Class 6 Social Science Chapter 6: The Beginnings of Indian Civilisation Notes

What is a civilisation?

The chapter opens with the archaeologist B.B. Lal, who saw the Harappans as a well-balanced community in which the gap between rich and poor was not glaring, a society of mutual ‘accommodation’ rather than ‘exploitation’. It then asks what a civilisation is. In general the word means an advanced stage of human society. The book takes it to need at least seven things: some form of government and administration, urbanism (planned cities with water management and drains), a variety of crafts, internal and external trade, some form of writing, cultural ideas, and a productive agriculture that feeds the villages and the cities too.

Civilisation began at different times in different places: in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) about 6,000 years ago, and in Egypt a few centuries later. In the Indian Subcontinent, the story begins in the northwest.

From village to city

The plains of the Punjab and Sindh are watered by the Indus and its tributaries, which made them fertile. A little further east, a few millenniums ago, the Sarasvatī flowed from the Himalayan foothills through Haryana, Punjab, parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. In this region, villages grew into towns from about 3500 BCE, and with growing trade the towns became cities around 2600 BCE. This is called the First Urbanisation of India, and the cities flourished till about 1900 BCE.

Archaeologists call it the Indus, Harappan, Indus-Sarasvatī or Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation, and its people the Harappans, because Harappa (now in Pakistan’s Punjab) was its first city to be excavated, in 1920–21. It is one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

The Sarasvatī is first mentioned in the Ṛig Veda, as a goddess and as a river flowing ‘from the mountain to the sea’; later texts describe it drying up. Today it is the seasonal Ghaggar in India and Hakra in Pakistan. Its basin had the big cities of Rakhigarhi and Ganweriwala, smaller cities such as Farmana and Kalibangan, and towns such as Bhirrana and Banawali. Since the sites spread so far beyond the Indus, the old term ‘Indus Valley civilisation’ is now obsolete.

Planned cities and water

Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were identified in 1924; Dholavira (Gujarat), Rakhigarhi (Haryana), Ganweriwala and hundreds of smaller sites such as Lothal followed. The larger cities were built to precise plans, with wide streets facing the cardinal directions, fortifications, an upper town for the local elite and a lower town for common people. Small and big houses were built with the same care, mostly of bricks. Drains below the streets carried waste water away, Mohenjo-daro drew water from hundreds of brick wells, and Dholavira built at least six large reservoirs. The famous Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is still a puzzle. Read more in town planning in Harappan cities.

Food, crafts and trade

Settling along rivers gave water and fertile soil. The Harappans grew barley, wheat, millets and sometimes rice, with pulses and vegetables, and were the first in Eurasia to grow cotton. They used the plough; a small clay model comes from Banawali. They kept animals, fished in rivers and the sea, and their cooking pots held dairy products, turmeric, ginger and even banana.

They traded within their own civilisation and with other cultures, by land, river and sea, the first intensive sea trade in India. They exported ornaments, especially beads of carnelian, a reddish stone found mostly in Gujarat; shell bangles; timber; objects of daily use; and probably gold and cotton. They probably imported copper, and by adding tin they made harder bronze. Lothal’s basin, 217 metres long, was probably a dockyard. Thousands of small seals of steatite, with an animal and a few signs of a script still not understood, helped traders identify their goods and each other.

The lives of the ancients

Archaeologists have found objects of daily use, such as a bronze mirror, a terracotta pot, stone weights, a bronze chisel, a gamesboard and a terracotta whistle, along with cultural and symbolic objects: the statuette often called the ‘Priest King’, a seal with a swastika, the three-faced figure on the Pashupati Seal, the bronze ‘Dancing Girl’ from Mohenjo-daro, a figurine seated in a ‘namaste’, and a pot from Lothal that seems to tell the story of the thirsty crow.

The end, or a new beginning?

Around 1900 BCE the cities were abandoned one by one, and people scattered into small villages. There is no trace of warfare or invasion; the Harappans do not seem to have kept armies. Two causes are now agreed: a drier climate that affected much of the world from 2200 BCE, and the Sarasvatī drying up in its central basin, which emptied cities such as Kalibangan and Banawali. Much of the Harappan culture and technology lived on into the next phase of Indian civilisation.

Read more in the Harappan civilisation. Answers to every question are in the NCERT solutions for Chapter 6.