LAHORE: Archaeologists and experts from related fields got together at the roundtable conference at the 11th Thaap Conference here on Saturday and discussed the past and present of Harappa.

The theme of the conference this year was ‘Archaeology and Living Cultural Legacy of Harappa Civilisation’.

Dr Rafique Mughal, a former professor of archaeology, raised the question whether “the people currently in the region are descendants of the people of Harappa and how much change, if any, has occurred in the lifestyle of the people living in the region since that time”. He wondered whether we were genetically linked with the residents of Harappa.

There was research that the residents of Harappa in recent and current times were the descendants of the ancient Harappans but it went unnoticed. He said ‘gughu ghoras’ were there in all cultures but the question was whether Harappan artifacts were connected with other civilisations, reminding the audience that the horse had not arrived in India when Harappan civilisation existed.

Linguist and language historian Dr Tariq Rehman said, “the Harappan language does not exist now as the language is spoken but the script is there now, which has not been deciphered. But the question is how old it is.”

A recent book, Dawn of Everything 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow, claimed that it could be 15,000 to 25,000 years old which meant that not only the Harappan script but everything related to that civilisation was much older than what it was earlier thought.

He says deciphering the script was another problem. “All we know is that there was some kind of script but we don’t know what it is. There are words which don’t belong to Sanskrit, Persian or any other known language in the subcontinent,” he said.

Dr Nadeem Omar Tarar, executive director of the Centre for Culture and Development, Gandhara Resource Centre, said archaeology was just one discipline of the field of study of heritage but there were disciplines also like linguistics, folklore, anthropology, painting and sculpture. He said anthropology was needed today.

The ancient civilisation of India has been bracketed by religions in Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim terms. Even today in Sindh, Buddhists are still living around Buddhist sites which was an example of the living cultural tradition that we are looking for, he said.

“Archaeology needs historical anthropology along with the cultural anthropology being practised in Pakistan since 19th century. In the community there are links of the past,” he added.

Dr Tohid Ahmad Chattha, a historian, said that in Pakistan oral history and archaeology had been separated which had created problems and new research being done in various departments had no connections. He said research on Harappa was not being done in the history department of any university of Punjab because the history professors send such thesis topics to archaeology departments. He said there was not a single department of Punjab Studies in the whole of Punjab, raising question why it is not being done. He raised the demand that Punjab Studies centres should be established in the universities.

Shafiq Butt said the ownership of the main archaeological site had not been with the government since the start of excavations more than a century back. “Only 132 acres were owned by government while 358 acres were property of the people where excavation was not possible. Harappa could not be on the list of Unesco as the land was owned by the people, though it was protected. When archaeology became a provincial subject after the 18th amendment to the Constitution, we started making an effort to urge the government to own the land,” he said.

He said a campaign was launched with the help of the local community and the officials to get funds released for buying land from the landowners which was not easy. “When Najam Sethi became a caretaker chief minister of Punjab, he released about Rs200m for acquisition of land and the land was acquired,” Mr Butt added.

Nain Sukh said that Rigveda maligned the native people while the invaders had been eulogised. “The main things that have been found in Harappa are pottery and stamps, showing their lifestyle. We can say that the real people of Harappa were the weavers or artisans,” he said.

Iqbal Qaiser connected Harappan civilisation with Baba Farid and Waris Shah who lived within the 60km of Harappa and Baba Nanak who had a gurdwara near Harappa.

Maqsood Ahmed, the director of the Department of Archaeology, also spoke.

Earlier, in the morning, Sumbul Natalia of the National College of Arts, Sumbal Sarfraz, Sadia Qutub Hashmi and Nomana Zaryab read out their research papers on Harappa and Indus Valley civilisation.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2022