Agricultural Practices

Rabi and Kharif. Early agriculture in the Indo-Iranian borderlands was based on a range of crops—wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, and flax—which were sown in November or December and harvested in April or May: rabi cultivation. Rabi crops required the cooler temperatures of the winter season, and the warmth available in the spring was adequate to ripen them. These were the crops that were introduced by farming colonists to the Indus Basin. A possible exception to this regime was cotton, which had been exploited and probably cultivated for millennia. Cotton is now grown as a summer (kharif) crop, planted in June and harvested from November onward. However, although winter frosts inhibit its growth, they do not kill it: cotton can therefore also be grown as a perennial bush, and it is thought that this was the method of cultivation in Harappan times, the bushes being grown on the edges of the active flood plain of the rivers. Jujube, a wild fruit that had been exploited or cultivated since the early occupation at Mehrgarh, could be gathered at any time during the winter months, from October to February.

One may surmise that initially the farming settlers in the greater Indus region adapted their rabi cultivation of traditional plants to the new constraints and opportunities of the Indus Basin, notably the far greater availability of water and cultivable land. After a time, however, they also began to make use of other plants native to the region; their willingness to experiment with these probably reflects the presence in the population of a significant number of people descended from the hunter-gatherers who had originally lived in the region and who had a long established familiarity with these plants. One local cereal, little millet, which was cultivated in Mature Harappan Gujarat, could be grown as a rabi crop (as it is today in Tamilnadu) and may therefore have initially been incorporated into the established rabi regime.

On the other hand, little millet could also be planted in the early monsoon period, around June or July, for harvest in October. The Harappans in the Indus Basin would have been aware that many other native species required summer temperatures to grow and the shortening days of autumn to reach maturity. These plants could take advantage of the moisture offered by the summer floods and monsoon rainfall, the latter being particularly relevant in Gujarat. During the Mature Harappan period, perhaps in its early days, a number of these were taken into cultivation; by around 2000 BCE these included Setaria, brown-top millet, green and black gram, sesame, and possibly broomcorn millet and rice. These native kharif crops were then supplemented by imported species: jowar, bajra, ragi, hyacinth bean, and cowpea ultimately from Africa, and perhaps rice, foxtail millet, and broomcorn millet from regions to the north and east. If, as seems possible, contacts took place with South India, where several South Asian millets and kharif pulses were cultivated, this may also have encouraged the gradual adoption of kharif cultivation in the Harappan realms.

The introduction of jowar, ragi, and bajra and the local domestication or introduction of domesticated rice were significant in altering the pattern of cultivation in the subcontinent: All achieved an enduring importance as staples, in

Contrast to indigenous millets. For the first time, serious alternatives to wheat and barley were available. The changing popularity of different varieties of millet in the sequence at Rojdi and the abandonment of barley cultivation after the first period (Rojdi A, 2500-2200 BCE) probably reflect a period of experimentation in which a pattern of agriculture, tailored to local conditions, gradually evolved from the "one-size-fits-all" uniform assemblage of West Asian crops, which would have produced less impressive results in Gujarat than in the Indus plains. A shift from rabi cultivation alone to rabi supplemented by some kharif cultivation occurred at Harappa in period 3C (ca. 2200-1900 BCE). By the Late Harappan period, the mosaic of differing local crop mixes and rabi-kharif balances was well developed in some previously settled regions, such as Gujarat, while in others, such as the Kachi plain, and in new areas such as the Deccan and the Ganges-Yamuna doab it was still evolving. It is possible that climatic changes also played a part in this evolution: the period 2200-1900 BCE is thought to have seen reduced rainfall.

The addition of kharif crops brought a number of advantages. They provided a means to reduce the risks involved in cultivation in the Indus region, where yields could be high but there were ever present dangers of crop failure due to drought, excessive flooding, or changes in the course of the rivers. The ability to plant a summer crop if spring harvests were poor therefore offered an important insurance against food shortages. Most of the millets were drought resistant, fast growing, and well suited to cultivation on poorer soils and in high temperatures, features that made them particularly attractive for cultivation in Gujarat, while rice could be grown in areas too wet for other cereals to thrive. New crops increased the diversity available in the diet. Finally, kharifcrops enabled doublecropping to be practiced, allowing two crops to be obtained from the land during a single year. Alternatively, and less labor intensively, cultivation might be rotated and land might be fallowed between crops. Double-cropping gave great potential for increasing agricultural productivity, and some scholars argue that double-cropping was an essential feature of agriculture by the later part of the Mature Harappan period. For example, an increasing population in the Kachi plain was associated in the early second millennium with combined rabi cultivation of cereals and pulses and kharif cultivation of rice and jowar.

The incorporation of kharif crops into the Harappan agricultural system had a further advantage that had far-reaching consequences. While the West Asian crops are well suited to the northwest part of the subcontinent where they were first grown and where they are still today the main staples, kharif crops are better adapted for cultivation in the rest of South Asia. Wheat and barley were introduced to much of the subcontinent, for instance appearing in South Indian Neolithic sites before 1800 BCE, but it was the native and introduced kharif crops that were to become the principal cultigens of these regions. Millets became the staple crop in Gujarat, the Deccan, and the south; this is reflected in the appearance in the Late Harappan period of many settlements on the previously uncultivated water-retentive black cotton soils of the north Gujarat plain and Saurashtra, which were ideal for the summer rain-fed cultivation of millets.

