Civilization wakes up - By Anand Sundas
Publication: Indian Express
Date: April 22, 1998

Dholavira. The lost empire that 300 labourers and a six-member team of archaeologists have made it their mission to rediscover. After seven long years of hope and sweat they have stumbled on to something - something really big. Dholavira, in the middle of the Khadir island, along the Rann of Kutch, is again the :cynosure of all eyes - western and Indian -after the excavation of the oldest and largest reservoir with archaeologists expecting to unearth at least 60 metres more. So there is the National Geographic team camped out there and 5 host of TV channels either in or trying to get in. Ministers, bureaucrats, businessmen have suddenly woken up with a jolt to the reality that is  Dholavira.

It is so distant and uninhabitable that it  looks far away from civilisation. So distant that apart from the chartered tourism buses or the tax[s that you succeed in hiring only after much wrangling and enticing, there is no easy mode of transportation that takes you to Dholavira.

The site has proven wrong some age old and widely held archaeological 'truths.' For instance, Dholavira - meaning white well - has proven that the Indus culture (Harappan, as archaeologists prefer to call it) was not totally a riverine civilisation, as it is in the middle of a Rann. So both academically and archaeologically, the site today is the most important of all Harappan sites, including the three in Pakistan - Mohenjodaro, Harappa and Gandhariwala - and gari in India.it is also a most sophisticated and scientifically built site; and unlike other sites, 80 per cent of what has been excavated has been found well preserved.

Archaeologists can't stop talking about the site. R S Bisht, director (Explorations & Excavations), ASI says: "Even after 5,000 years the 32 steps that lead to the reservoir still retain  their geometrical balance. This Indus capital city site shows how man first came, settled and then abandoned the site for more comfortable ones. It was only after 1,500 years of habitation that the people started moving north towards sites near the Ganga
and Yamuna, at about the time when the Mahabharata was being fought."

Another unique feature of the site is the "tremendous sense of town planning." As Sanjay Singh, archaeologist and site supervisor says: "The concepts that were later de tailed in the Rig Veda and the Puranas are all there. For instance, there is the param vesthinah madhyam vesthinah and awam vesthinah. The upper, middle and lower towns." Seven years of exploration - officially, the site was first excavated in 1969-70 by J P Joshi who was looking for a lost trade route from Pakistan-Sindh to Lothal - have thrown up more than 22,000 artefacts, seals, terracota, steatite and stone pillars.

"We have also recovered 37 micro beads of gold," says Bisht adding, "which cannot be picked up by bare fingers. Look at the size of the beads and you wonder what kind of hammer they used to round them off so perfectly and then what kind of a boring instrument they must have used to drove a hole within. "The site also boasts of a multi-purpose stadium, the oldest and biggest in the world, with three sides for spectators and a path for ceremonial procession, There is a smaller stadium beside it. "We have conclusive evidence to prove that they were also used as haat bazaars with national and international business transactions taking place," adds Bisht.

Archaeologists have  also for the first time found an outer city wall along with the first ever evidence of damming the channels Mansar and Manhar) for water harnessing. Interestingly, at all the dam sites archaeologists have found clusters of houses,probably for the staff to look after the dams!

"They knew the, value of measuring distance according to laws of horizontality and verticality," smiles Bisht before signing off. "Even if the, government today, after 5,000 years, makes the kind of arrangement that the Harappan people made then there will be no scarcity of water in the region." Perhaps. For, it is never too late to learn.

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