I keep looking at the design on a shallow bowl, perhaps 20cm across, which looks like an inverted heart, its surface slatted with diagonal lines. Right at the back of the British Museum there are a tiny number of artefacts from the western subcontinent — a few Indus seals, some jewellery, a few very early terracotta mother goddess figurines, and a terracotta elephant. But somehow, my eyes are glued to the Baloch bowl, from the Sohr Damb site, near present-day Khuzdar, dated from 3000 BCE.

The design is not a heart, as I first think, but the peepal leaf, so predominant in the Indus Valley civilisation, and associated much later with Buddhism. Yet — on the basis of five generations per century — the bowl was made 250 generations ago, over 120 generations before the pressure and violence of the Persian Achaemenids on the west and the Brahman Aryan priests on the north of the subcontinent provoked the resistance of the Buddha.  

It is now known that the well-known Baloch site of Mehrgarh, close to Sibi, was the precursor to the Indus Valley civilisation. The late Ahmad Hasan Dani, professor emeritus of archaeology at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, has said that the discoveries at Mehrgarh changed the whole idea of the Indus civilisation. At Mehrgarh “we have the whole sequence, right from the beginning, of settled village life”. It is also quite likely that the nomads and settler-farmers at Mehrgahr were Brahui, whose language has undeniable Dravidian links. But this peepal designed bowl shows that it was a united culture further south into Balochistan too.

The motif of the leaf appeared in subcontinental art over 5,000 years ago, but became a form of political resistance with the Persian invasion of Sindh in the sixth century BCE and with the northern Aryan priests at the same time

The peepal has the distinction of being the earliest tree depicted in art in the subcontinent, and it was always used extensively in medicine for healing. Its bark also produces tannin that is used for treating hides. The heart-shaped leaves of the peepal were used to heal wounds. The tree has a fruit, purple when ripe.

Millennia after the Indus Valley civilisation, the fruit was used to explain religious and spiritual matters in the Upanishads. The fruit is like the body at the meeting point with the natural world; the seed is the soul which is inside, hidden, and carries the possibility for new life.

Amongst the pre-Aryan people of the Indus Valley there was a tradition of wandering holy men. They were later quantified by Buddhism into two groups — the forest-dwelling Samanas (wandering holy men) and the physician Samanas, who were more connected with urban areas. The forest dwellers lived ascetically, but the physicians, surely making use of the peepal’s medicinal powers, were involved with people. They were healers but also welcomed amongst the people for their association with fertility rituals.

Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra (Patna) in the fourth century BCE, left fragments of writing that record his experiences in Bactria, Gandhara and Patna (though these writings were not collected together until the historian, Arrian, worked on them in the second century, 500 years later).

Megasthenes says that the forest-dwelling Samanas lived on wild food of leaves and fruits and wore clothes made of bark (it would seem of the peepal tree). The physician Samanas lived on food available in agricultural areas, such as rice and barley, and were thought to simply drape a cloth over their bodies.

But a third group, the Brahman priests — essentially the Aryan invaders — wore clothes made of deer skin. They led the bloody sacrificial processes that came in over centuries from the north and which became common practice at sites such as Harappa, but which were much rarer at the earlier more southerly sites of Mohenjodaro in Sindh in the Indus Valley.

At the point where Megasthenes describes them, the Samanas — physicians and forest-dwellers — were clearly rejecting both the Brahman practice of bloody sacrifice, animal and human, and the Persian Achaemenid monotheism of Zoroastrianism with its notion of heaven and hell, and good and bad deeds which accumulate karma.

The Samanas represent a wonderful glimpse of the old subcontinent, of its settled agricultural and contented way of life, its fecundity and its wealth. And they tell of the age-old story of how the invaders from the north and from the west brought barbarity, authoritarianism, and violence.

Buddhism and Jainism in their earliest form mark resistance by the old subcontinent. Non-violence and an internal retreat becomes a method of spiritual response for a population under siege.

The presence of Samanas is also a missing link between the ancient and the modern in the western subcontinent. Probably a sudden increase in invasion — from barren, rocky Persia and from the raw steppes of central Asia — required a drawing together of old values in the form of Buddha.

Buddhism and Jainism represent the assertion of the old subcontinent against invasion but also, more complicatedly, against the Brahman domination amongst the settled and older Aryan Rigveda settlers. The Patna Buddha represents the assertion of Kshatriyas power against the dominant Brahmans. To do this he draws on the Dravidian tradition of Samanas, the wandering holy men of the Indus Valley.

The message was: be calm, don’t have opinions. To outface the enemy conceal your feelings and try to deal with them using your intellect rather than your emotions. Have patience, endure suffering as a way to find enlightenment, don’t become bitter, believe in the fluidity of life and have faith that things can change. Violence is best challenged by non-violence and respect for all living things. The arrogance of the invader is offset by our spiritual awakening to simplicity and humility and to the beauty of the natural world, our world.

Whatever the truth about the person of Buddha, Siddhattha Gotama or Siddhartha Gautama as he became in Sanskrit, he was one of a long line of Samanas who were intrinsically Dravidian and had long been nurtured in the Indus Valley.

But he is a mere blip in the life of the peepal, which had existed for thousands of years before him and had always been an intrinsic and healing part of subcontinental life.

Catriona Luke is the author of the upcoming book on the history of the western subcontinent, Peerhi (generations), which will be published in the autumn.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 29th, 2016