Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8: Chapter I: The Discovery of Prehistoric India

Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c8

Language: English

c8.s1 Notes to Chapter I — 2 parts

Chapter I: The Discovery of Prehistoric India

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A mere man of letters, retired from the world, and allotting his whole time to philosophical or literary purposes, is a character unknown among European residents in India.
*Asiatick Researches*, 1 (1788).

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THE distinction between ‘history’ and ‘prehistory’ in India is a peculiarly elusive one: one can say, with Henri Berr, ‘India has had some episodes, but no history’, and indeed this unfair generalization does come home when one is attempting to work out any sort of coherent chronological framework in periods allegedly within the realm of recorded Indian history; but nevertheless there are certain phases of ancient Indian culture which lie distinctly beyond any possible form of literary record. Western Asiatic prehistory in general ends with the appearance of the arts of writing in Mesopotamia, the adjacent parts of Iran, and in Egypt in the centuries immediately after 3000 B.C. With the art of writing there comes the record of dynasties, king-lists and the like, which, however controversial in details, yet can be interpreted to form the outline of a fairly reliable chronology in terms of actual years before the Christian era.

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But in India, though writing was known and employed in the third and second millennia B.C., the peculiar script is still undeciphered, and the civilization which produced it is as prehistoric as Minoan Crete, also formally literate but with an unread script. This Indian script may have been used up to about 1500 B.C., but after this there is a complete gap in any known written documents on stone or clay or metal until we come to the inscriptions of Asoka set up about the middle of the third century B.C. For contemporary records of the intervening periods we have to depend on occasional contact with the Western world, where recorded history was an established discipline, or on the information to be extracted from the legendary or liturgical literature of India, orally transmitted for centuries.

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So prehistoric India may in its widest sense embrace all human communities in the sub-continent, from the Old Stone Age to somewhere near the Christian era, or in many regions well beyond this limit. The discovery and interpretation of Indian prehistory must therefore rely on the same methods as have been used in Europe to study the course of human development before the advent of written history (which as a rule begins with the incorporation of the region in question into the Roman Empire). These methods, the techniques of archaeology, are, in their distinctively scientific forms of the present day, of comparatively modern growth, though many aspects have been familiar to Englishmen since the eighteenth century.

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The introduction to India of European habits of thought, including the concept of history and of historical research, was brought about by men whose primary interests were not academic, though their education was sufficiently broadly based in the humanities for them to appreciate the value of such studies, and even to undertake them themselves in the intervals of busy professional lives in an exacting climate. The great contributions made to the knowledge of oriental linguistics and comparative philology by such figures as Sir William Jones or Carey of Serampore in the late eighteenth century were in themselves partly practical – the translation of the Bible, or an understanding of Hindu law were the immediate aims – though the purely academic issue was never forgotten. The foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal marks the establishment of antiquarian interests in India, as well as of the other aspects of research which, in the phrase of the time, would be classed as ‘philosophical’, and this antiquarianism would be prepared to concern itself with any period of India’s past, historic or prehistoric, that it encountered.

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But the fact that the earlier British settlements were in Bengal, a region still almost wholly unknown from the viewpoint of prehistoric antiquities, and where the natural luxuriance of vegetation renders any ruins invisible within a decade, gave little impetus to the study of field monuments of Indian antiquity. The great contribution of the Bengal School of antiquaries must always be their immense linguistic studies. And although field archaeology and the observation and record of monuments of antiquity, whether prehistoric earthworks or medieval abbeys, had become by the early nineteenth century a recognized English pastime among the educated squirearchy, India was not England. The Western Ghats were something very different from the mild pastoral slopes of Wiltshire: travel was difficult and dangerous; the country unmapped; distances were immense. It is therefore not surprising that archaeological field-work had to wait for altered circumstances, even were the men interested in such pursuits to be found in the services of the Company or the army.

