Indus Valley Civilisation: Characteristics and Significance
The Harappan People
- We get some idea of the size of the population that lived in any given Harappan city from studies conducted on excavated sites. Scholars believe that the largest Harappan city, Mohenjodaro, had a population of about 35,000.
- What did the Harappan people look like? What sorts of clothes and ornaments did they wear? How did they relax and have fun? Terracotta, stone, and bronze sculptures, along with skeletal remains, help answer such questions.
- Human terracottas can be divided into female and male figurines, those whose sex is not clear, a few that have both female and male attributes (e.g., a figurine from Harappa with breasts and a beard), and a few males in feminine dress.
Clothes
- Women: Going by the figurines, Harappan women wore a short skirt made of cotton or wool.
- Men: Male figurines are usually bare-headed, though some are turbaned. Most are nude, making it difficult to say what sort of clothes men generally wore.
- Certain stone sculptures suggest the use of a dhoti-like lower garment, and an upper garment consisting of a shawl or cloak worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm.
- Another form of dress was a kilt and a shirt, worn by both men and women.
- They also used cotton clothes — in one sculpture, the cloth is shown with a trefoil pattern in red colours.
Hairstyle
- Women: They wore their hair variously in braids, rolled into a bun at the back or side of the head, arranged in separate locks or ringlets, or wrapped around the head like a turban.
- What looks like a fan-shaped headdress could actually represent hair stretched over a frame made of bamboo or some other material. At Harappa, this is sometimes supplemented by flowers or flower-shaped ornaments — such hairstyles or headdresses could indicate women of distinction, or deities.
- Men: There are various hairstyles — braids, buns, and hair hanging loose.
- Most male figurines have beards, in styles ranging from the “goatee” to the more common combed and spread-out style, as in the case of the famous “priest-king.”
- Men and women alike had long hair.
Ornaments
- Female figurines wear ornaments such as necklaces, chokers, hair ornaments, bangles, belts, and ornaments on the waist. Beautiful jewellery has been found at many Harappan sites.
- The men used many more ornaments than modern Indians typically do — they would wear rings, bracelets, and ornaments around the neck and hands.
- Growing a beard was fashionable, but they would shave their moustaches.
- There is some degree of overlap in male and female hairstyles and ornaments, but also some differences.
- For instance, men and women both wear bangles and necklaces, but men rarely wear multi-strand necklaces made of graduated beads.
Terracotta Toys
- Terracotta toys of various kinds have been found at Harappan sites, including balls, rattles, whistles, gamesmen, carts with moveable parts, and animals on wheels. There are also spinning tops made of terracotta and shell.
- Clay marbles have been found in the courtyards of houses.
- Miniature terracotta cooking vessels, beds, and other toy furniture have been found, with which children must have played house.
- There are figurines of children playing with toys.
- Numerous terracotta figurines of dogs have been found at Harappan sites, some with collars, suggesting that people kept dogs as pets.
- Some terracotta figurines of people and animals have a comic appearance, reflecting a sense of humour among the Harappans.
Terracotta Figurines of Women
- While some female figurines found at Harappan sites may represent goddesses, many seem to represent ordinary women.
- Although such worship of female deities reflects the ability to visualise divinity in feminine form, it does not necessarily translate into power or a high social position for ordinary women.
- Terracotta figurines of women at work are few.
- Figurines depicting women grinding or kneading something have been found at Nausharo, Harappa, and Mohenjodaro, suggesting an association of women with food-processing activities.
- Some of the fat female terracotta figurines may represent pregnant women.
- Harappa has yielded a burial of a woman and baby, perhaps a case of death in childbirth.
- Some female figurines found at Harappan sites carry a suckling infant on the left hip; others show women carrying infants close to their breast.
- An unusual terracotta figurine found at Nausharo shows a male with a feminine headdress, holding an infant.
- Tiny terracotta figurines of small children have been found at most sites.
Heterogeneity of the Harappan People
- Early studies of Harappan skeletons focused on classifying the Harappans into racial types; more recent studies have abandoned these old, rather arbitrary racial classifications.
- Kenneth A.R. Kennedy’s study of skeletons found at Harappan sites shows biological heterogeneity between different regions, along with a similarity to the people who live in these areas today.
