Below Delhi, the search for India's mythical past

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The Economist.

Sometimes I think stories are all we've got. We tell stories about our own lives, who we are and where we're from, why we did something or why we plan to. And we know, don't we, that those stories change. The ones we told our parents are different from the versions our children hear. Those we tell friends or write on a job application are something else again. Every account contains elements of truth and fiction, and they all serve a purpose. They exist to make sense of the randomness around us. We need them, and not just as individuals. Countries need stories. Religions, civilizations, wars and religious schisms emerge from apparently irreconcilable differences over how groups of us view land, people, Resources Whose version of the tale do you believe? That's why history is so contentious, because different iterations give different people power. The story really matters. I'm Rosie Blore, and today on the Weekend Intelligence, my colleague Leo Morani examines a great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. The mythological tale is thousands of years old and thousands of pages long. But where might the events of this great drama have occurred in India today? The Mahabharat is at the center of a reckoning. Who controls the past.

I want to tell you a story. Actually, I want to tell you a story about a story and about the people who believe. It is a True story. It is a story of gods and of kings, of the grandest palaces and the most wonderful illusions, and of a war to end all wars. It is a story of the morality of battle and of the descent of our world into Kaliug, the age of darkness, the age that we live in now. For 75 years, archaeologists have been excavating across North India to look for the places and events mentioned in is called the Mahabharat. At its most prosaic, the Mahabharata can be distilled down to just a couple of sentences. Two factions of a sprawling extended family go to war over the throne of Hastinapur. One side wins, but at unfathomable human and moral cost. That's it. That's the story. But woven around this core are thousands of subplots, digressions, fables and sermons. Most Indians have never read this epic. But most of us, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, even atheists, know it intimately. We imbibe it from our parents and grandparents, from television and comic books, and even just in everyday conversation.

To understand what the Mahabharata and Ramayan really mean for Indians, you have to think about what Homer might mean to the Greeks if the Greeks still worshipped Apollo.

The Mahabharata is many things. It is a moral guide. It is a religious text. The Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu holy book, is one of its component parts. It is a bedtime story for children. It's all over popular culture. It's also just great fun. Everyone should read it or hear it or watch. May also be based on true events. Perhaps not the parts including gods and demons and magic and curses, but at least the core human story, that of warring clans. That is why archaeologists have been looking for evidence of the places it describes for most of the history of independent India. That is why they're still looking for it today. You may find yourself wondering why. Why would archaeologists spend time and public money hunting for evidence of a mythological story? Why would governments approve the funds? Why does anybody?

So about a year and a half ago, I saw a series of headlines in Indian newspapers which made this announcement, which at the time I thought was preposterous.

I'm chatting with my friend Raghu Karnad, an author and essayist. We're sitting in Raghu's study in Bombay, which looks out over the Arabian Sea.

Which was that the Archaeological Survey of India was going to be excavating to unearth proof of the mythic city of Indraprastha. Indraprastha is the City built by the heroes of the religious epic, the Mahabharata.

Raghu has spent months or maybe years thinking about the Mahabharata. Last year, he wrote a long and excellent essay about this excavation and its background.

The Mahabharata has sort of a place, along with the Ramayana, these two Sanskrit epics, that is incomparable to anything else in Indian culture.

The Mahabharata is thought to have been composed sometime around the 4th century BCE, describing events that happened centuries before that. It was written as an epic poem, and over time it grew and grew and grew until it reached some hundred thousand verses. How long is that? Scholars often compare it to the Iliad or the Odyssey, the great Greek epics. But let's face it, unless you studied classics or literature at university like me, you have no idea how long those things are. So instead, I want you to picture all seven Harry Potter books stacked one on top of the other. Then I want you to go get another set and stack it on top of that. That, roughly speaking, is how long the Mahabharata is. It had never really occurred to me to even think about whether or not it had any basis in fact until I read Raghu's essay, which is about one of the key locations in the Mahabharata, called Indraprastha. This place is central to the story I want to tell you.

In the Mavarta, Indraprastha is described as an utterly magnificent city.

It's.

It's.

Where do I have this?

Yeah. It says that the city rivaled the celestial home of Brahma and that it appears like, quote, a mass of new clouds appears in the sky.

