I
Introduction
There are two good reasons why a historical study of ancient India cannot realize its full potential on the basis of textual sources alone. First, the sources which have been used, beginning with the Rigveda, were not meant to be historical sources, and whatever historical information has been gleaned from them is not free from questions regarding their chronology, geographical applicability and even content. Except for the history of the kings of Kashmir, written by Kalhana in the twelfth century, there is no proper historical chronicle dating from the ancient period of Indian history, As H.C. Raychaudhuri wrote: ‘No Thucydides or Tacitus has left for posterity a genuine history of Ancient India.’1 K.A.N. Sastri wrote of ‘the utter impossibility of basing any part of the ancient history of India solely, or even primarily, upon literary evidence.’
Not only is there a paucity of professedly historical works, but of very few really ancient compositions do we know with certainty the time and place of origin. Great books which, like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, have for ages served as popular encyclopaedias of national culture, were frequently revised; the time, the authorship and the extent of such revisions are so obscure that it is hopeless to make an intelligent use of data drawn from these works. Lastly, in the few works of which we have definite knowledge in regard to authorship and provenance, a great amount of space is taken up by conventional descriptions, and it is seldom that we come across the plain downright statement of a fact.2
The problem of sources is not limited to the texts. It affects in good measure inscriptions, coins, sculpture, painting and architecture as well, although in these cases geography and chronology are not among the problems. The number of early inscriptions is severely limited. They increase in number only in the tenth–twelfth centuries, more in the south than in the rest of the subcontinent. But inscriptions are also textual compositions, and, like other textual compositions, devote a lot of space to conventional descriptions rather than to the enumeration of the event for which the inscription was intended in the first place. Coins come mostly from ‘hoards’—accidental, non-contextual discoveries which very often end up with the coin-dealers. A framework of the study of coins has no doubt emerged, but on many occasions the study of ancient Indian coins has not been able to proceed beyond a study of their design. The same is true of the specimens of art and architecture. They are concerned much more with the religious life of the day in different regions and less with the issues of individual authorship and patronage, precisely the issues which would have made them exciting as historical documents.
Over the last two centuries or more, scholars have certainly mapped out the different areas of ancient Indian history, but in many cases this has been no more than a preliminary sketch of the terrain. It is doubtful if they could do any better. When one remembers that there is no fine chronological grouping of the early Buddhist literature and that the whole of it can be put only in a broad period from the sixth to the second century BC, the best the historians of ancient India could do in this regard was to offer a generalized version of ‘Buddhist India’. Further, because the geographical perspective of these texts is limited mainly to the middle Ganga plain, this generalized version can apply not to India as a whole but only to the region which it invokes. This situation is true not merely of Buddhist India but virtually of all the epochs and geographical regions that we can think of in the context of ancient India. In fact, behind its academic curtain, there are vast stretches of darkness and too many loose ends. Under the circumstances, the pioneering modern historians of ancient India could only lay the outlines of the subject, moving from epoch to epoch and giving us a general scaffolding which somehow holds together. It could also be only a story of historical development in a more or less single line which, in fact, had the effect of blurring the multiple regional strands of India’s historical growth, at least for the early period.
Such basic limitations of the available sources cannot be wished away, nor can the situation improve by rephrasing the historical questions in the language of the social sciences. Whatever cloak a modern historian of ancient India may wear—that of an old-fashioned historian or of a modern social scientist—one cannot shed the burden of proof, and historical proof, as we all know, lies basically in the sources.
Archaeology can greatly expand the nature of the sources in the context of ancient India. Even in the areas with a much larger mass of detailed and rigorous textual documentation, archaeological research often leads to hitherto unperceived dimensions of the historical landscape. In the case of ancient India, where the basic quantum and the rigour of textual documentation are comparatively limited, archaeological research becomes more than ordinarily significant.
Archaeology can also greatly change the nature of historical questions, and it is here that the second reason of the significance of archaeology in ancient Indian historical research is rooted. Although modern archaeology is not afraid of handling a multitude of issues ranging from environment and subsistence to symbolism and cognition, it is primarily in the reconstruction of the story of man-land relationship through the ages that the subject excels. What we want to emphasize in the context of the ancient history of such a vast land mass as the subcontinent of India is that it is only through the reconstruction of the historical development of man-land interaction in different parts of the subcontinent that the framework of a past acceptable to all segments of its population can emerge.
The past is a hotly contested arena of modern times,3 and the fact that it has become so is in a large measure due to a sense of monolithic, racist past that we have inherited as a colonial legacy in a large part of the world. In the case of India, one immediately realizes that since the beginning of research on the history of ancient India, the story of its conquest by a carefully constructed ‘superior’ racial and linguistic group called the Aryans has been an overwhelmingly dominant theme and that this conquest and the subsequent assimilation of the various indigenous strands of culture by the conquering Aryans have been said to constitute the very basis of ancient Indian society and history. Even if this theme and approach are true— and we shall see in a later section that they are not—why should those who are considered beyond the Aryan pale accept this reconstruction of the past as their own?
As far as the Third World countries go, the most pressing need these days—as far as I as a Third World archaeologist understand it—is certainly to go beyond the bagful of colonial theories which they have all inherited and try to build up an image of themselves in which every member of their nation state can participate, irrespective of their regional, caste, tribal, religious, sectarian and a whole host of other affiliations. The primary sector of the past in which such a broad-based participation is possible is the history of their land, that particular patch of the earth’s surface which has befallen to their lot as a product of the historical circumstances and through which they have interacted in various ways through time. This approach makes archaeology predominantly a part of the environmental sciences, and as an Indian archaeologist I would state that it is only this approach which can lead to the concept of an Indian past in which all Indians can share.4
Thus, if one is interested in a non-sectarian and multilineal image of ancient India, archaeology, especially aided by the scientific techniques which are now available to the cause of archaeological research, provides the most significant area of historical enquiry.