Manasara Series (I. A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture; II. Indian Architecture according to Manasara-Shilpashastra; III. Manasara on Architecture and Sculpture: Sanskrit Text; IV. Architecture of Manasara: Translation; V. Architecture of Manasara: Illustrations; VI. Hindu Architecture in India and Abroad; VII. An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Architecture) v6.c40.s6: Waziristan

Mānasāra Series (I. A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture; II. Indian Architecture according to Mānasāra-Śilpaśāstra; III. Mānasāra on Architecture and Sculpture: Sanskrit Text; IV. Architecture of Mānasāra: Translation; V. Architecture of Mānasāra: Illustrations; VI. Hindu Architecture in India and Abroad; VII. An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Architecture) v6.c40.s6

Language: English

Waziristan

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The antiquity of Waziristan is established by the mention of the river Kramu and Gomatī in the *Rig-Veda* (x, 75), which are identified with the present Kurram and Gumal in this region.⁷ But the architectural structures discovered are nothing more than ‘ remains of rubble-built walls as well as single courses of large uncut stones at varying levels. They are likely to have served as wall foundations or floorings.’¹

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⁷ Stein, *Memoir*, no. 37, p. 2.

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¹ Stein, *Memoir*, no. 37, p. 6.

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In Northern Baluchistan the remains at Zhob, Loralal and Pishin are also very scanty from the architectural point of view. ‘The whole of this great mound (at Periano-ghuṇḍai in Zhob area) is composed of accumulations of clay and rough stones from decayed dwellings and permeated by layers containing ashes, bones, and decomposed refuse.’²

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² *Ibid*, p. 33.

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In the mound of Rāna-ghuṇḍai in Loralal District only ‘ the matrices left by charred beams, evidently of an old dwelling,’ were traced. In places ‘ it was possible to make out large blocks of mud brick masonry.’³

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³ *Ibid*, p. 52.

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At Tor-Dherai of the same district have been discovered the so-called ‘ written stones,’ that is, Nagari characters and Svastika marks on the rocks. ‘ The line of a massive base of stone masonry ’ has also been traced.⁴ A Buddhist relic deposit has also been found at an unrecognizable structure which was obviously a Buddhist *stūpa*, but no details are available.⁵

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⁴ *Ibid*, p. 65.

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⁵ *Ibid*, p. 66.

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The antiquity of Pishin also is assured by its mention in Zoroastrian scriptures (*Vendi-dad*, i) among the principal territories of ancient Iran. But the architectural remains are practically missing. ‘ The central mass (at mound Spina-ghuṇḍai) shows almost everywhere nearly vertical walls of clay mixed with rubble, ashes, and potsherds.’⁶

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⁶ *Ibid*, p. 82.

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At the Khārān area the only architectural remains consist of ‘ little roughly circular enclosures of stones only a few feet across. They recalled those funeral ‘ cairns ’ of similar appearance which at Moghal-ghuṇḍai in the Zhob Valley had proved to mark a burial ground of early historical times.’ But here they contained only soft earth without any deposit of bones, ashes or objects.⁷ Similar remains have also been traced at the Makrān coast.⁸ No early or pre-Muslim remains of architecture have been discovered along the central valley of Jhalawān and Sarawān.⁹

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⁷ Stein, *Memoir*, no. 43, pp. 34, 77, 86 ; also his *Northern Baluchistan Tour*, pp. 46 sqq.

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⁸ *Ibid*, p. 77 sqq.

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⁹ *Ibid*, p. 170 sqq.

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The discoveries made at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro have made it clear that the Indus peoples living in Sindh and the Punjab, and of the fourth and third millenia B. C., were in possession of a highly developed culture. 'At present our researches carry us back no further than the fourth millennium B. C., but even at Mohenjo-daro there are still earlier cities lying, one below the other . . . and also in other sites in Sindh and Baluchistan. One thing that stands clear and unmistakable both at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped on Indian soil, with many millenia of human endeavour behind it.'¹ Although 'India cannot be regarded as the cradle of human civilization, in fact no one country could be so regarded,' asserts Sir John Marshall, yet he would recognize India, along with Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, 'as one of the most important areas where the civilizing processes of society were initiated and developed.'¹ But, so far as architecture is concerned, he has no doubt that 'there is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the citizens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings, but the rest of the people seemingly had to content themselves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus Valley the picture is reversed, and the finest structures are those erected for the convenience of the citizens. Temples, palaces, and tombs there may of course have been.' He recognizes 'the evidence, in the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro and in its roomy and serviceable houses with their ubiquitous wells and bathrooms and elaborate systems of drainage, that the ordinary towns-people enjoyed here a degree of comfort and luxury unexampled in other parts of the then civilized world.'²

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¹ Sir John Marshall, Preface (viii), Vol. I, *Mohenjo-daro and Indus Civilization*.

