Which one of the following Harappan sites has yielded evidence of a wash basin in the toilet of a house?

Correct — A, Banawali. Banawali, in Fatehabad district of Haryana on the old Sarasvati course, was dug by R. S. Bisht for the Archaeological Survey between 1974 and 1977. One large multi-roomed house there — usually described as a merchant's — had a toilet in which a wide pottery jar was fixed at a height in the corner and used as a wash basin, with the waste water led by a brick channel to a sullage jar standing on the street outside. That detail is the site's signature, and it is all the more striking because Banawali had no Mohenjo-daro style network of covered public drains; refuse went instead into soakage jars sunk at fixed points along the lanes.

• (b)Rakhigarhi — Rakhigarhi in Hisar district is the largest Harappan site in India and has yielded bathing areas with soak jars, brick-lined drains and the cemetery whose ancient DNA was published in 2019. A wash basin inside a toilet is not among the finds recorded there.
• (c)Dholavira — Dholavira on Khadir island is the water-management site — rock-cut reservoirs, check dams, a stepwell — together with the ten-sign signboard and the three-part town plan with its stadium. Its distinction is the storage and channelling of water at settlement scale, not a fitting inside one house.
• (d)Lothal — Lothal is remembered for the brick basin identified as a dockyard, the bead factory and the warehouse. Its houses did have bathrooms connected to drains, which makes it the most tempting wrong answer, but the wash-basin-in-the-toilet find belongs to Banawali.

Harappan sanitation is usually taught as a single system — bathing platform, house drain, street drain, soak pit — but the arrangements actually differ site by site. Mohenjo-daro has the covered brick street drains; Banawali, on a smaller scale, relied on jars sunk in the street to receive household waste. Reading these differences is what separates a real understanding of the civilisation from a memorised list of firsts.

Each of the four sites carries one label in most candidates' memory: Dholavira means water, Lothal means dockyard, Rakhigarhi means size. Banawali is the one whose label is fuzziest, and examiners exploit that by attaching the unfamiliar find to the unfamiliar site. Banawali's other well-known finds run the same way — a terracotta model plough, barley grains, and a fortified town laid out with radial streets on the older Sarasvati bank.

• Banawali lies in Fatehabad district, Haryana, and was excavated by R. S. Bisht for the ASI between 1974 and 1977.
• A house there had a toilet with a pottery jar set high in a corner as a wash basin, drained by a brick channel to a sullage jar on the street.
• Banawali lacked a covered public drainage network; soakage jars at fixed points on the streets took household waste.
• A terracotta model of a plough is among the best-known finds from Banawali.
• Dholavira's distinctions are its reservoirs, its ten-sign signboard and its three-part town plan; Lothal's is the brick dockyard basin.

• Attaching every sanitation fact to Mohenjo-daro because of the Great Bath.
• Reading Banawali as a minor site because it appears less often on lists.
• Assuming all Harappan towns shared one drainage design.

A single-find-to-site item, and the find chosen is deliberately one that no summary list carries.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A terracotta model of a plough was recovered from which Harappan site in Haryana?

  • (a)Rakhigarhi
  • (b)Banawali
  • (c)Bhirrana
  • (d)Mitathal

  Answer(b) Banawali — the toy plough is one of the site's best-known finds.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The ten-sign inscription often called the 'signboard' was found at

  • (a)Lothal
  • (b)Kalibangan
  • (c)Dholavira
  • (d)Surkotada

  Answer(c) Dholavira — the large signs were set into a wooden board over a gateway of the citadel.