Home

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s first foray into fiction is a courageous declaration that the oppressed, too, have the right to imagine, narrate and reclaim their own civilizational inheritance, writes Satya Sagar

Satya Sagar August 24, 2026

Few Indian public intellectuals have challenged the ideological foundations of Indian history and society as relentlessly as Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. For more than three decades, beginning with his landmark book Why I Am Not a Hindu, followed by influential works such as Buffalo Nationalism and Post-Hindu India, Prof Ilaiah has consistently argued that India’s productive castes, the Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis, have been written out of the nation’s intellectual and civilizational story. 

His latest work, Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation, extends that lifelong intellectual project into an unexpected genre: the illustrated civilizational fable.

Prof Shepherd has never been content merely to challenge dominant narratives, he overturns them. Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation is an audacious act of literary and intellectual imagination that reclaims the Indus Valley Civilization from the long shadow of Vedic mythology. Instead of gods obsessed with sacrifice, ritual and heavenly rewards, Prof Ilaiah presents a civilization built by ordinary people whose greatness lay in domesticating animals, cultivating crops, discovering new technologies, building towns and creating the material foundations of human progress.

At first glance, the book appears to be a children’s story. It begins with Kathamma, a village storyteller and healer, who narrates the forgotten history of Harappa to an eager group of children living near the ruins of the ancient civilization. But this deceptively simple narrative device allows Prof Ilaiah to accomplish something far more ambitious. Through myth, memory and storytelling, he reconstructs an alternative civilizational imagination. One in which shepherds, hunters, women, artisans and animal keepers become the true makers of history.

The hero of the story is not a warrior king or divine sage but a young pastoralist named Harappa. His greatest achievements are neither military conquest nor spiritual revelation. Instead, he observes animals patiently, learns from nature, experiments fearlessly and transforms the economy of his community through the domestication of sheep, goats, buffaloes and chickens. 

When the young Harappa goes to graze his sheep in the forest, he encounters a baby buffalo and manages to bring it home, turning around the village economy. As he comes of age, he meets a curious girl, Maisamma, who is experimenting with ways to conserve water and even succeeds – an important step in the development of a civilization. The so-called lowly works of leathercrafting and tanning in present India are given their due placein Prof Ilaiah’s imagination. Be it the stepping into the Bronze Age or the shunning of human-worship, the reader is given sound reasoning, while still being left to inquire further. That is the power of a well-written book. 

In Harappa’s world, civilization emerges not from revelation but from labour; not from rituals performed by priests but from discoveries made by ordinary working people. This inversion is the book’s most radical intervention. For generations, school textbooks and popular culture have celebrated kings, sages and conquerors while treating productive labour as socially invisible. Prof Ilaiah reverses that hierarchy. Herding animals becomes scientific inquiry. Milking goats becomes technological innovation. Women discover fermentation, develop methods of preserving milk, and experiment with cooking and pottery. Each practical breakthrough adds another brick to the edifice of civilization. The cumulative effect is to redefine what counts as history itself.

Readers familiar with Prof Ilaiah’s earlier writings will immediately recognize recurring themes. In Buffalo Nationalism, he famously elevated the buffalo over the sacred cow as a symbol of India’s productive classes. Here too, the buffalo occupies centre stage. Rather than being reduced to a ritual symbol, it becomes the foundation of an entire economic and social revolution. Domestication of the buffalo is portrayed not merely as an agricultural breakthrough but as one of humanity’s defining achievements. This celebration of labour, productivity and material life has always distinguished Prof Ilaiah’s scholarship from mainstream cultural nationalism.

Women occupy an equally transformative place in the narrative. Characters like Sindh and Maisamma are innovators rather than passive companions. They discover new food practices, experiment with milk products, manage water, and contribute essential technological knowledge to society. In doing so, Prof Ilaiah quietly dismantles patriarchal assumptions embedded within many traditional origin stories, replacing them with a vision of civilization built through collective creativity.

Some readers may question the historical liberties the book takes. Archaeologists understandably distinguish carefully between evidence and speculation. Prof Ilaiah, however, is not writing conventional history. He openly inhabits the territory of civilizational imagination. His Harappa is a literary reconstruction rather than an archaeological report. That distinction is crucial.

What makes this book remarkable is not simply its celebration of Harappan civilization, but its refusal to accept that only the powerful have the privilege of myth-making. Ilaiah deliberately fashions a counter-myth. Not because history is irrelevant, but because history itself has long been colonized by those who claimed exclusive ownership of India’s past. If dominant traditions have employed epics, Puranas and sacred narratives to legitimize social hierarchy, Prof Ilaiah responds by creating an equally compelling narrative rooted in the dignity of labour and collective human endeavour. Harappa, an ardent observer and a keen inquirer, does not instantly believe in or bow down to any mystical deity, but displays a rational temperament instead.

