Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9: Chapter VIII. South Indian Megaliths
Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9
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Chapter VIII. South Indian Megaliths
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B Y WAY OF PREFACE to this chapter, it may be recalled that the term 'megalith' is derived from the Greek words *megas*=large and *lithos*=stone. It is applied primarily to structures of a rudimentary character built wholly or partly of large rough stones, but includes comparable structures of a more sophisticated kind in which the stones may be crudely or even, as at Stonehenge, elaborately dressed. A secondary condition is that the monument fulfilled a funerary or commemorative or religious function.
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The megaliths of India are extensive and peculiar. They are in fact the jungle of a problem, and a little preliminary clearing may be helpful, though the procedure is not without risk. In the present context it would appear to be justifiable to set aside at once the megaliths of that region of north-eastern India, extending from Assam to Bastar on the northern flank of the lower Godāvari, where megalithic 'cultures' (if so they may be called) are a more or less living tradition of the aborigines. To exclude these living or moribund cultures, which have been extensively studied,a may seem a wilful rejection of potentially useful comparative evidence; but they do in fact differ in general type and concept from most of the south Indian material, and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf's observation that they belong essentially to south-eastern Asia—Indonesia, Oceania, the Philippines, Formosa—matches the evidence, whatever be the truth of his plausible guess that they were introduced into north-eastern India by Austroasiatic immigrants (see also p. 89). The Bastar Gonds and the Khāsis and Nāgas of Assam alike erect single standing stones (menhirs) or alignments of stones in honour of the dead, who are thereby encouraged to help their living kinsmen. In Assam, as well as in Indonesia and Oceania, a forked wooden post of Y-shape is an alternative to the menhir, and both posts and menhirs are associated with ox-sacrifice. An identical custom occurs in Bastar; and the Koyas and Raj Gonds of Hyderabad erect small forked posts carrying the tails of sacrificial cows on graves or the site of memorial feasts. In all these regions it is the widespread belief that the soul or 'virtue' of the dead man is attached to the stone or post and benefits his survivors and the village-crops. Alternatively, the Bondos and Gadabas of Orissa erect a dolmen (table-like cist above ground), often of small size, as the seat of the dead; and this seat may be associated with a stone circle. Generally, the setting-up of menhirs, dolmens and stone-circles links the Orissa tribes both with the Khāsis and Nāgas of Assam and with the Gonds of Bastar. The Khāsis indeed (though not the Nāgas) approach more nearly to the dominant megalithic custom of peninsular India in that they collect periodically the bones of clan-members and deposit them in 'a free-standing cist, as big as a small house, built of enormous single slabs'.84 So too do the Mundas of Choṭā Nāgpur who, in addition to setting up memorial-stones of north-eastern type, bury excarnated bones of members of a family in dolmen-like graves consisting of a cover-slab supported by smaller stones. Here it may not be irrelevant that the Munda languages have been regarded as a mixture of elements from continental India on the one hand and further India on the other. Choṭā Nāgpur is geographically well situated for such an interchange: it remains to discover any equivalent cultural overlap which might explain the Khāsi cists.
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The problem, then, of interrelationship (or its absence) between megalithic areas and customs is not an easy one. On the whole, however, in spite of occasional and partial analogies, the differences between the megaliths of the tribal areas and the ancient tombs of the Deccan and peninsular India are far more impressive than their resemblances. As von Fürer-Haimendorf observes, ‘I have seen the monuments of the Nāgas and Khāsis, of Gadabas, Bondos and Gonds, and I have seen many of the prehistoric dolmens and cromlechs of Hyderabad, but was never struck by any close resemblance. This alone would, of course, not prove the absence of a genetic connection. More important are the differences in function and meaning of the monuments. The megaliths of the tribal folks of today are, with comparatively few exceptions, memorials unconnected with graves or burning-grounds. Those of prehistoric times are in the majority graves or closely associated with graves.¹⁴ He adds that the distinctive 'port-hole' opening which will be found to characterize many of the megalithic cists of southern India 'does not occur among any of the tribes of middle India who bury their dead in megalithic graves, such as the Mundas and Hos'. The time-factor is another consideration to which much further attention is needed. The south Indian megaliths seem to have come to an end in the 1st century A.D.; those of middle India and the north-east represent a living tradition of entirely unknown antiquity. If we add to these various diversities and difficulties the almost complete geographical exclusiveness of the two great groups, their essential separateness is at present a fair premise.
