Dhanda In Dholavira: The Entrepreneurial Heritage Of Our Ancient Past

Imagine you are at the heart of a bustling town square that pulses with life as bustling crowds throng and shove past you, laying their awestruck eyes on the enormous billboards that herald the newest products and most incredible offers to be found at the numerous shops beneath them.

No, you are not in Times Square. Nor are you in the 21st century.

You are in Dholavira, Gujarat, 6000 BC. A nine-foot-wide billboard looks down upon you from a great height as you wander the wide, bustling boulevard of the city.

Generally, the West-centric view of economic history says that the earliest billboards were used in the United States in the late 1800s. They became one of the earliest forms of mass advertising, heralding the age of businesses communicating widely to consumers about their wares. Over time, billboards gave way to print advertising, radio spots, television ads and now online advertising, but in many ways, billboards remain the most visible way in which brands publicly communicate to consumers and are an integral part of urban cityscapes everywhere.

The Dholavira discovery defies this narrative and shows us that our ancestors had that advertising nous and understanding of the importance of spectacle millennia before the rest of the world.

In the previous article in this series, Made in Meluha, Harappan brand-building was highlighted. But this billboard, found by the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1990s, along with others in the city, is a bold proclamation to posterity and says a lot about the Indus Valley’s society.

Beyond being the first to use billboards, this shows that our ancestors had a society of widespread literacy - common people could read and write. This may sound trivial, because we take this for granted; but not many in the ancient world could. The literacy rate in Ancient Egypt was no more than between one and five per cent and was similar in Ancient Mesopotamia, with only scribes and the sons of kings given the privilege. The fact that a billboard was used in Dholavira shows a more educated population to whom such marketing tactics would appeal. Besides mere literacy, it also shows that we had something else: free enterprise. In other ancient civilisations, trade and doing business was a tightly controlled affair - commodities were traded under the rulers’ supervision by a select few wealthy merchants amongst themselves.

A society where entrepreneurs were jostling for the best space to display their billboards says a lot about the business culture of that society. The Indus Valley Civilisation’s entrepreneurs were engaging with their consumers, in a much less formalised and open way, something we can relate to in the age of capitalism and consumerism. As we say in colloquial language, they were doing ‘dhanda’ (business) by opportunistically seeking out prime locations where their messaging and brands could reach potential customers. Perhaps that art, that ability to do jugaad, is indeed in our blood. Perhaps it was this innate innovative nature that invigorated and enriched us for millennia to come. Under the Gupta Empire in the 5th century AD, India was the world’s biggest economy, with its economy a third of the global GDP.

What happened to make us lose our way, you ask?

This glory, these heights scaled by our passion for innovation, for business, was forgotten over the centuries. The British colonial rulers contrived to break the bond between us and our history, seeking mastery not just of our land but our minds too. Warren Hastings, who was the Governor-General of India, said that Indians had “No higher intellect than a dog, an elephant, or a monkey". Under British rule, at best, an Indian could be a babu, an English-speaking, well-paid clerk running the errands of his British overlords, with no right to free thought, speech or any kind of agency. To them and the rest of the world, we were losers without a spirit of enterprise or autonomy, who could be domineered with ease and they did their best to drill this dogma into us. Unfortunately, we played along for centuries.

India was in a decrepit, destitute darkness; when Independence dawned, it was one of the poorest countries in the world.

It meandered along for the next 40 years; our socialist, shut-off economy stuck in stagnation. The world once again mocked us, labelling our paltry growth ‘The Hindu Rate of Growth’. For years, smart, educated Indians, who once would have been mere cogs in the British Civil Services, now toiled to serve the Indian bureaucracy - a big improvement, for sure, but what happened to that entrepreneurial streak, you may be thinking? What happened to that spirit of enterprise, which was so dynamic in Dholavira and so invisible centuries later? There were outliers like Ambani and Tata, but how many entrepreneurial spirits were snuffed out under the labyrinthine ‘License Raj’?

Something changed post-1990. We call it ‘Liberalisation’ and the years since then have seen a gradual transformation of our economy and how we are viewed.

Now, the smart young people aren’t striving to only serve some power structure and be cogs of some large machine - they are building their own. This fire, this fervour to form new foundations, can be seen everywhere. In the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report, 2021, 81 per cent of young Indians said they had the skills to start a business. India has 1.14 lakh startups and their growth is predicted to increase India’s GDP by 5-10 per cent by 2030.

Maybe ‘Liberalisation’ wasn’t just about laws and litigation; perhaps it was about liberalising ourselves, letting our true nature unfurl, drowned out as it was by colonial rule and the passing of centuries. The Dholavira billboard shows that this drive to do dhanda, which today’s youth are thriving on, is part of our blood, not some sudden phenomenon.

In the Indus Valley seals, a common motif is that of a bovine creature with a single horn on its head: a unicorn, conjured perhaps by the flights of fancy of our forebears. Today once more, our startups are creating unicorns of their own, demonstrating an art that owes much not only to MBA degrees from business schools or experience in Silicon Valley but to our ancient ancestors who were hustling, innovating and building their own enterprises, while they perfected the art of dhanda in Dholavira.

Aaditya Sengupta Dhar

Guest Author