Indian art has been the product of Indian culture as the Greek art has been the product of Greek culture or the Roman art has been the product of Rom… - Swaraj Prakash Gupta

Unfortunately, the horse has become a bone of contention between two groups of historians dealing with the 'Aryan Problem' in India, the so-called Nationalists and the so-called Marxists. The former, basing their views on the archaeological findings, maintain that the people of the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization may have been the Vedic Aryans who are known in history for their chariots driven by horses, while the latter hold that the archaeological findings are 'minor', ' limited', and 'marginal', and hold onto the age-old view that the people of the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization were not horse- users, hence could not be the Vedic Aryans. To say the least, this is a strange logic. For the scientists, Indus-Sarasvati people were definitely horse-users, whether they were Vedic Aryans or not hardly concerns them. But Marshall certainly erred gro.55ly when he observed that the Indus people could not be Vedic Aryan because they were not familiar with the horse, let alone its users. Incidentally, in the Vedas the people are never called a.Warohis, that is, horsemen, they are credited only with chariots driven by horses. They ate sheep, etc. but not horse meat or camel meat. Hence, it is not surprising that the horse and camel bones are only rarely found in excavations.

Habitational areas yield bones mostly of those animals which were killed and eaten—the horse, the camel, the elephant are only rarely represented in actual bones, very few indeed at every site, simply because these animals are not likely to have been as regularly eaten as sheep and goats as well as fish whose bones are abundantly found at all Indus-Sarasvati settlements. Wheeler seems to accept this position and never uses the absence of horse in Indus-Sarasvati art to prove that the civilization was non-Aryan or Dravidian.

It would therefore, indicate quite clearly that there were at least two phases in the Kot Diji ot the Early Indus-Sarasvati culture : Old (3500-3000 b.c.) and New (3000-2700 B.c.) The period between 3500 B.c. and 3000 B.C. was very crucial— the Early Indus- Civilization was spreading far and wide, informing us that it Was the proto-urban phase in which new townships were getting established in and also beyond the Indus and Sarasvati basins; the large cities of Harappa, Mohenjodaro, etc. were the culmination of the long process of urbanisation and not its beginning.