NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 6 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions, activities and projects

Book page 104 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

Why does the civilisation studied in this chapter have several names? Discuss their significance.

Answer

Because it was named several times over, by different people at different stages of discovery — and each name records what was known at the moment it was coined.

Name	Where it comes from	What it claims — and what it is worth
Harappan civilisation	From Harappa, the first city of this civilisation to be excavated, in 1920–21; its inhabitants are therefore called Harappans	Neutral and safe. It names a site, not a region, so it cannot be proved wrong by a new discovery — which is why archaeologists like it
Indus civilisation	From the Indus (Sindhu) River, along which Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were found	True but partial. Many sites are nowhere near the Indus
Indus Valley civilisation	The same river, plus ‘valley’ — the term used when only Indus sites were known	Obsolete. The map (Fig. 6.3) shows the civilisation “extended much beyond the Indus region”. The book deliberately does not use it
Indus-Sarasvatī / Sindhu-Sarasvatī civilisation	Both river systems together — the Indus and the Sarasvatī (today's Ghaggar-Hakra)	The most accurate. The Sarasvatī basin alone holds two major cities (Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwala), several smaller ones (Farmana, Kalibangan) and towns (Bhirrana, Banawali) — plus the highest density of sites on the map

The significance — three things the names teach us.

Names are dated evidence, like anything else. ‘Indus Valley’ tells you what people knew in the 1920s, not what is true.
Every name makes a hidden claim. Say ‘Indus’ and you have quietly said the civilisation belonged to one river. Say ‘Indus-Sarasvatī’ and you have restored the other half of it.
Knowledge grows, so names must be revised. “Such discoveries continue even today!” — Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, Bhirrana and Lothal were all unknown when the first name was given.

Tip: the safest sentence for an exam is: “It is called Harappan after the first site excavated, Indus after the river along which it was first found, and Indus-Sarasvatī because a very large number of its sites lie in the Sarasvatī basin; ‘Indus Valley’ is now considered obsolete.”

Q2.

Write a brief report (150 to 200 words) summing up some of the achievements of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilisation.

Answer

Plan first, then write. A 150–200 word report has room for about six sentences, so choose six achievements and give each one a fact.

Sentence	Achievement	The fact to include
1	When and where	Cities from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, along the Indus and Sarasvatī
2	Town-planning	Precise plans; wide streets on the cardinal directions; fortifications; upper and lower town
3	Water management	Covered drains below the streets; about 700 wells at Mohenjo-daro; 73 m reservoir at Dholavira
4	Crafts and metallurgy	Carnelian beads, shell bangles, copper and bronze
5	Trade	Beads at Susa, comb in Oman, the 217 m dockyard at Lothal, thousands of seals
6	Agriculture and society	First in Eurasia to grow cotton; equal building quality; no weapons of war

Sample answer (about 185 words):
“The Indus-Sarasvatī civilisation, also called the Harappan civilisation, was India's first civilisation. Its cities flourished from about 2600 to 1900 BCE along the Indus and the Sarasvatī rivers, and it is one of the oldest civilisations in the world.
Its greatest achievement was town-planning. Cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi were built to precise plans, with wide streets oriented to the cardinal directions, fortifications, and an upper town and a lower town. Remarkably, small and big houses were built to the same quality.
Their water management was outstanding. Bathing areas in homes drained into covered drains beneath the streets; Mohenjo-daro had about 700 brick wells, and Dholavira at least six reservoirs, the largest 73 metres long.
The Harappans were skilled craftspeople who drilled carnelian beads, cut shell bangles and made bronze tools and figurines, and they carried on a brisk trade by land, river and sea — their beads have been found at Susa in Iran, and Lothal had a 217-metre dockyard.
They also grew a wide variety of crops and were the first in Eurasia to grow cotton. Strikingly, they left behind no weapons of war.”

What makes a report good rather than long: one concrete number in every sentence. ‘They had good drainage’ is an opinion; ‘about 700 brick wells at Mohenjo-daro’ is history.

Q3.

Imagine you have to travel from the city of Harappa to Kalibangan. What are your different options? Can you make a rough estimation of the amount of time each option might take?

