The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c2: Foreword
The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c2
- Language
- English
Foreword
c2.1
This essay by my friend Subbarao is a brave and constructive attempt to set prehistoric and protohistoric India upon the map. A dozen years ago it could not have been written : a dozen years hence it will have to be re-written, preferably by Dr. Subbarao himself. Meanwhile it sets down and integrates in stimulating fashion an imposing body of evidence of which essential parts are due to the skilful industry of a notable group of young Indian archaeologists now working co-operatively in government or university service. To-day, no part of the world is better served in archaeological matters than is the Republic of India.
c2.2
In one respect only can the sincerest friend of India find cause for cavil, and let that one criticism be both uttered frankly and received with understanding. It is this : that at the present moment, publication is falling behind field-research. It would be easy to name able and productive excavations of which detailed reports are ominously overdue. The high standard set by the excavation-reports which have been published increases our regret for those which have not. It is most earnestly to be hoped that the next year or two will see an acceleration in this matter, always with the thought that unpublished excavation amounts to the destruction of evidence.
c2.3
Of the many fascinating problems upon which Dr. Subbarao touches in the following pages, two are (to me) outstanding. The first is : What happened after the end of the Indus civilization? What bearing did that great civilization has in fact upon the later life of the subcontinent? Here Shri A. Ghosh, Shri B. B. Lal and others have begun to point the way. When I was working in India there was still a gap of more than a thousand years between the Indus civilization (before 1,500 B.C.) and the Gangetic cities of the protohistoric age. To-day that gap has been halved but not securely closed. It may be that the active co-operation of Pakistan is required to close it finally; nevertheless, without that co-operation the advance in knowledge has been dramatically successful. May it continue.
c2.4
The other problem is that of the astonishing and seemingly sudden emergence of rich iron-working cultures in peninsular India during the latter half of the first millennium B.C. Of the associated black-and-red pottery, Dr. Subbarao has interesting things to say, but the iron-industry itself remains an unsolved mystery. How did it arise? If it was imported, whence and when? These are questions which only further digging can elucidate, both inside India and, perhaps, along those Arabian shores of which at present so little is known. The fact cannot be over-stressed that, in many aspects, the Indian Ocean constitutes a unitary culture-pool; with India, Arabia and Africa as its continuous margin. This was so in ages past; it remains so to-day.
c2.5
These are merely two of many problems of which Dr. Subbarao and his colleagues are acutely aware. And not least, I look forward, as they do, to the time when the necessary initial vertical digging—the search for a cultural time-table—can be supplemented increasingly by horizontal digging—by the systematic revelation of the ancient towns and villages of India and a clear demonstration of the sort of life that was lived in them. Archaeology can only justify itself fully when it is digging up *humanity* in the broadest sense of the term. Potsherds and the like are merely the alphabet of the archaeologist. What ultimately matters is the story that is made from them. In these pages, Dr. Subbarao has written a provisional introduction to that story, and I am delighted to have here the opportunity of expressing my appreciation and my blessing, both to him and to those many other Indian archaeologists whom I am proud to regard as my friends.
c2.6
The British Academy, London, MORTIMER WHEELER May, 1956.