This strategy is likely to provoke strong reactions. Admirers will celebrate it as an overdue act of intellectual decolonization. Critics may dismiss it as ideological counter-history, marred by factual inaccuracies. Yet both responses miss the point. The book’s purpose is less to settle archaeological debates than to expand the imaginative possibilities through which India understands itself.

The illustrations by Priti Gulati Cox strengthen this vision spectacularly. Rendered with warmth and simplicity, they evoke a world where humans, animals and landscapes exist in intimate relationship. Rather than merely decorating the pages, the illustrations reinforce the text’s central philosophical message that civilization grows from cooperation with nature rather than domination over it.

The prose itself is accessible, almost oral in rhythm, reflecting the traditions of village storytelling. Songs, conversations and repeated motifs give the narrative the feel of an epic told around evening fires rather than inside university classrooms. This accessibility allows the book to function on multiple levels: as children’s literature, political allegory, social philosophy and intervention in contemporary debates about Indian identity.

Harappa: God’s City of Civilisationdeserves to be read not as an archaeological textbook but as a bold intervention in India’s ongoing struggle over memory, identity and history. It invites praise, discomfort and fierce debate in equal measure, and that is precisely its achievement. It is a courageous declaration that the oppressed, too, have the right to imagine, narrate and reclaim their own civilizational inheritance. 

Details of the Book

Title: Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation
Author: Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
Illustrator: Priti Gulati Cox
Publisher: Unbound Script
Format: Hardcover
Book Length: 80 pages
Price: Rs 349 or $18

https://www.forwardpress.in/2026/08/review-kancha-ilaiah-shepherds-harappa-gods-city-of-civilisation/

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s new book portrays the Indus Valley Civilization as cooperative and egalitarian—and challenges nationalist myths about India’s origins.

STAN COX AUG 19, 2026

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd has a way of getting under Hindu supremacists’ skin. And the latest book by this political theorist, social activist, and former Osmania University professor—titled Harappa: God’s City of Civilization—is almost certain to elicit frenzied howls of outrage. This 90-page work of fiction, illustrated by Priti Gulati Cox (full disclosure: I’m married to the artist), is set about 4,500 years ago in a small village along a tributary of the Indus River. Over generations, its residents, working with people from neighboring villages, create in their home territory the city of Harappa, the likes of which have never been seen in South Asia—one that will become a nucleus for their region’s first (possibly the world’s first) great civilization.

There is much that we do not know about the lives of the people who were there at the dawn of Harappa. However, thanks to extensive archeological, anthropological, ecological, and genetic research, there is much we do know. 

We know that the people living in Prof. Ilaiah’s fictional village would have been descended from the mixing of two populations: First Indians—that is, modern humans who traveled out of Africa into Asia tens of thousands of years ago, with some of them eventually making their way to the Indus Valley—and an agricultural people who migrated to the Indus Valley from the Zagros region of present-day Iran. 

We also know that, at the time Prof. Ilaiah’s story begins, the Indus Valley people were farming and had learned how to domesticate animals, including sheep, goats, chickens, and water buffalo. And we know they would go on to create a written language and striking art, while developing highly effective structures for water management, sanitation, land and water transportation, urban housing, and public services. 

Harappan cities came to be scattered across a vast region one-third the size of present-day India. Archaeologists and historians have marveled at the highly functional and attractive layout of Harappan cities and their high-quality construction. They clearly were the product of well-thought-out urban planning; even the height-width-length ratio of the bricks used in construction throughout the region was standardized (at 1:2:4), as were weights and measures. But, in contrast to the ruins of other ancient civilizations, Harappa’s ruins contain no remains of grand, monumental structures. Their cities, full of home foundations that do not vary greatly in size, modest public buildings, and other utilitarian features, do not suggest wide class disparities. Accordingly, the book Harappaportrays a relatively egalitarian, cooperative, hard-working society.

Evidence points to a civilization built on the collective labor of its own people. That would stand in stark contrast to most other “great civilizations” of ancient and modern times, which usually achieved that status through conquest, territorial expansion, imposition of power over other peoples, grandiose architecture, and amassment of great wealth, with some intellectual and artistic accomplishments thrown in. Most importantly, in achieving all those things, those other civilizations depended heavily on labor provided by underclasses of their own people, or by those they conquered, or both. No such exploitation is evident in Harappa—neither in the village of Prof. Ilaiah’s book nor in the archeological remains of Harappan cities. 

That first Indian civilization had quite a good run, from about 4,600 to 3,700 years ago. Its demise is attributed primarily to the drying-up of the rainfed rivers on which it depended. That drought brought down other Bronze Age civilizations as well. But research based on ancient DNA samples shows that Harappa’s people didn’t just die off; they emigrated, some venturing east to the Ganges basin, others to southern regions of the subcontinent. In both the north and the south, over centuries, they blended with local First Indian populations and kept on contributing to India’s development and culture.