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¹⁴ [^cont]:
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Fig. 32 Distribution of megalithic cists with ‘port-holes’
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The main bulk of the south Indian megaliths lies to the south of latitude 18, which runs a little north of Hyderabad (Deccan); in other words, it begins south of the Godāvari system, and is characteristic of peninsular India. Much of that region is marked by outcrops of granite or gneiss, of which a large proportion of the megaliths are constructed; fires lit upon the surface of the rock buckle it along lines of cleavage, and iron wedges do the rest—a practice in vogue today as in ancient times. Along the fringes of the granite are derivative deposits of laterite (p. 47), which cuts like cheese when fresh but hardens on exposure. It is in the nature of things that the granite monuments are rough-hewn, if hewn at all, and that the laterite monuments are relatively trim and shapely.
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In 1944 a systematic survey of the south Indian megaliths was begun under the leadership of V. D. Krishnaswami and, although not yet complete, has, with subsequent excavation, produced a reasonably comprehensive catalogue of types.¹⁵ They are as follows.
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¹⁵ [^cont]:
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Fig. 32
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1. *Dolmenoid cists*, a phrase here limited to cists built of rough granite blocks, now above ground, within a circle of similar blocks which enclose an area from 20 to 140 feet in diameter. The uprights, four or more in number, are (or were) crowned by a massive single or double capstone, which may be either covered by a low cairn, or flush with a low cairn, or emergent from the traces of a denuded cairn. The eastern upright is occasionally pierced with a 'port-hole', and the eastern end may be approached by a short blocked passage. In the Chingleput (Madras) region, where these cists are best known, they are liable to include one or more terracotta legged sarcophagi (sometimes as many as five) with pots and iron objects. A sarcophagus 2 1/2 feet long in the Madras Museum from Sankavaram in Cuddapah district schematically resembles a ram; it contained an iron spearhead, the fragment of an iron knife, and huddled fragments of human bones, and was surrounded by pots of characteristic 'megalith' type. Another sarcophagus, from Pallavaram in Chingleput district, resembles an elephant; but such theriomorphs are exceptional.
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It may here be observed that two of the rock-cut caves in Kerala (see below) produced small legged sarcophagi, each about two feet long; and that round-ended cylindrical sarcophagi, without megaliths, have been found at Maski in Raichūr district, Hyderabad. But they are by no means a universal feature of the south Indian megaliths and do not occur, for instance, in the Pudokkoṭṭai cists or at Brahmagiri.
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It may be added that in the gneissic uplands of the Kerala region, south-western India, a single stone circle may enclose more than one dolmen; in one instance, as many as nineteen.
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2. *Slabbed cists* of granite or laterite, also within a stone circle, are oblong and about six feet in length and height. The eastern upright is normally pierced with a 'port-hole' which may be either circular with a diameter of four to twenty inches, or trapezoidal, or semicircular and cut into the upper edge of the slab immediately below the capstone; the hole was evidently designed for the insertion of bones and offerings. Excavated examples at Brahmagiri, northern Mysore, showed that the cists were sunk to half their height below the surface and were surrounded at the old ground-level by dry-stone walling. Their port-holes were closed by an additional external slab and were approached from the outside by a lined passage which had been blocked when the tomb was sealed. In the cists were pots and iron objects with the fragmentary skeletons of a number of individuals. Comparable cists at Suttukeni, near Pondicherry, had a simpler surround and minute, non-functional port-holes; typologically they may be thought to be later than the Brahmagiri series. In Pudukkottai, south of Madras, laterite cists with port-holes are approached through a slabbed ante-chamber as large as the main cist, and are sometimes called ‘transepted cists’. Generally, it may be affirmed that a cist was finally covered up to or even above the capstone by a barrow or cairn, circular on plan and generally outlined by stone blocks or slabs. According to local custom or the nature of the subsoil, the cist may be built on the natural surface, or partially or completely sunk below the natural surface. Thus in the Hyderabad region they are often deeply buried; the Brahmagiri cists were half-buried; whilst in a large megalith cemetery in the jungle near Savandurg, twenty-two miles west-south-west of Bangalore, there are free-standing port-holed ‘dolmens’ intermingled with identical port-holed cists at all stages of submersion below the natural surface down to capstone level.