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Curiously enough, the discovery of the great prehistoric civilization of north-western India, with which this book largely deals, was the accidental result of Victorian enterprise in that most characteristic engineering activity of the age, railway construction. By accident, too, we know the circumstances in some detail, and they are worth recounting. In 1856 two brothers, John and William Brunton, were engaged in laying out and building the East Indian Railway from Karachi to Lahore – John was in charge of the southern section, his brother of that in the Punjab, from Multan northwards. John, in retirement, wrote a very delightful book of memoirs for his grandchildren, covering the years 1812 to 1899, and in this he tells how he had heard of a ruined ancient city, Brahminabad, not very far from the line of the railway he was building – ‘I had been much exercised in my mind’, he writes, ‘how we were to get ballast for the line of the Railway. If all I heard were true, this ruined city, built of bricks, would form a grand quarry for ballast.’ Brahminabad (a medieval city) was therefore effectually plundered by this uncompromising English engineer, and the line laid.

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Now the Multan-Lahore line ran not far from another ancient city, by then a shapeless heap of huge, dusty mounds, part of which had been robbed of bricks to build the modern village of Harappā on the site. John must have told William of his brilliant scheme for obtaining ballast for the track: a prehistoric capital of the Punjab, Harappā, was plundered as ruthlessly as Brahminabad had been, and today the trains rumble over a hundred miles of line laid on a secure foundation of third-millennium brick-bats. During the brick-robbing antiquities of various kinds were found, and some of the more curious kept by the workmen and the engineers.

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The Brunton connexion with archaeology does not, however, end here. At Karachi, John Brunton was captain of the Corps of Volunteers, and, himself an excellent shot, he had trained a most efficient rifle team, which competed with the regular Line Regiments stationed there. The general commanding ‘was much annoyed at the repeated victories of the Volunteer Rifle teams’: his name was Cunningham, and when he retired from active service in 1861 he was appointed Director-General of an Archaeological Survey of Northern India. General Cunningham is one of the greatest figures of nineteenth-century Indian archaeology, and he had visited Harappā in 1856, when the Brunton depredation was in progress. He obtained various antiquities from the workmen, including engraved steatite seals of a type which we now know to be characteristic of the prehistoric Indus and Punjab civilization, with the symbols of an unknown script upon them, and the figure of a bull. Cunningham realized that these seals were something quite outside the range of Indian antiquities known to him: he felt they were extremely ancient and important. It was not until seventy years later that their true significance was recognized and the civilization now named from the site of Harappā was identified and defined.

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Three years after Cunningham’s visit to Harappā, in 1859, Darwin’s *Origin of Species* was published, and in the same year Sir John Evans, with Falconer and Prestwich the geologists, made the famous visit to Abbeville where they were convinced of the geological antiquity of man-made flint implements associated with extinct species of mammals. In 1863 Lyell published his *Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man*: in Europe at least Palaeolithic Man was being recognized. But in this same year the geologist Bruce Foote found the first Indian palaeolithic implement near Madras, and the first step in the conception of the essential unity of the earlier Stone Age cultures throughout the Old World had been taken. Further discoveries were soon to be made, and recognized for what they were within the limits of the geological and archaeological knowledge of the day. Today we can with some show of probability refer these earliest stone tools from India to a date somewhere around four hundred thousand years ago.

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After these initial recognitions of prehistoric India – Foote in the south establishing the existence of the Old Stone Age, Cunningham in the north showing the probable presence of ancient civilizations outside the range of recorded history – nineteenth-century antiquarian investigation in India turned more to the elucidation of the very complex problems of the allegedly historic eras. Although by the beginning of the present century communications within India had become very good and the political situation peaceful, archaeological field-work declined rather than increased, and men of the calibre and range of interests of Sir William Jones or General Cunningham were not to be found among the British in India. It was as if the archaeological pursuits of the pioneers of a century or more before had become as outmoded and reprehensible as an Englishman smoking a hookah or keeping a native mistress. Archaeological activity was canalized into an inadequately-financed State department, in which workers were comparatively few and their technique was out of touch with European developments.

