Harappan first cities
NAYANJOT LAHIRI
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Overview of the urban architectural wealth of the Indus civilisation
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HARAPPAN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVIL ENGINEERING: Jagat Pati Joshi; Infinity Foundation in association with Rupa & Co., 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002.
This book provides a balanced and scholarly overview of the architecture of the first cities of the Indus civilisation. Its author is the late Jagat Pati Joshi, who has brought his enormous academic and field experience spanning more than half a century into it. A former Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, Joshi’s knowledge of Harappan cities was based on his field work at Harappan sites, from Kalibangan in Rajasthan to Surkotada in Gujarat and Bhagwanpura in Haryana.
Usually, when we think of the architectural wealth of the Indus civilisation, it is its brick-built drains and broad streets that come to mind. These are also the urban features that usually find mention in most textbooks on Indian history. However, as this monograph demonstrates, there is much more to the urban character of Indus architecture and engineering. This emerges through thematic chapters that examine the principal Harappan settlement types, town planning, hydraulic engineering, religious architecture, burial architecture and building technology.
Urban planning
There is a balanced treatment of these features in practically all kinds of settlements, not all of these are monumental cities. For example, the character of wells of the small centres like Allahadino in Sindh is discussed in much the same way as the largest well of Harappan India in Dholavira in Kutch. The remarkable Dholavira well was made of dressed stone and had a feeder channel which connected with a tank reservoir. The impressive urban planning at small urban nodes like Lothal is suitably showcased as well. Lothal was perhaps the only urban centre where all streets and lanes were paved with mud bricks and covered with kankar. Mohenjodaro may have been almost 20 times the size of Lothal but curiously enough, with the exception of a stretch of the First Street, its broad streets as also its lanes, were invariably unpaved.
Architectural splendour
What perhaps needed to be discussed in far greater detail were those elements that marked out some architectural complexes as religious ones. It is somewhat surprising, for instance, that Joshi’s treatment of the Great Bath at Mohenjodaro fails to mention that this was the only freestanding structure in that city which could be walked around outside. Apparently this feature was meant to facilitate a procession-like movement into its precinct. This would mean that D.D. Kosambi’s description of it as a kind of ceremonial pushkar or ritual tank is likely to be more accurate than Marshall’s explanation — which is what Joshi relies on — of the Great Bath as a kind of “hammam” or hydropathic establishment.
What emerges very clearly from this work is that the urban planning and architecture of the Indus civilisation, with its extravagant use of water as seen in the wells and tanks as also its attention to drainage and decent housing, was distinctively different from that of other “Bronze Age” civilisations. As was pointed out in the first excavation report on Mohenjodaro, “there is nothing that we know in prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjodaro. In those countries, much money and thought was lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of citizens.” For those readers who are interested in learning more about the architectural splendour of this civilisation, Joshi’s book is well worth reading.
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