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3. Shallow-pit burials, without a cist, are sometimes found within stone circles, which may then be less than twelve feet in diameter. The pit may contain one or more pots or a terracotta legged sarcophagus. A variant type, best illustrated by an excavated example at Porkalam in Cochin,¹ may be restricted to the very individual megalithic complex below the ghats of Kerala in south-west India. Here the pit, in the centre of a sixteen-foot circle of roughly dressed laterite blocks, was itself covered by a granite slab. The pit was 4½ feet deep and contained a large urn enclosing many smaller ones, three iron objects, and a few crushed bones. At Kunnattur, in the Chingleput district, a similarly sealed pit within a circle contained a terracotta sarcophagus, Black-and-red pottery, two iron bracelets, and scraps of bone.88
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4. Deep-pit burials, within a stone circle but without a cist, and as much as eight feet in depth, were found at Brahmagiri, where there may have been something like a dozen of them amongst three hundred megalithic cists. On the floor of each of the pits, amongst many pots with iron implements and a few human bones, were four flat slabs, placed as though to support a table or bier. I have suggested that these deep pit-circles may have been macerating pits where the [obscured text] were laid out for the process of excarnation which certainly preceded burial in the neighbouring cists; but I do not press the hypothesis. Comparable pit-circles, but without the four floor-slabs, have been found at Maski in the Deccan.89
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5. Umbrella-stones or hat-stones (topi-kal or kudai-kal) are alternative names given to a type of monument which is peculiar to Kerala and in particular to Cochin. It consists of a circular laterite capstone in the form of a low and solid dome resting on four inwardly leaning and tapering stones about four feet high, standing so that their base-lines constitute a square with a diagonal approaching the diameter of the capstone. These monuments have not been explored methodically but are known to cover pit-burials. Their similarity to umbrellas, which are both honorific and, in the monsoon-ridden climate of the Kerala coastland, particularly utile, may not be accidental.
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6. Hood-stones are dome-shaped laterite blocks, similar to the cap of the umbrella-stones but resting on the surface of the ground. They too belong to Cochin and may be supposed to cover pit-burials like that under the untrimmed granite slab described under 3 above.
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7. *Multiple hood-stones*, also in Cochin, are intermediate between 5 and 6 in that they consist of from five to twelve inwardly-leaning uprights of dressed laterite, some three feet in height. Whether a capstone in fact completed the monument is not known. The structure presumably enclosed a burial-pit.
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8. *Menhirs* or standing-stones occur in the Deccan and Kerala but are otherwise not common in south India. At Anapāra, near Trichur in Cochin, a granite monolith twelve feet high is thought locally to mark a battlefield, and another at Kuttūr is dreaded by the local people as the haunt of ghosts; but the name *nadu-kal* given to menhirs in the Tamil Shangam literature (poetic anthologies) of the early centuries A.D. indicates a commemorative function, which in a general sense recalls that of some of the standing-stones of north-eastern India (p. 150). At Maski, in the Raichur district of the Deccan ‘a number of roughly aligned menhirs’ occur in close vicinity to burial-circles,⁹⁰ but excavation showed no burials actually beside them. On the other hand, at Devikulam in Travancore a burial-urn containing four pots and an iron axe was found beneath a menhir, and similar discoveries are affirmed elsewhere in that region. A single alignment of menhirs ranging up to 12½ feet high at Komalaparathela in Kerala is the only monument of the kind known to me south of the Hyderabad area; but in that area, particularly in the districts of Raichūr, Gulbarga and Mahbūbnagar, apart from the possible example at Maski, is a large number of serried groups of granite or, rarely, sandstone menhirs from three to twenty-five feet in height and arranged either in parallel lines or as a quincunx.⁹¹ The over-all orientation is roughly to the cardinal points. More than half of these alignments adjoin burial-circles, as at Maski, and the indications are that they and the circles are contemporary; but their function is unknown and guesswork scarcely profitable. They are not similar in lay-out to the alignments of north-eastern India, and are not obviously derived from there.
