The pushback was immediate. Audrey Truschke, an American historian of South Asia, argued that the figure was more plausibly part of a broader Eurasian “lord of animals” visual tradition or adapted from Proto-Elamite models, rather than an early indigenous Shiva. “Indian history is amazing, wonderful and fantastic,” she wrote. “It’s well worth getting it right.” The exchange revived nearly a century-old academic debate in the polarised arena of digital nationalism, showing how a three-centimetre soapstone block can become a battleground over identity, prehistory, and ownership of South Asia’s beginnings.
Unearthed in the 1920s by Ernest Mackay under the Sir John Marshall-led Archaeological Survey of India, Seal No 420 dates to the Mature Harappan phase around 2500 BCE. It depicts a central figure seated on a low platform, surrounded by an elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, and water buffalo, with two stylised deer or ibex beneath the dais. The figure wears a fan-shaped headdress with massive horns and has lateral facial projections that have fuelled endless debate. Above it runs a line of Indus signs, part of a script that still resists decipherment.
Marshall’s 1931 interpretation transformed the seal into a civilisational argument. He identified the figure as a “proto-Shiva” or Rudra Pashupati, citing four visual markers: The suggestion of three faces, the headgear crowned with the horns of a bull (emblematic of Nandi), and the trishula, the cross-legged mahayogi posture, and the surrounding fauna. Over time, both the seal and Marshall’s interpretation entered textbooks, museums, documentaries, and popular discourse as evidence that the roots of Hinduism predated the Vedas.
Yet many scholars have long questioned that neat continuity. Indologists such as Doris Meth Srinivasan argue Marshall may have misread key details: The facial projections may not indicate multiple heads at all. Others see the figure as a buffalo deity, horned fertility figure, ritual specialist, or simply a version of the “master of animals” motif found across Bronze Age Eurasia. Similar compositions appear in Mesopotamian and Elamite art, prompting some scholars to place the seal within a shared visual tradition rather than an exclusively Indian religious lineage.
Without a bilingual key, there is no Rosetta Stone for the Indus script. Every claim and counterclaim, therefore, remains speculative. Archaeologists arguing for continuity point to the yogic posture, horned headgear, and animal imagery; sceptics cite the absence of horses, the pastoral world of the Rigveda, and the starkly different material cultures of Harappan cities and Vedic society. The Rigveda’s world is largely pastoral, horse-centred, and fire-ritual oriented — seemingly at odds with the urban planning, drainage systems, seals, and standardised weights of Harappan civilisation.
Still, the affinities are not entirely imagined. The seated posture resembles later meditative asanas; animal assemblages and tree motifs recur in South Asian iconography; terracotta female figurines invite comparisons with mother-goddess imagery. Excavated platforms have been likened to altars, while linga-like objects and stone cylinders found at some sites have been interpreted by scholars such as BB Lal as echoes of later ritual practices.
Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola offers a middle path, arguing that the Indus-Saraswati world contributed images, rituals, and perhaps words that were gradually reassembled during the second millennium BCE into what later became Hindu traditions. Not direct continuity, but layered cultural sedimentation.
The debate has also acquired a geopolitical dimension. For decades, Pakistan largely downplayed its pre-Islamic antiquity, preferring to date its historical origins to the 8th-century arrival of Arab conqueror Muhammad ibn al-Qasim. But recently, facing internal challenges of national cohesion and seeking a unique geographic anchor, the country’s cultural institutions have been increasingly highlighting Harappan archaeology as the foundation of a distinct “Indus identity,” separate from the broader civilisational narrative of the subcontinent.
Ultimately, the battle over Seal No 420 reveals how deeply archaeology in South Asia remains entangled with modern identity. Indians should confidently claim the Harappan past regardless of whether the figure represents a “proto-Shiva” or “proto-Elamite” entity. The Pashupati seal can be read in several overlapping ways, and those readings deserve rigorous debate, not blunt assertions.
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 "Pashupati seal from Mohenjo-daro (Photo: Ministry of Culture)")