It was a hundred years ago, on September 20, 1924, that the world learnt about the Indus (Harappan) civilisation for the very first time. John Marshall, then director general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), set up by the British Raj, said this in the Illustrated London News .

“Not often has it been given to archaeologists, as it was given to Schliemann at Tiryns and Mycenae, or to Stein in the deserts of Turkestan, to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we are on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus… Up to the present our knowledge of Indian antiquities has carried us back hardly further than the third century before Christ… The two sites where these somewhat startling remains have been discovered are some 400 miles apart — the one being at Harappa in the Montgomery District of the Panjab, the other at Mohenjo-Daro in the Larkana District of Sindh. At both these places there is a vast expanse of artificial mounds evidently covering the remains of once-flourishing cities, which… must have been in existence for many hundreds of years.”

The dating was actually done through a letter to the editor by professor AH Sayce on September 27, 1924. He recognised the seals as identical to those he had found in Sumer, dated to 2300 BC. Thus was India’s history pushed back 2,000 years.

Unaware of its existence, in the 19th century, the British used the vast quantities of bricks from the site to build the Multan-Lahore railway line. Alexander Cunningham, founder of the ASI, had found the first Harappan seal there in 1853, and presented it in 1875.

ASI officer RD Banerji discovered the better preserved Mohenjo-daro, with its hoard of seals, only in 1922. This later discovery, 500km away, prompted Marshall to claim that South Asia had its very own ancient civilisation, contemporary with Mesopotamia, at least 2,000 years older than the Ashokan edicts and Buddhist stupas.

Originally described as Indus-Sumerian, it was soon clear that this civilisation had developed independently, and so was renamed Indus. But with sites found beyond Indus, in the Greater Indus Region, which includes the dry riverbed of the GhaggarHakra, and the coast of Gujarat, the civilisation is now named after the first city discovered — Harappa!

In 1947, India was partitioned. The major sites of the civilisation, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, went to Pakistan. The artefacts were divided between the two nations. The Priest King went to Pakistan; the Dancing Girl came to India.

By the 1970s, India had barely 10% of the Harappan seals and artefacts. But by 2020, thanks to the government’s efforts, more than 60% of 1,400 Indus-like sites are reported to have been discovered in India. These are found across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and even western Uttar Pradesh.

So, the old nomenclature of Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) was no longer applicable. The preferred nomenclature is now Harappa, after the first city discovered. In Pakistan, many feel the nomenclature favours Punjab, as usual, over Sindh. But chronologically, Harappa was the first site to be discovered.

Many Hindu nationalists insist that the Harappan civilisation should be called the Saraswati civilisation, based on the fact that many Indus sites in Pakistan are clustered along a dry riverbed. Known as Ghaggar-Hakra today, it seems to traverse the same course as the legendary river Saraswati of Hindu lore, which as per Hindu belief, flows underground and joins the Ganga and Yamuna at Triveni Sangam, Prayag.

• Saraswati Mahatmya (1200 AD) states that the Saraswati river dried up as she took the dreadful fire Vadava from Swarga, atop Meru, to the bottom of the sea. This fire was created by Sage Pippalada who accused the gods of killing his father Dadichi. The sage was pacified when he was told Dadichi gave his bones voluntarily to the gods to kill demons. This is why Gujarat and Rajasthan, despite being arid, have a lot of groundwater.
• Mahabharat (150 BC) describes Balarama’s pilgrimage upstream from Saraswati’s delta in the western sea to its source in the Himalayas.
• Rig Veda (1500 BC) mentions the Saraswati river 47 times. She is a mighty river flowing down from hills, the mother of rivers (nadimata). In later Brahmana texts, she is described as disappearing (vinasana).
• Iranian Avesta (1000 BC) also refers to Saraswati. There the ‘s’ sound becomes ‘h’ and the river is called Haraxavati. It is identified as a minor tributary of a river in Afghanistan.

As per satellite data, Ghaggar-Hakra was snow-fed over 10,000 years ago, before human habitation. In Harappan times, it was a rain-fed river, flowing only during monsoon, whose course frequently changed. So, the assumption that this was the mighty Saraswati is nothing but a conjecture, much like the Shiva identity of the horned-sage on the sea.

This desire to explain an archaeological site using Hindu mythology as proto-history (history before writing) is a trend also seen in Pakistan. Pakistan has the distinction of being the world’s first Islamic republic. So, its orthodoxy shuns its un-Islamic past and uses Islamic mythology to explain the Harappan ruins.

Allah destroyed the Harappan cities on the banks of the Indus just as he destroyed cities of Lut, Aad and Samood that were full of idol-worshipers.

The power of stories is far greater than the power of facts. For facts do not appeal to emotions. While facts are paramount in earth sciences like physics, chemistry and biology, in social sciences such as history, art, literature, politics, economics, sociology and anthropology, one has to factor in human imagination.

The subject of history will therefore always be a contested site — depending on which fact is valued and how a set of facts is interpreted. So, while Harappa is explained using Hindu mythology by nationalist Indians, it is explained using Islamic mythology by nationalist Pakistanis.