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He also recognizes another fact. Among the many revelations that Mohenjo-daro and Harappa have made, 'none, perhaps, is more remarkable than this discovery, that Śaivism has a history going back to the Chalcolithic age or perhaps even further still, and that it thus takes its place as the most ancient living faith in the world.'²

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² *Ibid*, Preface v, vi.

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The other cultural achievements of the Indians of the Indus Valley have been correctly inferred from the Harappa and Mohenjo-daro finds. ‘Their society is organized in cities; their wealth derived mainly from agriculture and trade, which appears to have extended far and wide in all directions. They cultivate wheat and barley as well as the date-palm. They have domesticated the humped zebu, buffalo and short-horned bull, besides the sheep, pig, dog, elephant, and camel; but the cat and probably the horse are unknown to them. For transport they have wheeled vehicles. . . . They are skilful metal workers, with a plentiful supply of gold, silver, and copper. Lead, too, and tin are in use, but the latter only as an alloy in the making of bronze. With spinning and weaving they are thoroughly conversant. Their weapons of war and of the charge are the bow and arrow, spear, axe, dagger, and mace. The sword they have not yet evolved; nor is there any evidence of defensive body armour. Among their other implements, hatchets, sickles, saws, chisels, and razors are made of both copper and bronze; knives and celts, sometimes of these metals, sometimes of chert or other hard stones. For the crushing of grain they have the muller and saddle-quern, but not the circular grindstone. Their domestic vessels are commonly of earthenware turned on the wheel and not infrequently painted with encaustic designs; more rarely they are of copper, bronze, or silver. The ornaments of the rich are made of the precious metals or of copper, sometimes overlaid with gold, of faience, ivory, cornelian, and other stones; for the poor, they are usually of shell or terra-cotta. Figurines and toys, . . . are of terra-cotta, and shell and faience are freely used . . . not only for personal ornaments but for inlay work and other purposes. With the invention of writing the Indus peoples are also familiar, and employ for this purpose a form of script which though peculiar to India, is evidently analogous to other contemporary scripts of Western Asia and the Nearer East.’¹

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¹ Sir John Marshall, Preface, v–vi, Vol. I, *Mohenjo-daro and Indus Civilization*.

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The ‘analogousness’ of the Indus script to various other scripts of Asia, Europe and Africa has been suggested by scholars for the past fifteen years. It has not yet been deciphered. Nor is it known in which language the then Indians, of Sindh and the Punjab to be more particular, used to write and talk. Thus the antiquated theories of Bühler and others on the introduction of writing in India from the Phoenician source in 800 B. C. can now safely be discarded.

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The cultural achievements of the Indians revealed at Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and other places in Sindh and Baluchistan can now be more confidently compared with those disclosed by the Vedas, not only with a view to revising the old notions that the Vedic Indians did not know the use of writing, but also with a view to understanding the casual references to the villages, towns, forts and cities with hundred enclosures or fortifications, stone houses, carved stones and brick edifices. For if the Indus peoples were the earlier residents, it will be curious to imagine that the later and highly cultured Vedic ‘Aryans themselves were still in the village state and that their society was in other respects correspondingly primitive.’¹ Vedic Indians must have been aware of the art of building, illustrated in Mohenjo-daro. In that case one can hardly persuade oneself to believe that it was mere imagination when told that a Vedic sovereign ‘sits down in his substantial and elegant hall built with a thousand pillars . . . residential palaces being vast, comprehensive and thousand-doored.’² Thus one can hardly share the obstinacy of the archaeologist when the latter expresses, in the absence of archaeological remains, his doubt about the Vedic forts being no more than ‘simple earthworks, surrounded by palisades or rough stone-walls.’

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¹ *Indus Civilization*, Preface, p. v.

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² *Ṛig-veda.* ii, 313; iv, 179.

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The inhabitants of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro are surmised by Sir John Marshall to have been ‘the pre-Aryan, probably Dravidian, people of India, known in the Vedas as the Dasyus or Asuras, whose culture was largly destroyed in the second or third millennium B. C. by the invading Aryans from the north.’³

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³ *Archaeological Survey of India, Report*, 1924-25, p. 63.

