Time travellers in Dholavira

THIS morning we drove out of Bhuj and discovered a city slumbering fro 5,000 years. Much of our four hour journey lay across the shimmering lands of the Rann. Once, not so long ago, this was a vast stretch of water, an inlet of the Arabian Sea. Then the area got silted up leaving flatlands which glitter with salt. When the monsoon drives the sea inland, and floods the Rann, handsome wild asses gallop across the cement-hard saline desert and huddle together on the little hillocks, called bets, which become islands in an inland sea.

One of the larger bets is called Khadir, and this is where our causeway led us, arrowing through this shimmering lands of the Rann.

For many years, the highest point here, the brand and flattish peak of the hillock, looked indistinguishable from the rest of the island. It was covered in coarse scrub and rocks. But when we drove up and parked, beside a surprisingly large number of cars and coaches, at the edge of a camp, we saw that the hillock was covered with workers digging, moving earth, exposing a great brick structure with steps, terraces and walls.

The workers and the camp had been set up by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Along with a number of other visitors, we spoke to the ASI's Director of Excavations, the articulate Dr. R. S. Bisht. It was from him that we learnt the true wonder of Dholavira. And then we went to the site and walked around the impressive remains of a city which would have celebrated its Fifth Millennium of existence when our IT world celebrated its second.

Dholavira must have been a huge and thriving city, 50 centuries ago. A fortress wall ran all the way round the 48 hectare city. Another concentric wall separated the lower town, which could have been the artisans and industrial area, from the main residential area of the middle town. Within this was a third wall which circumscribed and protected the Acropolis and the palace. Beyond these 48 walled hectares, however, spread other structures which have not been fully excavated as yet. Part of this was the cemetery. And it is the cemetery, and the varied methods of burial used in it, that points to two conclusions. First, that the ancient Dholavirans believed, strongly, in an after-life. And second, that the citizens of this megalopolis belonged to a number of ethnic groups, each with its distinctive customs. Great centres of civilisation, invariably, attract people from all around, even from other countries in the case of trading civilisations as, indeed, Dholavira was. In fact there is reason to believe that, in at least one case, an important personage in the town believed in the immersion of idols: little effigies have been found near one of the tanks.

These great tanks are some of the many surprising features of this ancient city. There were so many of these great reservoirs between the city walls that, from the air, it might well have looked like a complex of artificial lakes. Together, they held an amazing 2,50,000 cubic metres of water: a fantastic achievement in an area known for its aridity. On the rare occasions every year when it does rain, the water tends to run off in swift, eroding, streams. The Dholavirans used this by building check dams and diverting the water from the roofs, and two rain-fed streams, into an intricate system of drains with vents to allow the air to escape and not impede the flow of water. And, since most of their bricks were sun-dried and held together by mud mortar, they devised a unique system of letting the lime in the soil float to the top of special pits, and then skimming it off like cream. They used this to face the walls of the reservoirs. Their reservoirs charged their wells which, in turn, filled their drinking and bathing cisterns.

Dholavira would be ranked as a truly remarkable city on the basis of its water-harvesting systems alone. But there was much more in this megalopolis. From the very first stage, of the seven successive cultural stages that marked the growth of this city, Dholavirans were skilled in working with copper, stone, beads, shells and ceramics. In fact it was probably a pink-and-white city with its walls, roads, floors and possibly even the roofs of its houses glinting with baked colours. And then there was an enormous recreational ground in the heart of the town, served by stepped tiers: a public amphitheatre, probably.

Finally, we saw a reproduction of the world's oldest signboard with 10 large "letters" in their undeciphered script. Because of the placement of its spoked wheels, we believe that it proclaimed a traffic-regulating order distinguishing between hand-drawn carts and animal-pulled vehicles. Like us, the Dholavirans seemed to abhor traffic jams.

There was so much more to see and speculate upon. We spent the whole, long, fascinating day in Dholavira and our travel diaries have been filled with page after page of notes. But we are not archaeologists working on a thesis. We are writers and the wings of our minds are the vehicles of our vocation.

Driving out of Dholavira, with a low sun glinting off the quicksilver stretches of the Rann, we suddenly saw it as it might have been. Out of the inland sea, the island rose, tier after rising tier of pink and white, its ceramic tiles flashing in the sun, a faint banner of smoke pluming high across it. This was the view that ships from the north-west and the bat-winged junks from the north-east first saw as they sailed in from the Arabian Sea.

And when they tied up at the warves of the teeming city they mingled with merchants and traders and travellers speaking a score of languages, dressed in their own distinctive costumes: from Ur and Egypt, and pale and bearded savages from the grasslands of the north who smelled of fermented mare's milk and horses and gazed around them with the eyes of raptors assessing the city for its wealth and its weaknesses...

And after they had returned in force, Dholavira began its long hibernation, in the silvered lands of the Rann.

HUGH and COLLEEN GANTZER

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