# 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.
Arranged alphabetically by author or source: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

## A

* Such items of material culture [as the PGW] are very rarely the private monopoly of any one ethnic, racial, let alone linguistic group, but are the products of craftsmen, working within traditions, and serving whole communities.
** Allchin FR, Allchin B. 1997. Origins of a civilization: the prehistory and early archaeology of South Asia. New Delhi: Viking. quoted in M. Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence

## C

* To what extent has this Aryan hypothesis contributed to a better understanding of the relevant Indian archaeological data? In two cases at least. . . the Painted Grey ware and Ahar cultures this seems to have actually distracted attention from the basic task of a proper evaluation and analysis of the cultures themselves.
** Chakrabarti, D. K. 1968. "The Aryan Hypothesis in Indian Archaeology." Indian Studies Past and Present 9:343-358. quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.
* The idea that the Painted Grey Ware was an Aryan pottery has caused considerable damage to the study of ancient Indian history in north India because two or three generations of students who were raised on a strong diet of this theory in the many books written for them in Hindi accepted this idea almost as an axiom.
** Whose Past and Which Past? The Warring Factions of the Ancient Indian Historical Research, by Dilip K Chakrabarti, also in NATION FIRST: Essays in the Politics of Ancient Indian Studies , 2014
* D.D. Kosambi, an Indian communist icon to whom it is almost obligatory for government of India historians to pay homage, went to the extent of calling Painted Grey Ware ‘Puru-Kuru ceramics’.
** Whose Past and Which Past? The Warring Factions of the Ancient Indian Historical Research, by Dilip K Chakrabarti, also in NATION FIRST: Essays in the Politics of Ancient Indian Studies , 2014

## E

* 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

## L

* ...nothing in the archeological record suggests that the Ganges plain society was radically discontinuous from its Indus predecessor. Nor is there any independent archeological evidence for a massive intrusion of foreigners from the northwest. The suggestion in parts of the recent archeological literature that such evidence does exist is quite misleading. The “Painted Grey Ware Culture” of these writers would never have been interpreted as such if they had not started out by treating the Rig Veda as a history book.
** Sir Edmund Leach. Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

## S

* At present, the archaeological record indicates no cultural discontinuities separating PGW from the indigenous protohistoric [Harappan] culture.
** Shaffer JG. 1984. The Indo‐Aryan invasions: cultural myth and archaeological reality. In: Lukacs JR, editor. The people of South Asia: the biological anthropology of India, Pakistan, and Nepal. New York: Plenum Press. pp 77–90 . Jim Shaffer quoted in M. Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence
* There is no connection between the PGW and the 'Aryans'... If PGW has an indigenous South Asian origin it cannot, therefore, represent an intrusive culture with a western origin... this conclusion . . . means that we have no archaeological culture which might represent the Aryan phenomenon.
** Jim Shaffer. 1986. "Cultural Development in the Eastern Punjab." In Studies in the Archaeology of India and Pakistan (195-235). Ed. Jerome Jacobson. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

## U

* PGW can be regarded as one of the ceramics of the Iron Age North India which emerged, developed and declined in the socio‐cultural contexts during the late second and early first millennia BCE. However, there are many problems to be solved for better understanding the significance of PGW.
** Akinori Uesugi, "A Study on the Painted Grey Ware", in Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, 6 (2018), p. 2