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To these categories, of which 1 and 2 are the most widespread, should be added an extensive series of *burial-caves*²² which have been cut into the laterite of Kerala, since their contents, so far as known, are similar to those of the megaliths. The laterite lies on the foot-hills between the alluvial coast and the granite ghats. The caves have been made first by scooping out a square stepped pit in the rock, approached by rock-cut steps; then by cutting one or more doorways in one or more sides of the pit, each doorway about 1½ feet high and just large enough to admit the workman; and finally by opening up beyond the doorways a dome-shaped (rarely flat-roofed) cave or caves, normally circular but sometimes rectangular on plan and sometimes with a central rock-cut pillar of rectangular section rising to the roof. Often there are rock-cut benches along the sides, and occasionally there is a central opening in the dome of the cave.
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²² [Note text not visible on this page]
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Much nonsense has been written about these caves, but the suggestion that, as tombs, they may represent the huts, or even the umbrellas, of the living is not necessarily extravagant. What their relationship may be to the cists with circular or rectangular port-hole is less certain. It has more than once been postulated in Europe that megalithic tombs are in some measure simulated caves; and the question may be asked whether the Kerala caves with their small but obviously functional entrances are parental to the port-holed cists of south India. After all, cave-cutting was a widespread Indian accomplishment, whether amongst the Buddhists, the Jainas, or the Hindus. Nevertheless, it would seem more likely that the reverse relationship was the case. The Buddhists, Jainas and Hindus imitated free-standing structures in cutting their cave-temples and monasteries, and it would appear more likely than not that the Kērala caves, with their limited distribution, followed a parallel course, and were in fact quarried adaptations of the free-standing cists in the viable laterite of the Kerala lowlands.
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So much for the structural types of megalithic or allied monuments in south India. A passing mention may here be made of the few megaliths recorded, more or less inadequately, from the north and north-west.
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In the neighbourhood of Karāchi more than one observer a century or so ago recorded the existence of large stone cists similar to those of south India save for the absence of the port-hole.²³ In particular, they were noted on the hills near Waghodur, twenty miles east of Karāchi, and on the road to Shāh Billāwal in Baluchistan. Following these hints, I have indeed found the remains of a rough sandstone cist 5½ feet long, with the major axes east-south-east, in the sand 3½ miles north-east of the village of Murad Memon, about twenty miles east-north-east of Karāchi; it is said to have been demolished since 1950. The name 'Kaffir's grave' applied to it by the villagers safely indicates a pre-medieval antiquity. Other 'Kaffir's graves' of smaller size, 3-3½ feet in length, can also be seen in the sand about half a mile north-west of the nineteenth milestone on the Karāchi-Kotri highroad. One of them appears to be surrounded by a stone circle twenty-seven feet in diameter.²⁴ By virtue of their position on the map, these cists would repay investigation.
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²³ [Text of the note is not visible on this page]
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²⁴ [Text of the note is not visible on this page]
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The apparent (though not proved) absence of the distinctive port-hole from the Karāchi series seems to extend to the few other cists which have been recorded, though not recently seen, in the north. These include cists, with cairns and stone circles, noted long ago 'in the hilly districts of Delhi, Mirzapur, and Orissa'; and another 'six feet square and about four feet in height' at Deosa, a village thirty-two miles east of Jaipur in Rājasthān; and yet others eighteen miles south-east of Almora in U.P., and in the remoter depths of the Himālayan massif in the Leh valley of Ladakh, near the western border of Tibet. The fact remains, however, that, whatever future research may reveal in the north, it cannot upset the huge preponderance of megalithic cists in the south, particularly of the significant port-holed type.
