EARLY CIVILISATIONS OF THE NORTHWESTon the land’s produce. The traces of destruction at Kot Diji and the
abandonment and reconstruction of Kalibangan show that in their prime
the great cities were obviously able to hold sway over a vast hinterland.
But a perennial control of trade routes and of the agricultural base would
have required the maintenance of a large army and of a host of
administrators. The excavations have shown no evidence for the existence
of such armies. The agricultural surplus of the countryside was probably
used for trade or for some kind of religious obligations. Thus, the cities
depended on the well-being of their immediate hinterland, and their size
was a direct correlate of the agricultural surplus available to them.
When the climate changed and agricultural production declined, the
cities were probably in no position to appropriate surplus from farther
afield. Under such conditions the people simply had to leave the city and
this reduction of the population may have had an accelerating effect on the
decline of the cities, the big cities being affected by it earlier and more
severely than the smaller ones. Perhaps some inhabitants of the big cities in
the Indus valley may have migrated to the new and smaller towns on the
periphery, such as the towns of Gujarat. But with the decline of the centres
the peripheral outposts also lost their importance and became dependent
on their immediate hinterland only. In this way some of the smaller places
like Amri and Lothal survived for a few generations in the Post-Harappan
time when the big cities were already extinct. Finally these smaller places
also lapsed back to the stage of simple villages as urban life had lost its
sustenance. This was not a unique event in South Asian social and political
development. History repeated itself when the flourishing cities of northern
and central India, for instance, Kausambi, started to decline around AD
200 as long-distance trade, the most important factor in their rise,
disappeared. It was only several centuries later that the medieval cities,
capitals of kings or pilgrimage centres with great temples, signalled a new
phase of urbanisation.
IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT OF
THE INDO-ARYANS
The second millennium BC witnessed another major historical event in the
early history of the South Asian subcontinent after the rise and fall of the
Indus civilisation: a semi-nomadic people which called itself Arya in its
sacred hymns came down to the northwestern plains through the mountain
passes of Afghanistan. In 1786 Sir William Jones, the founder of the
Asiatic Society of Calcutta, discovered the close relationship between
Sanskrit, the language of these Indo-Aryans, and Greek, Latin, German
and Celtic languages. His epoch-making discovery laid the foundation for
a systematic philological study of the Indo-European family of languages
which as we know by now includes many more members than Jones had