In the midst of a patchwork of small farms growing wheat, mustard and sugarcane, in turns, you will find one of the most talked-about excavation sites of the subcontinent in recent times. In 2018, archaeologists excavating at Sanauli, about 70 km from Delhi, in Western Uttar Pradesh, dug up a necropolis or cemetery with burials of what seemed to be a clan of warriors – sword-wielding men and women, who were buried with their weapons, wore helmets, ornate armour and even rode chariots.

Nothing like this had been found before, and what was really astonishing was the time period in which this clan lived. According to Carbon-14 dating, this necropolis went back to around 2200 BCE, making the warriors of Sanauli contemporaries of the Harappans, who were residing further west.

This was significant because it was unprecedented.

This discovery set the proverbial cat among the pigeons as it questioned many earlier points of view. It also raised a storm, with some sections equating this evidence of warriors with the period of the epic Mahabharata. That aside, what was significant was the fact that Sanauli opened up another chapter in the tantalising tale of the many settlements (or ‘cultures’, as described by archaeologists) that co-existed with the Harappan world across the Indian subcontinent.