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Two other megalithic monuments in the north may be noted: an irregular group of standing-stones in the vicinity of Srinagar, Kashmir,⁹⁵ and a circle of standing-stones about ten feet high near the village of Asota, seventeen miles east-north-east of Mardan in the former North-west Frontier Province.⁹⁶
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We return to south India. There it has been shown that megaliths, particularly port-holed cists, are widespread, but that other types are locally present and there are clear local variations. For example, in northern Mysore the cists are carefully walled and have sizeable and functional port-holes, whereas in the Pondicherry region they are roughly enclosed and their port-holes are small and presumably vestigial.⁹⁷ Along the ghats and the isolated coastal strip of Kerala there are, as we have seen, several individual types, though their contents seem to indicate approximate contemporaneity both with one another and with the south Indian megaliths generally. And not only that; the megalithic problem cannot be considered as a whole without some reference to the non-megalithic urn-burials or urn-fields which have been recorded chiefly from the eastern plains south of the Kistna river; notable sites being Ādichchanallūr in the Tirunelveli (Tinnevelly) district of the extreme south, the environs of Pondicherry, the Madras region,⁹⁸ Amaravati near the mouth of the Krishna, and Maski in Raichūr district on the Deccan plateau. In all this heterogeneous assemblage of funerary customs there are significant common factors which must now be defined. They are three in number.
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First, where adequately recorded, the burials are those of bones collected after excarnation or flesh-removal elsewhere. I know of no clear instance of the burial of an articulated skeleton in an Indian megalith or urn-field.⁸⁹ Furthermore, although the bones of several individuals (up to six or more, as represented by skulls) might be included, they were normally bundled together as a single parcel; very rarely is there a suggestion that the same tomb may have been used more than once.
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⁸⁹ [Note text not visible on page]
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Secondly, the tools and weapons normally included in all these categories of burial are of iron, ranging from axes, knives, bill-hooks, hoes, wedges and horses' bits to all-metal spears more than six feet in length. Bronze is used for bangles, rings and other non-utile objects, and also for bowls; gold beads occur occasionally; but a liberal and developed iron industry is the outstanding feature.
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Thirdly, there is the pottery. The distinctive ware of the megaliths, and only less so of the urn-fields, is the Black-and-red to which passing references have already been made. This is typically the product of inverted firing, so that the top and inside of the pot, in direct contact with the fire, turn black whilst the lower part (upper in the firing) is a terracotta red or, rarely, as at Bahal and Tekwāḍā (p. 145), grey. Sometimes the whole pot is black. The ware is slipped and polished, usually fairly thin, and is wheel-turned. It is said in some instances to have been salt-glazed, with a resultant shining and crackled surface. Resemblance of the blackened pots or sherds to the Northern Black Polished Ware is only superficial; the 'megalithic' ware has been fired at a lower temperature and altogether lacks the metallic hardness and lustre of the N.B.P. fabric. Shapes are for the most part simple and utilitarian: bowls and dishes, globular vessels, and occasionally tall lids. Most of the vessels are round-bottomed, and cylindrical or concave-sided pot-stands are not uncommon. A jar with three or four feet is characteristic of certain areas, notably northern Mysore and Kerala. Decoration, when present, is rudimentary and consists of horizontal grooves, incised herring-bone or leaf impressions, or, rarely and usually early, simple painted linear patterns, usually in white; but graffiti, scratched after firing and of unknown meaning, are common. Within a general similarity of type and fabric, local preferences or phases are discernible.