Answer

Find both cities on Fig. 6.3 first. Harappa sits on the River Ravi in today's Pakistani Punjab; Kalibangan lies south-east of it, on the Sarasvatī (Ghaggar) in today's Rajasthan.

Straight-line distance: roughly 180 km
A real route, following rivers and skirting the desert: roughly 250–300 km

A. Options a Harappan traveller had, around 2500 BCE

Option	Rough speed	Time for ~280 km	Notes
On foot	20–25 km a day	about 12–14 days	The cheapest way, and the way most people travelled. Longer if you carry a load
Bullock cart	15–20 km a day	about 15–19 days	Slower than walking, but it carries the goods. Harappan carts are known from terracotta models
By boat, part of the way	25–40 km a day downstream; much slower upstream	about 10–15 days, plus walking between rivers	Down the Ravi, then across to the Sarasvatī. Depends on the season — the rivers are fullest after the rains
Mixed — the most likely	Boat where the river helps, cart or foot where it does not	roughly two weeks	Real traders would have used whatever was fastest on each stretch

B. Options today

By road, if the route were open: roughly 350–400 km, 6–8 hours by car.
By train and road: about a day, with changes.
The real obstacle is not distance. Harappa is in Pakistan and Kalibangan is in India, so the journey today needs a visa and a border crossing — and would take far longer than the fourteen days a Harappan trader needed.

The point of the question: a Harappan merchant could reach Kalibangan from Harappa in about a fortnight, and both cities used the same kind of bricks, the same weights and the same seals. That tells you these were not isolated towns but a connected network — which is exactly what ‘civilisation’ means in this chapter. And the fact that a border now cuts the network in two is itself a piece of history worth noticing.

Check it yourself: use the scale bar printed at the bottom left of Fig. 6.3 on page 89 and measure the gap between the two dots with a ruler. Your figure should come out close to 180 km in a straight line. Estimating distances off a scale bar is a skill worth practising.

Q4.

Let us imagine a Harappan man or woman being transported to an average kitchen in today's India. What are the four or five biggest surprises awaiting them?

Answer

Start from what they would recognise, so the surprises stand out. Wheat and barley flour, dal, curd, turmeric, ginger, banana, clay pots, a grinding stone, a flat griddle — all of these would be familiar. Now the shocks:

#	The surprise	Why it would astonish them
1	Fire that arrives at the turn of a knob — the gas stove	They cooked over wood or dung fires that had to be lit and fed. Flame with no fuel, no smoke and no ash would look like magic
2	Water from a tap, indoors, whenever you want it	They were the great water engineers of the ancient world — wells, drains, reservoirs, the Great Bath. Water arriving under pressure inside the house is the one thing they never managed, and they would appreciate it more than anyone
3	The refrigerator — a cold box in a hot country	Nothing in their world kept food from spoiling except drying, salting and eating it quickly. A box that makes winter in July would be the single strangest object in the room
4	Food they have never seen: potatoes, tomatoes, chillies, tea, sugar	All of these reached India long after 1900 BCE — chillies, potatoes and tomatoes came from the Americas only about 500 years ago. The staples of a modern Indian kitchen would be completely unknown to them
5	Steel, plastic and glass — and printed packets	They knew copper, bronze, stone, shell, ivory and terracotta. A steel pressure cooker, a plastic bottle and a sealed packet with writing on it would each be a new material and a new idea

A sixth, if your teacher allows one more: the writing everywhere — on packets, on the calendar, on the machines. They had a script of their own, but they would find ours unreadable, exactly as we find theirs.

Sample answer: “The first surprise would be the gas stove, because fire came from wood and had to be tended. The second would be the tap: the Harappans built wells, drains and reservoirs, so clean water flowing indoors on demand would impress them most of all. The third would be the fridge, a cold box in a hot land. The fourth would be the food itself — the potatoes, tomatoes, chillies, tea and sugar that did not exist in their India. The fifth would be steel and plastic, materials they had never seen. But they would pick up the turmeric, the ginger and the dal and know exactly what to do with them.”

