🐽All is quiet at Ancient Mound No. I (RGR-I), in Rakhigarhi, Haryana, as a handful of people laze in the winter sun nearby. A couple of workers are laboriously covering the recently concluded excavation at the site, as a precautionary measure to the predicted rainfall. In a humble temporary structure, built close to the mound, lie the skeletal remains of a nearly 4,000-year-old man.
Embedded in a chunk of soil, the skeleton has been unceremoniously dumped at the back of the room, with a bunch of other excavated goods. “Ye uss time ka ladaku jawan tha. Shayad sena me bharti tha,”🌠 Dharampal, a local villager explains. This deduction, he says, has been made due to the cut marks found in the skull. The skeleton was excavated from Mound No. VII, assumed to be a burial site of the Harappan people. Broken remains of pots of various sizes were found buried near the skeleton. “People of those times buried the belongings of the dead alongside their bodies,” he says.
Dharampal has been a part of the Archaeological Survey of India’s excavations at Rakhigarhi🃏, Haryana, since 1997. Locals like him are recruited informally by the ASI to assist with the excavations, due to their knowledge about the area. Dharampal proudly claims that he was trained in excavation procedures under the personal supervision of Amarendra Nath himself. Nath, who led the Rakhigarhi excavations between 1997 and 2000, was the then Director of the Institute of Archaeology under ASI. He was the first to carry out extensive excavations at one of the only two cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, which are located within present-day India and one of the five largest known sites of the period.
Even though the ASI identified Rakhigarhi as a Harappan civilisation site as early as 1963, little effort was made before Nath to publish any significant findings from the area. In 2015, Nath was sent to jail for fraud by a special CBI 🌺court for fabricating bills and misappropriating ASI money during the Rakhigarhi excavation process. This CBI investigation had led to a decade-long hiatus in continuing the dig in the area between 2000 and 2011.
🔯Peculiar controversies such as this one abound at Rakhigarhi. Mound No. III (RGR-III), the only site currently open to full public view, has also been an enigma for the archaeologists. When the digging began, discovering a host of skeletons excited the people working here about what they were about to uncover. However, it turned out to be a more recent graveyard of the Muslim villagers. Eventually though, as the digging continued, rooms and a bathing area began to emerge from underneath this graveyard, revealing houses from the ancient civilisation. While the rooms are built with uniformly-sized bricks, there is evidence of a well and a well-developed drainage system.
According to Dharampal, there was contestation over the Mound No. III site as the Muslims from the Rakhigarhi village needed a piece of land for burial. Eventually, the ASI allowed them to continue burying their dead in the area close to the mound. The graveyard now lies behind a bright blue structure next to the excavation. The structure, which Dharampal claims is a mazaarꦬ, is intriguingly covered with religious symbolism of both Muslims and Hindus. Similarly, Mound No. II (RGR-II), which was the first mound to be excavated by the ASI, was named after Mound No. I because of controversies over the area’s acquisition between the ASI and the villagers.
💎Mound No. III is the only site which is covered with a properly-built shed, to protect its findings from being destroyed by harsh weather conditions. Mound No. I and II have no such protection. The area near Mound No. II is lined with cow dung cakes as the space is still utilised by the villagers for their daily needs. Mound No. IV—from where sample collections have been dated to pre-Harappan period—has been cut through to build a lane for the village. While the Rakhi Khas village exists atop this mound, the Rakhi Shahpur village has been built across this lane. As Dharampal points to the layers of history buried beneath the soil in Mound No. IV, the mound ironically serves as a comfortable dwelling for pigeons at present. Meanwhile, Mound No. V, VI and VII continue to lie under the village houses and fields. When asked why the areas have not been acquired and the villagers rehabilitated yet, Dharampal says: “The government will move them as and when the excavation will begin on these mounds. For now, the ASI demarcates a trench in the area they need to dig on these mounds, and the villagers are compensated if they incur any loss of crops or homes.”
