Ancient Haryana: Rakhigarhi, Kurukshetra and Vedic Age

Haryana sits on the oldest inhabited ground in northern India. Harappan villages and towns stood here while the Saraswati and the Drishadvati still flowed, the hymns of the Rigveda name those two rivers, and the plain of Kurukshetra gave the Mahabharata its battlefield. For a state formed only in 1966 that is a long memory, and state papers mine it hard. This note takes the three layers in order: the Harappan sites, the Vedic age, and the kingdoms that followed down to Harshavardhana of Thanesar.

The Harappan sites of Haryana

More Harappan sites have been reported from Haryana than from any other Indian state, because the dry beds of the Saraswati and the Drishadvati, now called the Ghaggar and the Chautang, carried a dense string of settlements. The sites worth knowing are few.

Rakhigarhi

Rakhigarhi lies in Hisar district and takes in the two villages of Rakhi Khas and Rakhi Shahpur, on a dried channel of the Drishadvati. Its mounds were excavated for the Archaeological Survey of India by Amarendra Nath between 1997 and 2000, and a later series of excavations was led by Vasant Shinde. By area it is the largest Harappan site known in India, larger than Dholavira in Gujarat, and it has yielded planned streets, drains, fire altars, a granary, seals, bangle workshops and a cemetery. A skeleton from that cemetery gave the ancient DNA studied in a paper published in 2019, which drew wide attention because the genome of the individual showed no Steppe pastoralist ancestry. Rakhigarhi was named in the Union Budget of 2020 as one of five archaeological sites to be developed as iconic sites with site museums.

The Vedic age and Brahmavarta

The Rigveda praises the Saraswati as the greatest of rivers and names the Drishadvati beside it. The Manusmriti calls the land between these two rivers Brahmavarta, the holy land made by the gods, and that land is the Haryana plain. The region of the Sapta Sindhu, the seven rivers, lay to its north and west. In the later Vedic period the Bharatas and Purus combined into the Kuru people, and the Kuru country, with Panchala to its east, became the heartland of the later Vedic texts; the Brahmanas and the earliest Upanishads belong to this setting. The archaeology of the period is the Painted Grey Ware culture, and at Bhagwanpura in Kurukshetra district the excavation found late Harappan pottery and Painted Grey Ware in the same levels, which is one of the few places where the two cultures are seen to overlap.

Kurukshetra

Kurukshetra is called Dharmakshetra in the opening line of the Bhagavad Gita, and tradition places the eighteen-day Mahabharata war on this plain. The pilgrimage circuit of the region is the forty-eight kos parikrama, which links a long list of tanks and temples. Jyotisar is held to be the spot where Krishna delivered the Gita to Arjuna, Brahma Sarovar and Sannihit Sarovar are its great tanks, and the Sthaneshwar Mahadev temple stands at Thanesar. Gita Jayanti is celebrated here every year. Thanesar, the ancient Sthanvishvara, was the capital of the Pushyabhuti or Vardhana dynasty. Prabhakaravardhana ruled from it, and his son Harshavardhana, who came to the throne in 606, later moved his capital to Kannauj. Harsha's court poet Banabhatta described Thanesar in the Harshacharita, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who travelled in Harsha's reign, visited both Thanesar and Srughna, the modern Sugh in Yamunanagar district.

Between the Vedic age and Harsha

The republican tribe of the Yaudheyas held this country in the centuries around the beginning of the Christian era, and the coin moulds found at Khokhrakot in Rohtak are their best-known remains. Agroha in Hisar district is an old trading town whose coins carry the legend of Agodaka, and tradition connects it with Maharaja Agrasen. The Ashokan pillar that now stands at Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi was brought from Topra in Yamunanagar district by Firoz Shah Tughlaq in the fourteenth century, and it was on this pillar that James Prinsep worked out the Brahmi script in 1837. Together these remains make Haryana a state where every period from the Harappan to the Mughal has left something to dig up.