The Archaeological Survey of India began the first excavation of a Harappan site in independent India at Ropar in 1953, under Y. D. Sharma. Nehru wanted Indus civilisation significance established on Indian soil after Partition took Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.
The Bara site, dug in 1955 about six kilometres south-west of Ropar, gave its name to a pottery culture: brown-red vessels, incised or painted in black.
Six cultural periods run from Harappan, 2000-1400 BC, through to medieval, 1200-1700 AD. Ropar is also the Harappan site where a dog was buried with a human in an oval pit, which is unusual in the civilisation.
The Bara site is under wild growth. The museum, built in 1992 and opened in 1998, runs without a curator or gallery assistant. The excavation reports remain unpublished seventy years on.
Ropar was chosen because Harappan material had been reported there and because the site sits where the Sutlej leaves the hills, a likely place for a northern outpost of the civilisation. The excavation was directed by Y D Sharma.
The finding that mattered was the sequence itself, six periods stacked in one mound without a long break, which established that this part of the plain had been occupied continuously from the Harappan period to the present.
Bara gave its name to a late Harappan cultural phase identified at sites across the Sutlej and Ghaggar plain. Most of those sites are under cultivation and a large number have been levelled since they were first recorded.