Within this city, Indraprastha was a palace where one of the two clans of the story had their capital. It's an unbelievably opulent place, but it's also unbelievable in other ways. There are floors made of crystal so perfect they appear to be pools of water. There are pools of water so still they look like solid ground.

There are doorways that look like walls and walls that look like doorways.

It is a palace of illusions. The two rival clans in the Mahabharata are already not on the best of terms. But one day, the chief antagonist visits his relatives here at their palace of illusions.

And they're sort of embarrassed by all of these illusions and tricks, and they kind of bump their noses and fall into pools and things.

They are mocked, they're laughed at, they're humiliated.

And this sets in motion a vicious cycle of jealousy and provocations that leads to the great apocalyptic war that Essentially ends the era.

This apocalyptic war was just a few thousand years ago. I say few because remember that the Hindu cycle was runs for just a little bit less than half a billion years. So given the recency of the events, most of the key locations in the epic can still be found on a map of contemporary India. There is Hasdinapur, the capital of the kingdom over which the clans were fighting. There is Kurukshetra, where their big war took place. There are Mathura and Dwarka, associated with the Lord Krishna. All of these are real places. I've been to them. But there is no Indraprastha. It exists today as a metro station, as a college, as a distributor of natural gas, but not as a real place. I have come to Delhi, India's capital, because this is where most people think Indraprastha might have been or might still be buried deep under layers and layers of history. Until about a century ago, there was a settlement with a very similar name within the walls of a 16th century fort in central Delhi called Puranakila. The name literally means old fort. This settlement was cleared when the British built their new imperial capital of New Delhi. This is where archaeologists have been digging. To find evidence of Indraprastha here would be a big deal, not just because finding it would itself be a big deal, but because Delhi has been at the political heart of South Asia for centuries. So finding evidence here would draw a direct line between ancient spiritual authority and 21st century political authority. Pranakala is. It's a very nice place. There's not a lot of. Of ancient ruins inside here. There's some pretty robust walls and ramparts and crumbling but attractive gates. But on the inside, there's a mosque, a quite lovely mosque, starting all the way back in the 1950s and for decades afterwards, the Archaeological Survey of India, or asi, which is a government agency, excavated at sites associated with Mahabharata throughout North India. What they found was something they termed painted Grey ware. This is a kind of pottery. It's grey, it's also painted. Material from other periods is called black and red ware, or Northern black polished ware and so on. You get the idea. But the one place they did not find painted grey ware was here in the old fort. Walking into the headquarters of the Archaeological Survey of India in a frankly quite hideous building with some very strange Neo Imperial. Sorry, not. Yeah, no, Neo Imperial, no, what's it called? Neo Classical. It's a very strange neoclassical architecture. It's kind of peeling. I can see brickwork. Man, this place Looks like a ruin. Maybe it is appropriate. Today, the man leading the search for the Mahabharata's legendary city of Indraprastha is Vasanth Swankar. Now, if you're imagining Indiana Jones or even an Indian Jones, I suggest you banish that image from your head immediately. Vasant Swankar is a bookish looking man, but he has an enthusiasm for his work rarely seen in Indian government employees. Like many people in this country, he was introduced to the stories of the Mahabharata as a child.

So that time whenever we go to the bed, our granny or our. My father even used to tell the stories of Puranas, Mahabharatas, Panchitantra, Hithu Pradesh and other stories.

In 2014, Vasanth Swankar made a breakthrough. He found some shards of pottery.

Only few potshots have been cut.

So.

That shows that the deposit is there.

These shards, these potsherds, were painted greyware, the material that all the Mahabharata sites have in common. But he only found a handful, just 10 pieces in all.

Delhi, the capital city, and we have a history of continuous history of 3,000 years. It's very important. Continuously inhabited cities, there are very few.

To find these 10 shards of pottery, Swankar had to first dig through 15 or 20ft of earth. And at each historical layer, he had to carefully extract artifacts from those periods. If you go look at this excavation today, you will see that the ASI has labelled the layers with little plaques from the Mughal era closest to the surface, all the way down to the Kushan era. Eventually, however, he made it to the very bottom layer.

So first time we got the painted graveyard from the dig, it was really exciting and amazing experience. It was a thrill.

