The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c9.3

c9.3

The following account of the development of material culture, or to speak in more precise terms, the Pre and Proto-historic foundations of India and Pakistan, as the new sub-title puts it, is the elaboration of a hypothesis, put forward in the first edition of this book. The inspiration for the title comes from the famous attempt at correlation of British geography, history and archaeology by Sir Cyril Fox in his *Personality of Britain*. It is true, the Indian sub-continent, with its vastness and its great environmental and cultural diversity, provides a more difficult task; and a contributory difficulty is the circumstance that serious archaeological research in India is still in its infancy. Yet, an attempt has been made with the same objective of correlating Indian geography, history and archaeology. At the same time, an effort has been made to define the pattern of development of cultures; and as Gordon put it in the review of the first edition, "a great deal of that personality does emerge in this essay". Finally, this essay is a reply to the dramatic query of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, in 1946, "Where is the *Personality of India*?"