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March 21, 2002
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THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING INDIA Part 10: The Kampilya archeological project By Gian Giuseppe Filippi 
Among the capitals celebrated in the Indian epic Mahabharata, Kampilya is the only one not yet identified with certainty. The intuitions of General Alexander Cunningham (1878) and the further investigations of Dr B B Lal (1955), Dr V N Misra (1961) and Professor K K Sinha identified the location of Kampilya in the surronding area of the present day Kampil village, in the district of Farrukhabad, in the mid-Ganges Valley.
Invited by the president of the Panchala Research Institute of Kanpur in 1993, I visited the fields all around Kampil, strewn with an infinite number of terra cotta fragments. I felt close to the solution of my philological research on the protohistoric city of Kampilya, which I was investigating on the basis of the Mahabharata epic. I contacted Dr B Marcolongo, geo-archeologist of the CNR (National Center for Research, Italy) of Padua, well known for his competence in remote sensing technology, and at that point the investigations entered into a new phase. Upon analyzing the image produced by the LISS-II sensor of the Indian satellite IRS-1B, the Kampil area appeared much more complex than one might have supposed. An important potential human settlement five kilometers west of Kampil was situated in a long tortuous line covered with small artificial mounds. This orographic line was the escarpment of the ancient fluvial terrace of the Ganges River, which nowadays flows seven kilometers northeast of there. Therefore, this ancient bank of the Ganges had been intensively settled for a long period, at least from the 12th century BC to the 1st century AD, when the course of the river moved far away. In the satellite image another more ancient escarpment was visible to the southeast, but it was too old and evidently uninhabited. The fluvial plain lying in the Indian subcontinent at the foot of the Himalaya range has been, and is even today, affected by neotectonics, with significant changes in channel characteristics and rivers flows during the late Pleistocene and Holocene ages. Recently, imposing changes have been recognized in river courses in Pakistan (Sindh), Punjab and Rajasthan: a change of paramount importance has been the disappearance of the Sarasvati river around the 19th century BC, recorded in the rigvedic literature as the most prominent among the Indian rivers. This ecological disaster destroyed the developed Indus-Sarasvati civilization, compelling a considerable number of people to migrate and to settle down in other alluvial planes. In our satellite image it was possible to read the footprint of the arrival in the Ganges Valley of those migrating people. Of course, that intuition had to be tested on the field. The Ca, Foscari University of Venice, the CNR of Padua and the VAISonlus (a non-profit association) organized the first field survey "Kampilya Mission" under the direction of Marcolongo and myself. On February 6, 1996, the second day of the expedition, we found the imposing walls of a fortified city. In the following missions, in 1997 and 1999, we verified the regular rectangular shape of the layout of Drupad Kila, Fort of King Drupada, as it was called by the villagers. In fact, Kampilya is mentioned in the Mahabharata as the capital of the Southern Panchala Kingdom, at the time of the mythical King Drupada. The walls of the city measure 780 by 660 meters and are perfectly oriented toward the points of the compass. What is very surprising about this layout, orientation and size is that another city recently discovered in Gujarat, Dholavira, has precisely the same features. The plans of Kampilya-Drupad Kila and Dholavira coincide perfectly, something recognized also by Dr Bisht, the director of the excavations on that second town. The problem is that Dholavira was a town of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, 2,000 years older than Kampilya. This fact offered evidence of the continuity of only one urban model from the Indus-Sarasvati to the Ganges civilizations in the time frame of two millennia. Hitherto, scholars' opinions on the origins of the Indian civilization was based on the clear opposition between these two civilizations. In this view, the most recent one, the Ganges civilization, founded by the invading Arya populations, would have destroyed the native peaceful Indus-Sarasvati settlements. This conviction continued from the 19th century until nowadays, despite the archeological evidence that on the contrary demonstrates the continuity of the two civilizations: for instance, every Indologist well knows that the Gray Painted Ware is a peculiar kind of ceramic, common to both civilizations. With the descovery of Kampilya, our team could provide another important support to the theory of continuity: that the same urban model applied to Dholavira and Drupad Kila is undisputable evidence. In India, the discovery of Kampilya focused the attention of the scientific and political world. On January 7, 1998, the discovery was officially presented by the two directors of the mission in the presence of the Italian prime minister during his state visit in India, at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi. At the end of 1999, the Archeological Survey of India granted the necessary clearances for the excavation campaign and for a survey in a wider area around Drupad Kila. With the providential funds of a private sponsor, a new Indo-Italian mission, with the participation of the Indian Archeological Society was conducted in January-February 2000, achieving notable results, identifying a network of ancient mounds around Drupad Kila - the urban web of the Southern Panchala Kingdom dated from the 12th century BC. The walls and the buildings excavated within Drupad Kila are of the post-Maurya period, with traces of Kushana restorations. In fact, after the beginning of the Kushana period, around the 1st century AD, the town had been deserted because of the shifting of the Ganges. After an important First Kampilya International Symposium (Padua, Verona, Ferrara: June 1-3, 2000) the team composed by the scholars of Ca, Foscari University of Venice, CNR of Padua, VAISonlus, and of Panchala Research Institute of Kanpur has drafted an enlargement of the research on a territorial and multidisciplinary level through new technologies. The first step consists of a database with an advanced GIS (Geographic Information System), in order to develop an integrated master plan, with the purpose of exploiting the archeological discovery for the socio-economic development of the area, following Italian development policies. This plan, called "Kampilya Project", includes different topics such as: an indological and socio-ethnological research project, a human resources development plan, an environmental and agricultural optimizing project, a study for infrastructural support and, last, a health infrastructure program. An agreement between VAISonlus and Medecins du Monde guarantees that the health program will be the first to be carried out. (c) Heartland. This version has been edited by Asia Times Online.) To subscribe to Heartland, please email cassanpress@sina.com
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