Day 7 in Pakistan: A Detour to Harappa

One major sight I missed in Lahore yesterday was the Lahore Museum – the oldest museum in Pakistan. While the museum building itself seems intimidatingly large, an average visit by a non-specialist might take about an hour and a half to two hours, as the upper floor space is comparatively small. The exhibition halls are organised very logically. As one walks in, the hall with ancient artefacts from Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, and other sites are on the right. On the left is the hall with Islamic art, which leads into spaces dedicated to Hinduism and Buddhism, and finally to a hall that is nominally dedicated to Chinese art but serves as a catchall for everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else (such as the diary of Queen Victoria).

The most famous artefact at the Lahore Museum is the Gandharan Fasting Buddha. This iconic figure carved of dark grey schist stone shows the Buddha attempting to reach enlightenment through bodily mortification. His beard is dishevelled, his eyes are sunken, and he is so emaciated that one can see the veins protruding on his forehead and count the ribs under his skin. He sits on the edge of the hall, just opposite a partially reconstructed Gandharan stupa. At the very end of the central hallway is the hall for Jain art, which features icons and intricate woodwork. It leads to a small ethnological exhibit on minority cultures in Pakistan and a somewhat larger space for weapons from the last two hundred years. This is where the statue of Queen Victoria was placed after being taken down from Charing Cross in Lahore, now called Faisal Chowk.

I was the first visitor to arrive at the museum, and I was asked to wait for five minutes while the staff finished setting up. When I finished my tour about an hour and a half later, I headed back to my hotel and ordered a taxi on InDrive. It had occurred to me yesterday that with the extra time I had accrued, I could stop by Harappa on my way from Lahore to Multan. This time, I would not try to explain the whole arrangement to the driver beforehand, as I did when I visited Rohtas Fort on my way from Islamabad to Lahore. Instead, I would simply order the taxi to Harappa and hope that my offer of payment for the onward journey would be tempting enough. Failing that, my backup plan was to find someone to drop me off at the nearest larger city and order a car from there.

As I waited for my ride in the lobby of my hotel, a very tall Pakistani man approached me and asked if I was a Youtuber, which I suppose is a fair assumption to make of a single white man in any underexplored location. He sounded Scottish to me, but I doubted my ears until he said so himself. When I explained that I was merely on holiday and asked what he was doing, he said sheepishly that he was just mucking about. It later emerged that he had come to indulge in many pleasures of the flesh and cautioned me specifically against the red-light district in Lahore: “Let’s just say what they give you is not what they advertise.” The red-light district in Prague, he told me when he found out I was Czech, was much safer.

My driver to Harappa had very different associations with the Czech Republic, which stood out to me because whenever I tell someone in Pakistan where I’m from, I’m met with a blank stare. He recalled the case of a young Czech woman a few years ago who had been lured to Pakistan with the promise of a modelling job. Instead of that, she was arrested at the airport in Lahore for smuggling nine kilogrammes of heroin, which she claimed had been planted on her. After spending five years in prison, she successfully appealed her case and was permitted to return home.

The journey to Harappa took over three hours, and the onward journey to Multan another three. I found the site more developed than I expected, considering the sorry state of the roads leading to it from the nearest town. It was not a dirt road, but somehow the donkeys dragging carts of hay did not look out of place among the potholes. In contrast, the road in front of the museum was perfectly paved and even had a little parking lot. As everywhere else, there was a man selling tickets for five hundred rupees to foreigners sitting in front of a fully functioning metal detector that no one bothered to use. The museum was housed in a relatively modern building, but its contents were limited and not always identified, which made it difficult to tell what was an original and what was a replica or even a creative re-imagining.

When I passed through the gate towards the main site, I was stopped by a policeman. Before I knew it, I was talking to five or six men – some of them police and some of them souvenir sellers, only one of whom spoke any English at all. Having gone through the same process while visiting Rohtas, I was not surprised when I was asked for my passport and visa while one of the policemen made a phone call to figure out what to do with me. In the meantime, I was being offered all kinds of drinks and a chair to sit on, as the other policemen tried to explain apologetically that these were simply their instructions. “This is not like your own country,” one of them finally said, “this is Pakistan; you have to go with a guard for your own security.”

Having declined a rickshaw ride around the site (which only took fifteen minutes to cross), I set out on foot. I imagine this probably annoyed my appointed security guard, but he did not let it show and trailed me dutifully throughout the whole hike. When we reached the northern end, another group who had rented the rickshaw caught up with us, and the policeman gestured to me that we would take the ride back with them. They were a Pakistani family living in Dubai who had returned to attend a wedding in Islamabad. Most of this was explained to me by the teenage grandson who had grown up in the UK, adding that school had been cancelled anyway because “Iran keeps bombing us.”

In the end, I was glad the family let me join their rickshaw ride, as they made a stop at a very interesting shrine. It was a little structure just above the ruined roadside mosque built of ancient Harappan bricks. As we walked towards it, we passed an enclosure with two star-shaped rings almost as wide as hubcaps. “These are his rings,” said the grandmother by way of explanation. The comment clicked when we passed the threshold. Set out in front of us was a long and narrow tomb that could have fit three or four people lined up head to toe. It was the resting place of some kind of giant saint, in whose honour people decorated the drapery on the tomb with fancy hats and flower petals. I did not find out much more, as the grandmother’s English vocabulary was limited, and the grandson admitted his Urdu was not great.

As for Harappa itself, the place is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Southern Asia. It was the first Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India during the British Raj, which is why the term “Harappan” is commonly applied to sites and artefacts from the same period. Harappa arose perhaps as early as 3500 BCE but entered its ‘mature’ period between the years 2600-2000 BCE. At its peak, it traded not only with Mohenjo Daro in the south, but also with such faraway places as Elam and Sumer in Mesopotamia. Its clay and stone tablets from five thousand years ago indicate that the society had some kind of possibly symbolic script, but it has not yet been deciphered.

The reasons for Harappa’s decline are not fully understood, but human bones from its later period show indications of violence and disease. It is thought that a drying climate may have brought about resource scarcity and caused conflict among inhabitants. The disintegration took several hundred years and apparently ended with Harappa’s abandonment around the year 1400 BCE. A large part of the city was destroyed for its bricks, which were used as track ballast for the Lahore-Multan Railway.