Why this question is really about continuity: it looks like a game, but it makes you separate what has changed (technology and materials) from what has not (the grain, the spices, the dal, the flat bread, the grinding stone). Four thousand years changed the kitchen; it changed the menu much less.

Q5.

Looking at all the pictures in this chapter, make a list of the ornaments / gestures / objects that still feel familiar in our 21st century.

Answer

Go through the chapter picture by picture. The list is longer than most students expect.

Category	What you can spot	Where
Ornaments	Bangles covering the whole arm — worn by the ‘Dancing Girl’, and by the woman in the photograph on page 85 Necklaces and strings of beads Carnelian beads, still made and sold in Gujarat Shell bangles, still worn in parts of India	Fig. 6.15-4; Fig. 6.1; Fig. 6.10
Gestures	The ‘namaste’ — a terracotta figurine seated with palms joined, exactly as people greet one another today The hand on the hip, a completely modern-looking stance	Fig. 6.15-5; Fig. 6.15-4
Everyday objects	A comb (ivory, about 7 cm — the same shape as a comb today) A mirror A painted pot with bands and patterns A chisel Weights in graded sizes A whistle A board game with pieces	Fig. 6.11; 6.14-1; 6.14-2; 6.14-4; 6.14-3; 6.14-6; 6.14-5
Farming	The plough — “some of which continue to be used by modern-day farmers”	Fig. 6.9, from Banawali
Symbols and stories	The swastika, still drawn at doorways and on account books The thirsty-crow story, still told to children The bull, still a familiar figure in Indian art	Fig. 6.15-2; Fig. 6.15-6; Fig. 6.13-2
In the kitchen	Turmeric, ginger and banana, and dairy — from the residues in the pots	Page 97

What this list proves: the chapter's closing claim — “much of the Harappan culture and technology survived and was passed on to the next phase of Indian civilisation”. The cities were abandoned around 1900 BCE, but the comb, the bangle, the namaste, the plough, the crow story and the turmeric never were. This is one of the longest unbroken cultural threads anywhere in the world.

Project idea: make a two-column wall chart, ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. In the left column stick a printout or a drawing of the Harappan object; in the right, photograph the same thing in your own house — a comb, a bangle, a whistle, a board game, a jar of turmeric. Nothing teaches continuity faster than seeing the two side by side.

Q6.

What mindset does the system of reservoirs at Dholavira reflect?

Answer

Look at what the system actually was: at least six large reservoirs, built with stones or cut straight into the rock, the largest 73 metres long, and most of them connected through underground drains for efficient water harvesting and distribution — in the Rann of Kutch, one of the driest places in India.

What they built	The mindset it reflects
Reservoirs in a near-desert, before there was any crisis	Foresight and planning. They thought about next year's water, and the year after that
Six of them, not one	Caution. If one fails or has to be cleaned, the city still has water — the same thinking behind a backup today
Cutting a 73-metre tank into solid rock by hand	Willingness to invest enormous collective labour in something that produces no profit, only security
Underground drains linking them	Engineering intelligence. Rainwater is caught where it falls and moved to where it is needed — this is rainwater harvesting, four thousand years before the phrase existed
A system that had to be cleaned and maintained	Discipline and civic organisation. Somebody had to keep it working, generation after generation
Water for the whole city, not one household	A community mindset — water treated as a shared resource, managed in common

In one sentence: the reservoirs reflect a mindset of respect for water, long-term planning and collective responsibility — a society that read its harsh environment honestly and organised itself to live within it rather than hoping for the best.

Why this is worth more than admiration: Kutch is still short of water, and so are large parts of India. Modern Gujarat and Rajasthan have revived exactly this idea — check dams, village tanks, rooftop rainwater harvesting. The Harappans' answer to a dry land was not to bring water from far away but to catch and keep what falls. That mindset is being rediscovered, not invented.

Think about it: in the end, even this was not enough — the climate turned drier from about 2200 BCE and the cities were abandoned around 1900 BCE. Good planning buys time against the environment; it does not defeat it.

Q7.

In Mohenjo-daro, about 700 wells built with bricks have been counted. They seem to have been regularly maintained and used for several centuries. Discuss the implications.

Answer

Three separate facts are packed into that sentence — 700, maintained, and several centuries. Each one implies something different.

