The end, or a new beginning?

Before the ending, look at what the Harappans left behind. Among the everyday objects: a bronze mirror and a terracotta (baked clay) pot from Dholavira, stone weights, a bronze chisel, a gamesboard cut into a stone about 25 cm long, and a terracotta whistle about 4 cm long from Karanpura in Rajasthan. The Harappans designed many games and toys to amuse both adults and children!

Among the cultural and symbolic objects:

• a statuette often called the 'Priest King' (though nobody knows whose figure it is);
• a seal showing a swastika;
• the Pashupati Seal, showing a three-faced god seated on a raised platform, surrounded by powerful animals;
• the 'Dancing Girl', a bronze figurine from Mohenjo-daro, 10.8 cm high;
• a terracotta figure seated in a 'namaste';
• a design on a pot from Lothal that seems to tell the story of the thirsty crow, who finds a clever way to drink the water at the bottom of a pot.

The book asks how such a story could be remembered for more than 4,000 years, and points out that the Dancing Girl's bangles covering a whole arm are still worn in parts of Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Around 1900 BCE, this Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation, for all its achievements, began to fall apart. The cities were abandoned one by one. Those who stayed took up a village way of life in the changed environment; it seems the old government no longer existed. Slowly the Harappans spread out into hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small villages. Why villages? Because village life gives easier access to food and water than city life; cities always depended on villages for food, and sometimes water.

What caused the decline? Long ago people thought war or invasion destroyed the cities, but there is no trace of war or invasion. In fact the Harappans do not seem to have kept any army or weapons of war; as far as the evidence goes, it was a fairly peaceful civilisation.

Two causes are now agreed on. First, a change in climate that affected much of the world from 2200 BCE, bringing less rain and a drier period; that would have made farming harder and cut the food reaching the cities. Second, the Sarasvatī River dried up in its central basin, and cities on it, such as Kalibangan and Banawali, were suddenly abandoned. There may have been other causes, but these two remind us how much our well-being depends on climate and the environment.

Although the cities disappeared, much of the Harappan culture and technology survived and was passed on to the next stage of Indian civilisation. That is why the chapter asks: the end, or a new beginning?