The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c10.4

c10.4

For an intelligent understanding of the pattern of development of cultures in India, one should begin with the geographic factors. Before proceeding further on the analysis of these factors, it may be stated, that the writer does not believe in the "Sovereign influence of the environment". A rigid determinism cannot stand, as the *idea* intervenes between *man* and the *natural products*, and as Febvre put it, the natural regions are areas of possibilities for human groups.¹ Yet, Man cannot escape from his environment. The relation has been very well defined by Griffith Taylor. "....Nature in large measure determines the plan, it is, of course, obvious that the man is the agent whereby the civilization progresses. He is of great importance, and as his technology improves, he develops a region farther along the lines of the obvious plan.... In such exploitation, Nature determines the route of development, while Man determines the rate and the stage."² Thus the stage and the technological attainments of the society, at any time, determine the relative influence of the environment, at that period. The importance of this environmental limitation is very important for the tropical and semi-tropical areas, where the communities were technologically inferior to their contemporary higher civilizations, at any point of time. The luxuriant tropical forests were a hindrance, rather than an aid to large scale agriculture, and as Meggers has put it, ".... the level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies".³ To a large extent, environmental diversity and the way in which it has reacted on the thinking of the people plays a very major role in the cultural diversity of the Indo-Pakistan Sub-continent.