India before Indus

The Forgotten Eastern Chapter in India’s Prehistory

The story of India’s peopling is most often told from the northwest—from the Harappans who raised cities on the Indus, from the Aryans who composed the hymns of the Rigveda, from the Greeks who marched with Alexander through the Khyber. Yet this conventional map of origins leaves one corner of the land shrouded in silence—the northeast. Long before the first bricks of Harappa were laid or the first Sanskrit verse was sung, a quieter but equally transformative current was already flowing into the subcontinent, not from the Oxus or the Caspian steppes, but from the valleys of the Yangtze and the Mekong.

It was here, across the lush hills of Assam and Meghalaya, that a people from the southeast of China arrived between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. They were the Austroasiatics—rice cultivators, toolmakers, and early speakers of a language that would one day crystallize into Santali, Mundari, Khasi, and many others we barely acknowledge today. Unlike the pastoral migrants of later epochs, these were farmers. They brought not horses or chariots, but grains and words. Their journey marks one of the earliest known migrations into India after the first Africans, and though their story survives only in genes, speech, and soil, its imprint is vast.

From them came the domestication of rice in its most enduring form, the linguistic threads that tie Santali to Khmer and Vietnamese, and perhaps even the earliest whispers of metallurgy. The Munda words that would later rise again in Sanskrit, the Asur smiths of Jharkhand who would help forge the Iron Age, and the megaliths they raised in Orissa and the Northeast that would prefigure the earliest Hindu temples.

To view India’s making only through the Indus or the Aryan lens is to overlook the first revolution that took root along the Brahmaputra—the revolution of rice, iron, and language. This is the story of India’s forgotten beginning.

From Yangtze to Brahmaputra

This story begins about ten thousand years ago. It is not the true beginning though because the subcontinent had already been inhabited for at least sixty thousand years by the first immigrants from Africa. Those earliest settlers had long made the land their own, hunting wild buffalo and fishing in swollen rivers while gathering jāmuns in the forests that covered most of India. For tens of millennia life followed the same rhythm. Communities hunted, ate, and moved on. The subcontinent had its people, but they had remained largely untouched by anyone beyond their own. India was still sealed off from the world outside. That long isolation was about to end as the Pleistocene ice thawed.

Around ten thousand years ago a new movement began on the horizon. Across the mountains in the far northeast, new people started crossing into the subcontinent. They came down from the highlands and followed the rivers into the fertile plains of the Brahmaputra. The land they found was rich, green, and soaked in rain, a perfect refuge for anyone seeking new ground.