Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan c4.s17.7

c4.s17.7

Though India appears to be on the periphery of the culture spread in relation to Western Asia, and within India itself the present distribution of forests and the gradual removal of forest-cover from Sind, the Panjab, Saurashtra, Malwa, Uttar Pradesh (as even attested by literary evidence, for instance the burning of Khandavavana, the home of Nagas, for building the new capital of the Pandavas—Indraprastha—is vividly described in the *Mahabharata*) the concentration of primitive tribes in certain inaccessible forests and hills, and above all the increasing archaeological evidence—though all this points to the spread of civilization from west to east, *it still cannot be over-emphasized that our knowledge is relative, based on insufficient evidence (in some cases no evidence at all) and the fact that there is no unanimity among the archaeologists themselves whether the various Chalcolithic cultures which appear in the wake of the destruction or disappearance or gradual transformation of the Indus Civilization are purely indigenous or introduced (again) by movements and ideas from Western Asia.*