Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c9.3

c9.3

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.