Archaeology of India and Pakistan
Prehistoric India. By Stuart Piggott. (Penguin Books. 2s. 6d.) PROFESSOR WHEELER and Professor Piggott had established great reputations for themselves in occidental prehistoric archaeology before ever they sef foot in India. The exigencies of war sent Stuart Piggott to India in 1942, and in the intervals of his military duties Lieutenant-Colonel Piggott began a study of Indian prehistory, the results of which are first published in easily accessible form in this double-volume Pelican. Mortimer Wheeler arrived in India in 1944 to take up the post of Director-General of Indian Archaeology ; he came fresh from military operations in the Mediterranean, and I recollect my amusement, at hearing two influential Indians com- menting on the folly of the British administration in appointing a Brigadier to an archaeological post: " Will Government never learn ? " they exclaimed. But it was India which soon learned that no mistake had been made. jit, four whirlwind years Professor Wheeler revolutionised Indian atebaeology with a vigour, efficiency and inspiration which even ignored the hot weather.
Five Thousand Years tf Pakistan is not a record of those four years, although it is rich in the experience of travel,• excavation and study which they provided to one who, for all his apparent ruthless efficiency, was, from the outset, sympathetic to the Indian achievement. The title of this book, as Wheeler readily admits, is a wilful paradox, but contains a fundamental truth. The book has been compiled for the purpose of presenting to the outside world a brief sketch of the imposing material heritage of Pakistan from the five thousand centuries before the death of Aurungzeb in 1707. Wheeler writes with equal assurance and verve on all aspects of his large subject from the prehistoric cities of the Indus plain through Taxila to the Moghuls of west • Pakistan. His vignette of life at Mohenjodaro is brilliant and an outstanding example of how prehistory can best be written—the dull excavation reports brought to life 'in a scene whose detail never exceeds the archaeological evidence.
Equally so, in another way, is his treatment of Muslim architec- ture in India—the architecture of the desert translated to the land of jungle, and gradually changing as it absorbed and reflected the all-pervading personality of India. This book is not only a record of achievement and a guide to antiquities. It is a starting- point for fresh work ; and Professor Wheeler is constantly indicat- ing the problems to be solved—the archaeological counterpart of the Arvans, for example. or the site of Dehul. Here are cultural tasks for Pakistan, whose archaeological adviser Professor Wheeler has been since the partition of India.
Prehistoric India is the third book to be published this year from Professor Piggott's pen. To say that it is as important and remarkable a contribution to Indian prehistoric scholarship as were British Prehistory and William Stukeley to the archaeological and antiquarian scholarship of Britain is to do it no more than the merest justice. The ordinary reader must not suppose this to be a cheap synthesis—an agreeably produced vulgarisation of things widely known. Far from it ; this is itself a work of great originality and scholarship, and, despite years of PengiTins and Pelicans, we must be permitted a sigh of amazement and gratitude that such works as this, which would not have been out of place in a format and at the price of Wheeler's book, can be produced so cheaply, and that cheap books can also mean the best books.
Some of Piggott's archaeological conclusions have already appeared in specialist journals ; he has not attempted a general picture before. It is convincing, lucid, and, at times, quite frankly exciting—especially in his last chapter where the evidence from archaeology and from the Rigvedas is fused into a picture of the Aryas which is one of the best things Piggott has ever done and illumines the problem of the Indo-Europeans more than anything I have ever read. There is a refreshing subjectivity in Professor Piggott's judgement of the Harappa civilisation ; he complains of its " terrible efficiency . . . which recalls all the worst of Rome," stigmatises " the competent dullness of its arts and crafts " which reach " a dead level of bourgeois mediocrity," and calls the whole civilisation, whose " immemorial stagnation " he compares with that of the Central American pre-Columban civilisations, " one of the least attractive phases of ancient Oriental history." Indeed, he confesses that there is something in the Harappa civilisation that he finds repellent—as repellent as the present reviewer finds it attractive and interesting, or as Professor Piggott himself makes it interesting to the reader of this book.
The general reader may find some of Piggott's close argument about the early Baluchistan peasant village communities hard going, but, on the whole, both books are extremely readable. Both are well illustrated by photographs and diagrams. GLYN E. DANIEL.
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