Dholavira November 15-16

We left our eco camp at the Little Rann of Kutch in the morning of Friday November 15 and headed on to Dholavira, another major site of the Indus Valley Civilization.

We had a lively discussion about religion and politics along the way. Roxna’s husband, Subrahmanian Swamy, is a leading Hindu nationalist / Hindutva ideologue, and Roxna’s sympathies lie in that direction as well, although she is herself a Parsi. They are both especially interested in the Rama Setu (Rama’s Bridge) line of coral reefs and sandbanks stretching some 30 km from the southern tip of India to Sri Lanka, which may or may not be a human-made feature that may or may not be associated with the events of the Hindu Ramayana epic, which tells of the God Rama building a bridge there so he could cross over to Sri Lanka and rescue his kidnapped wife Sita.

A NASA photograph from 1994 clearly showing the line of shoals attracted Hindu interest, and Subrahmanian and Roxna have been involved in legal cases to stop damage to this religiously significant feature by the planned construction of a shipping canal across it.

 

The NASA photograph from 1994 of the Rama Setu (from Wikipedia)

Dholavira is located on an ancient island once surrounded by the seasonally flooded Great Rann of Kutch, not far from the Pakistani border. At Dholavira we stayed in some government tourist bungalows and met up again with Dr. Rawat, the Director of the Gujarat State Department of Archaeology, who had excavated there in the 1990s. That afternoon Dr. Rawat took us to the nearby site of Jhandiasar on the shore line of the Great Rann of Kutch where there are fossilized trees from the Jurassic period.

The bungalows at Dholavira

 

 The fossil site of Jhandiasar

 

A fossilized tree

 

The next day, Saturday November 16, Dr. Rawat gave us a lengthy tour of this large and spectacular archaeological site with an upper citadel and a lower town and especially impressive water reservoirs.

 Dr. Rawat speaking about the site with the well-preserved eastern walls of the citadel in the background

 

Dr. Rawat by a remarkable column base

 

Dr. Rawat and his assistant in a room with two remarkable pillars

The remains at the top of the citadel

 We took our group photograph in the north gate into the citadel.

 Our group photograph

The group in the lower city

 

One of the large reservoirs

 Throughout the trip Prithi filmed the places we visited.

 

 

Prithi filming Dr. Rawat speaking about the reservoirs

In the afternoon we toured the Dholavira site museum and then went to a lady in the village who has handicraft textiles for sale; her son spent the time we were there watching videos on his computer.

 

Shopping for handicraft textiles