Painted Grey Ware culture

The Painted Grey Ware culture (PGW) is an Iron Age Indian culture of the western Gangetic plain and the Ghaggar-Hakra valley on the Indian subcontinent, lasting from roughly 1200 BCE to 600 BCE, or, as the new consensus states, from 1300 BCE to 300 BCE.

Quotes

• Since many of the sites that yielded this particular pottery were associated with the Mahabharata story, I decided to undertake excavation at Hastinapura, which was the capital of the Kauravas. ... it is relevant to state that the excavations revealed that a sizable portion of the Painted Grey Ware settlement was washed away by a heavy flood in the Ganga. ... A comparison of this archaeological evidence with that from literature was highly telling. The relevant part of the text runs as follows: "After the washing away of the site of Hastinapura by the Ganga, Nichaksu wil abandon it and move the capital to Kausambi." Archaeologically, what is no less exciting is that the lowest levels of Kausambi began with the same kind of material culture as was there in existence at Hastinapura at the time when the flood destroyed it. The texts further mention the names of the rulers of Kausambi, according to which Udayana was twenty-fifth from Nichaksu.... .. Thus the approximate date of Nichaksu would be around 850 BCE. Further, since, according to the same texts, Nichaksu was the 5th ruler of Hastinapura, after the Mahabharata war, the war may broadly be placed around the 10th century BCE.
  • Lal, B. B. (2008). Rāma, his historicity, mandir, and setu: Evidence of literature, archaeology, and other sciences. New Delhi: Aryan Books International. p.16-19

• When still a beginning archaeologist, Lal made his name internationally by digging up the missing link between the Aryans and India: the Painted Grey Ware (PGW, 1200-800) culture. As we ought to have realized since the controversies among anthropologists about hyped “missing links” between ape and man that turned out to be overrated or faked, a missing link tends to be tricky business. Eggermont told us Lal had identified the PGW as a marker of the Aryan invaders making their way deeper into India, and Lal’s first publications on the subject could be cited to that effect. Indeed, they still are: till today, some believers in the Aryan invasion quote Lal’s early hypothesis on the PGW as material evidence for their hypothesis.... even at the annual conference of the European Archaeological Association, Maastricht 2017, I heard this said urbi et orbi, without anyone protesting; which incidentally confirmed that in the fifty years since, no other such “proof” has materialized.
  • Elst, K. in BR Mani: A Legendary Archaeologist: Prof. BB Lal Felicitation Volume, Delhi 2018. Also online at [1]

• But the fact is that Lal has abandoned this hypothesis long ago. Nothing in the PGW data positively proved that it was “Aryan”, or more “Aryan” than its surroundings. This was only assumed because it would fit neatly in the Aryan invasion hypothesis, which was taken to be a fact. Actually, the PGW had to fill the yawning gap in the evidential support basis of the Aryan invasion hypothesis. As Lal delved deeper into the subject, he realized that the invasion hypothesis was not a proven factual framework within which one could interpret new data. Instead, it was itself a mere hypothesis, one among several unproven ways to look at the available facts.
  • Elst, K. in BR Mani: A Legendary Archaeologist: Prof. BB Lal Felicitation Volume, Delhi 2018. Also online at [2]

• The PGW is but one of many dashed hopes of Aryan invasion believers looking for a material sign of their hypothesis. None of Lal’s colleagues has discovered the long-awaited trace of an invasion.
  • Elst, K. in BR Mani: A Legendary Archaeologist: Prof. BB Lal Felicitation Volume, Delhi 2018. Also online at [3]

• The lone archaeological witness to the Indo-European (IE) immigration into India, Prof. B. B. Lal, has changed his mind. During the last two decades, he has published several books in which he disowns his old interpretation of his PGW discovery[3], culminating in a hefty tome dedicated to a reasoned argumentation in favour of the OIT, including a refutation of the counter-arguments already given by then, where he pleads that “the civilization that prevailed in the Sarasvati valley from the 5th millennium BCE to the 3rd millennium BCE is indeed that of the Rigvedic people”[4]. He explained to us in 2017 how, as a junior scholar, fresh from studies under the pioneering invasionist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, he had force-fitted his findings into the dominant paradigm, but had later come to understand that his explanation was merely an application of the paradigm, not a proof of it.
  • Ever closer to Bhāropīyasthān, State of the Art of the Out-of-India Debate. Elst, K. Published in the Festschrift/tribute of Lambert Isebaert: Etudes Classiques vol.88, Université de Namur 2020, p.85-108.

• There was the discovery in 1976 that at Bhagwanpura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana the people of Painted Grey Ware — supposed by some popularizers of history to be Aryan invaders — were the immediate successors of the Harappans. But the discovery provides no evidence of a conflict. Actually we have an overlap and fusion between the two cultures, a continuity of pottery types, painted designs and terracotta figurines. The damage to the site was due to floods and not war: twice there was an inundation, the first when the late Harappans alone were present, the second when the PGW people were living peacefully alongside them.
  • K.D. Sethna, Problem of Aryan origins, 1992:98 and quoted in Indigenous Indians, Elst K. , 1993:6