Unfortunately, the next civilization to arise in northwestern India would, over the centuries, evolve in the opposite direction, toward inequality and injustice.

The Aryan Immigrants

A century of research and scholarship has established beyond all doubt that the Harappan Civilization was the Indian subcontinent’s first. But Hindu supremacists, whose political and cultural power has been increasing steadily over the past three decades, continue to insist that India’s first civilization was launched by a people who composed the Vedas, India’s oldest religious texts. In the first of these works, they identified themselves as the Arya. (Millennia, later, Western scholars would dub them the “Aryans”.)

There are big holes, though, in the claim that the Arya were the fount of Indian civilization. First is the timing. They didn’t start composing the first of their foundational works, a set of prose and poetry known as the Rigveda (which was originally transmitted orally and eventually written down in Sanskrit) until less than 4,000 years ago—at a time when India had already been hosting one of the world’s great ancient civilizations—Harappa—for centuries. On top of that, the Arya weren’t even ancestral Indians. In fact, at the time they composed the Rigveda, they were newcomers to the subcontinent—or may not have even arrived yet.

Nomadic cattle herders known as Arya migrated out of the steppes of present-day Kazakhstan around 4,000 years ago. They spread south through Central Asia and present-day Afghanistan, to finally end up, about 3,500 years ago, in a part or northern India that would become the Hindu homeland.

Hindu fundamentalists have long insisted on a wholly different history: that the Arya had always lived in what is now northern India and had founded a Vedic civilization more than 5,000 or even 10,000 years ago. At least one claim has them in India, working on the Rigveda, as early as 25,000 years ago (which might have had them mingling with the original immigrants who’d come from Africa). Still others claim that the Arya have been living in India since the beginning of time! Much of the “evidence” supporting these wild “estimates” is gleaned from tortured “analysis” of the Vedic texts themselves—a circular argument if there ever was one. 

Meanwhile, Hindu supremacist claims regarding their origin are easily disproven. DNA samples collected from ancient human remains at archeological sites, from Africa to India to Iran to the steppes of Eurasia—particularly samples analyzed in the past decade or so—show 

• that the Vedic Arya were recent immigrants from the Central Asian steppe who settled in northern India in the second millennium B.C.E. and 
• the people who built the Harappa civilization, India’s first, carried DNA from First Indians and Iranian farmers and none from Central Asian populations.

The Downgrading of Labor

In contrast to Harappa, Arya-dominated civilization evolved in a severely hierarchical direction. They didn’t bring caste with them to India, and they mentioned no caste-like hierarchies in the early Vedas. Centuries later, as they were consolidating their power through imposition of the caste system, their rationale was based on economics much more than ethnic origin. By then, there were few or no “pure” Arya or “pure” Harappans or “pure” local First Indians living in the newly adopted Arya “homeland.” Each person’s genome most likely carried DNA from either two or all three of those populations, in various proportions. India had become a genetic melting pot of sorts. The evolving caste system was a socioeconomic hierarchy.

The caste system was designed by those claiming membership in the Vedic Arya elite, their goal being to consolidate their power over society. The system downgraded the types of labor that had created and sustained the Harappan Civilization while elevating the kind of abstract thinking and pursuit of conquest and power that had characterized most other ancient civilizations. (To be sure, most societies around the world have done likewise ever since; caste isn’t the only means to exploitation and oppression.) 

To the extent that the word civilizationhas positive connotations for us, I expect that many of us who read Harappa: God’s City of Civilization’s text, view its images, and ponder the way of life, labor, and leisure portrayed, will close the book and think to ourselves, “That wasn’t just a village that would one day launch a civilization. That was a civilization! And a damn good one, too.”

Stan Cox is the author of seven books, including The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can and Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World. His latest book is Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth. He writes from Dearborn, Michigan.

https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/harappa

Dear Sir,

I read your book in the early 2000s, and I believe it was a Malayalam translation. Coming from a Christian family, it was the first time I encountered the reality of caste in such a direct and powerful way. It opened my eyes to a world I had not understood before, and it profoundly changed the way I looked at Hinduism and caste.

When I founded Countercurrents, the impact of that book stayed with me. I am sure it shaped, in no small measure, the way Countercurrents approaches caste, Hinduism and Hindutva. The book has undoubtedly influenced generations of readers, not only in India but across the world, and helped many people see caste and the structures of oppression associated with it in a new light.

I have always felt that even if you had written no other book, “Why I Am Not a Hindu” alone would have been enough to place you among the highest echelons of Indian thinkers. Its impact goes far beyond the pages of the book.

Thank you for opening my eyes, and the eyes of millions of others, to realities that are so often hidden, denied or ignored.

Congratulations on completing 30 years. I wish you many more years of writing, questioning and challenging the structures of injustice.

With deep respect and solidarity,

Binu Matthew

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

An upcoming book on life of Prof Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd