Religion,urbanism and the ruling apparatus of the Harappans

This article is not concerned with the exposition of the distinguishing traits of religious proclivities of the Harappans, for the subject has been discussed by us extensively elsewhere. ¹ Nor does it intend entering into nuances of the applicability of the formulation of ‘religion’ per se in that context. We need not recall the grand old debate of ‘dharma’ versus ‘religion’ going back to the times of at least P.V. Kane’s monumental History of Dharmaśåstra, ² notwithstanding its invocation in the recent debate on secularism in Parliament and in a recent publication which does not find the use of ‘religion’ suitable for Indian conditions because of its colonialist import. ³ We would much rather go along with the reviewer of this recent attempt to underline the perils of translating terms of specific cultural origins, who rightly points out:

There are questionable colonial histories for a host of other terms used by scholars, such as culture, history, ritual, politics, and critique among others. If we shed all our terms for these reasons we would wind up with claims of mutual incomprehension…and an end to the scholarly enterprise. ⁴

Recognising the perils involved in deciphering meanings of iconographic delineations on the yet undeciphered writings of Harappan seals and sealings, and without sharing Wendy Doniger’s scepticism reflected in her outburst ‘Is Indus Religion a Myth?’ ⁵ , we would accept that Harappans’ varied religious beliefs and practices manifested in some kinds of male and female and even hermaphrodite, iconic and aniconic deities, convictions in animism, animalism (both real and mythical animals as objects of worship), shamanism, superstitions and ritualistic observances may be taken as a workable frame.

The nature of authority governing the Harappans has also been, like their religious beliefs, a subject of intense speculation amongst historians, archaeologists and anthropologists from very early stages of Harappan studies. Theories that have been floated from time to time have identified socio-political organisation as (a) an extensive ‘empire’ governed by ‘twin capitals’ of Mohenj-daro and Harappa, perhaps with a ‘line of kings’; (b) a society with an over-arching influence of ‘religion’ and the dominance of ‘priest king’/‘priesthood’; (c) peace-loving people swayed by an ‘ideology of moral force’ manipulated by some divine sanction; (d) ‘federation made up of smaller units’ and a ‘managerial class’; (e) ‘a state based on control of people’ where the identity was expressed in terms of ‘kinship’ and the hallmark of the social system was some kind of jajmani system and (f ) a state that was a ‘heterarchy’ with shared power and collective responsibility—perhaps by a council of tribal or local leaders to manage the participation of the local community in the larger network. ⁶

More than four decades ago Paul Wheatley put forward the following hypothesis:

Whenever in any of the seven (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, North China, Mesoamerica, the Central Andes, and the Yoruba territories of SW Nigeria) regions of primary urban generation, we trace back the characteristic urban form to its beginnings we arrive not at a settlement that is dominated by commercial relations, a primordial market, or at one that is focused on a citadel and archetypal fortress, but rather at a ceremonial complex…religion permeated all activities, all institutional change, and afforded a consensual focus for social life. ⁷

And relatively more recently, reviewing the ‘Theories on the Sociopolitical Organisation of the Indus State’, Jane McIntosh observed:

The suggestion that the Harappan state was a theocracy seems particularly apt in the Indian context, where the highest status in the ideological hierarchy is accorded to the priestly caste…the dichotomy between temporal and religious authority is a false distinction. In all ancient civilizations, whatever the form of government, the rulers governed through divine sanction. The gods were always the ultimate authority in society, and the rulers the channel through which their will was done. In this sense every society was a theocracy…To my mind, the model of a society in which power was vested in the priesthood fits the Harappan evidence. ⁸

Wheatley was essentially concerned with the origin and diffusion of urban life in Neolithic, Shang and Chou times. However, it is part two of his work dealing with ‘The Early Chinese City in Comparative Perspective’ that assumes significance in the present context. The quote above sums up his thesis about the primary genesis of urban forms throughout the ancient world. Wheatley has been quite right in stressing that earlier generalised formulations such as those of Max Weber (who in any case was concerned with the ‘industrial city’ rather than the ‘pre-industrial city’) and Gideon Sjoberg were built almost exclusively on data from the western world, and in ignorance of data on cities in Asia.

