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.

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 and Allchin, 1997: 222).
 * 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
 * Allchin FR, Allchin B. 1997. Origins of a civilization: the prehistory and early archaeology of South Asia. New Delhi: Viking.

B

 * The Painted Gray Ware (PGW) type of pottery was especially promoted by B. B. Lai (1978) as best representing the Aryan presence.... Objections had already been raised, however. Chakrabarti (1968), for example, pointed out that sites like Hastinaput contain evidence of rice use and of the presence of domestic pig and buffalo alongside the PGW, which are all features that have been ascribed an eastern origin, as opposed to the traditional northwestern origin of the Aryans. Moreover, B. K. Thapar (1970, 156) remarked that had the PGW been symptomatic of the Aryans coming in from the Northwest, then the same pottery type would be expected to occur in Iran and Afghanistan. It does not, which threw serious doubts on Lal's thesis. As far as archaeologists like Shaffer are concerned, "there is no connection between the PGW and the 'Aryans'"; it is an indigenous culture. Accordingly, "If PGW has an indigenous South Asian origin it cannot, therefore, represent an intrusive culture with a western origin." Most important from the perspective of this chapter, "this conclusion . . . means that we have no archaeological culture which might represent the Aryan phenomenon" (Shaffer 1986, 232).
 * Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.


 * D. K. Chakrabarti (1968) decades ago voiced the by now familiar complaint among South Asian archaeologists that such an a priori precommitment blinkered and actually hampered proper examination of the archaeological material in its own light: "To what extent has this Aryan hypothesis contributed to a better under- standing 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" (358).
 * Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

C

 * 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. Similarly, the idea that the Aryan homeland was India should be discarded forthwith. To harp on the ‘glory of ancient India’, one does not have to brandish it as the Aryan homeland. One should have enough faith in one’s country without this kind of mumbo-jumbo. 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

 * 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


 * 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


 * 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


 * 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.

F

 * No trace either of the skillful turned pottery of the Oxus civilization: the vases used by the Vedic priests are made of wood or unturned ceramic. The black ceramics from Swat attributed to the Āryas, the gray ceramics (PGW, Painted Gray Ware), which Indian archaeologists consider as the best marker of their presence in the Indus and Ganges valleys, do not in any way recall what is found in Togolok or Gonur.
 * 806 Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.

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.


 * 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

S

 * 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


 * “the discovery of the Late Harappan traits during the PGW period … It is clear that there is a continuation of the Harappan tradition until the onset of the PGW culture towards the end of second millennium BCE” (Kumar et al., 2009: 114).
 * 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
 * Kumar M, Shinde V, Uesugi A, Dangi V, Kumar S, Kumar V. 2009. Excavations at Madina, district Rohtak, Haryana 2007–08: a report. In: Osada T, Uesugi A, editors. Linguistics, archaeology and the human past. Occasional Paper 7. Kyoto (Japan): Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. pp 25–177.


 * [At Alamgirpur in western Uttar Pradesh] “no stratigraphic gap between Harappan and PGW levels” exists and period IB at this site has been labeled “Harappan–PGW Mix” (R.N. Singh et al., 2013: 32, 37).
 * 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
 * Singh RN, Petrie CA, Joglekar PP, Neogi S, Lancelotti C, … Pathak A. 2013. Recent excavations at Alamgirpur, Meerut district: a preliminary report. Man and Environment 38(1): 32–54


 * “At present, the archaeological record indicates no cultural discontinuities separating PGW from the indigenous protohistoric [Harappan] culture” (Shaffer, 1984: 85).
 * 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
 * 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