Introduction

The crescentic alluvium that constitutes the Ganga valley is the dominating topographical feature of north India, in much the same way as the Ganga river is of special significance in the lives and traditions of the inhabitants of India. (Readers should here note that both Ganga and the Ganges refer to the same river, with the former term used traditionally in India.) The lie of the land is deceptively simple: the river flows through and across an immense plain, a stretch of alluvium that covers more than a million square kilometers from the Yamuna river in the west to the Bay of Bengal towards the east. Although its topography appears to be fairly homogeneous, in fact, the valley is marked by physiographic and historical complexity. Some preliminary issues may be clarified at the outset.

First, a clarification about terminology needs to be offered. Much of the Ganga valley, so called because it represents the infilling between the Himalayas to the north and the central peninsular revetment to the south, is low and flat. For this reason, it is frequently described as the Ganga plain. The terms ‘valley’ and ‘plain’ will be used interchangeably here. The Ganga valley itself, in terms of geology, structure, relief, and physiography forms part of a larger macrodivision - the Great Plains of India. This seemingly featureless plain covers some 700 000 km2 with the Ganga and Brahmaputra forming the main drainage axes and a physiography that varies from the semi-arid landscape of the Rajasthan plain to the humid Assam valley in the east (Figure 1). The flat terrain of the Ganga valley, in turn, has generally been subdivided into three segments made up of the upper Ganga plain, the middle Ganga Plain, and the lower Ganga plain.

No marked physical breaks which would provide a rational basis for its demarcation into these tracts can be identified in the Ganga valley. Generally, the upper Gangetic plain which includes the Yamuna-Ganga doab (land between two rivers) has a drier climate with a greater concentration of wheat cultivation while rice predominates in the middle Gangetic zone. The humid lower Ganga valley extends from the foot of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling area to the Bay of Bengal, with the bulk of it forming a deltaic plain that extends across eastern India and Bangladesh. There are also differences in the nature of the soil. Although this is alluvium-based throughout the valley, more loam and clay can be observed in the upper Ganga plain. The loams increase and the sands decrease in the central plain, while further east, the soil is marked by finer textural sequences - from loams to very fine silty clays - with some tracts of the old alluvium in the Bengal delta having lateritic clay. These three tracts are further subdivided into smaller units. For instance, in the lower Ganga valley, the Mahananda plain is marked by old alluvial formations and historical links with Tibet and the Brahmaputra valley. This makes it a different subregion from the coastal and related estuarine regions that dominate the lower Ganga tract, through which the whole of the Ganga plain was open to the traffic from the coast. It is perhaps unnecessary to delineate all these subregions in a geographical overview of this nature. What needs to be remembered is that regional divisions and subdivisions within the valley have been based on a variety of factors that include landforms, climate, and location.

Second, the cultural gradients that make up the archaeology of the Ganga plain can be as varied as the physical subdivisions. For one, its various segments were colonized at different points of time and by groups occupying diverse subsistence and cultural niches. In the middle Ganga segment that stretches from Allahabad to Banaras, the first settlement clusters were those of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Early Holocene, while further north and south, the pioneer colonizers were advanced agricultural communities. In the case of the Yamuna-Ganga doab, a broad-based subsistence pattern coincides with the

Figure 1 Divisions of the Great Plains (after Singh 2001-02): 1, Punjab-Rajasthan plain; 2, Upper and middle Ganga plain; 3, Lower Ganga plain; 4, Assam Valley.

Presence of sites related to the Harappan tradition of the late third-early second millennia BC. On the question of the evolution of a productive iron technology as well, the chronological spectrum is fairly wide. In the upper Gangetic plain, iron was present in an early second millennium BC context while in the lower Gangetic valley, iron-bearing horizons become visible from c. 1200 BC and later. Similarly, the evolution of early historic cities was uneven. In the Indian state of Bihar, the antiquity of urban sites along the Ganga in the south, going back to c. sixth century BC if not earlier, seems to be much clearer than for those that are clustered north of the Ganga.

This archaeological complexity does not make for a straightforward, unified picture; on the contrary, there are multilineal lines of development. The variety and depth is impressive and amply documented in the relevant archaeological literature. It is also one which cannot be seamlessly integrated into what is known from the earliest stratum of Indian literature. The Ganga valley and its colonization figures prominently in what are described as the texts of the later Vedic tradition. The large corpus is poorly dated (suggested dates range from c. 2000 BC to 600 BC) but it certainly goes back to the time period of many advanced agricultural communities that will be described here. The problem is that Vedic images of early colonization and agriculture cannot be satisfactorily integrated into what is known about the archaeology of this region. So, for example, while there are allusions in the Satapatha Brahmana (c. 700 BC) about agriculture being carried to the banks of the Gandak river in Bihar by the putative Aryans in the first half of the first millennium BC, excavations have revealed that in the third millennium BC itself, there were rice-cultivating agricultural communities in that area. For understanding the ancient settlement geography of the Ganga valley, it is better to focus on the various features of the archaeological column and its various branches, rather than seek ‘confirmation’ for religious texts.