- This means that the Harappans of Punjab resembled present-day Punjabis in appearance, while the Harappans of Sindh resembled the modern inhabitants of Sindh.
- Kennedy also identified the incidence of malaria among the Harappans.
Structure of Harappan Society
- The absence of deciphered written evidence is a major handicap, and inferences about Harappan society have to be made very carefully, on the basis of archaeological data alone.
- The people who lived within the Harappan culture zone comprised both villagers and city folk.
- Harappan society included a wide range of occupational groups: farmers, herders, hunter-gatherers, craftspeople, fisherfolk, merchants, sailors, rulers, administrative officials, ritual specialists, architects, carpenters, brick masons, well diggers, boat makers, sculptors, shopkeepers, sweepers, garbage collectors, and so on.
- Some farmers may have lived in the cities and tilled their fields nearby.
- Terracotta net sinkers and arrow points, found at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, suggest that the city population included hunters and fisherfolk.
- The level of social differentiation may not have been as great as in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but differences in house sizes and the discovery of hoards of jewellery do indicate a concentration of wealth, and differences in social and economic status.
- The affluent social groups would have comprised rulers, landowners, and merchants.
- Class and rank differences, based on occupation, wealth, and status, must have existed.
- However, claims that the caste system existed in Harappan society remain highly speculative.
Food Habits
- Harappans of Sind and Punjab ate wheat and barley as their staple food. Those living in the towns of Rajasthan had to be content with barley alone.
- The Harappans of Gujarat, in places like Rangpur and Surkotada, preferred rice and millet.
- They obtained their supply of fat and oil from sesame seeds, mustard, and possibly ghee, and might have used honey to sweeten their food.
- Seeds of jujube and dates found at Harappan sites indicate a preference for these fruits.
- It is likely that they also ate bananas, pomegranates, melons, lemons, figs, and, of course, mangoes. They also seem to have consumed a whole range of wild nuts and fruits, and were eating peas too.
- Apart from this, the Harappans seem to have relished non-vegetarian food — bones of deer, bears, sheep, and goats have been frequently found at Harappan settlements.
- Fish, milk, and curd too would have been known to them.
- However, they had neither tea nor potato chips.
Warfare
- Did the Harappans play, and did they fight? We know that they played dice. But beyond that, we again draw something of a blank — they did fight, and there is enough evidence for it, possibly because the archaeologists who excavated various Harappan sites were looking for evidence of war, and not of sport.
- One important indicator is that, at the time of the emergence of the Harappan Civilisation, several “Early Harappan” sites, such as Kot Diji and Kalibangan, were burnt down.
- While an accidental fire could destroy large towns, it is more likely that some of these settlements were burnt down by victorious human groups.
- There is also evidence of skeletons lying scattered in the streets of Mohenjodaro.
- Human societies, from time immemorial, have disposed of the bodies of their dead in some ordered fashion; it is natural that the Harappans would not have left their dead to rot in the streets.
- So, some extraordinary conflict is clearly indicated, when the Harappans did not get an opportunity to bury their dead.
- The presence of citadels and fortifications around many Harappan towns also indicates a need for protection against outsiders.
- Some of these protective walls might have been bunds, built for protection against floods. But given the opulence of the Harappan townships, in contrast to the surrounding rural communities, it is likely that the Harappans also wanted to protect their wealth and lives by fortifying their settlements.
- Some copper and bronze weapons have also been reported from Harappan sites.
Conclusion
The Harappan people emerge from terracotta figurines, skeletal remains, and material culture as a society far more textured than their undeciphered script alone could tell us — one with distinctive fashions in clothing, hairstyle, and ornament, a playful and affectionate domestic life reflected in toys and figurines of children and pets, and a food culture spanning cereals, fruits, dairy, and meat across different regions of the civilisation. At the same time, evidence of biological heterogeneity across regions, differentiated house sizes and jewellery hoards, and burnt settlements and scattered skeletons at sites like Mohenjodaro reminds us that Harappan society was neither uniform nor free of conflict, but a genuinely complex, occupationally diverse, and regionally varied civilisation — one whose social structure and internal tensions, in the continued absence of a deciphered script, historians must keep reconstructing carefully from the material record alone.
