Ideas and Images: A Historical Interpretation of Eastern Vindhyan Rock Art, India

Ideas and Images argues that the development of symbols and signs informing scripts, mainly the idea of coding thoughts through symbols and images, has always been uniquely ‘historical.’ Rock art abuts and occupies long periods of time, from the Mesolithic, Neolithic-Chalcolithic, and Iron Age, to the medieval and colonial, in which the translation of indigenous thoughts was perfected through numerous mnemonic practices, some of them evidently to record in a surprisingly sophisticated historical oeuvre. These are ordered and direct representations of the ontological, philosophical, thought-object world of prehistoric or pre- or non-scripted communities. Such representations are better understood as so many graphic archives, and their temporality is broadly sequential, authentic, unique and historically contextualized since they record exceptional and everyday events, but also sometimes emotionally or humorously charged stories. The genre called ‘rock art’ is a successful and reliable record of interpretations accorded to society and the natural worlds of the past. The development of symbols informing scripts, or the idea of coding thoughts through symbols, was already in the domain of rock art thousands of years ago.

This work builds on the strength of recent historical and archaeological work arguing for the presence of a ‘historical sense’ in prehistory as the basis for including all prehistoric material as potentially of historical value. The rise of scripts in early parts of the historical era was therefore anticipated in earlier techniques of memorialization. Much of Vindhyan rock art came into existence during a period identified distinctly as historical, and it offers alternate perspectives and views of the ‘historical’. The book presents verifiable imagery and events in rock art. It is also postulated that it might be worth considering whether rock art influenced later symbolic forms in terracotta, pottery, sculpture, and coinage. Human, animal, design, decorative forms and imagery feature in all these chronologically later media, although such comparisons and relationships posited with rock art on a one-to-one basis would be misleading.