Preface
I am presenting in the following essay my own thoughts on
“palaeolithic man in Chotanagpur”, and before I proceed with the paper itself I
would like to acquaint the reader who is not familiar with palaearchaeology about
some of the important things to know, and without which the full import of the
essay will not be conceivable.
Therefore, the following points may be noted,
- India of certain
typical stone formations or layers formed during the earth’s own formation
during the Pre-Cambrian period hundreds of millions of years ago when life
did not exist on the earth.
- 2.That these
stone formations were of different types each subsequently being pertinent
to the evolution of palaeolithic man and the stone tools he made out of
these rock strata and which in turn formed his evolution since man is the
produce of his environment. These strata are the Archaean, theChronockite,
thethe Dharwar and the Cambrian.
- It must be
remembered that due to plate tectonics, or movement of the earth’s crust
(much like the scales on a pangolin’s body) the present peninsular India
was originally a part of Gondwanaland and connected with Africa and the
European land-mass in the super-continent called Panagea.
- That the
different techniques of making stone tools (for example Levallois flaking
technique) will appear highly technical and irrelevant to the non academic
reader, but it is but one kind of technique iun the stone tools assemblage
of palaeolithic man whether found in the valley of Seine in France, or in
the valley of Damodar in Jharkhand (which is the new name of the state
created from the Chotanagpur plateau). Similarly the basins and valleys of
Seine and Damodar have much in common
with the basins and valleys of Seine in France,
Sone and Narmada in neighbouring Madhya
Pradesh, or Vaal or Danube
in central-eastern Europe. Man in all the river basins emerged as a
bipedal tool making creature with
fair amount of creative intelligence and aesthetic appreciation from more
than thirty thousand years ago !
- 5. We are
therefore to bear in mind that the
basins and valleys of all rivers flowing through forests are places
that evidence the habitation of Early Man whether in Europe or in India.
This is because man was the product of these places and as Jared Diamond
has reminded us “ Geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the
contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan
Africans, and Aboriginal Australians.” Thus emerges a palaeolithic stone
tool tapestry of remarkably individual identity and yet a common form in the river basins and valleys of
our Indian rivers such as the
remarkable stone tool repositories of Early Man in the Krishna and Upper
Krishna basins in Tamilnadu; the Subarmukhi and Pennar basins in Andhra Pradesh; the
Tungabhadra basin and the Malaprabha basin in Belgaum district of Mysore; the
Nagarjunakonda valley of Guntur district of Madhya Pradesh; the Wainganga,
Godavari , and in particular the Nevasa
basin in Maharashtra which was studied in such detail by one of the
doyens of Indian palaeoarchaeology, Professor H.D.Sankalia, and where for
the first time the Middle Palaeolithgic period in India was recognized.
The list is seemingly endless as we cover the hidden nooks and crannies
where palaeolithic man emerged in the crevices of valley and along the
eroded scarps of plateau and scarps of rift valleys, emerging into the
modern investigations of archaeologists eager to understand the enigma of
evolution and the scalpel of change upon the physique and mind of modern
man. Thousands of palaeolithic
sites lie scattered across the sub-continent.
- Having thus
established the importance of river basins and upper river valleys as the
emergent habitation sites of palaeolithic societies of humans it is
necessary that the importance of these environments from a cultural standpoint as national
heritage, even world heritage, is appreciated by administrators and
politicians and that their destruction is prevented in the present age of
economic and industrial development which first of all destroy such areas
for development . Since India’s independence in 1947 such regions have
been systematically targeted in the valleys and basins of the most
pristine environments of hundreds of rivers across the sub-continent
including some of the most important palae-archaeological sites including the Mahanadi, Damodar,
Godavari, Narmada, Sone, Sutlej, Beas
etcetera which have faced series of big dams and reservoirs
submerging the ancient sites, mines and industrialized power generation
that has completely vandalized them, and displaced thousands of
settlements of indigenous peoples living in these areas.
- The process of
power generation upon which the industrialization of modern India was
planned consisted in big dams for hydro-electric power, huge coal mine
complexes like Singrauli, on the
river Sutlej and the Govindsagar Dam, on the Damodar river in
Jharkhand through the big dams of the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC),
and countless other pristine habitats across the country. Most of the
hydel power projects failed due to the siltation of dams and were
converted to water reserves for coal-fired thermal power stations, and now
they will come in useful for new nuclear power stations… The surface of India was
dammed, mined , deforested, and the villages faced untold traumas through
complete destruction while forests were completely denuded. The ecology of
India
underwent a drastic change. Despite glaring evidence of what such
destruction constitutes the five year plans of development and power
generation continued and within the last couple of decades the upper basin
of the Damodar valley was attacked by the North Karanpura Coalfields
Project where over three dozen vast open- cast mines are being made.
