NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 6 Chapter opening — The Big Questions
Book page 85 Updated on2026-09-05
Q1.
What is a civilisation?
Answer
A civilisation is an advanced stage of human societies. The chapter is careful not to leave it at that, and gives a working checklist: to be called a civilisation, a society should have at least seven characteristics.
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Characteristic
What the book says it covers
1
Government and administration
Some form of it — to manage a more complex society and its many activities
2
Urbanism
Town-planning, the growth of cities and their management, which generally includes water management and a drainage system
3
A variety of crafts
The management of raw materials (such as stone or metal) and the production of finished goods (such as ornaments and tools)
4
Trade
Both internal (within a city or a region) and external (with distant regions or other parts of the world) — to exchange all sorts of goods
5
Some form of writing
Needed to keep records and to communicate
6
Cultural ideas
Ideas about life and the world, expressed through art, architecture, literature, oral traditions or social customs
7
A productive agriculture
Enough to feed not just the villages, but also the cities
These seven do not sit side by side — they stand on one another. Farming has to come first, because everything else depends on somebody growing surplus food:
The seven characteristics of a civilisation, stacked in the order in which they can appear. Take away the bottom block and the whole shape collapses.
Why the book bothers to define the word: ‘civilisation’ is used loosely in everyday speech. A historian needs a test that can be applied to evidence dug out of the ground. Each of the seven characteristics leaves something an archaeologist can actually find — a street plan, a drain, a bead workshop, a foreign seal, an inscribed object, a figurine, a grain store. That is how we can say the Harappans had a civilisation without a single written sentence that we can read.
Did you know? Chapter 4 ended with the first human groups settling down, farming and developing technologies such as construction, metallurgy and transport. This chapter picks up exactly there — civilisation is the next step in that same story, not a separate one.
Q2.
What was the earliest civilisation of the Indian Subcontinent?
Answer
The Indus-Sarasvatī civilisation — also called the Indus, Harappan or Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation. It is one of the oldest civilisations in the world, and its people are called Harappans.
Villages → towns: from about 3500 BCE
Towns → cities (the First Urbanisation of India): around 2600 BCE
The city phase, as dated on Fig. 6.2: about 2600 to 1900 BCE
Where. In the north-west of the Subcontinent, along two river systems: the Indus (Sindhu) with its five main tributaries — the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej — watering the plains of the Punjab (today divided between India and Pakistan) and Sindh (now in Pakistan); and a little further east the Sarasvatī, which then flowed from the foothills of the Himalayas through Haryana, Punjab, parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat.
How it fits into world history. Fig. 6.2 on page 87 puts three civilisations on one line:
Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) began about 6,000 years ago; ancient Egypt followed a few centuries later; the Indus-Sarasvatī cities date from about 2600 to 1900 BCE. (The line is a reading aid, not drawn to scale.)
Tip: keep the two dates apart in your head. 3500 BCE is when villages started becoming towns; 2600 BCE is when towns became cities. Only the second one is the ‘First Urbanisation’.
Q3.
What were its major achievements?
Answer
Run the chapter's own checklist of a civilisation against the evidence, and every box is ticked — usually by something you can still go and look at.
Achievement
The evidence in this chapter
Town-planning
Cities built to precise plans, with wide streets oriented to the cardinal directions (Fig. 6.4, Kalibangan; Fig. 6.5, Dholavira), fortifications, and an upper town and lower town — three zones at Dholavira
Water management
Bathing areas in homes connected to covered drains running below the streets (Fig. 6.7, Lothal); about 700 brick wells at Mohenjo-daro; at least six large reservoirs at Dholavira, the biggest 73 m long, linked by underground drains
Fair, uniform building
“The quality of construction was the same for small and big houses” — the point B.B. Lal makes in the chapter's opening quotation about a well-balanced community
Crafts and metallurgy
Drilled and decorated carnelian beads; shell bangles cut from hard conch; mastery of copper and of bronze (copper + tin); stone weights, a bronze mirror, a bronze chisel (Fig. 6.14)
Long-distance trade
Harappan carnelian beads excavated at Susa (present-day Iran); an ivory comb found on the coast of Oman; the 217 × 36 m dockyard at Lothal — India's first intensive maritime activity
A writing system
Thousands of steatite seals carrying signs of a script — though the script is still undeciphered
Productive agriculture
Barley, wheat, millets, sometimes rice, pulses and vegetables; the first in Eurasia to grow cotton; a clay model of a plough from Banawali (Fig. 6.9)
Art, games and daily life
The ‘Dancing Girl’ bronze (10.8 cm); the ‘Priest King’ statuette; the namaste figurine; the thirsty-crow story painted on a Lothal pot; a stone gamesboard and a terracotta whistle
Peace
No army, no weapons of war, no trace of warfare — “a relatively peaceful civilisation”
Which achievement is the most unusual? Not the size of the cities — Mesopotamia and Egypt had big cities too. It is the combination of two things: city-wide drains and wells serving ordinary houses, and houses of rich and poor built to the same standard, in a society that left behind no palaces, no royal tombs and no weapons. Very few ancient civilisations anywhere can show that.