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Though the Archaeological Survey of India did, within its limited powers, achieve a considerable body of research in Indian antiquities in the first quarter-century of its life, yet it was not until the nineteen-twenties that attention was directed to those prehistoric sites whose existence had been half-suspected by Cunningham on the Harappā evidence. It is to the credit of an Indian officer of the Survey, the late Mr R. D. Banerji, that Harappā’s great twin city, Mohenjo-daro in Sind, was recognized in 1922 and excavations started in that year. Work at Harappā had begun two years earlier under the direction of Daya Ram Sahni, the work at the two sites being co-ordinated by the then Director-General of Archaeology in India, Sir John Marshall.

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The Mohenjo-daro and Harappā excavations continued, with interruptions, for several seasons — at the Sind site from 1922 to 1931, and on the more northern site in the Punjab from 1920 to 1921 and again from 1933 to 1934. Concurrently with this large-scale excavation work, that great explorer of Western Asia, the late Sir Aurel Stein, undertook to survey the little-known areas of Baluchistan on the extreme western edge of British India and to search for prehistoric sites: his two journeys, in North Baluchistan in 1926-27 and in South Baluchistan in 1927-28, brought to light a vast amount of material of first-rate importance for linking the prehistory of north-western India with the other areas of ancient civilization in Iran and Mesopotamia.

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Stein’s campaigns were essentially those of reconnaissance: he made few excavations beyond trenching sites here and there, and collected mainly surface indications of ancient habitation in the form of the all-important potsherds which contribute so much to the archaeologist’s knowledge of the ancient Orient. But Hargreaves partially excavated a cemetery and a settlement in Baluchistan in 1925, and produced important evidence which amplified Stein’s own remarkable results.

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Archaeological field-work, however, was not wanting in India itself, and the brilliant young Indian archaeologist N. G. Majumdar carried out a comprehensive survey of Sind and the Indus plain between 1927 and 1931, defining the extent of the minor prehistoric settlements within the area dominated by the cities of Harappā and Mohenjo-daro, and making certain very important excavations. He was undertaking fresh field-work in 1938 when he was killed by bandits in the Kirthar Hills.

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One other major excavation was undertaken in a north-west Indian prehistoric site – that of the town of Chanhu-daro in Sind, which was dug by the late Ernest Mackay, who had been in charge of the later excavations at Mohenjo-daro in 1935–36. Here extremely important evidence was available for the final phases of the Harappā Civilization, as it was now beginning to be called.

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Such, then, was the state of knowledge of prehistoric north-west India by the late 1930’s. There were extensive excavations at two major cities and one smaller town in the Punjab and Sind, trial trenches dug in several sites in Sind and Baluchistan, and a fair idea of the geographical extent of the various prehistoric cultures as the result of Majumdar’s and Stein’s explorations. Stein made further discoveries in Rajputana and in Las Bela state in the early years of the 1939–45 war, again adding to our knowledge of the extent of the various types of regional cultures.

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For the achievements of this field-work, under arduous conditions and in difficult terrain, one can have nothing but praise, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of much of the excavation which should provide us with the essential background for our study. Criticism is here inevitable, and also necessary if the Indian material is to be evaluated correctly. Of the broad facts of town-planning, streets, houses, drains, and so forth at Mohenjo-daro we have abundant evidence, even if its detail is sketchy, and the recognition of the great urban civilization of the Indus Valley would hardly have been possible without the wholesale methods of exploration which were in fact employed. But the reports on Harappā, Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro published in eight impressive quarto volumes between 1931 and 1943 cannot, in all fairness, be said to approach the archaeological standards set in European archaeology by the 1890's, and in common employment since the 1920's.