Suankar walked over to the corner of his office and unlocked a cupboard. From within it, he pulled out a treasure chest. Actually, it was a plastic box, but it was filled with artifacts found during the dig. There was a 2,700-year-old amulet. There was a golden stick for applying eyeliner. There was a little molded figure with ancient fingerprints still visible on the back.

These are the few shirts of painted graveyard culture. Painted graveyard. This is metallic sound See. How beautifully they've been fired?

It's not every day that you get to hold in your hand something from 3,000 years ago. But after seeing those amulets and sticks of gold, these shards are a bit underwhelming.

This is very, very difficult to convince people this is the evidence of Mahabharata because everybody is looking for diwar.

This is the problem. Ordinary people like me expect them to Find signs of an apocalyptic war or the ruins of a palace of illusions. Instead we get some random shards of broken pottery. Swankar is aware of the gulf between what he has found or even what he could ever hope to find in his wildest dreams and the image that most people hold in their heads.

So if you talk about the Mahavrata with the new generation people, they will imagine only that BR Chopra is Mahabharata, with the huge cities, golden chariots or heavy ornaments and others.

Beyor Chopra was a Bollywood producer who made a 94 episode televised version of the Mahabharata in the 1980s. It was probably the single biggest cultural phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century in India. The country would come to a standstill when it was on air. Streets would be deserted. Legend has it that even cabinet meetings would have to be scheduled to avoid clashing with the show. The title track is instantly recognizable. If that show influenced how a generation of Indians expect Indraprastha to look, I guess it's not all that different from the way in which Hollywood movies condition us to think of ancient Rome as pretty much like the 21st century, just with slightly different design choices. My friend Raghu offers a different analogy.

Though I think an even better analogy would be how you think of Troy. And you may well. In fact, I would bet that a large number of people listening to this immediately picture the Troy which was laid low by Brad Pitt.

This is a better comparison. Homer wrote about Troy in his Greek epic, the Iliad, the one none of us have read. Some two and a half or 3,000 years ago, archaeologists and amateurs spent years searching for it. And in the end they found it in what is now northwestern Turkey. Looked at this way, India's 75 year long search for the Mahabharata is not unusual at all. When the search started in the 1950s, India was a brand new republic. It was a time of nation building. And nation building requires shared stories. And wherever we are in the world, whatever our nationality or religion, we all want to know where we come from. We all seek to claim the mantle of past glories and to aspire to those heights. Our past gives us a foundation upon which to build our future. It is the job of the archaeologist to find that foundation.

Yeah, because being an archaeologist, I have to go by the facts only. What are the buried facts? I have to excavate them, I have to put them out. Put a basic interpretation and further interpretation can be done by the other scholars.

But not everyone is so fastidious.

So whatever rubble they had, they Just built on top. Yeah, built on top just to suppress it. We still have many traces inside Delhi for indiraprastha.

This is one afternoon in Delhi. While I was slacking off eating some dim sum, my hard working producer Barkley went back to the old fort and engaged a tour guide on his own.

So what do they, what are they proving here?

They're proving nothing. This is just a fort which was built by the Muslims. So again the thing buck stops here. They say that this was ours, we say that this was ours. So this is the controversy which is going on.

Poor Berkeley had just walked right into the middle of a centuries old argument. I'm going to briefly pause my story of Indraprastha to provide some background. In the second millennium Northern India became a site of raids and contestation by armies from Afghanistan and beyond. They often prevailed. And for about 600 or so years India was ruled by Islamic empires. Some of these rulers attacked, looted and destroyed Hindu temples. This is historical fact. But the reason they did this is, was because in those days temples were not just sites of worship, they were also a kingdom's treasury. They were the king's source of legitimacy, of divine right to rule. To destroy them was to claim total victory. Temples not associated with political power were usually left alone. Today, however, the standard narrative is that this was the work of a bunch of barbarians foreigners who invaded the subcontinent and humiliated its native Hindu population. The British, keen to show themselves in a good light compared to the previous guys, pushed this narrative. The resentments that the Brits created are still festering today anyway, back to Barclay's tour guide.

Under every structure there's an Indian Hindu city underneath it. But it is not possible now to excavate each and everything and bring it up. We could just have a traces of it. So this proves and everything stops here because we cannot destroy entire Delhi or the nearby Uttar Pradesh area where this all Mahabharata happened. This is just to prove that yes, it was there and it was all demolished by these Muslim Islamic rulers.

