RECAP: Part I discussed how unstable modern claims become when ancient geographical terms are treated as national property. More shatteringly for hardliners sitting in New Delhi, the names India, Hindu and Hindustan all trace, through Persian and Greek transformations, to Sindhu, the ancient name of the Indus–a river that flows mostly through Pakistan. It goes without saying that we do not really know what the inhabitants called themselves because we cannot understand their script. The term Indus civilisation arose in modern archaeology following the discoveries at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the 1920s. “Harappan civilisation” became common because Harappa was the type-site. However, experts are united in dismissing an alternative label of “Indus-Saraswati Civilisation” not merely because it invokes another river but also because it carries an indefensible claim: that the Ghaggar-Hakra palaeochannel can be identified with the Saraswati celebrated in Vedic literature, and that the Harappan world should therefore be understood as part of an unbroken Vedic-Hindu civilisational continuum.
The Vedas place Saraswati between the Sutlej and the Yamuna, whereas the Indus and its tributaries flow hundreds of kilometres to the west. Even as a 2019 study found evidence that the Ghaggar experienced perennial phases and was re-energised by Sutlej-fed flows during the early Holocene, it also concluded that by the mature Harappan period, this channel had lost its glacial connection and had become an ephemeral system. Geologically, the Indus has altered its course by only a few miles over 4,500 years, and therefore, one does not need much to make the connection between the rise of India’s Hindu-nationalist politics and this obsession with laying claim to the Indus. Some have gone as far as to point to barren landscapes of Harappa in the Vedas, perhaps forgetting that these texts were composed several centuries after Harappa’s decline.
The heated debate owes much to the so-called Pashupati seal-a small steatite seal discovered in 1928-29 at Mohenjo?daro. The seal depicts a horned figure seated cross?legged and surrounded by animals. In 1931, British archaeologist John Marshall speculated that it represented a Proto?Shiva or Pashupati (lord of animals). The interpretation became famous because it appeared to offer a direct bridge between Harappan imagery and later Hindu traditions. India’s Ministry of Culture has, in the past few years, repeatedly posted the seal on its social media, describing it as evidence of “India’s unbroken civilisational continuity.”
The presence of a religious motif does not determine a passport four thousand years later.
But Marshall’s label was an interpretation, not a decipherment. In the 1970s, Art Historian Doris Srinivasan challenged the proto-Shiva reading and suggested that the figure might instead be a divine bull-man or a fertility deity. Other scholars have proposed a shaman, a ruler, or a deity with West or Central Asian parallels. Historian Audrey Truschke responded that the figure cannot be conclusively identified as Shiva because the Indus script remains undeciphered and there is no textual bridge to later Hindu traditions. She argued that the imagery fits more naturally with the Proto?Elamite “lord of animals” motif found across ancient West Asia. Even historians who favour a Shaivite interpretation admit that the Proto?Shiva theory is debated.
All in all, the Indus script still has no generally accepted decipherment. There is no caption beside the figure telling us its name. A 2025 report on a conference in Tamil Nadu noted that, although the Indus script appears on thousands of artefacts, no Rosetta Stone-like bilingual text has been found, so the language behind the signs remains unknown. Researchers have identified over 400 distinct symbols that were written right?to?left, but the inscriptions average just five signs, leaving open the question of whether they represent a full spoken language. Without a bilingual inscription or knowledge of the underlying language, Indologists such as Asko Parpola call the Indus script “perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered.” Things may change with the rise of machine-learning studies, but they have not yet produced a definitive reading.
More importantly, even if a convincing line of religious continuity were established, it would not convert a Bronze Age civilisation into the exclusive property of a modern state. Religions travel, change and survive borders. The presence of a religious motif does not determine a passport four thousand years later. What is important today is that the seal was found at Mohenjo?daro in present?day Pakistan.
Nevertheless, one could sense this nationalist unease as far back as the early years after partition, when Indian diplomat K M Panikkar urged in a letter written to the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru that archaeological work continue in India because the separation placed the principal Indus sites across the new border. Sebsequent excavations around the Ghaggar-Hakra river (often identified with the Vedic Sarasvati) and, calls to rename the culture the “Indus-Sarasvati civilisation” (despite clear reservations raised by a long list of archeologists and historians including Sudeshna Guha (attaching Sarasvati gives a Vedic overtone to a Bronze?Age civilisation) and Shereen Ratnagar (hardly any evidence that the Sarasvati was ever a real river) show that the choice of name is not an innocent technicality. It is a political act with implications for national identity.
Pakistan has good reason to resist the claim that its history began in 1947. For decades the country emphasised its Islamic identity and downplayed its pre?Islamic past. This was deemed necessary to privilege a narrow arc around Muslim rule in South Asia and the two-nation theory. Historian Ayesha Jalal described the state’s use of history as an exercise in “official imagining,” while K.K. Aziz’s “The Murder of History” has documented a labyrinth of errors and ideological distortions in Pakistani textbooks.
That changed with the publication of Aitzaz Ahsan’s “The Indus Saga: From Pataliputra to Partition” in 1996. Ahsan argued that Pakistan’s history did not begin in 1947 or with the arrival of Islam. Instead, he argued how Indus basin had constituted a distinct civilisational space for millennia, and Pakistan was its principal geographical successor. Ahsan went further; pointing out that an “unobtrusive strip of land” called the Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient separates the Indus from the Ganges and that the Indus has been geographically closer to Central Asian rivers such as the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) than to any Indian or Arabian plains. In other words, the roots of the Indus civilisation lie as much in Central Asia and Persia as in the subcontinent. He also criticised those Pakistanis who look solely toward the Arab world for identity.
Away from the public eye, Pakistani archaeologists, museums and scholars continued to study and preserve Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Taxila and Gandhara. Schoolchildren learned about the Indus civilisation. Successive governments used archaeological heritage in diplomacy and tourism. Yet the national story often gave these worlds less emotional space than it gave conquerors, dynasties and Partition.
The renewed interest in Indus can, therefore, be read as a correction. It allows Pakistanis to say that Islam is central to the country’s political history without pretending that the people and landscapes of the region appeared with Islam. A Muslim-majority nation can inherit Buddhist monasteries, Hindu temples, Sikh shrines and Bronze Age cities without weakening its constitutional identity. Faith is not a solvent that dissolves everything that came before it. (To Be Concluded)
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. She tweets @DureAkram.