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Before these various factors are further considered, something must be said of the date of the megalithic series. This can now be stated in general terms, but within them no detailed chronology is yet available. The lower limit at least is fairly clear. At Brahmagiri, where a town-site alongside the megaliths was explored with this problem in view, it was found that the megalithic culture overlapped a different and more elaborate successor which was dated by the occurrence of Rouletted Ware (p. 31) to the 1st century A.D. This evidence was confirmed forty-five miles away at Chandravalli where the successor-culture was marked, not only by Rouletted Ware, but also by imported silver coins of the Roman Principate, dating from the first three or four decades of the 1st century A.D. Again, 300 miles to the south-east, at Arikamedu near Pondicherry, a brick-built commercial town which yielded imported Arretine and other wares of the first half of the 1st century A.D. succeeded, apparently without a time-gap, a village characterized by the 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware.¹⁰⁰ As long ago as 1817 a Roman silver coin of Augustus (23 B.C.-A.D. 14) is recorded to have been found in a megalithic cist in the Coimbatore district; it may of course have been intrusive. A port-holed cist at Tiruvilvamala in Cochin contained russet-coated pottery with white or yellow curvilinear patterns, allied to a similar ware with rectilinear patterns dated to the 1st century A.D. at Brahmagiri and Chandravalli.¹⁰¹ The evidence as a whole, though not abundant, is consistent, and some of it is well-documented. The megalithic complex ended in the first half of the 1st century A.D.
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The earlier time-bracket is less firmly defined. On the town-site at Brahmagiri the 'megalithic' strata were three to four feet in vertical depth. What this accumulation represents in time is very conjectural, but two to three centuries might not appear unreasonable. I have in fact suggested 200 B.C. as a schematic date for the beginning of the 'megalithic' occupation there. The guess may err on the short side, but a date not earlier than the 3rd century B.C. would be consistent with the recorded finding of a bronze coin of Eran, ascribed to the 3rd or 2nd century B.C., in a port-holed cist at Sulur, again in the Coimbatore district.
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In review, there is at present no evidence for ascribing any south Indian megalith to a date earlier than the 3rd century B.C., and the 3rd century B.C.–1st century A.D. is here accepted as a provisional time-bracket.
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It may be added that only at Brahmagiri, at Sanganakallu (p. 85), at Kunnattur in Chingleput,⁸⁸ and at Maski has a 'megalithic' settlement been excavated, and very few such settlements have been identified. Only at Brahmagiri was the evidence definitive in a chronological sense. The town lay along the lower slopes of the hill in the vicinity of a tank, and the cists, of which there must have been many hundreds (about 300 survive) are spread about the adjacent plain, amidst what are, and doubtless were, the fields of the inhabitants. In the Madras (Chingleput) region, the relative position of the living and the dead is apparently reversed; there, the megaliths are commonly on the slopes of the hills or amidst rocky outcrops, with the implication that the living dwelt amongst their fields on the adjacent plain. Here, too, ancient tanks are found in the neighbourhood, and it is a fair assumption that the megalith-builders practised tank-irrigation.
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⁸⁸ [Note text not visible on page]
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It remains to ask, Where did they or their culture come from? Their iron-industry at least is no insoluble problem. Its impressive quantity and quality owe much to the accident of preservation in protective tombs. The scrappy remains of iron-work from the 'megalithic' levels of the Brahmagiri town would never, unsupported, have suggested the extent of the industry. *Per contra*, had megalithic tombs been built beside the Gangetic cities of the Iron Age, there can be no doubt that their display would have been correspondingly striking. There is in fact no more difficulty in deriving the early ironwork of south India in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. from Gangetic sources in the 5th and 4th centuries—and ultimately from Persian sources at the end of the 6th century (p. 24)—than in deriving the ironwork and N.B.P. Ware of the towns of the upper Deccan from the same northern region. The distinctive ceramic fashion of the *doāb*, as is not unnatural, was gradually left behind in the Deccan, but the use of the splendid and abundant new metal quickly penetrated southwards into the Peninsula. At the risk of complicating the matter with a gratuitous historical intrusion, I here add the suggestion that the southward extension of the Mauryan Empire into the Peninsula at the beginning of the 3rd century B.C., probably in the time of Ashoka's father, Bindusāra,¹⁰² provides an apposite context. The sharp and sudden difference at Brahmagiri between the magnificently equipped megalith-builders and their relatively primitive stone-using predecessors is exactly consonant with a tremendous historical event of the kind.¹⁰³ On this view, the three copies of Ashoka's Minor Rock-edict at Brahmagiri were appropriately addressed to the southernmost colonists of his father's empire, and not, as I had previously conjectured, to their bucolic precursors.
