‘Ahimsa’ by Devdutt Pattanaik: Deciphering Harappan legacy of non-violence
Devdutt Pattanaik has acquired the reputation of a scholar who scrutinises religious texts and traditions from a distance, but with compassion and sympathy. His gaze is always secular and critical, but never derogatory or even condescending. This time, he has chosen to cast his gaze on the Harappan civilisation that dotted large parts of the Indian subcontinent around 5,000 years ago.
Till the beginning of the 20th century, the history of ancient India stretched as far back as to the Aryans, around 3,500 years ago. Then some archaeological discoveries made in 1924 pushed the temporal boundaries of Indian history back by two millennia. Further explorations revealed that a vast civilisation thrived on the north-west of India around the river Indus. It was identified as Indus Valley or the Harappan civilisation, named after the first discovered city. The book under review tells the story of this civilisation in rich details. This is no easy task as we do not have any texts written by the Harappans which could reveal important facts about their lives to us.
Harappans knew writing like their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia (Iraq). But the script they used has not been deciphered so far. However, archaeology has unearthed sites, material artefacts and seals that have enabled historians to reconstruct Harappan lives. This exercise involves considerable imagination and speculation. Was a particular round-shaped clay structure an oven meant for cooking or a yagya altar meant for worship? Contemporary political motives can so easily enter our interpretations of the distant past.
Pattanaik has very carefully identified all these pitfalls while telling us the story of the Harappans. The book proceeds in three separate though connected directions. First, it describes the social, religious, cultural and economic life of the Harappans. Second, it handles various historical controversies pertaining to the connections of the Harappans with the Vedic people, the reasons for the decline of the Harappans and, of course, the big question about the roots and origins of the Aryan people. The author has handled all these questions with a great deal of clarity and credibility.
Third, the book has an argumentative side. It makes a case that the Harappans were a non-violent people as compared to their contemporaries. Their normative world was governed by a trading ethos and regulated by monks “who valourised restraint, and shunned vulgar display of wealth”. Their collective life was organised around a number of ‘myths’ and stories that held the community together. These became the social mechanisms for maintaining cohesion and order in the society.
The Harappans did not rely much upon coercion in regulating social behaviour. Restraint rather than social friction was the norm. As Pattanaik writes: “It was a merchant-monastic ecosystem like Jain, Buddhist and Hindu orders of later times, where material power was acquired through wealth and success while moral power was obtained by giving up wealth, relationships and trappings of success.”
The book is organised in the form of an inventory and a visual resource. The inventory has listed a hundred themes pertaining to the lives of the Harappans and the profile of the social world they lived in. It includes important information on their ideational universe, material resources, socio-cultural lives, rites and rituals, and economic activities. All this information has been extrapolated from a rich range of material and other artefacts found at the excavation sites. Then there are important pictures of the seals, drawn by the author himself, which offer glimpses of the lives Harappans lived. Clear and explicit, these pictures would enable the readers to draw their own conclusions. In this sense, the book presents important data that can be used to reconstruct Harappan lives.
The Harappan society was by no means insular. It had crucial economic links with societies as far as Mesopotamia. Precious stones, such as lapis lazuli, were exported by the Harappans to the Mesopotamians, 5,000 kilometres away. These long-route trading transactions would have definitely created connections. It is quite probable that Harappan society was culturally quite diverse. It accommodated a great deal of cultural, religious and linguistic diversity
This brings the book to an important question and perhaps its most important conclusion. How much of the Harappa is still with us? The answer: a very great deal, more than we can imagine. Worship of Lord Shiva and of mother goddess is only a part of the legacy of the Harappans for us. A large part of our cooking, eating, clothing patterns, our rites and rituals, leisure and entertainment, can be easily traced back to our Harappan ancestors.
We need to be reminded that along with the Aryan legacy, we are also great inheritors of the Harappan legacy. Non-violence and diversity are two important components of this legacy. Thus, it was the Harappans, as much as the Aryans, if not more, who were our most rightful ancestors. Can we consider ourselves to be their rightful and deserving descendants? The book leaves us at this delicate question and concludes beautifully on an optimistic note: “Just as Harappans resisted a central authority, just as they balanced standardisation with diversity, we will resist attempts to homogenise India into a single idea.”
— The writer is professor of history at Dr BR Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD)
