(a) "The Neolithic Age represents a revolution due to significant changes that took place during this period." Examine. (20…

(a) The Neolithic as a revolution

V. Gordon Childe used "Neolithic Revolution" for the shift from food gathering to food production, and the term fits India if its meaning is kept to consequences and not speed.

Changes.

(i) Subsistence. Cultivation of wheat and barley, and sheep, goat and cattle herding, at Mehrgarh from about 7000 BCE. Rice at Koldihwa and Lahuradeva in the Ganga plain, millets and horse gram in the South, as at Utnur and Piklihal, where ash mounds mark cattle penning.

(ii) Technology. Ground and polished stone tools, such as celts, for clearing land; handmade and then wheel-thrown pottery for storage and cooking; querns; bone tools.

(iii) Settlement. Permanent villages with mud-brick houses at Mehrgarh, and pit-dwellings at Burzahom, and storage of grain.

(iv) Society and belief. Surplus, property, kinship groups, and burial with grave goods, as at Mehrgarh and Burzahom, indicate early social differentiation and ritual.

Assessment. The change was not sudden. In Mehrgarh it came out of local Mesolithic hunting and herding over centuries, and in Kashmir, Bihar (Chirand), Assam (Daojali Hading) and the South it began at different dates, between about 7000 and 1000 BCE. It is therefore "revolutionary" only in its effects: it made population growth, sedentism and craft and trade possible, and led to the Chalcolithic villages and the Harappan cities. Unlike Childe's model it had no single centre or single date.

(b) Homogeneity and diversity in the Indus–Saraswati zone

The Indus–Saraswati (Harappan) civilisation spread over more than a million square kilometres, from Sutkagen Dor to Alamgirpur and from Shortughai to Daimabad, and shows both uniformity and regional variety.

Homogeneity.

(i) Town planning: a citadel and a lower town, streets on a grid, and covered drains.

(ii) Baked bricks in a fixed ratio of 1:2:4.

(iii) Standard weights in a binary series and a fixed unit of length.

(iv) Seals with an undeciphered script, and similar pottery and beads.

Diversity.

(i) Settlement form. Dholavira is laid out in three parts, built in stone, with a chain of water reservoirs. Lothal has a dock, and Banawali an apsidal building.

(ii) Ritual and burial. Fire altars at Kalibangan and Lothal, and different burial forms.

(iii) Subsistence and craft. Wheat and barley in the north-west, rice and millets in Gujarat, fishing on the coast, and specialised craft towns such as Chanhudaro and Balakot.

(iv) Regional cultural roots. The local traditions of Kalibangan, Sothi–Siswal, Kot Diji and Amri, and the Sorath Harappan.

Archaeologists such as Jonathan Mark Kenoyer stress a shared Indus tradition with local forms. The uniformity is thus one of ideas, administration and exchange, and not of a single state.

(c) The Aryan problem and the help from languages, archaeology and Vedic literature

The problem is about the origin of the Indo-Aryan speakers, and whether they came from outside or developed within India.

Comparative linguistics. From William Jones in 1786, the similarity of Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek and Latin showed a common Indo-European family. Indo-Aryan names of gods (Mitra, Varuna, Indra) and horse-training terms appear in West Asian texts of about 1400 BCE, such as the Mitanni treaty. But language does not show when, how or whether people moved, and Aryan is a linguistic category, not a race, as Max Müller and Romila Thapar stress.

Archaeology. The steppe and Central Asian cultures (Andronovo, Sintashta chariot burials, BMAC), and in India the Gandhara Grave culture, Ochre Coloured Pottery, Copper Hoards and Painted Grey Ware, have been linked to Vedic society. The Harappan-continuity view of B. B. Lal and others finds no clear break in the record.

Vedic literature. The Rigveda (about 1500–1000 BCE) describes a horse-and-chariot pastoral society of the Sapta Sindhu and the Saraswati, while the later texts place the people in the Ganga–Yamuna doab.

Evidence from DNA. Recent ancient-DNA studies report steppe ancestry in South Asia in the second millennium BCE, but the interpretation is still debated.

None of the three lines alone settles it, but together they suggest a gradual movement and mixing of groups, with linguistic and cultural change.