Wheatley proposes the picture of a series of specialised villages centred round a sacred place, a temple for instance. These villages supplied their products to this centre, then growing together into a city which retained in its centre a holy place and the seat of governance. Thus, for Wheatley, city was typically not a unit by itself, separated from the surrounding countryside and its villages, but a cultic and administrative centre of a large district which included villages and farms. Thus, older definitions of cities which said that the population of cities has to consist of a majority of non-agriculturists have to be rejected. ⁹ Though not the first, there have been very few such omnibus theoretical formulations which locate the fulcrum of all urban growth across several continents in religious authority and stress the sacred and symbolic character of the early city. Hence, the need to analyse the relevance of the proposition in the specific context of the Harappans because marshalling of empirical evidence from the ‘Indus Valley’ is not the strength of Wheatley’s contentions, notwithstanding his otherwise awe-inspiring scholarship.

Long before Wheatley, Piggott had argued:

the potent forces behind the organization of the Harappa kingdom cannot have been wholly secular…the priesthood of some religion played a very important part in the regulation of Harappa economy from within the walls of the citadel of the two capital cities. Such rule by priests, or priest-kings, would be wholly in accordance with what we know of other ancient civilizations in Western Asia, where the written record has provided us with an insight beyond the limits of archaeology, and it is unlikely that the Harappa civilization, individual though it was, differed radically in this respect from its sister kingdoms. ¹⁰

Finding the unadorned architecture and the monotonous regularity of the streets of the Harappan civilisation quite repelling, Piggott added: ‘the absence of any such buildings (temples) does imply that household shrines were of more importance than centralized worship in specific temples’.

A decade before Paul Wheatley’s much discussed work became public in 1971, Walter A. Fairservis, Jr. had announced that ‘a critical objective’ of his researches was ‘the identification of the intensifying factor that brought about the gathering of civilizing traits that produced the Indus civilization’ (emphases added). Doubting that trade had much influence on the location and/or upkeep of Mohenjo-daro, he also suspected that the political or military orientation involved in the term ‘empire’ was unwarranted. Through such an eliminative process, Fairservis concluded: ‘it appears that religion was the intensifying factor that created and gave form to the Harappan civilization. I submit that Mohenjo-daro was almost purely a ceremonial center and that its functional intent was similar to the centers of the Old Kingdom Egyptians and the Mayans’. ¹¹ And, to him, the ‘religious character’ of the civilisation seemed to have manifested itself in (a) the occurrence of female and bull figurines in all Harappan sites and in a large percentage of sites in Baluchistan; (b) the construction of large buildings at prominent points and their association with drains, baths, cisterns, storage areas and the like and (c) character of the seal writing, apparently ritualistic in content. Also central to this paradigm is Fairservis’s identification of the ‘Zhob cult’ in the Quetta Valley with its ‘mother-goddess and bull figurines…ritual bathing, human and animal sacrifice and the intentional placing of ceremonial structures at the highest point in the village DambSadaat (MianGhundai)’.

Identifying ‘important features’ of Harappan civilisation, Fairservis’s choice falls on the ‘peculiar situation of a society possessing civilisation but dwelling largely in villages with ceremonial centralisation’. Have we found enough evidence of the forms of religious manifestations amongst rural folk? Archaeologists are too tempted by big and glamorous sites such as Dholavira and Rakhigarhi while hundreds of small village sites await their spades and shovels, notwithstanding excavations of some rural settlements in Gujarat such as Rojdi, Kanewal, Vagad, OriyoTimbo and Zekda (Jekhada). Incidentally, the majority of such settlements apparently date from only the early second millennium bc.

In general, being an ecological anthropologist, Fairservis, Jr. located the ‘motivation’ for ‘increased need for religion’ there in terms of the increase in ‘populations of cattle and men’ causing intensification of the ‘perils of famine’. When famine and similar disasters were not an immediate threat, for instance, at the time of the initial Harappan settlement of east Punjab and Gujarat, the religious needs were perhaps not so acute and a reason for large religious centres was minimised, that is, the urge to centralisation waned. ¹²