Unlike millets, rice demanded a substantial supply of water throughout the growing season. It could be grown in naturally flooded areas or in permanently bunded fields containing impounded water (wet rice cultivation), or it could be raised in areas where sufficient water came from high summer rainfall (dry rice cultivation). Summer rainfall was coupled with the water brought down in the summer by seasonal streams and rivers from the surrounding mountains, which was often retained in simple dams; this combination enabled growers to raise rice in the Kachi plain, where it was the main crop at Posturban Pirak. The Kachi plain was the only area of the greater Indus region in which there is evidence of irrigation. In addition, the Kachi plain was closely linked to Baluchistan, where small-scale dams had been used for water conservation since at least the Early Indus period. The farmers in this area, then, were experienced in the use of irrigation and therefore adapted to the incorporation of rice cultivation in the spectrum of agricultural practices. The construction of a canal alongside the settlement at Pirak shows the continuation of irrigation technology in the region.

The evidence for rice as a crop is limited in the Indus region as a whole, though it may have been present at Harappa. It could be cultivated in the river valleys and elsewhere by sowing it in the dhands created by floodwater being retained in depressions. The margins of Lake Manchar would have provided ideal conditions, as they do today. However, in the Ganges-Yamuna doab and in areas to the east, summer monsoon rainfall was adequate to provide water for growing rice, and this is reflected in the cultivation of rice in Late Harappan sites in this region, such as Hulas, and in the spread of farming communities into the Ganges Valley in the first millennium.

Ground Preparation and Tools. The only direct evidence of the practices of Indus agriculture comes from the plowed fields at Kalibangan, belonging to the Early Harappan period, and at the Indus outpost of Shortugai. The field at Kalibangan was about 140 meters square and had been plowed in two directions at right angles, a practice still used in the region. In modern times, closely spaced strips are first plowed in one direction and are sown with horsegram. More widely spaced strips, plowed at right angles to the first furrows, are sown with mustard seed. This matches the arrangement in the Kalibangan field, where furrows 30 centimeters apart were plowed first, followed later by furrows 1.9 meters apart. The small field at Shortugai may have been used for growing flax, judging by the large number of Linum seeds scattered across it.

A terra-cotta model plow (ard) was found at Banawali, giving an idea of the form of the Harappan plow. It had a narrow, pointed share to gouge through the ground surface and a curved shaft by which it was drawn along. The model can give no idea of the scale of the original: It is possible, therefore, that it was small enough to have been drawn by a man, though it is more likely that a yoke for a plow team of two oxen would have been attached to the shaft.

Plowing was probably practiced mainly in permanently cultivated areas, such as in Sindh outside the active floodplains of the Indus and in the Saraswati Valley. New deposits of silt, exposed as the floods subsided from the

Indus floodplain and from the margins of seasonal lakes such as dhands and Lake Manchar, could be sown directly, without preparation. The black cotton soils of Gujarat, used for kharif cultivation, also did not require plowing: Deep cracks that opened during the dry season adequately turned and broke up the soil, and a new cultivable surface developed as the ground absorbed the summer rains and swelled up, sealing the cracks again. The ground needed only to be harrowed before sowing. No direct evidence of an Indus harrow survives, but there has been some speculation that the Indus sign of a vertical line with a series of shorter lines at right angles to it may represent a harrow.

In lands where it was used, the plow enabled larger areas to be cultivated than was possible with hand tools such as digging sticks and hoes, and it made use of animal traction, reducing the human effort involved in ground preparation. Ratnagar (2001) argues that farmers in the Indus period were likely to have been less interested in achieving high productivity than in ensuring reliability: minimizing the risk rather than maximizing yields. Nevertheless, an increase in agricultural efficiency by using animal labor is likely to have increased productivity and therefore produced a surplus that enabled some sectors of the community to engage in part-time or full-time nonfarming activities such as craft production and trading expeditions. Yields would also be higher if the seeds were carefully sown rather broadcast. The crisscross plowed furrows at Kalibangan would have required careful sowing along the furrows in order to maintain the clear separation between the two crops grown in the field; this suggests that sowing rather than broadcasting was practiced even in Early Indus times. In Mesopotamia, where a seeder plow was used, a field could be sown using less than half the seed that would be required for broadcasting, and the ratio of sown to harvested seed could be as high as one to fifteen.

Apart from the plow, very little is known about the agricultural tools or cultivation techniques used by the Harappans. Gypsum crystals found on a sherd at Kalibangan may have been used as a fertilizer. Harvesting was probably undertaken with a flint blade or flint-edged sickle. At sites in the Kachi plain, early sickles were made of flint microliths fastened with bitumen into a handle probably of wood. By the fourth millennium this was the only use made of microliths at Mehrgarh, and they continued in use into the Post-Harappan period, being present at Pirak. Fuller (2001) suggests that variations in the plant remains at Rojdi and Harappa may reflect changes in the practices of crop processing, with some degree of centralization in threshing and winnowing in the Harappan period, resulting in only processed grain being stored, while in the Late Harappan period whole grain was stored and processed only as required. This suggestion has been supported by Weber (2001).