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All this may be claimed to make good sense, but what of the 'megalithic' Black-and-red Ware? How does that fit into the picture? Not too badly. In recent years the Black-and-red Ware has been creeping steadily northwards on the map, and there is more than a suspicion that some of the northerly examples are also amongst the earliest; in other words, that the pottery, like the iron, may have been derived by the south from the north. Indeed a few scraps of the Black-and-red have occurred with Indus or sub-Indus valley wares at Lothal and elsewhere in Kāthiāwād.¹⁰⁴ The peripheral Indus site of Lothal may well be late in its series but must be placed somewhere in the 2nd millennium B.C. Are its Black-and-red sherds truly significant in this context? The basic technique of Black-and-red Ware is widespread in space and time: for example, it occurs in ancient Egypt and modern Africa. Is the Black-and-red pottery of India necessarily a unitary problem? The door must be kept open to doubt; the more so since at Rangpur, only a short distance from Lothal, more substantial vestiges of Black-and-red Ware were separated from the sub-Indus culture of the site by a distinctive intervening phase (p. 138). But evidence of continuity in the Black-and-red wares of India is in fact accumulating within the general limits of the 1st millennium B.C., and the problem should solve itself beyond doubt in the near future.
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The most northerly occurrences of the fabric are in the fertile south-eastern parts of Rājasthān, on the eastern flank of the Arāvalli Range. There, in the districts of Udaipur, Chitorgarh and Mandasor, bowls with everted rims, black internally and largely red externally, and occasionally painted with simple rectilinear or circular patterns in white, are found sometimes with and sometimes without microliths, rarely with a scrap of copper. At Āhār, close to Udaipur railway-station, an ancient site of some recorded importance showed over thirty feet of occupational deposit in which two main cultures, separated by a break, have been recognized. The later is of the historical period, but the earlier, nearly twenty feet thick, showed three sub-phases, all characterized by Black-and-red sherds. From the lowest sub-phase the ware is described as rather coarse, and polished only on the exterior; in the middle sub-phase the fabric is finer and the pots are polished both inside and outside; in the final sub-phase, decay has set in and new wares begin to dominate the field. In the upper levels of this culture were pottery-ringed soakpits of the kind which began to characterize the cities of northern and central India in the latter half of the 1st millennium B.C. Only two microliths were noted.¹⁰⁵
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The initial date of this Rājasthān series is undetermined, and the pottery bears only a generic resemblance to that of the megaliths. It continues, however, towards the south-east, to the Mālwā Plateau and the Narbadā valley, where both its date and its affinity with the megalithic ware become less dubious. At Nāgdā on the Chambal, north-west of Ujjain, the Black-and-red belongs to the Iron Age and is presumably therefore after 500 B.C. At Ujjain itself the evidence is similar; the Black-and-red Ware is associated with iron but precedes the arrival of N.B.P. Ware which, on this tolerably remote site, may have arrived relatively late. At Maheshwar on the Narbadā, the Black-and-red Ware is found mainly with N.B.P. Ware, but a little appears in the preceding Chalcolithic culture (p. 140). Farther south, at Bahal the sequence is identical; the first sherds of Black-and-red are in the top of the Chalcolithic, and the ware continues alongside N.B.P. pottery and iron. At Nāsik on the upper Godāvarī on the other hand, the Black-and-red is uncompromisingly equated with the N.B.P. Ware.
