Despite their superficially similar titles, these two recent books on the Indus Civilization (2600–1900 BCE), sometimes referred to as the Harappan Civilization, could not be more different. While Andrew Robinson's The Indus is a journalistic attempt to synthesize contemporary archaeologists’ understanding of the Indus Civilization for a popular audience, Shereen Ratnagar's Harappan Archaeology is a set of critical essays that seeks to challenge widely held positions on Indus society. Considered together, however, they offer insight into the current state of consensus and debate in the study of South Asia's first urban civilization, a topic of perennial and crucial importance for scholars, teachers, and students across a range of South Asian studies disciplines.

Given the dearth of currently available popular accounts, Robinson's slim volume The Indus takes on potentially outsized significance. Robinson is a prolific author of nonfiction books with thematic foci on biography, ancient writing systems, and South Asian history, and The Indus is pitched on the dustjacket as “an accessible introduction to every significant aspect of an extraordinary and tantalizing ‘lost’ civilization.” As a non-specialist, Robinson follows a well-charted course through The Indus, relying heavily on a select set of recent synthetic treatments by contemporary Indus scholars, including Mark Kenoyer, Rita Wright, the late Greg Possehl, and Asko Parpola (to whom the book is inscribed), all clearly cited throughout. The Indus does not significantly engage the recent primary literature. Journalistically negotiating his sources’ distinctive approaches and emphases, Robinson identifies areas of scholarly disagreement and controversial issues as such, presenting the reader with alternative perspectives while cautiously leaving debates formally open-ended in the text. While its core sources lend The Indus a solid evidentiary foundation, Robinson is clear that he will “mix hard information from archaeology with informed speculation” (p. 17).

Aware of the high stakes surrounding speculation on the earliest stages of South Asian history, Robinson opens his introduction to “An Enigmatic World” (chap. 1) with discussion of the politicization of what to the novitiate may seem like basic facts regarding Indus language, religion, and so forth in contemporary India. Often omitted from popular treatments of ancient civilizations, this acknowledgment of the social context within which archaeological knowledge is produced—and contested—is commendable and resurfaces throughout. Robinson's engaging narrative of the discovery of the Indus Civilization in the early twentieth century, for example, highlights the colonial context within which Mortimer Wheeler's influential midcentury vision of militarily defended cities governed by priest-kings who enforced a strict material and ideological homogeneity was developed.

This long-outmoded paradigm serves as a foil in Robinson's subsequent discussion of the architecture of Indus cities (chap. 3), which promotes more recent scholarly interpretations of the walls surrounding the multiple walled residential sectors at Harappa and Mohenjodaro as civic authorities’ attempts to control the movement of goods and people. Highlighting the lack of obvious royal palaces, temples, and tombs that distinguish the Indus from its contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Robinson impresses the reader with the well-known sophistication of Indus urban planning and infrastructure—and the authority it implies.

Indus crafts are particularly well-studied, and Robinson's discussion of these (chaps. 4 and 6) draws heavily on Kenoyer and colleagues’ studies of Indus technologies. Most of them would agree that trade networks “surely played a role in knitting together the Indus cities, towns, and villages into a civilization” (p. 104).

Considering the political organization of Indus society (chap. 7), Robinson gives voice to widely accepted contemporary understandings of the Indus Civilization as being comprised of interacting city-states within a shared cultural tradition rather than a politically unified empire—yet counterintuitively interprets the well-known relative absence of evidence for warfare or kingship in the iconography of the Indus as evidence for a strong central authority that enforced peace throughout the region. Here, Robinson's credulous repetition of Jane McIntosh's fanciful depiction of the Indus Civilization as a “peaceful realm” is unfortunate—no serious scholar of the Indus Civilization argues for an absence of conflict, rather that Indus cities were controlled by competing communities of elites whose legitimacy derived primarily from management of trade and maintenance of civic order rather than military conquest.

Continuing his discussion of Indus society, Robinson again turns to another of McIntosh's speculations, namely that Indus society was organized along principles of “caste”—although he definitively and correctly identifies it as such in absence of evidence for the specific ideologies that underpinned historically known varna and jati concepts. Moving on to the related—and equally controversial—issues of Indus religion (chap. 8), Robinson highlights the conspicuous absence of obvious temples in the Indus Civilization, leading the reader through well-trod analyses and critiques of John Marshall's early twentieth-century identification of parallels between particular Indus iconographic elements and those known from later historical Hinduism.

Regarding the end of the Indus Civilization (chap. 9), Robinson is unequivocal that “today the idea of a concentrated Aryan Invasion of the Indus Civilization has been wholly rejected by scholars” (p. 131), although following a discussion of the various environmental challenges facing Indus peoples, he prominently discusses the venerable idea that Indo-Aryan speakers migrated into the region from Central Asia as the Indus Civilization was in decline. Parpola's related hypothesis that the Indus script must therefore represent a Dravidian language features significantly in a detailed account of the Indus script and the many (unsuccessful) attempts to decipher it (chap. 10).

Addressing “The Indus Origins of Hinduism?” in the penultimate chapter, Robinson again draws heavily on Parpola, presenting an overview of the historical development of Hindu tradition, the content of the vedas, and his reasonable argument that aspects of Indus religious practice contributed to the development of later South Asian faith traditions—in twelve pages.