- The importance
of the upper Damodar basin and Karanpura valley lies in the fact it
represents all three phases of palaeo-archaeology in human evolution from
the Lower Palaeolithic (150,000 BP) through the Middle and Upper
Palaeolithic (50,000-15000 BP) closing at the end of the Late Pleistocene
and the beginning of the Holocene about 12,000 years ago at the end of the
last ice age. Modern geologists are of the view that during the last five
centuries we entered a new geologic age caused by the impact of human
activity which they term
Anthropocene (which is an informal geologic chronological term that serves
to mark the evidence and extent of comparatively recent human activities on the planet,
vastly aggravated by the industrial revolution , caused by industrial pollution of the Earth’s land,
water and atmosphere). The long period from the Lower
Palaeolithic to the beginning of the Holocene evidenced in the river valleys and basins of India is the longest continuous record of human
evolution and an invaluable source of information of how the world changed
over time. It was challenged by a changing world in the Holocene period from the
domestication of animals, farming, clearing of forests over thousands of
years, but during the last few centuries of colonization and introduced
industrialization, the building of big dams, and vast mines, mega cities
and new townships began a rapid
change in the landscape, its land, water and atmosphere , not only locally
but on a global scale altering the planet itself at an ever accelerating
rate. Human dominance of the
biological, chemical and geological processes of the remaining natural
world are gravely threatened to the extent we can not even consider human
survival in the coming centuries. This
has international scientific consensus.
- Amidst this
scenario of modern industrial evolution we have to consider the importance
of how people lived in an unpolluted pre industrial world. For this we turn to the pre historic rock paintings of the hunters and cave
dwellers who have left their entire
stone tools record in the scarps of the hillsides and the shelters of the
painted caves which are among the
earliest rock paintings found in India. In these painted caves
overlooking the Damodar valley the art of the pre-historic hunters is seen
and down in the valley it continues in the art of the first settled
societies who worshipped the cave paintings, a tradition still in
continuance in Karanpura, and here we find the oldest living artistic
tradition in the world--- the great mural painting traditions on the walls of the village houses in the valley
painted by the tribal women during the advent of spring and marriage season (Khovar), and in the
harvest festival with the onset of
the winter (Sohrai). This is the oldest and longest continuing artistic
tradition in the world. The NKCP aims at annihilating this entire
civilizational and evolutionary record. The last phase of the pre-historic
rock paintings is found in the spectacular painted cave of Isko
at the easternmost end of the Karanpura valley which represents the
geometric and script like drawings of the Neo-Chalcolithic period (
3500-1500 B.C.) This site has received much attention from the Jharkhand
government and its cultural and archaeological significance may well be
overlooked in turning it into a popular tourist site – or modern worship
site which will cause the destruction of the site and its surroundings
which require careful preservation from an academic standpoint which is
beyond the understanding of the promoters. I any foreign country such
sites are revered as sacred relics of scientific and cultural sanctity and
protected as such. In India
such sophisticated approaches may well be impossible and the whole site
may well become a ravaged tourist mess if not properly handled because the
defacement of the rock art through visitor graffiti is bound to start
unless adequate means are taken to stop it.
- Isco was where
my work in the rock paintings and anthropo-archaeology of the Karanpura
valley began in 1991 and it was (and much of the region still is)
pristine. The pebble stone tool deposits were found both within and around
the immediate cave and even older
bi-face pebble tools and worked flakes were found lying around the
surrounding surface areas. The cave floor emanded excavation but despite
decades of negligence on the part of the authorities who were formed of
this discovery in 1992 neither the Archaeological Survey of India nor the
Bihar Archaeology Department do anything about it. About five years back
the over-zealous administration cast concrete over the cave floor sealing
a treasure of surface tools including neoliths and microliths. I managed
to stop further work as soon as I became aware of this disfigurement.
- It must be noted
that pebble tool deposits have been found in the immediate vicinity of the
Isco cave, and they do exist in painted rock shelters which was drawn attention by the doyen of Indian rock
painting study , Vishnu Wakankar whose name will be for ever associated
with Bhimbetka. Wakankar held that
the pebble tools found in the Bhimbetka rock painting site near Bhopal belonged to the same level as the Lower Palaeolithic and Achaeulian provenance fifty
thousand years old although the rock paintings themselves might have been
of more recent provenance. This inferred that humans had been living in
the caves for tens of thousands of years before the paintings were made in
them. Conversely, perhaps many of the earliest markings may have eroded as
the sandstone walls are friable and subject to erosion by wind and rain.
Wakankar held that the pebble tools found in Bhimbetka were connected with
Lower Palaeolithic and Achaeulian
deposits of this area . This would mean that the earliest humans – who
might not have as yet been fully human in the modern sense - occupied these caves for those tens of
thousands of years during which they reached what in Europe
was the Neanderthal phase 30,000 years ago, and only thousands of years later began to paint
the caves. Rock art in Europe may well have begun earlier than in India since Europe
was covered with a heavy ice sheet and the cave-men had more time inside
their caves to think of making markings that grew eventually into rock
art. On the other hand man in India experienced little of the great ice age and spent his
time more in the open in the temperate climate. The rock art might be
attributed to the more recent pebble stone tool makers.
- The Damodar
suite of pebble stone tools is strikingly similar to the Sone basin Palaeolithic
stone tools, and the Sone tools are very similar to the Narmada
pebble stone tools. The stone tools
found at Riwat in the Soan Valley of the Potwar plateau in western Punjab
(now in Pakistan) belong to the earliest stone tool makers (Homo habilis/Homo erectus) of two million years ago(Irfan Habib, Prehistory
of India, 2001. P.25) and bear a striking similarity to the
Palaeolithic stone tools found in the upper Damodar valley in Karanpura.
