Dholavira lets its history rest unencumbered… an island forsaken by water aeons ago, yet still trying to come to terms with its degeneration from a thriving fluvial landscape to an arid panorama, draped in white, a cremation of sorts… and amidst this geological rollercoaster lie the latest vestiges of one of the oldest civilizations… an assemblage of stones overlooking a sleepy village unfussed about the significance of its archaeological treasures…

A thirty kilometre arrow straight road cutting through the salt flats of the Great Rann of Kutch – dubbed the road to heaven, a tad overstated one feels, for there must be countless such heavens wherever linear infrastructure has permeated into parched lands – is where the sense of an otherworldliness starts coming to the fore… the salt-scape so similar to a snow-scape that it feels a bit eerie, not just visually but even the way it cracks and shifts beneath one’s feet…

From this seemingly endless expanse of white, the island of Khadir bet rises roughly a hundred metres, shaking off the salt to accumulate some vegetation and habitation… the shrubbery and livestock both carrying a sullen expression under a March sun already beginning to sear and swelter…

I found myself in these surrounds for an ultramarathon, hoping to tick a 100k off the bucket list, and in my own convoluted logic decided that the best way to acclimatise to the heat would be to spend the whole day loitering about… the break of dawn was spent on the salt flats, watching salt crystals first turn amber and then white… during the rains this would all be inundated with shallow water, but for now it was comfortably traversable…

As the white began to shimmer, I retraced my steps back to terra firma… jirds were starting to emerge from their burrows and skittle around, and the avifauna began to vocalize… a little after ten I started walking towards the archaeological site, the excavated ruins of a Harappan site, one of the largest remnants of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) dating back to around 4,500 years…

I was mildly surprised to find that it was discovered only in the late 1960s, and properly excavated in the 1990s and early 2000s,  having assumed it was found along with Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the early 20^thcentury, the two largest and most well-excavated sites of the IVC that now lie across a geopolitical quandary…

Hierarchy is the hallmark of civilization, or maybe life as a whole, and the site was no exception, with a well-planned, three-tiered layout… a fortified castle sat atop the hillock, and its benevolence flowed down into the middle and lower towns… most of the artefacts are offsite, housed in a museum near the entrance, leaving one with a rather drab canvas of geometrically arranged stones to contend with in a heat that bordered on uncomfortable but was still manageable… Dholavira lies on the Tropic of Cancer, the northernmost point where the sun is exactly overhead at noon… a fact I wasn’t too chuffed with, trying to look for photos that could come out okay despite the harsh light…

The water reservoirs are perhaps the best excavated part of the site at present, and some of the largest in what has been discovered of ancient civilizations… their size and number indicates that freshwater would’ve been scarce even then, and its management a priority… which puts a doubt on the theory that a climatic transition to aridity forced the city to be deserted… throughout history, human ingenuity has always been able to thrive in arid climes I feel, because one only has to manage the elements, unlike tropical regions where faunal and microbial dangers multiply manifold…

The housing complexes and road patterns are also fleshed out quite well, though one feels that there is still quite a lot to be unearthed, quite literally… unlike other Harappan sites which use bricks, stone is the primary construction material here, which on one hand seems a bit crude for a civilization purported to be quite advanced, but on the other it may be a reason why the site has remained relatively unscathed…

Most of the castle area is cordoned off for the general public, maybe for the best… what one gets is a series of circular plinths, water channels, a well and two pillars jutting out of the ground that could either flank an entrance, or signify the holy phallus, or maybe both… a ceremonial burial ground is also believed to exist here, but ‘tis a bit hard to imagine with all the scaffoldings around…

Rest is the usual harvest of artefacts… pottery pieces, terra cotta seals, bangles, rings and beads that one can see in the museum… combined with the tools that were also discovered, the site is believed to have been an important centre for craft production, when navigable waterways would have put it at the intersection of trade routes between Gujarat, Punjab, Sindh and farther into West Asia…

What I found endearing was the lack of crowds though, despite the UNESCO World Heritage Site inscription – a recent award in 2021 – which allowed me to loaf around the site the entire day… some livestock around the perimeter was the only encroachment I found, the villagers content to leave history to its own devices… but the government is quite bullish on promoting the destination, which has resulted in an annual paraphernalia during the winter months, so this solitude may not last for long…

Walking back to the hotel a couple of miles away, looking at fresh tiles on newly constructed sidewalk plastered with fresher cow dung, one surmised that ‘tis perhaps the intrigue and mystery of the IVC that lends a unique aura to any of its sites… a language yet to be deciphered, an end yet to be understood… Dholavira belongs to a history that is reluctant to reveal itself, its bleak present a stark contrast to the rich imagined past, leaving those allured by it perennially but pleasantly flummoxed… mired in myriad interpretations, excited at the possibilities of each excavation… for ‘tis not just the civilization that’s ancient here, but the landscape as a whole, the salt flats embosoming a geological past that humbles the human history within its folds…

Musing on the salt flats and the Harappan archaeological site at Dholavira, Gujarat