An even shorter final chapter concludes that the Indus combined “artistic excellence, technological sophistication and economic vigor with social egalitarianism, political freedom and religious tolerance over more than half a millennium … a hopeful sign for the future of humankind” (p. 187). Indeed, “Forgotten Utopia” was the title of Robinson's recent cover story for New Scientist promoting The Indus—which inevitably initiated a minor wave of click-bait bearing even more cringe-worthy headlines across the social mediascape.Footnote ¹ Irrespective of the dippy caricature that it lends itself to, The Indus nevertheless generally reflects its source material, identifies areas of scholarly disagreement and controversial issues as such, and presents the Indus Civilization to a popular audience in an engaging way that will be recognizable to specialists.

In contrast, Harappan Archaeology: Early State Perspectives by Ratnagar, a professor of history from Jawaharlal Nehru University who has over three decades developed fiercely independent positions on the nature of Indus society, is a challenging volume of critical essays “questioning some existing views of the Harappan Civilization” (p. 1). Comprised of loosely joined chapters that “for a large part stand on their own” (p. 1), Harappan Archaeology is not meant as a comprehensive overview of the Indus Civilization, although its chapters are arranged such that it could be read alongside a more comprehensive text in a graduate course. While the themes developed throughout Harappan Archaeology will be familiar to followers of Ratnagar's work, here they are developed and updated, notably incorporating recent research by Indian and Pakistani archaeologists. Not based on original fieldwork, Ratnagar's arguments are grounded in a historian's close reading of the primary literature.

Ratnagar's alternative vision of the Indus Civilization is woven throughout the chapters of Harappan Archaeology. “Discoveries, Regional Variations, and the Interpretations of Harappan Origins” (chap. 2), for example, concludes that “disrupted settlement and changing settlement patterns bring to mind K.V. Flannery's hypothesis (1999) of state origins” in which “states could only come into being only when chiefdoms were in competition with one another in a particular region, and the war leader of one of these chiefdoms came to prevail over the others” (p. 51), making clear her commitment to a neoevolutionary theoretical perspective that understands the state to be a distinctive type of human society characterized by political centralization and military expansion.

Warfare is then the central theme of “A Past to Mirror Ourselves” (chap. 3), developed from Ratnagar's memorial lecture for a respected Indian freedom fighter, which argues for the continuing influence of colonial constructions of the Indian past, asking “Is it, then, the latent idea of Indian Civilization as spiritual and tradition-bound that has promoted archaeologists to conclude that the Harappans were not warlike?” Subsequent discussion of what Ratnagar interprets as evidence for warfare in the Indus will likely not convince archaeologists who have examined the same evidence and long come to the consensus that evidence for large-scale organized conflict is conspicuously scant.

An especially slim chapter on Indus economic organization (chap. 5) argues that the physical standardization exhibited by certain types of Indus artifacts implies state control of the economy, yet unfortunately gives short shrift to the rich literature on Indus technologies demonstrating considerable variation in the organization of different crafts. Similarly, parallels between walled sectors at many Harappan settlements and those of contemporaneous northern Mesopotamian towns episodically incorporated into various historically known empires are argued to imply the existence of a militarily expansionist Indus state (chap. 7) that colonized areas such as Gujarat to control resource procurement and trade (chap. 8).

Consistent with her earlier work, Ratnagar consistently argues for the salience of kinship in Indus society, specifically hypothesizing that the animal motifs on Harappan seals were “emblems of different descent groups, with the unicorn, the emblem of the ruling lineage” (p. 119) whose members “searched for their own spheres of control” through warfare and “marriages with local families” (p. 153). This theme is further developed in her discussion of urban architecture at Mohenjodaro (chap. 6), in which residential blocks are interpreted as home to elite “Houses” that “included several families, both agnatic kin and people related by marriage” (p. 112) “that in some instances organized production of certain crafts” (p. 128). Ratnagar, however, is clear that “we cannot say that this or that residence group of the past was a caste … until and unless there is evidence that a hierarchy pervaded society as a whole, and that various castes had their respective places in that hierarchy” (p. 130), echoing Robinson's dismissal of McIntosh's speculation about the existence of “caste” in Indus society as noted above. Further, Ratnagar forcefully argues that as “such theories may imply the caste hierarchy was primordial … that this reprehensible form of social division has the validity of timelessness” (p. 80). Her “Interpretation of Settlement Morphology” (chap. 4) finds no evidence for caste-based divisions of space in Indus settlements, as has occasionally been argued.

This full-throated critique of what Ratnagar perceives as a continuation of the colonial-era idea “of Indian civilization being dominated by Tradition” (p. 231) is central to her discussion of Indus decline (chap. 10), which attempts to deconstruct arguments for material and cultural continuities as pandering to modern India's political right. Rather, the decline of the Indus Civilization is understood by Ratnagar as the collapse of a politically centralized state—along with the political economy it managed and the ideologies it promoted.

“Weaving together the threads” in a short concluding chapter, Ratnagar ultimately concedes that “there may never have been a continuously settled, uniformly controlled, or entirely enculturated territory” (p. 255) across the Indus region, yet finds it “legitimate to hypothesize some degree of centralization” (p. 256) amid contested, perpetually unfinished processes of state-making that played out differently in the various regions encompassed by the Indus Civilization. Archaeologists whose work she often quite pointedly critiques will no doubt take issue with her theoretical orientation and disagree with particular interpretations of the archaeological record upon which her arguments are based. Nevertheless, Ratnagar's explicitly historical perspective on the social dynamics of the Indus Civilization conjures numerous specific hypotheses for skeptical scholars to evaluate with further research—a testament to the vitality of South Asian archaeology in the twenty-first century.