It was the opinion of the famed Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin
when he visited the Narmada in1935 with
De Terra that “Above the immense
alluvial plain emerges a platform of
nummulitic limestones rich
in flints. The whole platform is nothing but a fabulous workshop… millions
of points and implements.(27 November, 1935), and again “The Narmada ranks as the classic
Pleistocene of India –and only a single Palaeolithic implement had yet
been found in situ…(about 1850).
Nothing else has been done there during the subsequent eight decades! ...
Great was our surprise to find there vastly rich deposits of ancient industry -- as rich perhaps as Madras, and with fauna.” (18 December, 1935). It is important to understand that the Palaeolithic stone tool
industry of Pleistocene man two
million years ago ( 2 mybp) in this Sone –Narmada region of Central India is
connected with the adjoining hill tracts and plateau of Chotanagpur
including the Karanpaura Valley , where they have been brought to light by me , and in neighbouring Orissa and Chhatisgarh
. These were among the birth-places of palaeolithic man in Asia.
Obviously these three hilly regions divided by three major rivers, and
connected by the Kaimur and Bundelkhand ranges had close associations
between the primitive peoples living in them who during the hunting period
(7000-4000 BC) would have been ranging long distances. On the other hand these typical stone
tools of similar form are distinct from many other parts of India in
independent form. H.D.Sankalia the
famous palaeo-archaeologist had observed,
“In a vast country like India there are bound to be
regional variations in the Middle Stone Age culture.” The
Damodar-Sone-Narmada represents a unique stone tool and rock art culture
which spans the regions of Orissa, Jharkhand, Chhatisgarh, and Madhya
Pradesh representing Early Man in what Verrier Elwin called “Middle
India”. Their contemporary tribal arts and crafts are also strikingly
similar.
Palaeolithic man in the Chotanagpur plateau
The Chotanagpur plateau in east central India was more
or less completely the portion carved
from the old state of Bihar in 2000 to constitute the new state of Jharkhand
which was even then heavily forested and mostly populated by ancient ethnic
tribal groups. After its formation it
felt the marginalizing of its tribal
communities and the government policy of increased industrialization and mining
of its vast mineral deposits which has been a growing phenomenon all over India since its
independence from British rule in 1947. India has followed the outmoded and
decadent model of development of the
Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment which is no longer fashionable in
western countries which long back had destroyed their natural environments and
native cultures and attempting to farm them back to prominence. Our
understanding of the palaeolithic in Jharkhand is at best dependant upon
inadequate research or collection of stone tools or excavation of sites ( as in
Chaibasa which uptil recently said to be sterile of flake- blade industry).Gua,
Ghatsila and Sini were on the other hand considered “rich” in such industry on
the basis of particular finds. I would
say that all the plateau areas of Jharkhand are rich in palaeolithic deposits
but the proper attempts have not been made to find and document them. The
other thing to be realized is that the past thirty thousand years of the
archaeological record is confined to the surface and subsoil and since the
plateau has a conglomerate crust and frequent heavy rains there are adequate
eroded areas to find evidence of early man without need for excavation except
in specific instances. The lithic (or
stone)phase is represented in these sediments of mottled clay and early conglomerate
largely revealed through erosion apart
from the gorges of river valleys and rift formation scarps such as the edges of
Hazaribagh plateau above Damodar caused by tectonic shifting. This example may
be applied in principle to the entire Chotanagpur plateau and in particular in
the basins and upper valleys of streams and rivers. One of the major drawbacks
of palaeo-archaeology is the attempt to construct sequences occurring millions
of years ago through study of few select finds. Obviously, the larger the
quantity of finds the better the
archaeological reconstruction possible. Stone tools are not merely curiosities
in a museum but tools for understanding the human past, and from our
understanding of it to help us to understand – even shape constructively – our
human future on this planet.
I have pointed out that Palaeolithic man world wide has
to be found predominantly in the forested basins of rivers which were also the
sources of water and food, wild animals and birds, and the large and small pebble
stones required for early stone-age cultures. Certain basins and river valleys saw the rise of
man such as along the Nile
and Zambesi in Africa, along the Danube and Neckar in Europe, and in the middle eastern part of India in the Narmada and Sone basins, and in the Damodar river basin
and valley in Jharkhand. In the upper parts of the Nile in Ethiopia have been found the older large bi-face choppers ,cleavers and hand- axes and as one
comes down to Egypt the tools assemblage changes. Similarly, in the upper basin
of the Damodar in Jharkhand this suite of
larger stone tools appear, and in both rivers as we go down into the
broader river valley a smaller more crafted suite of stone tools appear. The
stone tools found in the Damodar basin and valley are similar to the stone tool
types of the Sone and Narmada rivers to the
west.
The Sone rises in Sone-mund in the highlands of the
Amarkantak hills in Madhya Pradesh, flowing northeast into Bihar
in the Rohtas district where it is met by the North Koel
river at Kabrakala an important archaeological site near Japla in Jharkhand.
Other important tributaries of the Sone are the Johilla, Banas, Gopat. The
upper and middle parts of the river and its tributaries have yielded vast
remains of palaeolithic man not far from the sources of the North Koel and
Damodar in the Chotanagpur plateau in Palamau district. Thus the continuation
of the stone tool types is understood.