There are efforts ongoing to reclaim India's ancient Hindu glory from beneath all the Muslim stuff on top. In some parts of the country that involves petitioning courts all the way up to the Supreme Court to allow Hindu worship or even temples at the site of medieval mosques. But here at the old fort it's a slightly different story. And this is where we come back to Indraprastha and its palace of illusions. The government of India has a program called Adopt a Heritage. Ignore the ropey grammar. The idea is that charities or Companies can take over the maintenance of ancient sites and in return they can establish so called semi commercial activities. The organization that has adopted Puranakila or the Old Fort is called the Sabitha Foundation. One of their ideas is to stage a big sound and light show projected onto the monument or within the monument. They want it to be all about Indraprastha and the Mahabharata. Here's how they explained it to one Indian newspaper I All our tourist events, museums, interpretation centre and heritage walks of the site will be centred around the Mahabharata. We need to build the right narrative of the Purana killer. In other words, they want to shift the focus from the fort. We can see with our own eyes this fort that happened to have been built by a Muslim ruler and towards the Hindu story of Indraprastha and its palace of illusions. I chased the Sabhata foundation for months to get them to talk to me about their plans. They were not keen, but eventually they did offer to show me what they have done at the Red Fort, which is another monument in Delhi that they have adopted. Now do not confuse the Red Fort with the Old Fort. One of these is red, the other one is old and not red. The red one was built by the great grandson of the guy who built the old one. So far so good. Good. The red one is also one of Delhi's primary tourist attractions, unlike the old one which no one goes to. All clear, let's continue. I'm standing outside the Red Fort waiting for the guide to arrive and I'm looking at a poster for the thing we're about to see which is the all new sound and light show Redfort Delhi. The guide showed me the museum that the foundation had set up at the Red Fort, which I must admit is very nicely done. It's far better than any government run museum I have ever been to in India and I've been to a lot of these things. After the nice museum, we walked to a big square in the middle of the fort and waited for the sound and light show to begin.

I give you 400 years. 400 years of this majestic and historic Red Fort. This is the same Delhi, the Delhi that was destroyed, then rebuilt again seven times. For centuries, year after year, Delhi has remained the center of power. Legend has it that some 5,000 years ago, near the old fort, not too far from here, existed Indraprastra, the capital of the Pandavas, as told in our epic Mahabharata.

I have no idea why, but India is obsessed with sound and light shows. I have Been anti sound and light show ever since I was dragged to one as a kid on a school trip. It was incredibly tedious. This one, though, was actually pretty good. It had high production standards and engaging narration and lots of dancing as well. I was, however, less impressed by the historical narrative. Most of it was fine. It's basic, it's broad brush. They are, after all, cramming 400 years of history into 45 minutes.

The flag of freedom was hoisted triumphantly over the ramparts of this majestic and historic Red fort.

But the last part, the very end, was kind of shocking. In the bit covering India's fight for independence from the British, the show spoke only of a leader who, though important, was hardly the main protagonist. It made no mention of Mahatma Gandhi, who led the non violent struggle and whose face is on every banknote and in every government office in India. It was a highly selective telling of history. It was also very confusing. The history I'm talking about here is less than a century old. It's thoroughly documented. There are people alive in India today who live through it. So to fiddle with this stuff is kind of obvious. But perhaps it's a taste of what is to come at Puranakila once the foundation has finished reinterpreting it through the lens of the Mahabharata. If this sound and light show is any guide, this will probably involve removing all mention of its actual builder, an emperor called humayun, and turning 10 shards of painted greyware into the greatest, grandest palace that has ever existed. At least my producer's tour guide will be happy to try and wrap my head around all this. I went to see Ratish Nanda, a conservation architect whose work I respect.

Conservation, unlike mathematics, is open to interpretation, but it needs to be informed.

Radish has spent the last two decades restoring Humayun's tomb. That's the emperor who built the old fort. This tomb is probably the most beautiful structure in Delhi. It was so architecturally pathbreaking, it served as the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. About 100 years or a little bit less.