The fact	What it implies
About 700 wells in one city	Water was available within a short walk of every house — not one well for the whole town. Several neighbourhoods, and possibly many individual houses, had their own. That means water was treated as a basic need of every citizen, not a privilege
Built with bricks	Serious engineering. A brick lining stops the sides collapsing and stops dirty surface water seeping in — so the wells were built for durability and cleanliness, not dug in a hurry
Regularly maintained	Somebody was responsible. Wells silt up and go foul within a year or two if nobody cleans them. Regular maintenance implies a municipal authority or a strong community system, and people who understood that dirty water makes you ill
Used for several centuries	Stability. The system survived generations of rulers, whoever they were. It also means a reliable water table — until, in the end, it was not reliable any more

Put the wells next to the drains and the picture completes itself. Clean water came in from 700 wells; dirty water went out through covered drains under the streets. That is a complete urban water cycle — supply and disposal, planned together, in a city of the third millennium BCE.

The comparison worth making: many towns in India got piped water and covered sewers only in the last hundred years, and some still do not have both. Mohenjo-daro had the equivalent, in its own technology, more than four thousand years ago — and kept it running for centuries. The maintenance is the truly impressive part. Building something once is easier than looking after it for three hundred years.

Discussion: ask your class who cleans the water tank in your school, who repairs the taps, and who pays for it. Then ask who did those jobs in Mohenjo-daro. Nobody knows — which is exactly why archaeologists find the 700 wells so tantalising.

Q8.

It is often said that the Harappans had a high civic sense. Discuss the significance of this statement. Do you agree with it? Compare with citizens in a large city of India today.

Answer

Civic sense means caring for shared spaces and shared systems — the street, the drain, the water supply, the neighbour's convenience — and not only for your own house.

The evidence for the statement

Evidence in the chapter	What it shows
Bathing areas in homes connected to a public drain network below the streets	Every household plugged its private waste into a shared system, and accepted the rules that came with it
Drains ran below the streets and were covered	Waste was carried away out of sight — nobody was allowed to throw it into the road
Streets wide and oriented to the cardinal directions; houses lining them	Nobody built out into the public street. Private building respected public space
The same quality of construction for small and big houses	A shared standard applied to everyone — B.B. Lal's “mutual accommodation”, not exploitation
About 700 wells and six Dholavira reservoirs, regularly maintained	Long-term collective upkeep of common property
No weapons of war, no army, no trace of warfare	Disputes settled without violence — the widest form of civic sense there is

The Harappan arrangement, as described on page 94 and photographed at Lothal in Fig. 6.7: bathing area → outlet → covered drain below the street.

Do I agree? Yes — with one honest reservation. The physical evidence for civic sense is very strong, and it is hard evidence: drains do not lie. But we should be careful about the word ‘sense’, which suggests a feeling inside people's heads. What we can actually see is a system. We cannot tell from the ruins whether every Harappan cheerfully swept his own drain, or whether a strict authority made him. Both would leave the same clean drain behind.

Compared with a large Indian city today

	A Harappan city	A large Indian city today
Where we do worse	Drains covered and running under every street; streets kept clear	Litter and plastic in the streets; open and choked drains; encroachment on footpaths and roads
Where we do worse	Same quality of building for rich and poor	Very unequal housing in the same city
Where we do better	Perhaps 30,000–40,000 people in the largest city	Millions of people, in a city that must also handle cars, industry and electronic waste — a far harder problem
Where we do better	Unknown; no records of rights	Municipal law, elected corporations, the right to complain, and campaigns such as Swachh Bharat

The fair conclusion: the Harappans built better public systems for their size than most modern Indian cities manage for theirs — and, more impressively, they maintained them for centuries. But their task was smaller and ours is far more complex. The lesson to take is not that the past was better; it is that a city works only when private habits respect public systems. That was true in Mohenjo-daro and it is true on your street.

Class activity: walk once round your school block and count three things — open drains, litter on the footpath, and blocked or encroached pavements. Then write, in one paragraph, what an archaeologist digging up your neighbourhood in 4000 CE would conclude about your civic sense. It is a sobering exercise.

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