Q1.
The Harappans returned to rural settlements because a rural lifestyle gives easier access to food and water than an urban lifestyle. Then as now, cities depended on villages to provide food, and sometimes water.
Answer
This box is not a puzzle — it is the explanation of something that would otherwise look strange. If a civilisation collapses, why do people move backwards, from a comfortable city to a small village? Because a city is the harder place to survive when supply lines fail.
| Living in a Harappan city | Living in a village | |
|---|---|---|
| Food | Grown somewhere else. It must arrive from hundreds of rural sites on a daily basis, by cart and boat | Grown in the fields around you. You eat what you harvest |
| Water | Wells, reservoirs and drains — built structures that need cleaning, repair and an authority to organise both | A stream, a pond or a shallow well used by a few families |
| If the rains fail | Thousands of people who grow nothing are suddenly hungry at once | A few families move to where the water still is |
| What holds it together | Administration, trade, planning — all of which can stop working | The family and the field — which cannot |
So the move was sensible, not a defeat. With the climate drier from about 2200 BCE and the Sarasvatī drying in its central basin, the food and water reaching the cities fell. The Harappans did the reasonable thing: they “adopted a rural lifestyle in the changed environment”, scattering over “hundreds, if not thousands, of small rural settlements”.
Why the box says “then as now”: the dependence has not gone away. Your city's rice, wheat, milk and vegetables are grown by farmers you will never meet, and much of its water is stored far outside it. If lorries stopped for a week, the city would be in trouble long before the village would. The Harappan cities failed at exactly the point where every city is weakest — a city cannot feed itself.
Discussion point: ask in class where the food in your school lunch was grown, and how far it travelled. Then ask how many days your town could manage if nothing arrived. That single question makes 1900 BCE feel very close.