The Upper Sone includes the Jabalpur district in Katni sub-division ,
Shahdol, Siddhi and Bilaspur in Madhya Pradesh. These were half a century
ago heavily forested river valleys but
after Independence
they fell victim to the curse of
industrialism, mining and big dams. Today these areas have been already devastated thoroughly. The
Pleistocene deposits of the Upper Sone (35,000-12,000 BP) are otherwise having
the general order of stone tools common to peninsular India, apart from their
stylistic identity.(Oldham, Foote, 1961; Wakankar, IAR- 1956-57; Joshi,
IAR-1957-58; Sengupta,IAR-1961-62: 8-9;and Nisar Ahmed) The lower levels are of
conglomerate yielding early stone age
tools, above which is the sandy loess of the tertiary age tens of thousands of
years old on which are found other layers of stone tools brought to light by
Ahmed in sixty-five places (Ahmed 1966:3-7). The blade-burin industry is
similar to the Poona types. The whole is representative of an Acheulian phase
with pebble tools and flakes, scrapers, hand-axes, borers, points and blades.
The Upper Sone includes Singrauli where heavy coal mining
has been going on for sixty odd years the massive opencast coal mines made to
feed power generation which operations
have completely destroyed the palaeo-archaeological beds. Jharkhand is now
following the same model in Karanpura. The Sone basin at Singrauli contained a
lower palaeolithic treasure of stone tools which was mined out as well as
submerged under the waters of the Rihand Dam reservoir and now forever lost.
All over India
hundreds of such hydel and mineral-rich
river basins have suffered similar fates in the process of industrial
development. Tens of millions of forest dwellers have been displaced and
thousands of villages destroyed. What are left to posterity are deep scars
evidencing Anthropocene man.
The Rihand Dam is drained by the rivers Sone, Dudhi ,
Rihand, and tributaries of the Sone
rising in the hills. Geologically the northern part is of Gangetic alluvium,
the middle part of Vindhyan sandstone, and southern part of the Cuddapah
formation (Krishnaswami, S.Rajan, 1951:42). Researchers in the past who figure
prominently for their work in this region are Cockburn, 188; Oldham;
De Teron; Peterson, 1939; Bruce Foote;Zuener). Unfortunately the only major
report on this important area is a
research paper by Krishnaswami and Soundara Rajan of 1951. They noted,
“ …prevalence of a large series of Abbevilian-Acheulian
bi-facial hand-axes, pebble and chopping tools… Bi-face tools include cleavers
of many types. There are numerous flakes
both used as tools, and waste; among the useful flakes there being a
prominent proto-Levallois flakes “. Krishnaswami had suggested that this area
represented a meeting of the Soan valley(in thePotwar plateau of western Punjab in Pakistan)and
Madrassian types. The Soan tools belong
to the earliest stone tool makers (Homo habilis/Homo
erectus) two million years ago.(Irfan Habib, Prejistory of India, 2001.
P.25) It is important to understand that this region of central and east India and the
adjoining hill tracts and plateau of Chotanagpur –Orissa-Chhatisgarh was the
birth-place of palaeolithic man . To the north the sprawling Indo-Gangetic
plain is entirely devoid of any
palaeolithic remains which shows these first humans were explicitly
forest-dwellers. Chotanagpur forms part of the Assam geological formation and is separated by the Malda Plain of East
Bengal, now Bangladesh
, which was carved in the most ancient times by the Ganges
and Brahmaputra rivers. In the middle of the
Chotanagpur plateau x the thick alluvium crust is cut through by numerous river
valleys revealing an ancient lower
palaeolithic level with attendant middle and upper palaeolithic stratas. This
is most evident in the sandstone scarps of the Hazaribagh plateau north of Isco
which have been identified as sites of early man, and this series will be found
in the scarps on either side of the Karanpura valley and the hill ranges which
bifurcate the valley which contain the most notable rock art caves of Eastern
India. The entire areas involved in the valley are inhabited by primitive tribal
societies and their kinsmen some of whom
may have migrated from adjacent regions, while their art and culture reflect
the traditions of their ancestors from
the chalcolithic and Neolithic ages as well as the earlier hunters and
gatherers who left their painted art on the cave walls in the hills. The same
may be said of the larger region of Chotanagpur plateau x beyond the immediate
confines of the Damodar valley and in the valleys of all the other rivers
flowing from the plateaux. Chotanagpur has evidenced across its entire extent
the remains of Lower, middle and upper palaeolithic stone tools in Hazaribagh,
Ranchi, Khunti, Singhbhum, Gumla, Chatra, Giridih ,Lohardagga, Santal Parganas,
Godda, Palamau, and other districts. Hazaribagh has been highlighted due to my
objective analyses and continued searches which have revealed the extent of its
prehistoric archaeology and art. But similar work in other districts is bound
to show similar results. As to the southern parts of the plateau similar
searches and studies have been made in the past by by Sarat Chandra Roy in Ranchi, Khunti, Gumla, Lohardagga, and
Singhbhum. In the eastern region below
the plateau in the river valleys of Damodar and Suvarnarekha and in Purulia in
1949 P.R.Sarkar made a series of important discoveries of palaeolithic remains
in what he called Western Rarh.The first notice of discovery of a palaeolithic
stone tool was by Hughes in the Bokaro coal-field (Vincent Ball,Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,1865,
pages 127-128) and a boucher made from micaceous quartzite now in the Indian
Museum, Calcutta. The first evidence of the chalcolithic was in