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In order ‘to facilitate the co-ordination of the data of archaeology with literary evidences,’ Rai Bahadur Ramaprasad Chanda has discussed some of the passages in the Vedic literature, comprising the *Saṁhitās*, *Brāhmaṇas* and *Sūtras*, ‘the youngest in age among which is probably older than the third century B. C.’⁴ He has endeavoured to show that the animosity between the invading Aryans and the original inhabitants of India, including those of the Indus Valley and farther south and the extreme east, was of such a nature that the former destroyed all the towns, cities (*pur*, *pura*) and forts (*durga*)

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⁴ *Archaeological Survey of India Memoir*, no. 31 (1926), pp. 12-14; no. 41 (1929), pp. 1-36.

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of the latter, and that there was thus no possibility of any cultural influence between them.

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'Two of the famous Ṛig-vedic kings, Divodāsa, the chief of the Bharatas, and Purukutsa, the chief of the Pūrus, are found engaged in war with the hostile owners of *puras* (cities). It is said (4, 30, 20) that Indra overthrew a hundred *puras* for his worshipper, Divodāsa. The greatest feat that Indra performed on behalf of Purukutsa, the chief of Pūrus, is thus described in a stanza (6, 20, 10): 'May we, O Indra, regain new (wealth) through your favour; the Pūrus worship thee with this hymn and sacrifice. You destroyed the seven autumnal *puras* with thunder-weapon, slew Dāsas and gave wealth to Purukutsa.' 'If we can shake off our bias,' continues Mr. Chanda, 'relating to the absence of towns in the Ṛig-vedic period, we can recognize in these stanzas (5, 34, 7; 7, 25, 2; 1, 41, 3) references to both fort and town.' It is rightly declared that 'the recovery of the ruins of cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro leaves no room for doubt that the Ṛig-vedic Āryas were familiar with towns and cities of aliens.' He concludes that 'there existed, and the folk-memory remembered, that there once existed Ārya worshippers of Indra who waged wars against civilized aboriginal neighbours living in towns and fighting from within strongholds.'¹

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¹ *Memoir*, no. 31, 1926, pp. 2, 3, 4.

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The Rai Bahadur has taken pains to quote passages from the later Vedic literature also, comprising the *Yajur-veda*, the *Brāhmaṇas*, together with *Āraṇyakas*, the *Śrauta* and *Gṛihya Sūtras*, and the subsidiary works, as Yāska's *Nirukta*, Śaunaka's *Bṛihaddevatā*, and Pāṇini's grammar, to show that the Paṇis, the inhabitants of Ānarta, Aṅga, Surāshṭra, Deccan, Sind, also Gāndhāras, Sauvīras, Kāraskaras, Kaliṅgas, Vaṅgas, Puṇḍras, Keralas, Karkoṭas, Vīrakas, Bāhīkas, Madras, Prasthalas, Vaśātis, Khaśas and others were treated by the Āryas as Nīchyas (low-born) or Apāchyas (ill-mannered?). He has also endeavoured to show that, while the Āryas disposed of their dead by burning, these peoples adopted both cremation and burial.² But these data would hardly justify the inference that 'the Ārya conquerors were inferior in material culture,'³ to the 'civilized aboriginal neighbours living in towns and fighting from within strongholds.'⁴ Although Indra is called Purohā or Purandara (sacker of cities), and the Aryan conquerors might have ‘either destroyed the cities or allowed them to fall into ruin,’¹ there is, however, nothing to show that the former were inferior to the latter in the art of town planning and building fortified cities. In fact, the Rai Bahadur himself asks his readers to shake off the bias relating to the absence of towns in the Ṛig-vedic period. Thus, if there were towns like Mohenjo-daro, and if the Aryans themselves were living in extensive (*śatabhuji* or hundred winged) *pur* (town) made of copper or iron (*Ṛig-veda*, 7, 15, 4), it will be curious to think that the composers of Vedic hymns, the first effort of human beings to express thoughts in such language of grammar and metres, if not of some scripts also, were inferior to the ‘cultured aboriginals’ in matter of house-building. If proper excavations could be made even the obstinate archaeologist might explore better types of cities of the Vedic Aryans, of which the literary description has been declared to be poetic exaggeration. In utter confusion the archaeologist assumes that ‘the Ṛig-vedic Āryas reached the lower course of the Parushṇī long after the disappearance of the folk that built the ancient city of Harappa and when that city was already in ruins.’²

Waziristan

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