Hindoli Group of Rocks in the Eastern Fringe of the Aravalli-Delhi Orogenic Belt-Archean Secondary Greenstone Belt or Proterozoic Supracrus tals?

The very low-grade metamorphic sequence of volcano-sedimentary rocks, sandwiched between the platform sediments of the Vindhyan Supergroup to the east and the Banded Gneissic Complex (BGC) to the west, in the eastern fringe of the Aravalli-Delhi orogenic belt, has remained a stratigraphic enigma in the Precambrian geology of Rajasthan. This sequence known earlier as the Gwalior ‘series’ and in contemporary literature as the Hindoli Group, has been considered by several workers as a Proterozoic supracrustal unit and by some others, as an Archean secondary greenstone belt, based purely on geological considerations. U-Pb zircon geochronology was conducted to find an answer to this controversy on samples of felsic volcanics, conformably intercalated with the Hindoli sediments and hence, considered contemporaneous with them. Zircons from a sample of massive rhyodacite gave a concordia age of 1854k7 Ma though zircons from a sample of felsic tuff gave a wide range of ages between 3259-1877 Ma. Careful consideration of the nature of the samples and their constituent zircons suggests that the Hindoli Group rocks represent a low-grade Proterozoic supracrustal cover sequence in the eastern part of the Bhilwara belt, broadly synchronous to the Aravalli-Bhilwara sedimentation around 1.8 Ga.