R. D. BANERJI, M.A.
Late Manindra Chandra Nundy Professor of Ancient India History and Culture, Benaras Hindu University.
Modern research has greatly extended our knowledge of early India. As the "miracle of Greece" no longer obtains in consequence of the revelations of the archaeologists in Crete and elsewhere in the Near East, so there is in India no longer an "Aryan miracle".
It has been established that a wonderful pre-Aryan civilization existed in the Indus valley many centuries before the period of the Aryan intrusions, and that it was of higher and more complex character than can be gathered from the patriotic writers who celebrated the achievements of the famous Vedic Age. The discovery at Harappa on the ravi in Montgomery district of the Panjab of "seals" lettered in a strange script, which has been un-earthed from time to time, presented to modern scholars a problem that aroused speculations on the one hand and scepticism regarding these on the other, but ultimately led to the thrusting open of the door to forgotten wonders of antiquity.
In this volume it is show that the before the period ;of the Musalman intrusions there were prosperous, progressive and enterprising Aryo-Dravidan communities in southern India, who not only extended their sway towards the moth, but to farther India, the Ductch East Indies and Malaya. Greeks, Romans and Arabs has long trades with and influenced Dravidian seaport communities, and Aryo-Dravidian seafarers and colonizers carried from time to time the elements of a complex Indian civilization with Western features to distant places, including Cambodia, whence, it would appear, there emerged at intervals fresh carriers of some of the elements of the specialized and locally developed Aryo-Dravidian colonial culture to even more distant areas.