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That there is no inherent impossibility in applying these standards and methods to Indian excavations has been happily, but all too briefly, shown by the recent work carried out in India by an archaeologist trained in, and an outstanding exponent of, the highest standards in European techniques. Professor R. E. Mortimer Wheeler's excavations on Indian sites between 1945 and 1948 have cut ruthlessly across the old traditions whereby stratification was ignored and ‘levels’ were fixed by measurement from a datum. By this ‘incredible system’, in Wheeler's words, ‘the so-called “stratification” of the Indus Valley civilization is dominated, not by local observation, but at long range by the sea-level at Karachi. ... It is a survival of an obsolete device evolved in the alluvial plains of the great river-valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia as a rough substitute for exact observation in ill-controlled “mass-excavations”. It has no place whatsoever in the technique of modern field-archaeology.’ The 1946 excavations of the hitherto unrecognized defences of the citadel of Harappā have given a new significance to the city, and have established the first sure facts in the stratigraphy of the site.

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An example of what can be done has at least been set for Pakistan and India, and it is hoped that the tradition may be carried on by future workers who have received some training in the methods new to India, if familiar to us in England. Only by the frequent interchange of persons and ideas in European and Oriental archaeology can these standards be preserved and kept up to date. It is largely the British who have been to blame in the past for inadequate financial support of the Archaeological Survey of India, and for the failure to keep it abreast of developments in excavation technique.

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Side by side with the collection of material in India and Baluchistan, new work was being carried out in other countries of Western Asia. Iran in particular was yielding up the secrets of her prehistory to the excavations of the French and Americans in the 1930's, and the indefatigable Sir Aurel Stein made a noteworthy series of explorations from Fars to Lake Urmia which filled in the geographical background for the distribution of the cultures found in stratified contexts in the excavations. Already in 1933 Professor Gordon Childe had made a penetrating synthesis of the North-west Indian material in its relation to the other cultures of the most ancient East; ten years later the accidents of war brought me to New Delhi and enabled me to start on a revision of Childe's basic work in the light of the accumulated new knowledge of the intervening decade, and this has been continued since the war by Dr Donald McCown of the Oriental Institute of Chicago.

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Investigation of the Indian Stone Age was neglected, after the pioneer work of Bruce Foote, until the 1930's, when Mr Miles Burkitt turned to the interpretation of certain South Indian material at much the same time as other workers were investigating ancient stone industries and geological phenomena in the north-west. This culminated in a joint expedition by the Universities of Yale and Cambridge in 1935, led by de Terra and Patterson, and their work has been supplemented by that of Movius and Krishnaswami. The studies of these investigators have made us acquainted with an extremely important series of Old Stone Age human industries associated with geological deposits which, in the river-terraces of the Himalayan region at all events, seem to offer promising correlations with the known sequence in Northern Europe.

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But there are still enormous gaps in our knowledge of Indian prehistory, and that just mentioned between the Old Stone Age and the earliest settlements in Baluchistan is outstanding in immensity and obscurity. Hardly less obscure are the happenings after the collapse of the Harappā Civilization in the middle of the second millennium B.C. – a period traditionally associated with the arrival from the west of the Indo-European-speaking tribes who called themselves the Aryans, but scarcely attested by direct archaeological evidence. Nevertheless the time is ripe for a stocktaking and an attempt to assess our present knowledge of prehistoric India before new work and up-to-date techniques once again advance the horizon of our knowledge.

Notes to Chapter I

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For a general account of archaeological work in India, see *Revealing India's Past* (ed. J. Cumming, 1939); earlier work on the Palaeolithic period is commented on by Krishnaswami in *Ancient India*, no. 3 (1947), 13. *John Brunton's Book* was edited by Professor J. H. Clapham and published in 1939. In addition to the special reports on excavations referred to later in this book, the Archaeological Survey of India has published a long series of *Memoirs* and *Annual Reports*. The latter series is now in abeyance, and a publication, *Ancient India*, was started in 1946, four parts of which have appeared. Since the formation of the Dominions of India and of Pakistan there has been no announcement on future archaeological publications.

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Detailed criticism of the standard of the previous excavations in India is to be found in *Ancient India*, no. 3 (1947), 143–149, by Professor R. E. M. Wheeler, then Director-General of Archaeology in India, with a comment on Chanhu-daro by myself.