Fairservis’s contentions about the alleged overarching ‘Zhob cult’ and religion as an ‘intensifying factor’ also need some critical assessment vis-à-vis Wheatley’s hypothesis outlined above. Fairservis refers to ‘different kinds’ of civilisations in the ancient world with different emphases in their organisation. For example, in Egypt one is able to identify the thrust on local and state religion; in Crete, however, it was the mercantile activity that is the hallmark. No wonder, Gordon Childe’s judgement that international trade and geographical position created Cretan civilisation, has been conveniently recalled by Fairservis. Unlike Egypt, Sumer’s fame was focused on urban agriculture and centralised state to control water–soil resources. Shang China, in total contrast to all these, was clearly a warrior state. Such diversified emphases in widely dispersed ancient civilisations easily take the steam out of Wheatley’s generalised formulations. Incidentally, Possehl’s work on Kulli also discusses Indus urbanisation in the light of Mesopotamian trade without reference to the so-called ‘catalytic’ role of religion. ¹³

In the late 1960s, S.C. Malik in his multi-disciplinary enquiry into the problem forcefully called for a ‘dynamic’ approach to archaeology. Reflecting on what he described as ‘the problem of the transformation of communities living at the level of self-sufficient food-producing systems into the level of the peasant-urban system’, Malik offered an explanation about the functioning of the ‘real’ Harappan society. He contended:

The Harappan society has been looked at as an organisation of systems and institutions of activities which were accepted by the people not by force but by certain moral sanctions—ideology—through the various cultural devices such as myths, symbols, etc. Therefore, could we conclude about this ideology that the world-view of the Harappans was perhaps of a patterned kind, i.e., in this society the religious rites and functions of the ‘priest’-cum-‘ruler’ and the various craftsmen and the other social classes had a duty to perform so that there was a functional relationship which had divine sanction? The Harappans may have viewed their society as a part of a vast and complicated machine beyond individual comprehension in which all parts were somehow dependent and interrelated…But, of course, we can never hope to prove these ‘ideological’ aspects (emphasis added). ¹⁴

Shereen Ratnagar has been an important contributor to this ongoing debate about the role of religion in shaping Harappan society. Her writings on various aspects of the lives of the Harappans in the last more than four decades, show her shifting foci. Initially, in the late 1970s, she argued the case for the Harappan state being ‘intrusive or imposed over a large territory’ where the rulers derived their power through ‘some kind of merchant oligarchy’. She was quite emphatic in asserting that ‘in spite of the large number of Harappan sites excavated we have no structures so far which may be identified as temples or palaces’. ¹⁵ Almost two decades later, however, in a more detailed study of the political organisation of the Harappan society, one notices a paradigm shift in Ratnagar’s position. Characterising the Harappan state as ‘uniquely peaceable’, she postulated a ‘possible royal cult’ and identified the authority as ‘one ruled by priests’. ¹⁶

The more recent construction suggested by Ratnagar is an amalgam of several propositions in the field. To illustrate, at one level she blames the western perceptions of ‘oriental/Indian society’ being stagnant (critiques of Karl Marx and Gordon Childe are offered in the same breath) and dependent on ‘tradition and religion’, while at another level she contends: ‘all Bronze Age rulers would have been “priest kings”, in the sense that they exercised power from within the trappings of religious authority, but this does not mean that religion was a source of power’. Finding ‘the existence of the state (or several states) in Harappan times’ as ‘indisputable’ and recognising that ‘we have no formula for identifying the architectural features of ancient palace’, she suggests that ‘perhaps the citadel at Mohenjo-daro functioned as a palace-like entity’ with spaces for ‘the college of priests’ and ‘public ceremonial (the Bath)’.

Drawing analogies from contemporary Mesopotamia and ‘Bronze Age China’, Ratnagar holds that the Harappan state/states rested on ‘tribal foundations’ amidst survival of ‘distinctions of clan and lineages’ as well as on ‘absence of private property in rural agricultural land’. She now speculates that

Rulers would have initiated and cemented relationships with various village communities through marriages, the bestowal of gifts, or by sending members of their own kin groups to reside amongst the various rural communities. It could be this phenomenon which explains why it is the unicorn, possibly a royal emblem, that is the most frequently occurring image (over 65%) on the Harappan seals. ¹⁷

Writing a few years earlier, in 1998, Kenoyer had wondered if rulers of the Indus Valley cities ‘may have been wealthy merchants, powerful landlords or spiritual leaders’. He went on to add:

Square stamp seals with animal motifs carried messages understandable to all the different communities living in the Indus cities. As a totemic symbol, the animal represented a specific clan or official, and additional traits, such as power, cunning, agility, strength, etc., may have been associated with each animal. At least ten clans or communities are represented by these totemic animals: unicorn, humped bull, elephant, rhinoceros, water buffalo, short-horned humpless bull, goat, antelope, crocodile and hare. Of these, the representation of the unicorn is perhaps the most numerous and widespread, and because of the sheer numbers of unicorn seals, it is unlikely that all of them are marks for rulers. ¹⁸

However, Ratnagar’s overall proposition that ‘religion and ideology are always the trappings or “packaging” of the exercise of political power’ ¹⁹ is surely plausible.