I think our work both at the Humayun tomb and the gardens was really preceded by years of archival research and condition mapping and all of that. And what we've been able to put together is a whole history of how and when it was built. There are very few images till the 19th century and there are some descriptions. Shah Jahan has one. Shah Jahan's court poet writes a poem on Humayun's tomb and it seems very abstract, but it isn't it's something that we can. For example, we figured that one of the dominant plants was hibiscus from that poem.

The tomb sits just a little bit to the south of the old fort. It has lush gardens and a really nice peaceful atmosphere. The foundation that showed me around the Red Fort and has plans to change the narrative at the old fort has also adopted this tomb, Humayun's tomb. It plans, get this, you're never going to believe it. A sound and light show. I wonder whom they're going to credit with building this thing. Maybe Sachin Tendulkar. Having spent the afternoon chatting with Ratish, something I realized is that he too is engaged in rewriting the historical narrative. Ratish believes that Humayun, who built the old fort, who is buried here, does not get enough credit as a historical figure. Last year, Ratish, in the trust he works for, opened a brand new museum of Humayun right next to the tomb. The difference, of course, is that Rotosh's interpretation is based on archival and physical evidence.

He had achievements. We are crediting him with establishing the Mughal school of art by being a great warrior, by being a great architect and an incredible traveler. I mean, he does 30,000 kilometers. So we use all of that to tell a lot of stories from his life and let people be the final judge.

A little bit about Humayun. Humayun was the second emperor of the Mughal Empire, which you would think would be enough for him to be a big deal. But his reputation suffered for two reasons. Firstly, he was sandwiched between his father, the founder of the empire, and his son, Akbar, the greatest of all Mughal emperors. So great is he that his name means great and he's called Akbar the Great. The Great. Great the Great. Secondly, Humayun lost his empire soon after inheriting it. He then spent 15 years in exile, wandering around Persia and Central Asia. Eventually, he won back his empire and Delhi and the old fort and was just starting to get settled back in until a year later, he heard the call to prayer and rushed down the staircase to get to the mosque on time.

And the staircase is S shaped, so it's not only, you know, it's not a circle, it sort of curves and with the long robes and all of that, you can just. It's disaster waiting to happen.

And so it did. He tumbled down the stairs and died. So it's not really surprising that he's not the most widely admired ruler of his dynasty. On the bright side, and I guess his son built him a really nice tomb. I've heard from A tour guide and seen the work of the Heritage Foundation. I've spoken to an architect and an archaeologist. All of these people are interpreting history or reinterpreting history. But now I want to talk to someone whose job it is to actually produce history. I want to understand how history is written. I'm on my way to Delhi University to see Richard Eaton, one of the finest historians of India's Islamic history. So roughly the period of the second millennium until the part where the buffet Brits showed up.

Barclay.

Richard Eaton.

Hi.

Barclay is the producer on the podcast Barclay Barclay. You can tell because he's got a big mic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Looks like.

Formidable. How does history work? What is the process of writing history? How do you do your job?

Let's say those are two separate questions. How it works and how one writes history. How it works is history gives meaning and background to everything. We would not know who we were or why we are here without history. Otherwise, everybody is born this morning. It's just that simple. That's how history works.

Richard Eaton is a rugged, all American Midwesterner who just happens to have pursued a life of research. Though in his case, that sometimes involves clambering up bastions in southern India looking for evidence that their cannons could swivel. Don't ask. He's actually based in Arizona, so I'm lucky to find him here in Delhi.

How one does history is a question of methodology for which there is a specific discipline of how you gather evidence, how you weigh evidence, how you make inferences, how you understand causality, and so forth.

History changes all the time. Why is that? How is that? How can history change?

Several ways. For one thing, we are always finding new evidence. Farmers will dig up inscriptions exposing whole new dynasties or reigns that we never knew existed. They'll dig up coins giving very precise understandings of who was ruling when and where. We can reconstruct economic affairs on the basis of these kinds of things. On the one hand, the evidence itself is changing as more evidence arrives. On the other hand, the questions change according to who? Who is asking those questions?

This makes sense to me as a journalist, someone who works for the Economist, let's say, is likely to approach a given subject rather differently from someone who writes for the New Left Review. Similarly, there are various flavors of historian, from gender historians to Marxist historians, and all sorts of things in between, and they all have different perspectives on the same thing. Even plain vanilla historians see things through their own particular lens.