the finding of a flat copper celt and a copper amulet by Bruce Foote at Bargunda (B.Foote, The Foote Collection of Indian Pre-historic
and Proto-historic antiquities, 1914, page 248 )now in the Madras Government
Museum. Pachamba in
Giridih district yielded a few copper celts, now also in the Indian Museum,
Calcutta
(J.Goggin Brown, Catalogue of
Pre-historic Antiquities in the Indian Museum, page 140). The District
Gazetteer for Hazaribagh (1957) noted “Large dolmens or flat stones planted
upright abound in the district..” (P.C.Roy Choudhury,Hazaribagh District Gazetteer, 1957, p.82)
It was in this backround I brought to light in 1991 the
rock art site of Isco in the Karanpura valley, and the palaeolithic remains of
the Damodar basin and valley. Later the number of rock art sites was increased
to include over a dozen painted caves in the hills and escarpments surrounding
the valley, and the palaeo-archological sites
close to or not distant from them, as also the iron age sites on which
the tribal hamlets were built as well as the megaliths in these areas. From
this small beginning grew a giant tree of research which has drawn serious specialists
from every continent to Hazaribagh and included hundreds of academic studies in
international universities. Out of these grew the tribal art work I began with
the village women which has been exhibited in
many European countries, UK,
Canada,
USA,
Australia,
etc. The full stone tool suites from the Lower, Middle and Upper palaeolithic
(Achaeulian, Levallois flaking) and including microliths, stone mother goddess figurines etc. have been
catalogued and presented in my Sanskriti museum in Hazaribagh.The Damodar basin
has been shown to be one of the most important archaeological sites not only of
India but of the world because it not only offers the whole palaeolithic story
but the emerging rise of man from the palaeolithic and his evolution into the people
who inhabit the valley today. It is an
“Avatar” kind of story. It has been written about, filmed, and its story
displayed to millions around the world. It is gravely unfortunate that the
Karanpura valley has been chosen by the government to be completely mined for
coal by opencast method.
After bringing to light the valuable archaeological and
cultural heritage of this rich agricultural and fertile valley with its vast
forests and hilly ranges I pointed out its nature of being a rift valley akin
to Olduvai gorge in Tanzaniya. The rift
formation of the Karanpura valley evidenced by the vertical scarp of the
Hazaribagh plateau to its north and Ranchi plateau to its south upon
examination by experts evidenced a pebbled shoreline at a height of about 150 vertical
feet showing it was in the deep past a vast lake contained by the eastern range
of Sati Hills which formed the trap, and left a pebbled shoreline along the vertical scarps. The
Hazaribagh plateau is set on a very ancient bed going back millions of years and tectonic movement has loosened the rubble
in the vertical scarps above the valley
revealing in their lower portions over a hundred and fifty feet
below the plateau the oldest chopping
tools of Homo habilis in the
Karanpura valley. Additionally, the oldest stone tools have been exposed in the
vertical scarps and gorges cut by streams like Dudhi Nala in Chapri above Isco as
well as more recent stone tools along the stream. With regard to the lake I
believe it must have melted after the last ice age and that the deep caves which
were formed by erosion were later to be painted by the hunters…
As the years progressed I began studying the relations
between the Karanpura valley and known migration patterns both of the tribes
which inhabit the valley today and the
nomadic hunting-gathering forest autochthones who pass in and out and
were in all probability the direct descendants of the earliest hunters. In fact
these people claim the rock paintings in the caves that surround the valley
were painted by their ancestors. I found convincing reasons for believing that
the old migration trails were later become pilgrim routes facilitating
travelers going from Benares to Orissa. I also found deep connections through
the various primitive mural art forms in the valley with those practiced by villages on the
Hazaribagh plateau. In a dating of flake tools from a megalithic site in the
valley I found that these megalith builders had brought flakes from the
neighbouring Hazaribagh plateau scarps at around 85,000BP and that the
fresh chipping was done around 5,500 BP.
! This deduction was made possible through a series of spectrometric datings conducted at the Palaeolithic
Research Institute in Dresden
by my associate Dr Volkmar Geupel in
2004. Much of the region’s pre-history has yielded many of its secrets to my
researches. Its now famous mural painting traditions of Khovar and Sohrai have
also yielded to continual searches and several thousand motifs both in the rock
paintings as well as the village mural house wall painting traditions have been
drawn and compared with motifs in other parts of India and the world. This project
is currently being pursued by colleagues at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.
The deeper connections between palaeolithic peoples and
their descendants, and in turn handed down to our generations present a
fascinating field for study and research. The living connection between the
rock paintings in the hills and the village wall paintings by tribal women is a
fascinating reflection of forms when we
realize that the traditions have evidenced themselves in Catal-hoyuk , a
Neolithic settlement on the plains of
central Turkey
on the Anatolian plateau over eight thousand years ago. This ancient settlement in which matrilineal
agricultural societies built the largest known Neolithic settlement, its
architecture and building, and wall paintings by women, could not but have come from places like the Karanpura valley in
India.
