Indus Valley Civilization: Hindu perspectives

Interpretive Traditions

The Indus Valley Civilization (Harappan Civilization, c. 2600–1900 BCE) left no deciphered texts, so any account of its religious life is necessarily an inference from artifacts: seals, figurines, architecture, and burial practice. Two broad interpretive traditions have grown up around this evidence. Mainstream archaeology treats Harappan religion as a distinct, self-contained system, only speculatively connected to what emerges centuries later in Vedic and post-Vedic Hindu texts. A second, largely Hindu-traditionalist current — represented by some Indian scholars, several 20th-century Indologists, and popular religious writing — reads specific Harappan artifacts as direct precursors of recognizably Hindu deities, symbols, and practices. Both readings work from the same limited body of evidence.

The Pashupati Seal

The single most discussed artifact in this debate is a steatite seal from Mohenjo-daro depicting a horned, seated figure in a cross-legged posture, surrounded by a tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, and deer. John Marshall, who directed the Mohenjo-daro excavations, proposed in 1928 that the figure was a prototype of Shiva in his Pashupati ("lord of animals") aspect, citing the horns, associated with later depictions of Shiva, the seated posture, read as an early yogic asana, and the animal retinue. The identification has never been settled: other scholars have proposed a buffalo deity, a composite or ambiguous animal figure, or a ritual specialist wearing a mask, and note that a three-faced or ithyphallic reading of the figure — both cited by Marshall in support of a Shiva connection — is itself disputed. The seal remains, within Hindu-traditionalist readings, the strongest single piece of evidence for continuity between Harappan and later Shaiva worship.

Fire, Water, and the Sarasvati Question

Excavations at Kalibangan, in Rajasthan, uncovered rows of small brick-lined pits containing ash and charred animal bone, interpreted by the excavators as fire altars; some later writers have read these as evidence of ritual practice ancestral to the Vedic yajna, the fire sacrifice central to later Brahmanical religion. Mohenjo-daro's Great Bath, a large brick-built tank on the citadel mound, is similarly read by some as evidence of ritual bathing continuous with later Hindu practice around sacred tanks and rivers. A separate strand of this tradition connects the Ghaggar-Hakra, the seasonal river system along which many Harappan sites, including Kalibangan, are concentrated, with the Sarasvati river praised in the Rigveda as a great, now-vanished river; some scholars, and a large body of traditionalist writing, treat this identification as established, using it to argue that the Rigveda describes a landscape the Harappans themselves inhabited. Mainstream Indology is divided on the identification and does not treat it as settled.

The Continuity Debate

The interpretive question is entangled with a larger and more contested one: how the Harappan population relates to the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples of the Vedic texts, conventionally dated from roughly 1500 BCE, after the Mature Harappan cities had already declined. The scholarly mainstream, drawing on comparative linguistics, the shared Indo-European vocabulary of Vedic Sanskrit, and increasingly on ancient-DNA evidence, holds that Indo-Aryan-speaking populations arrived in the subcontinent from Central Asia in the second millennium BCE, after the Mature Harappan phase, and that Vedic religion is a later, partly distinct tradition that in time absorbed elements of the cultures it encountered, Harappan included. A minority position, sometimes called the Indigenous Aryans or Out of India theory and held by some Indian scholars and much of the Hindu-traditionalist and nationalist literature on the subject, argues instead that Indo-Aryan speakers, and by extension Vedic religion, originated within the subcontinent, and that the Harappans were themselves Vedic or proto-Vedic in culture. This position is not accepted by the international mainstream of historical linguistics, archaeology, or population genetics, which continue to find its central claims unsupported by the comparative and genetic evidence. Both positions remain part of the current public debate over how to read the Indus Valley Civilization's religious life.