All history is revisionist by nature. It has to be. Otherwise you wouldn't do it. Why write anything if we already know what happened, why it happened? So you could just learn that and say, okay, that's done.

Now we know that doesn't mean, however, that revisionism is a neutral word.

We are living today at a time, and certainly in both India and absolutely America, where there, to my mind, seems to be a growing gap between what historians are doing and saying in their ivory towers and what the public is thinking or imagining. And I don't think that's good. I think there needs to be an attempt to close that gap and not surrender historical sensibilities to myth makers or demagogues, which is what likely happens.

The vast majority of people do not spend their spare time reading history for fun or leisure. And they have no reason to disbelieve the leaders they admire and vote into office, or the online influencers who tell them engaging and ego boosting stories on YouTube. These things reinforce each other. Like at the Purana Killer, where a tour guide whose literal job is to provide accurate information instead ends up providing propaganda. It's possible, of course, that he doesn't know he's doing it because the gap between scholarly research and mainstream discourse has become so wide. I asked Richard about the real world consequences of this, beyond what tour guides have to say.

Consequences is that the greater the gap becomes, the more likely, the more susceptible the greater public is to rank idiots coming in and informing the public on who they are and what they're doing.

There are people in India today who claim that the Taj Mahal was actually a temple called the Tejo Mahalay. There are people in India today who claim that the apocalyptic war described in the Mahabharata provides evidence that India invented nuclear weapons thousands of years ago. People believe all sorts of things. Belief has an important function in holding a society together. But there is also value in agreeing upon actual evidence based facts. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

We were excavating in just a three take.

Vasant Swankar, the archaeologist with the asi. He grew up with the stories of the Mahabharata, but he was always careful in our conversations about interpreting what he finds.

The deposit of Pentatgrave was there. The people of pentantgiriware culture lived at that particular site. They did their activities at this side. But what kind of activities?

This is why the ASI is still digging. It isn't to find palaces. It's to build an accurate picture of the people who lived here 3,000 years ago. And maybe those people really did do some of the things that formed the basis for the Mahabharata, it's not that hard to imagine a pair of clans warring over scarce resources. And maybe, maybe it really was an intra family feud once so bloody that societies all around took it as a cautionary tale. Then that story was spread across India by wandering birds. It was passed down over generations and embellished and embroidered with every telling. And that true life event, if it happened, would became the rich tapestry of the Mahabharata that we know today. That is a story worth telling even 3,000 years later. But sometimes we forget the morals and the lessons of our great stories, whether in the Bible or the Iliad or the Mahabharata. We focus instead on the literal interpretation of what is in those stories and we end up mangling the message. My friend Raghu put it very nicely.

You know, the Mahabharata is a famously morally nebulous story and that's part of what makes it so attractive. It isn't about good versus evil.

The Mahabharata is better understood as a story about morality, about fulfilling your dharma, and about the consequences of failing to do so. I mentioned at the very start that the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita is a component of the Mahabharata. That part is a discussion of the ethics of war, consisting largely of the discourse between Arjun, a member of the clan based at Indraprastha, and his charioteer, the God Krishna. Arjuna is deeply ambivalent a about fighting members of his own family. Lord Krishna explains to him the necessity of fulfilling his Dharma, basically of doing his job. Eventually, Krishna, who I like to think of as a bit fed up by this point, takes his supreme awe inspiring form. I am time, destroyer of worlds, Krishna says. Even without your presence in battle, all these warriors arrayed in opposing ranks will cease to be. And so Arjun joins battle, ultimately defeating his enemies and emerging victorious, but also plunging humanity into Kalyug. There is no black and white here. There is only the grim eventuality. With or without Arjuna, with or without war, there is Time, destroyer of worlds. All we can do is root around the soil looking for shards of broken pottery. Everything else is just a palace of illusions that we build for ourselves.

Sa. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Weekend Intelligence, which was presented and reported by Leo Morani, produced by Barclay Bram and sound designed by Nico Rofast. The music is from Epidemic Sound, Blue Dot Sessions and Darren Ng. Fact checking was by Indrani Bhatuch. The executive producer of the Weekend Intelligence is Gemma Newby.

Sam. Sa.