The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c10.2

c10.2

History without Geography is like a picture without a frame. We are familiar with the slogan—unity in diversity of the Indian sub-continent. The recent studies in Indian archaeology again show certain very significant diversities in the different parts of the country and suggest a more fundamental relation between the physical and cultural regions. This diversity in the material culture of the first large scale agricultural communities seems to operate as a sub-cultural continuum throughout the Historical periods with certain modifications. The essence of human civilization is the progressive emancipation of Man from the clutches of Nature as a result of a persistent analysis of its processes and agencies and his final mastery and escape from its adversities. Hence the environment looses its strangle-hold on man with the gradual evolution of technology. Thus it is quite natural, that as we move back in time, the archaeological regions coincide with physical regions. If one extends this study to the Historical periods, we see the conflict between the centripetal forces released by horizontal spread of techniques and other cultural traits and the their reaction on the resident or local traits within the various primary foci representing the main physical regions. The latter may be described as the basis of the centrifugal forces. A study of the centripetal and centrifugal forces would thus throw a great light on the origin, development and function of the physical and cultural regions. The former particularly form an essential background for the study of the distribution pattern of individual or collective cultural traits. Depending on the nature of the traits, they may overlap in space. Of all the various indices which lend themselves for such an analysis, language is a very important manifestation of the social cohesion of a region, as it reacts on the other modes of thinking also. Hence, in the following pages, an attempt is made to correlate archaeological and physical regions with the cultural. Indian history, in one sense, is a struggle between the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. In the course of this study the writer tries to analyse forces operating behind the cultural diversity to understand our history and archaeology in better light.