Ancient Indian peoples’ race and caste character is still troubled terrain. Once some clarity comes with careful study of their early racial, civilisational, and cultural character, modern Indian society’s roots and their connection to Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi ancient history can be understood.Understanding the Harappan civilisation builders is the key to re-evaluating Indian racial roots. Reading the Sanskrit texts written after the settlement of Aryan migrants, starting with Rigveda, does not give us any clues to the nature of ancient Indian society. All the Sanskrit books deal only with the lives of Brahmins and Kshatriyas, and both these castes belong to one Aryan race. Neither food producers nor builders of the animal economy nor technological innovators exist in those books. No trace of skin colours or other racial characteristics comparable to those of present day Shudras, Dalits, or Adivasis can be found in those books. Even the most popular Ramayana, the Mahabharata, reflects only Brahmin and Kshatriya life, culture, and colour. Only a few, e.g., Srirama and Srikrishna, are even shown as mixed race. This we can see in paintings or idol images of Rama and Krishna, though in very modern Indian dress.Rakshas/Vanaras, another category of characters in those books, also do not engage in food production, animal husbandry, or tool-making. Thus, no ancient Sanskrit books reflect the real racial and caste origins of the people who founded Indian civilisation, or how the later imposition of the caste system stunted economic and cultural development in India.Painted or illustrated ancient humansThe most prominent mythological images of ancient men and women are the paintings and illustrations of Raja Ravi Varma, a South Indian Kshatriya, who mapped his contemporary ruling family images, dress codes, colour, and body type according to his understanding of the Kshatriya and Brahmin families of his time. He seems to have relied on textual descriptions in depicting the subjects of his paintings. Consequently, his images of supposedly ancient mythological figures, both male and female, do not manifest any ancientness. They instead appear fashionably modern. Their clothing, ornaments and houses do not represent ancient Indian economic, civilisational and cultural environments at all. His people of Krita Yuga or Treta Yuga look like modern Kshatriyas or Brahmins – mostly of North India.Similar characteristics are found in Indian temple idols and cinematic characters. We find no ancientness in them. For example, the Ramayana is said to date back to Krita Yuga and the Mahabharata to Dwapara Yuga, but we cannot locate them in any time frame of ancient civilization. If we compare their dress, body and facial images to those of our freedom fighters, the freedom fighters look more like ancient people than Ramayana and Mahabharata figures.The texts and associated images are inconsistent with what we know of material production in ancient times. The people of Krita Yuga or Dwapara Yuga had not developed technologies for producing the clothes, ornaments, shoes, chappals, or other fashionable commodities depicted in Varma’s images.In the societies portrayed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, was there tillage agriculture using buffalo-bulls? Was there irrigation? Were there crop-harvesting systems? Was there social interaction among productive castes? Were consumer tastes of Brahmins and Kshatriyas in those times similar to modern tastes? No to all. Both the written word and painted or illustrated images should reflect the production systems of the era they purport to represent. But there’s ample evidence that Ramayana and Mahabharata were written during early modern times and are only claimed to be ancient. Likewise, the “ancient” people in Varma’s paintings are creatures of the modern existence depicted in those texts.Sanskrit books and historyReal human history does not come into play in the Sanskrit texts, as they were mostly written by Brahmins who had no footing in the production process. Their feet sat instead under the folded legs of Rishis, and their hands did no work; they were used only for worshipping the Kshatriya rulers as Gods and their women as Goddesses. Their roles are imaginary, highly exaggerated, and situated in no known time frame. Varma’s paintings also reflect none of the socio-economic conditions of ancient Indian civilization that developed with several new innovations of technologies and methods of production.Priti Gulati Cox’s illustration of HarappansMaisamma builds a reservoir, 2026, Harappa: God’s City of Civilization, chapter 3 (left); Saraswati, 1890, Raja Ravi Varma (right), image credit: Raja Ravi Varma Heritage FoundationOnce I completed the first draft of Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation, my longtime friend and editor of Countercurrents, Binu Mathew, sent the manuscript to Priti Gulati Cox (born and brought up in India), who lives in the US along with her husband Stan Cox. She liked the scheme of the novel and eagerly agreed to illustrate the story’s characters, events, and locations. Having no idea how she would portray ancient Indian people, I waited eagerly to see her first sketches.As she later wrote in our book’s Afterword, she was “thrilled to illustrate Harappa: God’s City of Civilization” She became the first person to give physical shape to India’s original civilisation builders. Present-day Adivasi/Dalit/Shudras will see themselves in her portrayals of their ancient ancestors. Her figures broadly resemble our Tribals of central India, including the Gonds, Koyas, Bills, Santhals and many others.Priti’s magnificent work is based on her deep study of research by archeologists, historians, and anthropologists that has revealed much about the Harappan people and their civilization, built environment, animal economy, food production, water management and other technological accomplishments. However, she did not romanticise the ancient lifestyle of the main character Harappa’s family or the many others who built the big village of Jambhu Dwipa and developed it into the first civilised city of the ancient world, Harappa.Race and casteVigraharadhi presents Harappa with a sculpture of him, Harappa: God’s City of Civilization, chapter 6 (left); Coronation of Rama, 1905, Raja Ravi Varma (right), image credit: Google Arts and CultureEven in India, the caste question is crucially connected to the race question. As I was writing the novel, I focused on several main themes: how the villagers domesticated animals; how in their economic development, they built a city of such magnitude, featuring kiln-fired bricks, advanced wood craft, and large water bodies and distribution