Speaking about the division of the leadership of the Harappan society along ‘ideological lines’, Walter A. Fairservis argued:

Each seal-owner belonged to a socio-religious unit symbolized by one of two specific groups of animals. One of these groups consisted of the tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo, and the other consisted of the so-called ‘unicorn’ bull, zebu, goat-ram, and short horned bull. Both groups were dominated by supreme leaders, motalai, whose emblem was the crocodile. This socio-religious division among the Harappan leadership appears to have been based upon the need to reconcile two contending forces in daily life, the need to appease the wild and uncontrollable, and to foster the domestic and promote the fertile. ²⁰

Mortimer Wheeler had often characterised the Harappan civilisation as constituting an ‘empire’, whose rulers controlled it from its twin capitals, namely Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. It was also seen as ‘the vastest political experiment before the advent of the Roman empire’ having ‘priestly attributes’. Putting it slightly differently, Wheeler stressed, ‘The general condition of combined kingly and priestly rule fits the habit of the third millennium’. ²¹ With the knowledge that the area of the geographical spread of the civilisation ran into hundreds of thousands square kilometers, such an idea of a unified political ‘empire’ was largely given up. However, it was resurrected by Ildiko Puskas, who talks of the ‘empire phase’ of the Harappan society and ‘gods of the imperial religion of the Indus Valley people’, when two pairs of ‘proto-Brahma and Magna Mater Tara-Sarasvati’ and ‘Shiva-Durga’ account for ‘the sophisticated religion of the urban centres, which required and maintained a large priesthood’. ²²

The entire argument of the Harappan civilisation being an ‘empire’ is not only antiquated but also difficult to sustain in view of the accumulated corpus of data about the complexities of economic systems prevalent in numerous settlements spread over a vast area. For example, the distribution of economic resources and mechanism of their harnessing show that regional traditions can be distinguished rather early in the urbanisation processes. Each city expressed and retained its separate identity through symbolic and religious subsystems. Differential access to basic resources was crucial in linking various regions of the Indus civilisation. These resources included agriculture and climate, minerals and timber and trade routes. A study of these shows that ‘the integrating factors for the Indus cultural tradition lay not in an empire dominated by all-powerful priest kings, but in areas of resource exchange and technological and commercial interaction’, (Wheeler). ²³

Complexities of economic transactions, which appear accentuated by the light thrown by somewhat specialised centres of production, have been invoked to hypothesise about ‘federation made up of smaller units’ and the emergence of a ‘managerial class’. Padri, an unwalled village on the southern coast of Saurashtra, specialised in the production of salt by evaporating seawater; Nageshwar (southern coast of the Gulf of Kutch) in an area with very little arable land, was only procuring and processing marine shells and the inhabitants of Nagwada (north Gujarat coast) engaged in bead making and shell-working using pre-prepared shells brought in from outside are pointers of inter-dependent nature of Harappan industry which may have required harnessing of managerial skills at different levels of the bottom-to-top structure.

Similarly, studies of varied modes of carrying out agricultural activities along with animal husbandry also militate against the notion of an omnibus political entity. ²⁴ Cultural developments in fourth and early third millennia Baluchistan and the adjoining Indus plains which constitute the prelude to the urban civilisation of the third millennium bc show intensified intercultural exchanges and differential access to prime agricultural land, pressures on resources which led to the occupation of marginal lands. These developments, in turn, necessitate redefinition of the parameters of the relationship between farming and herding, rethinking on the chronological precedence of nomadic herding over agriculture and a better appreciation of the symbiotic bonds between herdsmen and farmers (with occasional confrontations, too). Simultaneously, the common assumption that natural conditions made for great prosperity of agriculture in the Harappan civilisation has been questioned and an intensive study of apparatus of water use (especially in the form of ‘lift irrigation’ in contrast to elaborate ‘canal irrigation’ in Sumer) indicates that a highly labour-intensive agriculture would have been required to support Harappan urbanism. These micro studies sharply bring out the need for a more nuanced integration of Harappan economic subsistence base with religious phenomena that may throw further light on the rationale of the already known ‘regional variations’ of Harappan cults and diversity of religious practices suggesting a high degree of multiculturism. ²⁵

