The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c3: Footnote to the Second Edition
The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c3
- Language
- English
Footnote to the Second Edition
c3.1
It is never safe for a historian to indulge in prophecy. I prophesied in 1956 that "a dozen years hence" Dr. Subbarao might find an opportunity to re-write his pioneer book. And now, a mere two years later, the completed second edition lies upon my table. It is larger than its predecessor, as befits a subject in which Indian research has been outstandingly active; but it retains, as second editions sometimes fail to do, the clarity and over-all vision of the first draft. This has been no easy achievement. At the present time, Indian archaeology is passing through that difficult secondary stage which is liable to confront all scientific investigation. The first stage is one of limited knowledge and restricted inference (often wrong). Upon this follows the accumulation of scraps of evidence which tend to constitute an untidy and incoherent heap. Only later, when this heap has sufficiently grown and matured, does it begin to take an assured place in the landscape. In India we are, at the moment, in the untidy-heap stage, and it is greatly to the credit of my friend Dr. Subbarao that he has been able, however provisionally, to make so reasonable a shape of it.
c3.2
Much in this book is necessarily controversial. Some of it will be modified and supplemented in due course by the author himself. But that is surely one of its outstanding merits. It is a survey of the field through the eyes of one of its most active explorers in the year 1958; but it is also a stimulus, both to the author himself and to his colleagues, to resolve complexities and to fill up gaps. The Second Edition is, in effect, a preface to the Third Edition, which will, I have no doubt, reach us sooner than I should dare again to prophesy.
c3.3
The British Academy, MORTIMER WHEELER July 1958.