This book renders an account of our knowledge of Indian prehistory from the earliest times to the settlement of the Aryans in the north-west in the second half of the second millennium B.C. It does not pretend to be more than a stocktaking of our incomplete evidence and interpretation, as a preliminary and incentive to further work in the field. Some form of working hypothesis is essential, however drastically it may have to be revised, and I have therefore attempted to indicate what