To me those traditions could not have
come to central or eastern India from that side at that date. Conversely, we
are informed by dedicated researchers like Sarat Chandra Roy that at a more
recent date the Mundas and their kin came from northern India to
Chotanagpur. They were a people with megalith raising traditions, but those
traditions appeared in Chotanagpur thousands of years before and went to north India from the
east. The ancient palaeolithic roots of Chotanagpur’s human evolution long
predates anything found in northwestern India. Many tribes may have been
driven back to these eastern forested fastnesses by invading tribes from the north but long before this
the north had been inhabited by eastern tribes either through the Satpuras,
Gangetic valley, or the sub -montane Himalayan foothills from earliest times.
The megalithic culture began long before the iron age and
evidenced its continuity in the Asura culture of South Ranchi among a people
who were iron smelters of mundaric origin whose linguistic origins and physical
identification place them among Southeast Asian and Turainian groups coming
into India during the upper palaeolithic period via the Chin Hills and through
the Brahmaputra valley. In my opinion we are witnessing in the archaeology of
Jharkhand a profoundly important field for study and researches as we find the megalithic culture was using chipped
flake tools and that the overlapping of the older palaeolithic period was
through the neo-chalcolithic phase emerging in iron age times. A divide
between the older and the newer period may be found, and this idea is
reinforced by a distinct stylistic division appearing at about this time in the
rock paintings. If the village mural tradition is indeed connected to the art
of the hunters it must have been begun among the first sedentarized
agricultural societies around 4,000B.C. That we have in Jharkhand ancient
tribal art forms six thousand years old is a staggering thought when we realize
that the art of the early hunters in the
caves is at least five thousand years older.
When I learned from the nomadic Birhors (who call
themselves uthlu, which
means”wanderer” that their ancestors painted the rock art in the highest hills
I was able to understand how they still are able to draw similar forms in the
soft dust of their settlements ! I spent decades studying their ethnobotany --
knowledge of food and medicinal plants—their hunting and folklore. It dawned
upon me while I was thus employed that I was witnessing the living stone age
although they can barter their catch with local villages for iron implements etc.
Their knowledge of survival trapping and food-gathering was a source of
profound inspiration when I realized they managed to live without destroying
anything !!
In South Ranchi S.C.Roy’s researches of Asura sites as
pointed out have established the connect between the palaeolithic and the
megalithic just before the rapid evolution of wheel turned pottery, copper
and tin smelted bronze, and discovery of iron, coupled with agriculture
to create a new economic order. But the exchange economy which was slowly
emerging between the self supporting forest peoples like the Birhor and the
sedentarized villages dependent upon seasonal agriculture had not reached a
stage that involved any sort of money. The artisan castes developed according
to their crafts but exchange continued right uptil the imposition of outside
rule( long pre-dating the British arrival). The bronze casting tradition of the Malhars, the iron-smithy of the
lohras, the pots of the Kumhars, the basketry of Turis, the oil extraction by
Telis, the carpentry of Barhis etc. were forms of production hardly necessary
for the hunter-gatherers who traded amongst themselves. The production of iron
made the Asuras stronger than others and these and other tribes were feared by
the Vedic entrants to forest India.
As long as the villages had their own self rule system through councils, as
long as they were in control of their own farmlands, forests, religious
institutions, festivals and sacred places, and could practice their own customs
they were strong and safe from intrusion by outsiders who would exploit them. But
slowly the scythe of Time entered in the form of gift-offerers – those who come
with promises of giving real development for the people but are in fact
industrial wolves in the sheep’s clothing of development.
In eastern central India in the Chotanagpur plateau an area geographically identified with the
young state of Jharkhand in the Damodar
and Suvarnarekha valleys – and even down into the Bengal plains through which
the Damodar flows, and in other river valleys such as Kasai and Kamsavati –and
adjoining Purulia in Bengal, Simlipal in
Orissa, and in East Singhbhum we see the
impacts of modern industrial development. The stone age sites in Chandil and
Ghatsila have had to face industrial development. The series of big dams on the
Damodar have completely destroyed the lower valley, and
similar dams built on the
Suvarnarekha which was rich in Acheulian and Abbevilian stone tool culture have
wiped out a glorious region of ancient Jain heritage in over seventy temple
sites, wiping out the forests and submerging palaeolithic as well as historic remains
without the slightest remorse or twinge of conscience expressed by the
government. The local administration is
powerless. Near Dhanbad, twenty-five
temples in a group once considered by British archaeologists (Block, Beglar,
Cunningham, Marshall) as the finest example of early Jain architecture – at
Telkupi , between 1957 and 1961 these lovely stone and brick temples of unknown
provenance in their earliest phase since the whole area is associated with
earliest Jain saints like Mahavira and Parasvanatha twenty-five centuries ago – these temples were
heartlessly submerged without salvage or documentation under the eye of the watchful
eye of the state archaeology department and the appreciative gaze of the
government even when the architect of modern India , Jawaharlal Nehru, was
alive. Today one temple of this priceless cluster – Telkupi – stands proudly
showing but its upper portion in the silted up foreshore of this dam. The dam