systems; and how their productive, cooperative, egalitarian social structure evolved.I knew that the people who built the Harappan civilisation were a mixture of racial backgrounds and had no caste system. However, that was not the subject of my novel. My focus was on their everyday life. Priti’s illustrations gave life to my words, depicting the evolution of a people’s civilisation and culture.When I received proofs of the book with Priti’s illustrations incorporated throughout, I noticed that she rendered them in shades of graphite-gray in the early chapters, then gradually added bits of color here and there in the middle chapters, before moving to vivid full-color toward the end. I asked her about the purpose of her evolving color scheme. She said that throughout the book the illustrations were rendered with no sharp detail or outlines, as if they were people, animals, and scenes visible only through deep mists of time. The first four chapters, she said, depicted the people of the village that would become Harappa as they had lived for millennia, as an integral part of the natural world. Given that no traces of early societies like that remain, she said, she depicted it in monochrome.Starting with Chapter 3, in which the villagers begin working with nature in ways that improve the life of the village, she said, she began adding color in natural tones to details in some of the scenes: a peacock by a water tank, terra-cotta bangles on the arms of dancers at the winter solstice, copper being smelted. In Chapter 5, she began introducing scenes entirely in color, but she stuck to strictly earth tones: clothing, some adorned with vegetable dye, buildings constructed with red-clay bricks, a wooden boat.She pointed out that Chapter 9, in which a small team of itinerant Aryans enter the story, begins with a landscape scene in subdued colors, save for one ominous sight: a stretch of saffron-colored sky on the horizon. In her illustrations for the final two chapters, Priti portrayed the pale-skinned bodies of the Aryans against a full palette of intense Holi colours. She portrayed the book’s final image, featuring thumbnails of Harappa’s indigenous technologies (arranged on the branches of a tree that is depicted among archeological finds in Harappa) as having been painted on white paper, the edges of which are being consumed by bright saffron-orange flames. And the tip of the tree has caught fire as well.Production and painting Harappa & Maisamma as elders, Harappa: God’s City of Civilization, chapter 8 (left); Shri Sheshanarayana, 1886, Raja Ravi Varma (right), image credit: Google Arts & CultureAny people as a race or tribe as a social group survives by growing crops from the earth, while exploiting naturally available food resources: land, animals, fish, wild fruits and tubers, etc. But books written by Brahmins in Sanskrit, from Rigveda to Manudharma and after, erased the very existence of any ethnic groups, castes, and communities that were involved in food production and food gathering. This, I realised when I was doing extensive reading of literature on the Harappan civilisation which thrived well before the arrival of Aryans. The Brahmins of modern India, the main representatives of the Aryan race, composed the Vedas almost 1,500 years after the heyday of Harappa, the world’s first great civilisation.The Brahmins deliberately avoided including the role of productive communities in their ancient texts. They, along with the Kshatriya kings, played a key role in denying education in their real history. They erased the history of a civilisation that existed long before the Aryans migrated into the Subcontinent and replaced it with a history that existed only in their own minds.Tony Joseph’s theory of migrationHarappan “tree of life” up in flames, Harappa: God’s City of Civilization, chapter 10 (left); Krishna’s Embassy to Duryodhana, 1905, Raja Ravi Varma (right), image credit: Google Arts & CultureAs Tony Joseph, a great historian and writer, proved in his book Early Indians, the Harappa civilisation was built by people descended from two groups of ancestors: early migrants from Africa and a population of farmers who had migrated from the area that’s now western Iran. The Africans were dark skinned whereas those from West Asia were colored people. The intermixing of these two waves of migrants produced the Harappans, who later seem to have been designated Shudras.The light-skinned Aryans, who migrated into the northern Subcontinent from the steppes of Central Asia met and, over time, mingled with dark-skinned people of Harappa, producing a racially diverse population upon which, centuries later, the Brahmins would impose an unjust caste system. Meanwhile, immigrants from the region of Mongolia settled in far-eastern India, what we now call the Northeast, adding another group to the race-caste social structure.Priti’s illustrations capture the first migrant races that settled in the Sindhu River region and built the Harappan economy, civilisation and culture, generation after generation. They finally built the greatest earliest urban civilisation in India much before the Aryan arrived here. Her colours show that they resemble the Dravidian masses of India, South and North. She also showed the newly arrived Aryans: a white-skinned, black-haired, and blue-eyed folk, with their horses, cows, bulls, and iron weapons.ConclusionDescendants of the Harappans – present-day Shudras, Dalis, and Adivasis – were forbidden by the later migrant Aryans to write books about their ancient life. This novel is the first one to put that ancient story in fictional form, but based on what we have learned from scholarship in archeology, history, and genetics about the Harappan people, their civilisation and culture. They are the Indians who do not exist in the Sanskrit books written by ancient and medieval Brahmins. And today’s ruling caste-class Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party forces continue to compel Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi students to read ancient Sanskrit books – and accept them as actual history – in schools and colleges.Harappa: God’s City of Civilization can provide students an opportunity to read about and see how the first Indians – their ancestors – looked and worked in a far more ancient India than the Sanskrit books describe.Cox has portrayed Harappans, the actual ancestors of the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses, not the fanciful characters in Ramayana and Mahabharata famously painted by Raja Ravi Varma. He showed them in his own class, caste, race mirror, whereas Priti has shown the Harappans as they really were.Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is The Shudra Rebellion.