Drawing upon such fresh insights about the non-industrial economic activities, namely the vast continuum of hunting-gathering and agro-pastoralism of the Harappans, McIntosh has postulated a different kind of socio-political formation. For her, it was not a ‘territorial state’ but a ‘state based on control of people’. Such states, she argued, are characterised by

hierarchy in which individuals owe service to their superiors in the state, to whom they often have a theoretical kin relationship; the land is not owned, only the rights to exploit it… In such states…identity was expressed in terms of kinship…This social system, in combination with something similar to the jajmani system, would have enabled kin or occupation groups to be integrated into a single functioning whole. ²⁶

Those who have argued in favour of a religious authority controlling the administrative apparatus governing the Harappans have invariably invoked the so-called monotonous cultural patterns and the ‘peaceable’ nature of the Harappans. Sustenance for such constructions has often been derived from the alleged paucity of offensive weaponry. The underlying assumptions being: it could only be a ‘moral’ authority and that such an authority tends to be somewhat ‘conservative’. Such constructions are fundamentally flawed. How could one speak of monotony when the civilisation shows distinctive stages of ‘evolution’ from village settlements to mature urbanisation? ²⁷ Also, varieties of regional manifestations would reflect on flexibility of growth rather than unilinear regimentation. As far as weaponry is concerned, bronze arrowheads, and swords/daggers may not have been as rich in numbers as those of contemporary civilisations in west Asia, but numerous and formidable mace-heads of sandstone, limestone and alabaster were ‘in common use’.

One of the oft-cited evidence for postulating ‘priestly’ order is the white steatite statue of the bearded ‘priest king’ from Mohenjo-daro wearing a head band, trefoiled garment (one shoulder being bare) showing remnants of red paste inside the trefoils. At the ‘Harappan Gallery’ inaugurated at the National Museum (New Delhi) ²⁸ in 2000, a 65-cm-tall headless stone statue of a ‘male’ seated figure was identified as that of a ‘priest’ and ‘linked with this so-called “priest king” of Mohenjo-daro’. There could not have been a more contrived reasoning. Why ‘priest’ when the statue is ‘headless’? Pointing out that all such ‘headless’ stone sculptures from Mohenjo-daro come from the ‘late levels’ of that site, McIntosh has conjectured that these could be seen as ‘smashed portraits of a line of hated rulers’. ²⁹

That the authority could not be religious is also underlined by the following:

(i) So far, there is no firm evidence of a structure from any of the known big urban settlements which could be seen as a public place of worship and a shrine housing any cultic manifestation. The biggest claim made so far has been in regard to Mohenjo-daro and its ‘Great Bath’ being a ritual centre. ³⁰ The ‘Granary’ situated alongside is seen as a place where ‘taxes’ received from people attending ceremonies were stored. Curiously, in the citadel area at Mohenjo-daro, none of the structures appear to be of administrative type. Also, there is nothing to infer that the ‘priestly class’ who may have resided inside the citadel had any control over the administration of the city or the ‘lower town’. A non-residential structure (HR-A, House 1 at Mohenjo-daro) in the lower town area is rather special: ‘It has a canopy-like structure in the central courtyard and staircases in every second alternate room on the ground floor surrounding the courtyard. It was accessible from all sides’. Several contradictory claims about the nature and purpose of this structure are in the field. During Caspers calls it ‘tree shrine’, but Shereen Ratnagar argues, ‘what we have here is not a temple but the residence of a politically important person, who was killed and hastily buried in a clash during which statues were also smashed’. ³¹ Even if this was a ‘religious’ structure, people may have practised their beliefs without the intermediation of a priestly class. ³²