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The trend of the evidence is clear: in the Rājasthān-Mālwā region and along the great central rivers, Black-and-red pottery is liable to occur about or just before the middle of the 1st millennium B.C., and may anticipate the arrival of iron and N.B.P. Ware. The probability of an earlier date in Kāthiāwād depends upon a further examination of Lothal or some equivalent late-Harappān site. The ware does not occur in the Jumna-Ganges doāb; it would appear rather to be at home between the Arāvalli and the Vindhya Ranges and to have survived there and farther south as a folk-craft after the foreign and technically better N.B.P. Ware had arrived upon the scene. With local modifications in form, decoration and skill, it subsequently penetrated southwards with an improving technique, and was ultimately perfected by the megalith-builders and urn-field-users of peninsular India. The time-table, as at present known, fits this suggested diffusion of the Black-and-red Ware as it fits that of the 'megalithic' iron-industry. The two cultural streams, one from the northern plains, the other from the Mālwā Plateau, unite in the Deccan.
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To sum up so far; it is here postulated that about 300 B.C. certain cultural elements, with iron as their major component, were infiltrating southwards into a variety of Chalcolithic communities, when their progress was suddenly stimulated and given a new political coherence by the southerly extension of the Mauryan empire from its homeland in the northern plains. Between the invading complex and the crude Chalcolithic cultures upon which it impinged there was no organic transition, save where the advancing iron outpaced its own N.B.P. Ware and absorbed the makers of the Black-and-red Ware farther south. For the most part, the invader passed over the invaded like the tide over the sand. It was a case of cultural conquest, nothing less.
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If this historical reading of the archaeological evidence be provisionally accepted—and it fits the factors of time and space as they are known at present—there remains one unexplained factor, and that a formidable one. Whence came the urge and the art of building the megalithic structures themselves? To that question there is no present answer. The general, indeed the specific, resemblance between the south Indian port-holed cists and others in the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, the Jordan valley, North Africa, the Spanish Peninsula, France, Central Germany, and the British Isles has long been recognized.
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Most of these analogues are over a thousand years earlier than the Indian series, but the structural likeness is often astonishingly close. Is there a causative link through all this diffuse geography? Or did the south Indians evolve their tombs from their own inner consciousness, without foreign aid? Certainly some of the Kerala types are unique and therefore local. But in regard to the cists we do not know. One thing, at least is certain: in the 3rd century B.C. there was no monsoon-borne sea-traffic, no short cut, direct to peninsular India; that was a discovery of the 1st century B.C.¹⁰⁶ Any link with the West must have been closely coastwise or overland, and has presumably left intermediate traces. If the little-known cists of the Karāchi region turn out, on excavation, to be of the series, a solution is perhaps on the way. That, however, remains to be seen.
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It would, of course, produce a tidy geographical solution of the problem if we could with any confidence derive the southern megaliths, or at any rate the idea embodied in them, from the megaliths of Orissa, Chotā Nāgpur and north-eastern India. With C. von Fürer-Haimendorf, however, I see no ready help in that direction.⁸⁴ In spite of rare and incomplete resemblances, I prefer to return to the initial premise of this chapter and to accept the differences manifest in the north-eastern series as too numerous and extensive to justify affiliation. The structural problem—and that alone—of the south Indian megalith culture seems to me at the present time insoluble save by extravagant guesswork.
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In this outline of the megalithic problem I have said nothing about its linguistic aspects. I am not a linguist, nor, in any case, is the evidence adequate to support anything more than speculation. Von Fürer-Haimendorf has boldly recognized the megalith-builders as primary speakers of Dravidian languages;¹⁰⁷ and it is certain that, within measurable range of the earliest Dravidian records, there is no rival and commensurate cultural phenomenon. It may indeed be averred categorically that the megalith-builders were also Dravidian speakers. But this affirmation does not carry us far in a search for the 'origins' of the Dravidian tongue, unless in one respect. The map of the Dravidian languages, with their north-western outlier (Brahui), bears an alluring likeness to that of the megalithic cists with their little-known but sufficiently definite north-western groups. Did both in fact come in from the north-west? There is at present no new answer to this question.