and toilets connected
     to a drainage network that emptied into soak-jars and cess pits. The toilet commodes
     were made up of big pots sunk into the floor. Most interestingly, as historian
     Upinder Singh points out, the toilets came equipped with a
     ‘lota’ for washing up. 2 This must count as one of the most important and enduring of Harappan
     contributions to Indian civilization. Unfortunately, the toilet design did not
     survive quite as well as the lota.
DEALING WITH SLUMS