Book review: John Marshall and Harappa

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Book review: John Marshall and Harappa ​

By Khaled Ahmed


Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilisation was Discovered
by Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher: Permanent Black, Delhi, 2005
Pp354; Price Rs 1500
Available in bookstores in Pakistan

John Marshall was called in to head the Archaeological Survey of India by Lord Curzon, the first viceroy to think about India’s ancient past. He held the job from 1902 to 1928, presiding over almost every great archaeological discovery in the country. The book tells a fascinatingly complex tale of how Marshall tackled the job from viceroy to viceroy whose declining interest in his mission depressed him while the Indians remained strangely unmoved by his achievements. Author Lahiri writes well and is able to fill with new research all the nooks and crannies of the big story neglected so far. Skipping is not easy while reading the book.

The centrepiece is Harappa, the dig in Punjab from where seals were first discovered and taken away in the early 1900s causing experts like Marshall to date the city no further in the past than 1000 BC. But as the story unfolds it tells us about Marshall’s more attractive digressions in Sanchi in Bhopal, Pataliputra in Patna, Bihar, Kalibangan in Rajputana, Nal in Balochistan and Mohenjodaro in Sindh. How he managed to carry out work on all these locations with the small budget he had — getting smaller with each new viceroy — is the highlight of the book. The Begum of Bhopal paid for the Sanchi dig; Ratan Tata paid for Pataliputra.

John Hubert Marshall (1876-1958) was a Cambridge man trained in archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean region and was lucky to come to the notice of the new viceroy, Lord Curzon. He was to have the longest tenure at the head of the archaeology department in India, discovering almost all the sites from Harappa to Taxila that later received additional profile through comparative studies. Before him, Alexander Cunningham, the first director-general of the Survey in India, had obtained seals and coins — the coins were never found — from Harappa from odd travellers. He was inclined to connect them with the Buddhist legacy he had known, just as Marshall was inclined to connect them to the Mediterranean region.

Harappa was a greatly vandalised site, mostly for the bricks that the villagers could use in their buildings. Marshall always thought of doing a thorough job on it but it attracted him less than the other digs he had initiated through his deputies, including Mohenjodaro in Sindh. He never visited the site till it had become famous following the publication of his article on it in London Illustrated News when other scholars immediately connected the seals to the ones discovered in Sumer, and pushed back its antiquity from 1000 BC to 3000 BC. He then wrote in an Indian newspaper thinking it would benefit his work by arousing positive ‘Indian nationalist sentiments’; only to find himself accused rudely of having neglected the Harappa site.

Harappa gave its name to the proto-Dravidian ‘civilisation’ that existed in the region containing Kalibangan and Mohenjodaro too. The seals with certain animal engravings and a strange un-deciphered writing were the main connecting phenomenon, Harappa contributing merely seals and potsherds. All the discovered objects were carried to Simla where Marshall and his museum were headquartered, which accounts for many of the seals including the famous dancing girl of Mohenjodaro with frontal nudity being permanently placed in museums outside Pakistan. Just as well because Islamic Pakistan would have been embarrassed just as it was under General Zia when rock-engraved images of markhor in the Northern Areas were discovered with their penis showing prominently. Zia ordered Professor Dani to remove the offending organ from the memorabilia he had prepared for a conference on the subject.

In 1924, when Marshall put Harappa on the archaeological map, the Indian government was giving him Rs12,000 for ‘digging purposes’ for the whole of India and Burma; this sum was enhanced after the great Harappa discovery by Rs 80,000. When Marshall’s men wanted to dig at Nal in Balochistan they had to give up because the local nomads were unwilling to work for them, and they didn’t have money enough to bring the diggers from other provinces.

Marshall’s assistants have to be mentioned because he himself didn’t go to the digs. Daya Ram Sahini, an expert on ancient Sanskrit, did excavation in 1921 and rendered its first account under the Survey. Rakhaldas Banerji was another famous epigraphist, rated highly by Marshall as a potential ‘reader’ of the Harappa script, worked on the project. There was Madho Sarup Vats too who dug at Mohenjodaro and first reported that it was an extension of the Harappa culture. The book also contains the story of Luigi Pio Tessitory, the incredible Italian linguist, who explored the quiz of Kalibangan by excavating Harappan seals from there, and lies buried in Bikaner today.

The Harappan civilisation has remained mute because the inscription on the seals could not be deciphered. On the other hand the Sumerian civilisation that Harappan civilisation communicated with was fairly easily connected with history through a cuneiform script, and there were Biblical references to lean on. Efforts made to decipher the seals have not succeeded except that Finnish scholars have pointed to a proto-Dravidian Tamil connection. Today Mohenjodaro and Harappa are on the Pakistani map. Out of the two, Mohenjodaro has attracted many visitors and could be a major tourist attraction. Islamisation of Pakistan has taken Pakistanis away from this fascinating site. Harappa has never been attractive. Today both the sites are under threat from state ideology and sheer neglect. *

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan

 

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The venom of Indo-Pak media war
by Khaled Ahmed

Tracking the Media: Interpretations of Mass Media Discourses in India and Pakistan;

By Subarno Chattarji; Routledge 2008; Pp302; Price Rs 695; Available in bookstores in Pakistan.

