Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c10.20

c10.20

And in greater or lesser degree this is the recurrent implication of Indian prehistory. It may be that the industries of the Old Stone Age of the subcontinent should be approached on these lines, with Africa directly or indirectly as a major though not exclusive source. More certainly, the derivation of the Indus Civilization from Mesopotamia may be understood in this fashion; and the Gangetic Bronze or Copper Age, in which the individuality of the northern plains first asserted itself, demonstrates the extent to which borrowed ideas and materials could be transmuted by the genius of a borrower supported by a prolific environment and drawn by imaginative ambition. So too in the succeeding Iron Age we observe this recipient India of the plains adopting the new metal with an avidity that amounted, nevertheless, to a technical rather than a social revolution; and then spreading it southwards to the more isolated and archaic populations of the central plateau, and southwards again—if I am right, as a parcel of Mauryan encroachment—into the Peninsula. And behind this interplay of material and geographical opportunity lies the Mind of India which, for all the recklessness inherent in so immense a generalization, may be said to show a surprising uniformity of response amidst an infinite diversity of background. For on the one hand Indian prehistory—it is not my function to extend this assertion into history—displays, like the Indian landscape, wide expanses of uniformity: a monotonous and interminable Palaeolithic, a diffuse Microlithic, centuries of Indus Civilization, centuries of Ganges Civilization, leagues of Megaliths. But on the other hand, again like the Indian landscape, this monotony is broken by sudden changes and heights; ever and anon India leaps from its sleep and grasps new ideas, new opportunity, with quick and prehensile intelligence. Let me say again that a prehistorian is writing.