long since lost its hydro-electricity potential. The Adivasis or tribals of the
region – chiefly – Bhumias, disappeared half a century ago and the fabled
forests of Manbhum are no more…Through the forests which remain lie the remains of broken Jain statues in
groups like relics of an unknown past
.This has been India’s crowning shame in the name of development . Having been
aware of this the campaign to save Karanpura valley began with the residual
archaeological remains of this once culturally vibrant are of Jharkhand, but it
was to make the region distinctive in an almost unknown discipline:
palaeo-archaeology. Today Anthropo-archaeology is an emerging discipline in
Indian universities and it is about time the universities concentrated ground
level studies in threatened river valleys and basins. Proper documentation of
archaeological remains has not been done in Jharkhand let alone the discovery
of new sites, or the protection and conservation of existing sites; and at the
present rate of destruction of archaeological remains in the name of
development soon nothing will be left to prove that these once existed at all. All
over Jharkhand the picture that emerges is the same. The Rajmahal hills in the
Santal Parganas area represent the most important fossil site in India. Massive
state sponsored stone mining is all but completely destroying the region. At
the same time a museum for the fossils has been built in a Jesuit school in
Sahibgunj. This is the state of affairs in almost every major site. In a
similar fashion stone mining is eating up the Kaimur range in the Rohtas
district of the neighboring state of Bihar
which is an extension of Chotanagpur in the Vindhyan formation of mountains. In
the Santal Parganas area famous in an earlier age for the Santal Rebellions of
1857 there are a series of vast new opencast mines in Godda and Rajmahal. In
Godda, Rajmahal, Sahibganj, Pakur,Paharpur and Maluti there are palaeolithic remains
and these continue down through the
chalcolithic and Neolithic period to the iron age. Environmental and now
archaeological clearance for all big mines is guaranteed by the fact that
huge investments are made even before
the clearances are obtained , and
afterwards the courts are unable to block the mining because of “sunk
investments”. This is government policy
in all development projects in the name of so called national interests.
Dr. Kalyan Chakrabarty, Not long ago Director General of
the National Museum in Delhi , wrote in the Sanskriti Hazaribagh
guest book, “The museum can only be an
extension of a living landscape, not a mirror of its extinction.” (10th Feb.,2005)
Strong words indeed. If only the government could
understand their significance. Wherever local museums may be found in India not far
away is the extinction of the landscape, the remains of which have landed up in
the museum. Destruction of the landscape through the ideology of development
has destroyed archaeological India.
Even as it has destroyed tribal India.
Fortunately in the Karanpura valley in the Damodar basin the struggle to
present ecological, archaeological and indigenous/human rights issues began
long ago and built a firewall against total and sudden obliteration of the
landscape.
In the southernmost part of the Chotanagpur in south
Ranchi is a densely forested area with West Singhbhum in the eastwhere
attention was first drawn to a palaeolithic series of stone tools and chert
flakes near Chaibasa by Captain Beeching in 1868(A.K.Ghosh, 1970:4).This will
be found to be connected with the similar remains of the Mahanadi valley in the
south in the state of Orissa, and in the west with river valleys and rock art
in Chhatisgarh state. The entire region from West Bengal
and Orissa in the east to Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh in the west in the
Saal forests areas will be found to be of an archaic level of human occupation
stretching back from the most recent times to the Lower
Palaeolithic. Man was evolving in Africa,
Europe and India at similar periods and
strikingly similar manifestations of this evidence which we can understand
through the study of stone tools they
left behind. By 150,000 a n evolved form called Homo sapienshad evolved and spread from Africa through Asia and
Europe and about thirty thousand years ago attained a stage called Neandertal
in Europe (from remains found in a cave in the Neander valley in Germany),
and such a type and manifested itself in
what is now the Middle East and was also surely manifesting itself in South
Asia (i.e.India and Pakistan)These proto-humans were making large stone tools
like hand-axes and cleavers.
Two of the prolific stone tool sites of early man are
bordering the North Chotanagpur plateau
overlooking the Ganges valley in the north.
The sites are Jethian valley in Gaya
district and Kharagpur range in Monghyr district which is an extension of the
plateau. The Jethian site is actually in
the Gangetic plain where the Jamunia river has exposed a Pleistocene deposit of conglomerate and mottled clay to a depth
of several metres, revealing early stone age tools (12,000 BP)The area is also
rich in quartzite hand-axes , cleavers, choppers, flakes and cores and
evidencing the Levallois stone tool making technique. The site may representthe
first advent of early man toward the Ganges
valley. The Middle Palaeolithic finds from the Kharagpur range in Monghyr district is rich in stone tools
evidencing early man. Not far away is
the Middle Palaeolithic site in Jamalpur
, and similar Middle Palaeolithic industries continue along the edges of
the North Chotanagpur plateau from Jharkhand
state into West Bengal in Midnapur,
Bankura,Birbhum, Burdwan,and Purulia where theey join up with the East
Singhbhum Middle Palaeolithic series in East Singhbhum.
From the observations made in this paper
it will become abundantly clear that the Chotanagpur plateau not only
represents Early Man ( i.e. from 150,000 years ago) but from as far back as two
million years ago since Olduwan /Pleistocene type stone tools of the Sone and
Soan (Pakistan)series made by Homo
habilis have been found in the upper Damodar river in Karanpura valley.
