D. P. Agrawal

"The Indus civilization is still alive today."

"The Pre-Harappan and the Harappa cultures are not two disparate entities but urban and rural aspects of the same cultural phenomenon. The Harappan phase at Kot Diji, Amri and Kalibangan, should not be understood as one culture supplanting another, but like a city corporation taking over a sub-urban village to urbanise."

"It is obvious that in north and west Rajasthan tectonically changed paleochannel configurations were a major factor which affected the human settlements, perhaps from the pre-Harappan times onwards. Major diversions cut off the vital tributaries and growing desiccation . . . dried up the once mighty Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers."

"The modern situation is no less intriguing. After the first crop of radiocarbon dates from the Indus sites, D P Agrawal, who, as the Secretary of the Radiocarbon Committee of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, had a hand in obtaining some of them, argued that these dates, could not suggest anything earlier than 2400 BC as the date of the beginning of the mature Indus civilization. He believed that this tallied with Wheeler’s opinion that the Indus- Mesopotamia contact did not date before Sargon, forgetting that radiocarbon dates are not historical dates. Agrawal represents some Indian archaeologists of the 1960s and 1970s, who considered it unsafe to go beyond the hitherto accepted framework of Indian archaeology. The premise was that any argument in favour of an earlier Indian past would not be ‘scientific’ and would, more damagingly be termed ‘nationalistic’."