The excavations are carried out annually for around 3-4 months during winters at the Rakhigarhi sites. However, the dig this year concluded by mid-January itself. Dharampal says that in this year’s cycle, he was told, the funding allocated for excavations at Rakhigarhi had reduced. This is a strange revelation. The keenness displayed by bodies such as 💞National Council for Educational Research and Training♛ (NCERT) in adding the findings from the site to school textbooks, somehow, does not match up to the lack of enthusiasm shown by the government in pushing for the development of this historic site.
🍸Vicky Mallik, another local history enthusiast who has been participating in the excavations, claims that this has been the primary problem in the state’s approach towards Rakhigarhi. “It’s been nearly 30 years since this site is being dug up, but basic amenities such as a washroom or provision for drinking water have not been looked after,” Mallik says. “Apart from building a shed at Mound No. III, no genuine attempt at developing this site has been made by the government. And yet, they proudly hail Rakhigarhi as an iconic world heritage site,” he adds.
🍬The skeletal remains of the nearly 4,600-year-old woman—which in recent years stirred up a media storm about the “unbroken continuity” in the genetic make-up of Indians right from the Indus Valley Civilisation—have emerged from Mound No. VII. A mustard field currently surrounds this mound. The site, now closed for public view, has been identified as the burial ground of the ancient people, where many more such skeletons have been found.
ღRemains such as these, along with the several other artefacts stored at the temporary structure near Mound I, are supposed to be housed at the Rakhigarhi Indus Valley Civilisation Museum-cum-Interpretation-Centre, located near the excavation sites. However, Mallik says that the construction of this museum-cum-interpretation centre appears to be nowhere near completion.
ღ“Every year, we are told that the museum will be completed in another six months. Ten years have passed like this,” he rues. Commissioned in 2014-15, its construction too, ran into multiple hurdles after the CBI enquiry into the fund misappropriation by ASI officials. In 2021, the archaeology and museum department of Haryana recommended changes to the museum structure to “reflect the Indus-Saraswati civilisation”. They advised the agency overlooking the museum construction to design the interiors and exteriors of the building according to the brick structures found at the Harappan site.
ꦇReportedly, these recommendations were made “to avoid bringing disrepute to the state” with an ill-conceived architectural plan. While the construction of the museum remains indefinitely stalled, the excavated goods from the mounds anticipate their fate in battered sacks.
🐷Despite the evident dissatisfaction with the government’s lackadaisical approach towards the preservation of this precious heritage, curiously, Mallik is more than willing to accept the narratives that have recently emerged about Rakhigarhi’s findings. “I do believe that those living here are our ancestors,” he says. He substantiates his confidence in the theory, too. “If you look at the images of the bull in the Indus Valley civilisation artefacts and compare them with the pictures of the cows and bulls around this area, in the Harayana belt, you will find similarities.
Twenty years ago, the way we did agriculture, was very similar in pattern to the ways of the Indus Valley people.” He falters a little while drawing on comparisons between the practice of burying the dead among the Harappans and the ritual of cremation in modern-day Hinduism. “You can say, there is a continuity of at least 75 per cent from then to now,” Mallik claims. Dharampal too, is not far behind with this affirmation. “The entire settlement at Rakhigarhi has been traced along the Drishadvati river, which was a part of the river Saraswati🐼,” he claims. Recent excavations at Mound III have revealed a water reservoir, which is further fuelling the claims of the existence of a drying river that compelled the Harappan people to explore means of water storage. Both Mallik and Dharampal state that their information comes from the ASI reports as well as the conversations among ASI officials that they have overheard in the years they have spent at the site. Stone plaques at the front of each mound, installed by the ASI, back the narrative that is propounded by locals such as these two.
ꦓMany historians, on the other hand, have termed such deductions “hasty” and without any solid grounding in scientific revelations. Their version remains that existing evidence does not support the conflation of the Vedic civilisation with the Harappan civilisation. As historians and archaeologists furiously duel over the material evidences that back their respective claims, the chasm between historical derivations and archaeological findings only seems to deepen with time. Meanwhile, the ruins at Rakhigarhi await their much-deserved preservation and the elusive truth of this millennia-old civilisation continues to remain a casualty.
Apeksha Priyadarshini at Rakhigarhi
(This appeared in the print as 'The Lost City')