It is important to remember that the earliest apes (from
which our human species may or may not have directly evolved)have left remains
in the Siwalik ranges north of Chandigarh
many millions of years ago. Ramapithecus was
an ape similar to Australopithecus in
South Africa.
In the Museum of Man at Chandigarh
one can view the oldest stone tools in India and their evolving types. Modern
humans are not supposed to have descended directly from Ramapithecus which existed over 15MYBP. According
to modern theory the apes from which
human bipeds evolved were Australopithecine
(3.8 million-1.7 MYBP) in East and South Africa which were makings
tone tools around 1.7 million years back. Their stone tools
were flakes formed by knocking two large pebbles together. However, in the Soan valley in the Potwar plateau of western Punjab similar proto-humans
were making similar tools known as Oldowan( after Olduvai) tools having
several faces which were made perhaps
earlier(2MYBP). (Irfan Habib,Prehistory of India,2001, pp.21-27)In the
lowest levels found under the Hazaribagh plateau in Karanpura valley similar
stone tools have been found and require deeper examination which could make it one of the most important sites
in the world.
It is theorized by modern experts that the human race is
descended from proto-humans in East Africa.
Their migrations have been described as “candelabra” or bifurcating, one
migration coming south-eastward to South Asia
and the other going north-westward to Europe.
During the course of their long migration via the Horn of Africa to India they were
obviously evolving and their journey was in fact an expansion due to population
increases and exploiting new hunting grounds since they had no permanent home.
These early men are believed to have been the first proper humans evolved
around the time of Homo neandertalis who was found in West
Asia to have buried his dead with flowers , ornaments and food , and
was already making complex flint tools. This early man obviously had spiritual
beliefs and practices. An early stone mother goddess found in North Jharkhand –
a small stone figurine resembling the Venus found in Willendorf in Austria on
the Danube is dated about the same date – 20,000BP (B.K.Thapar,1996). The
Neandertal’s descendants in Europe were
painting caves with images of bison and
horses about the same time. These were societies that depended for their
survival only on hunting and food-gathering. Europe was then completely an
ice-bound continent, while India was in a tropical ice age period during which
the sub-continent was not covered by a thick ice sheet. We should expect the evolution of man in India to have
been more advanced than Europe since agriculture and metals were in evidence in Southeast Asia thousands of years earlier than in
post-glacial Europe. Jharkhand would be an
excellent field for the carrying out of such field researches. It could also
bring a new focus on the importance of the state both for foreign interest in
the region and tourism.
Today there is an important revolution taking place in
the understanding of intelligence and its applications. The brain size of
Neandertal man was the same as humans today despite the long time span between them. The enlarging of the
brain does not signify an increase in intelligence as it is understood (H.D.Sankalia,Prehistory of India, p.191;
Alexis Carrel,Reflections on Life, 1972,p.71). Palaeolithic man had a very
large brain because his skull was very big but he was not more intelligent according
to our present understanding of what constitutes intelligence in action or
behavior. The question that confronts us is “Have we evolved ?.” Our destructiveness to our habitat, to other
human societies, and the scale at which warfare and ecological degradation are
increasing would point in the opposite direction ! Modern development has been equated with
evolution, and we are to ask ourselves whether such evolution is at the expense of human
societies and their natural environment. Do our actions represent an evolving
species ?
After completing this paper I have just received
information that Reliance’s Tilaiya
ultra mega power project (UMPP) being promoted by the state government, is planned
to be built at Tilaiya fifty kilometers
north of Hazaribagh town and will be receiving its coal from the new opencast
coal mine planned by NTPC (National Thermal Power Corpn.) at Keridari between
Barkagaon and Tandwa in the North Karanpura valley. I had seen this disaster
coming (as I had seen the earlier mines at Piperwar destroy the living
landscape).This area where the opencast mine will be made is a pristine
forested region, once part of the elephant corridors which I could not save, and watered by several
streams and rivers including the Salgah
river which is a tributary of the Barki near Tandwa where a big dam is being
built. It is also one of the major palaeolithic site in Karanpura. Thisregion
contains several villages and in the
hills above it some of the most important rock art sites such as Nautangwa
Pahar rock art caves. In the middle of what will become the Keridari opencast mine are the Chunatari Caves
which suppied the kaolin and white earth (
charak-matti) for the surface
plaster of village houses on which Khovar and Sohrai paintings are cut or
drawn. I had seen this disaster coming for a long time, and now finally it has
arrived. Tilaiya was India’s first big dam built during the mid 1950s. I was
thirteen then, and saw its construction. Scores of villages were displaced and
today a vast forest is a large expanse of water of which a third has silted up
and is useless. The dam cease full power production decades ago. From a survey
done by my colleague Ruchi Pant about a decade back in the Damodar Valley
Corporation offices here in Hazaribagh I found that the rehabilitation and
resettlement (R&R)of the displaced villagers was never fully carried out. I
have a DVC booklet of the times showing
little boys in white school uniforms then in fashion – wide shorts, shoes etc.
This became the face of all further Indian power projects.
Goodbye Tilaiya,
goodbye Salgah, goodbye Nautangwa…I think the reader can feel the pain in my
heart. It is only such pain which can save our disappearing world.
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