(ii) The alleged signs of a ‘fire-cult’ at Kalibangan and Lothal are also not indicative of any temples or public places of worship. ³³ Jagat Pati Joshi’s obsession with the identification of stratigraphically dispersed ‘fire altars’ with ‘Vedic’ yajnakundas (sacrificial pits) is rooted in his a priori belief in making the Harappan religious systems accord with the ‘Aryan’ Vedic texts. ³⁴ The ambivalence of chronological stratification of these structural remains, specially their ascription to ‘Harappan’ levels, was pointed out long ago. Such ambivalences are also noticeable in characterisation of comparable structures, for example, from Rakhigarhi in Haryana. The ‘Harappan Gallery’ at the National Museum displayed two huge photographs of almost similar structures. While one was described as ‘potter’s kiln’, the other was identified as ‘yoni-shaped fire-altar’, and both were ascribed to the ‘mature Harappan period’ (2600–1900 bc). One is quite intrigued that when ‘first detailed report’ of Kalibangan excavations (1960/61–69) was published in 2003—more than three decades after the excavations—Joshi, who contributed the chapter on ‘structures’, writes at length about ‘underground and aboveground tandoors’ but mentions ‘ritualistic structures such as fire-altars in KLB-3’ very casually and without any details or illustrations. They do not even figure in the classified catalogue of 105 excavated structures at the site, whereas ‘ovens or tandoors’ are clearly listed and illustrated (Pls. XVII–XX). ³⁵ Such obfuscation may have something to do with the stratigraphic ambivalence of the so-called ‘fire altars’ at the site. To add further confusion on this aspect of Harappan belief systems, the distinction between ‘fire altars’ and ‘domestic hearths’ is not always clear. No wonder, apropos the Nausharo evidence of an unusual type of domestic hearth, the question has been asked whether the domestic ‘fire altars’ were in fact ordinary hearths or, conversely, whether all domestic hearths could have been used in family worship as well as for cooking’. ³⁶

(iii) The flourishing Harappan cities were the culmination of a gradual process which had begun long before their emergence and its roots can be traced in the preceding rural cultures. The process of urbanisation was boosted through the fast-growing trade and commerce and shaping of the rest of the socio-religious organisation was a peripheral development. Assimilation of regional elements into the otherwise standardised patterns indicates the flexibility of Harappan settlers. Such flexibility is not a characteristic of a regimented community. It can only be ascribed to a free community whose main concern was their success in trading. Thus, the concept of a central authority of a religious/or even military kind wielding its power all over the Harappan region turns into a kind of myth. If there is any impression of a sudden magnitude assumed by religions life of the Harappans, it should be attributed to the extraordinarily flourishing trade based on thriving agricultural settlements and intensive activities of numerous skilled artisans and craftsmen. This economic vibrancy might have intensified the psychological inclination towards religion perhaps as a feeling or gratitude or perhaps out of the desire of maintaining the prosperity attained.

Where do we stand now on the issue of the nature of the ruling apparatus of the Harappans? Putting problems in a broader perspective, a comparative study of early civilisations has stressed:

Archaeological findings supply valuable information about technology, subsistence, circulation of goods, settlement patterns, and the distribution of wealth, and data of this sort are becoming increasingly abundant and comparable for early civilizations. It is, however, very difficult to infer social and political organization from archaeological evidence alone. Many sites have been excavated that belong to the Indus Valley civilization, but it remains unresolved whether it was a state, a number of kingdoms, or a stateless commonwealth. So few written documents on this early civilization have been preserved that it seems unlikely that this and other questions will ever be answered. ³⁷

It would perhaps be the best to recognise that no explanation yet offered is satisfactory, and so to exclaim with the sage Yajñavalkya: neti, neti (not this, not this).

Addendum

An additional note is required to present Shereen Ratnagar’s views more fully. In her 2016 monograph, she contests assumptions about the so-called peaceful character of the Harappans and absence of offensive weaponry in their repertoire. She counterposes to this the existence of a centralised state, notwithstanding the absence of an identifiable centre of power. ³⁸ Further, invoking decades’ old perception about ‘standardisation’ amongst the Harappan artifacts (writing, seals, weights) she stresses that in South Asia early states emerged with rulers consolidating and expanding their power among tribes by deploying military power and using the labour of their subjects and prisoners of war. ‘Labour recruitment in the state sector’, ‘state organised labour’ and ‘labour levies’ have also been postulated in this context. Even evidence for the presence of ‘the slave in antiquity, a person denied an identity and personality’ is seen in the small terracotta figurines that are found in such large numbers at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. ³⁹