We are familiar with Pakistan TV’s regular Kashmir programme showing clips of Indian atrocities in ‘Held Kashmir’ and the ‘dhong’ or make-believe elections held there while Pakistan lives under military rule, without explaining why there is such a high turnout of Kashmiri voters. But we haven’t really sat down and analysed the discourse of the Indo-Pak media about each other’s country. Author Chattarji examines the press on both sides to see if there is a pattern.

The book quickly latches on to conflict as the theme most amenable to media distortion. It is during times of war or threat of war that the media wakes up from its almost instinctive observance of the rule of objectivity and goes into contortions. If the wars are covered with a slant, periods of tensions are equally seen with special nationalist goggles. This is not the finest hour of the journalists in India and Pakistan. But this is the moment when the journalist becomes heady with the feedback of identity he gets from his end-feeders. A cartoon would depict an anchor sitting on a bidet while his audience has its mouth attached to the ejection pipe.

Chattarji focuses on Kargil. Both sides lied through their teeth. But the Pakistani media — TV was state-owned, the newspapers were spoon-fed — took a fall after Kargil was forsworn by the Nawaz Sharif government, and Pakistan had to finger the pie plastered on its face. India was on its nationalist upswing. And the moment of nationalism never leads to anything good, as the world witnessed in the negative transformation of America after 9/11. There are not many deflators of this kind of media frenzy in Pakistan but there are some in India.

One definitely is Ashish Nandy, who constantly theorises on ‘hatred of the neighbour’ and hatred aroused by religion. He says, ‘When proximity sours, it releases strange demons’. Chattarji says: “The manifestation of the barbaric was preceded and followed in Gujarat by the violence of exclusion and hate speech. Such exclusionary trends take various forms, and post-riots scenarios such as the one in Gujarat are one of them. It is the way in which the languages of patriotism, the national self, and the enemy, within and without, begin to permeate everyday existence that extends the boundaries and temporal locations of conflict”. (p.xxix)

Conflict and strife is the pabulum of the media. And if it allows the journalist to feel the rare warmth of a popular hug of nationalism he can hardly resist the suspiciously political urge to pursue charisma. He becomes the force multiplier of the national effort to confront and defeat the enemy and reduces his own profession to prostitution by ignoring signs of reversal that appear to him clearly at the outset. War is sensation and has its ups and downs that lend themselves to reporting; peace is an unexciting non-event and has no ebb and flow like war. It’s not worth the attention of the heroic journalist.

Indian nationalism was brushed up frequently by the Indian press through its coverage of Pakistan’s recurrent domestic crisis. Journalists and reporters waggled their fingers at Pakistan reminding it of the dismemberment of 1971 and it could break up once again unless it behaved. Bloggers quantified the level of indoctrination the media had unloaded on the reading public. One blogger named Ramanand wrote: ‘Nawab Bugti Singh was a Hindu and he has been eliminated because of his religion. This is not fair and not acceptable to any Hindus in India’.

Chattarji goes to Nawa-e-Waqt to find the orthodox-nationalist coverage of events in Kashmir and India in general, studded with words like ‘martyrs’ and ‘mujahideen’ doing ‘jihad’ against the background of atrocities committed as a habit by the Indian army. It published foreign secretary’s visit to New Delhi to pursue the peace talks right next to the article saying ‘Kashmir can only be liberated through jihad’. Of course, Nawa-e-Waqt has its counterparts in India, like Dainik Jagran, recommending another contrived break-up of Pakistan to wean it from mischief.

Of course there are the never-ending intelligence-fed stories that predict Indian terrorist attacks during important foreign visits and important festivals when Muslims can be accused of killing each other after blasts. The biggest martyrs to this kind of journalism are the bilateral talks that don’t produce quick results in favour of Pakistan, and the CBMs that are actually meant to solve nothing but put the big issue on the backburner forever. The author recalls that Edward Said had described this kind of creation of discourse on both sides as the creation of ‘communities of interpretation’.

The book recognises the difference of discourse in English and Hindi-Urdu. It is such a pity that no reconciliation is possible in the mother tongue of those involved in conflict while it is becoming possible gradually in the English language. If reconciliation is achieved by ignoring the venom secreted by Hindi and Urdu, will it be permanent or merely skin-deep, as if English was our language of posturing? India and Pakistan look at each other through ‘bad news’ filtered through a media intent on focusing on things going dramatically wrong. They don’t need real but unexciting information about each other because they have decided the process of knowing is concluded and is flagged with final judgements on everything.

This book is pioneering in its scope. More of this sort of examination is needed to stem the upsurge of partisan disease attacking the media in South Asia. The perverse slogan is: save the country by sacrificing the ethic and morality of the media. In the end, not even the country you are doing the dirty work for is saved