INTRODUCTION

History and the environment

Environment—that is a world alive and related to a living centre, the
habitat of an animal, the hunting grounds and pastures of nomads, the
fields of settled peasants. For human beings the environment is both an
objective ecological condition and a field of subjective experience. Nature
sets limits, man transgresses them with his tools and his vision. Man
progressively creates a specific environment and makes history. In this
process it is not only the limits set by nature which are transgressed but
also the limits of human experience and cognition. From the elementary
adaptation to the natural environment to the establishment of great
civilisations, the horizon of experience and the regional extension of
human relations constantly expand.
The conception of the environment changes in the course of this
evolution. Ecological conditions which may appear hostile to man at one
stage of this evolution may prove to be attractive and inviting at another
stage. The hunter and foodgatherer armed only with stone tools preferred to
live on the edge of forests near the plains or in open river valleys, areas
which were less attractive to the settled peasant who cut the trees and
reclaimed fertile soil. But initially even the peasant looked for lighter soils
until a sturdy plough and draught animals enabled him to cope with heavy
soils. At this stage the peasant could venture to open up fertile alluvial plains
and reap rich harvests of grain. If rainfall or irrigation were sufficient he
could grow that most productive but most demanding of all grains: rice.
Wherever irrigated rice was produced, plenty of people could live and great
empires could rise, but, of course, such civilisations and empires were very
much dependent on their agrarian base. A change of climate or a devastation
of this base by invaders cut off their roots and they withered away.
Indian history provides excellent examples of this evolution. Prehistoric
sites with stone tools were almost exclusively found in areas which were not
centres of the great empires of the later stages of history: the area between
Udaipur and Jaipur, the valley of the Narmada river, the eastern slopes of the
Western Ghats, the country between the rivers Krishna and Tungabhadra
INTRODUCTION
2
(Raichur Doab), the area of the east coast where the highlands are nearest
to the sea (to the north of present Madras), the rim of the Chota Nagpur
Plateau and both slopes of the mountain ranges of central India (see Map 1).
The cultivation of grain started around 7000 BC in Southern Asia,
according to recent archaeological research. This was a time of increasing
rainfall in the region which has always depended on the monsoon. Before
venturing into the open plains of the lower Indus the precursors of the
Indus civilisation experimented with cultivating alluvial lands on a small
scale in the valleys of Baluchistan. There they built stone walls
(gabarbands) which retained the sediments of the annual inundation.
Initially the archaeologists mistook these walls for dams built for
irrigation, but the holes in these walls showed that they were designed so
as to retain soil but not water. Such constructions were found near Quetta
and Las Bela and in the Bolan valley. In this valley is also the site of
Mehrgarh which will be described in detail in the next chapter.
Palaeobotanical research has indicated an increase in rainfall in this
whole region from about 3000 BC. The new methods of cultivating
alluvial soil were then adopted not only in the Indus valley, but also in the
parallel Ghaggar valley some 60 to 80 miles to the east of the Indus. This
valley was perhaps even more attractive to the early cultivators than the
Indus valley with its enormous inundations and a flow of water twice that
of the Nile. The builders of the great cities Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa
were masters of water management as the systems of urban water supply
and sewerage show. So far no village sites have been found in the Indus
valley. Perhaps due to the inundations agricultural operations were only
seasonal and no permanent villages were established. The cities may have
served as organisational centres for such seasonal operations. They were
also very important centres of trade. Harappa which was situated near the
borderline between agriculture and the pastoral zone served as a gateway
city on which the trade routes coming from the north converged. Metals
and precious stones came from the mountains and entered international
maritime trade via the big Indus cities.
Life in the Ghaggar valley may have been of a different kind. There was
a much greater density of settlements there. It was probably the heartland
of this civilisation. The site of Ganweriwala, near Derawar Fort, which has
been identified but not yet excavated, may contain the remains of a city as
big as Harappa. It is surrounded by a large cluster of smaller sites. Perhaps
here one could find the rural settlements which are conspicuous by their
absence in the Indus valley. Archaeological evidence points to a drying up
of the Ghaggar around 1700 BC which may be due to a sudden tectonic
change. The river Yamuna which now parallels the Ganga is supposed to
have flowed through the Ghaggar valley until an upheaval in the foothills
of the Himalayas made it change its course. The distance between the
present valley of the Yamuna and the ancient Ghaggar valley is less than
INTRODUCTION
3
40 miles in the area between Jagadhri and Ambala. The land is rather flat
in this area and even a small tectonic tilt could have caused the shift in the
flow of the river. The northward thrust of the subcontinental shelf which
threw up the Himalayas causes tectonic movements even today, as frequent
earthquakes indicate. Other tectonic upheavals at the mouth of the Indus
river may have produced a large lake submerging Mohenjo-Daro. This
latter hypothesis is contested by scholars who think that the mighty Indus
could never have been blocked for any length of time. However, even one
sudden blockage or several seasonal ones would have done enough
damage. The drying up of the Ghaggar and the blocking of the lower Indus
could thus have ruined the major centres of the Indus civilisation.
There was one region which remained initially unaffected by these
upheaveals: the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat. This region had been
colonised by the people of the Indus civilisation and had emerged as a major
link with the outside world. Only a few sites have been excavated there so
far. Dholavira is a site to watch. It lies far inside the Rann of Kutch, but it
was obviously a seaport like Lothal on the other side of the peninsula.
Clearly, Dholavira is an important site. Maritime trade via Oman brought
African millets to this region where inland settlements like Rojdi lived on
cultivating them rather than wheat and barley which were the mainstay of
the Indus civilisation elsewhere. The millets were of great importance for the
spread of settled agriculture into the highlands further to the east.
The total area covered by the Indus civilisation was very large. So-called
Late Harappan remains have been found even at Daimabad in
Maharashtra. Shortugai in Badakshan, Afghanistan, is so far the most
northern settlement of the Indus civilisation located by archaeologists. The
distance between Shortugai and Daimabad is about 1,500 miles. Such
distant outposts, as well as cities not threatened by tectonic upheavals,
decayed when the heartland no longer provided trade and cultural
supervision. The vigour of the Indus civilisation had thus been sapped long
before the tribes of cattle-rearing nomads who called themselves Aryans
(the noble ones) descended from the north. The ecological scenario faced
by these newcomers was very different from that which had given rise to
the Indus civilisation. As nomads they could adjust to a changing
environment. Initially the plains of the Panjab provided rich pastures for
their cattle until a sharp decrease in rainfall drove them eastwards, to the
jungles of the Ganga-Yamuna river system which receded in this period of
perennial drought.