ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the some Indic cultural models used as explanatory tools by historians and anthropologists. The cultural geography of Kashmir was similarly devised by co-opting the entire range of Vedic-Puranic goddesses by associating them with rivers, creating thereby divine hierarchy. Similarly, in Chamba, an alternative cultural space was devised by Sanskritizing the local cultural ethos. Like Kashmir, linkages with the sub-continental cosmologies were appropriated – Sanskritizing the local or parochializing the Sanskritic. Like culture, there is not one dominant model; the novelty is in their creative usage as methodological tool, in tandem or in isolation of each other. When we think about 'culture' in the context of early Indian history, the nearest comparable term that comes to our mind is Samskri: a base word that defines civilization. Having never visited India, Redfield located peasant local communities, which he understood as connected with other local communities through the intricate network of castes, marriages and kinship spread over generations.
