Reclaiming Harappa: Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Civilisational Imagination of Equality, Ecology and Human Dignity

in Book Review, Editor’s Picks

by Binu Mathew

This is the Foreword to Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s new book “Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation“

“Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation” is much more than a novel. It is an act of historical imagination, civilisational recovery, and ethical resistance. In a time when competing political and ideological forces seek to erase, appropriate, or rewrite the history of the Indus Valley Civilization, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd undertakes a bold and necessary literary project: he reclaims the memory of Harappa by transforming archaeology, oral memory, and emancipatory imagination into a compelling narrative of human origins and collective life.

This novel asks us to imagine India before the arrival of caste hierarchy, before the sanctification of inequality, and before the fragmentation of human communities into graded systems of oppression. In doing so, it offers not nostalgia for a lost past, but a radical vision of a possible future. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Harappa is a civilisation built on cooperation, labour, collective intelligence, ecological balance, and the dignity of all forms of life. It invites us to recover not merely a forgotten history, but a forgotten ethical horizon.

What makes this work extraordinary is the way it centres those who have historically been excluded from writing history. The protagonists of this civilisation are not kings, priests, conquerors, or empires. They are shepherds, women, animal keepers, inventors, cultivators, healers, and children. Through characters such as Harappa, Jambhav, Sindh, Pocha, and Maisamma, the novel reconstructs a world in which knowledge emerges from labour, innovation grows from collective experience, and civilisation itself is built through the intimate relationship between humans, animals, rivers, forests, and the earth.

One of the most profound achievements of Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation is its ecological imagination. Here, human beings are not masters of nature but participants in a larger web of life. The domestication of animals, the discovery of milk culture, the management of water, and the emergence of settled communities are narrated not as acts of conquest over nature, but as acts of cooperation with it. In an age of climate catastrophe and ecological collapse, this vision acquires immense contemporary relevance.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd has long been one of India’s most original and courageous thinkers. In this novel, he expands the terrain of his intellectual intervention into the realm of fiction, demonstrating that imagination itself can become a site of political and historical struggle. Memory, in this work, becomes resistance; storytelling becomes an instrument of decolonisation; and literature becomes a means of recovering suppressed civilisational possibilities.

Priti Gulati Cox’s remarkable illustrations deepen this experience immeasurably. Her visual interpretations do not merely accompany the text; they animate its emotional and philosophical universe, allowing readers to inhabit the landscapes, faces, animals, and dreams of an ancient civilisation reborn through art.

Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation is therefore not simply a historical novel. It is a civilisational manifesto, an ecological meditation, and a democratic dream. It challenges us to rethink the foundations of Indian history and to imagine a future rooted not in hierarchy and exclusion, but in equality, coexistence, and human dignity. This is a book that will reshape how readers understand India’s past—and perhaps how they dare to dream of its future.

The book is available on Amazon, Flipkart, and Unbound Script

Binu Mathew is the editor of Countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org