In some parts of India, it is customary for a bride, upon marriage, to take on a new name — not just a surname, but a first name — chosen by her husband's family. It's a signal that her old life is over, and that she now belongs completely to another. This is the kind of thinking that underlies India's renaming mania. It is as if the rulers of Bombay and Madras, men of dubious credentials and modest achievement, wanted to show that they were now the lords and masters of these cities — and to demonstrate the change by conferring a new name upon them. For what these aggressive nativists are doing is to demonstrate that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power, the power to decide what a thing will be, the power to name — for if one does not have the ability to create, one can at least claim the right to define.
23. India's Lost Urban Heritage
WHEN EVEN A BOOSTER OF THE NEW INDIA like myself looks around the decay and dilapidation of some of our cities — our rutted roads, uncollected garbage, choked drains, corroded water pipes, peeling paint, and plentiful potholes — one is tempted to think back to the great Indian cities of antiquity and wonder what went wrong.
Evidence of human habitation in India goes back to the Second Interglacial Period, between 400,000 and 200,000 B.C. Whereas some relics and implements of the prehistoric period have been found, there is no substantial body of information available from archaeo-logical or other sources for the years before 3000 B.C. But Indian religious philosophy and myth describe cycles of existence that are dated precisely back into prehistory. There are continuities in Indian life that suggest a closer connection to the formally “unknowable” past than we might otherwise dare imagine. Historians have seen many of today's rural Indians as virtually a living archive of the country's ethno-history. But what of our city dwellers? Can we trace the heritage of Howrah back to the halls of Harappa?
I'm not being facetious here. The first proof of early Indian civilization, after all, dates back to about 3250 B.C., in the valley of the river that has given our country its name. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization occurred by accident, when a pair of enterprising contractors in Sind in the late nineteenth century supplied the builders of a major road with bricks from a desert trove. The bricks turned out to be more than 4,000 years old. This got the Archaeo-logical Survey of India interested, and in 1922 British and Indian archaeologists dug up the source of the bricks — not just one but two complete cities buried in the sand some four hundred miles apart. The bigger city was at Mohenjodaro on the Indus, the smaller at Harappa on the banks of its tributary, the Ravi. Subsequent excavations — within a region some five hundred miles on either side of the Indus and about one thousand miles along its course — unearthed remains of other ancient cities, all contemporaneous with the other great valley civilizations of the world, the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates.
At Mohenjodaro no fewer than nine layers of buildings were excavated, evidence of a city that had been built and rebuilt for centuries. Archaeologists’ finds — jewelry, terra-cotta figurines and seals, statuary, and earthenware — speak of a rich and well-developed culture, well in advance of its time (the Chalcolithic Age, when stone implements coexisted with those of copper and bronze). The cities were well planned, with broad avenues intersecting at right angles, advanced sewage and drainage systems (including septic tanks), spacious two-story homes, and hypocaustically regulated public baths. (Today few Indian towns boast a public swimming pool, but water was clearly important to our civilization in those days, and the remarkable “Great Bath” of Mohenjodaro may have had a ritual significance.) Wheat, barley, and dates were cultivated; several animals, from the camel to the humped zebu, were domesticated (though the cat was apparently unknown); they had already invented the wheel, and probably yoked buffalo or oxen to their carts. Gold, silver, copper, bronze, and lead were used, and garments of cotton spun and woven some two to three thousand years before Westerners wore them.
Somehow our modern cities never quite lived up to this heritage. Perhaps in other aspects they did: historians believe the society of the Indus Valley Civilization to have been a patriarchal and hierarchical one, probably ruled by a dominant priestly class, refined (with much personal ornamentation), religious (worshiping Pashupati, Lord of the Beasts, a precursor of later Hindu gods), and not particularly warlike — for they had no swords or defensive armor. Some historians have deduced a king who was worshiped as divine; others see a bureaucratic system at work in the meticulous organization and professional urban planning. Some of the art that has survived is simply magnificent, with one famous figure of a dancing girl reflecting considerable creative and casting skill. Despite its patriarchy, the Indus society was far more egalitarian, apparently, than its contemporaries, with ordinary citizens living far better than in Egypt or Mesopotamia, even enjoying a degree of comfort and luxury then unknown in the civilized world.
Some of these conclusions are speculative, since the picto-graphic script found on the seals has not been conclusively deciphered, but most are widely accepted. The cities were obviously connected by trade, and recent evidence suggests their commerce was international, for similar seals have been found as far away as Sumer in Iraq, with which trade could have been conducted along the Makran Coast. Here, too, is the earliest evidence of Indian pluralism, for the Indus society was apparently multiraciaclass="underline" the human beings depicted on Indus Valley artifacts are of several ethnic types, as are the skulls found in the excavations.
In other words, in these cities of the distant past, our forebears created a society not unlike our own — and arguably superior to ours in many respects. For over a thousand years, till about 1750 B.C., the Indus Valley Civilization flourished and prospered. It was then snuffed out abruptly. The archaeological evidence — heaps of skeletons, signs of disarray and sudden death — suggests some sort of catastrophe: perhaps a natural disaster, perhaps a brutal invasion. A great flood from the Indus itself, possibly triggered by an earthquake, is one possibility. Another is the advent of a horde of nomads who would one day give our country the foundations of its present civilization — the Aryans. The destruction of the Indus Valley Civilization snapped the umbilical cord that linked its way of life to those of later generations of Indians. Dare one suggest that as we look to the twenty-first century, we might do well to be inspired by an Indian example — one that flourished in the twenty-first century before Christ?
3. Indians Who Made My India
24. The Legacy of Gandhi and Nehru
THE TUMULTUOUS TWENTIETH CENTURY produced many remarkable leaders, but few nations were blessed with a pair quite like India's Mahatma Gandhi and his protégé Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi was idealistic, quirky, quixotic, and determined, a cross between a saint and a ward politician; like the best crossbreeds, he managed to distill the qualities of both and yet transcend their contradictions. Nehru was a moody, idealist intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the toiling peasant masses; an aristocrat, accustomed to privilege, who had passionate socialist convictions; an Anglicized product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent over ten years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protégé of the saintly Mahatma. Together they brought a nation to freedom and laid the underpinnings for the world's largest democracy.
Gandhi's life was, of course, his lesson. He was unique among the statesmen of the twentieth century in his determination not just to live his beliefs but to reject any separation between beliefs and action. In his life, religion flowed into politics; his public persona meshed seamlessly with his private conduct.