Early Notices
These go back to the early sixteenth century and involve three groups of people—Portuguese residents of Goa, other European sailors and occasional travellers. Principally, two categories of monuments are dealt with during this phase: the rock-cut caves of west India and the south Indian temples. Richly carved examples were generally considered too heathenish to be of appeal to good Christians, but some like the Italian Pietro della Valle, who visited India between 1623 and 1625, did not altogether ignore objective reporting. He himself drew the ground plans of south Indian temples, the first of their kind in European literature. Among the monuments in the interior, Elephanta was frequently described, and in the east the Black and White Pagodas—the Konark and Jagannatha temples of Orissa respectively—were known as early as the seventeenth century when they served as prominent navigational markers on the Orissan coast. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European familiarity with Indian monuments was fairly broad-based.
The Middle of the Eighteenth Century
The formal beginning of Indian archaeology can be traced back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when academic interest in the Indian antiquities began. This interest is best expressed in the writings of the French language scholar, Anquetil du Perron, who is better known for his translation of the Upanishads, and the Danish engineer, Carsten Niebuhr, who also reported on the archaeology of Arabia and Persia. Both emphasized the need for a systematic and scholarly study of Indian antiquities. This was also the time when a French geographer, J.B.B. D’Anville, discussed the possible location of the famous site of Pataliputra. To understand this specific geographical interest we have to remember that in classical antiquity, people from the Mediterranean lands were frequent visitors to India and some of them also wrote books on her, which have generally survived only in fragments. The memory of India, thus, was never lost from the European mind. There was also an element of contact between Europe and India possibly throughout the middle ages. The names of the major ancient Indian cities were known from the classical sources, and by the middle of the eighteenth century there was a specific geographical interest to identify them on the ground. Pataliputra, the ancient Mauryan capital described by the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court, Megasthenes, was one of these cities. D’Anville incorrectly identified Pataliputra with Prayag at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna. However, it is not the correctness of such identifications which matters; what is important is that around the middle of the eighteenth century the old classical references to Indian cities were being remembered and sought to be understood in modern terms. Incidentally, Pataliputra’s correct identification with modem Patna had to wait till 1788, when the second edition of an English geographer’s book, Memoir of a Map of Hindustan, was published. The geographer concerned was James Rennell, who collaborated with J. Tieffenthaler, a German missionary, and du Perron, to produce a three-volume study of Indian historical geography in 1786–88.
We must also realize that in the second half of the eighteenth century there was considerable philosophical interest in the antiquity of India in Europe, especially among the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. In their quest to move away from the dogmas of Biblical tradition, these scholars, who included Voltaire and Diderot, first looked towards China and then towards India as centres of civilization and culture. Voltaire, in fact, went to the extent of asserting that everything had come down from the banks of the Ganges!
The Establishment of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta
The establishment of the Asiatic Society on 15 January 1784 fits into the ethos of the age. This was the period when ‘societies’ of various kinds were being established and consolidated in Britain. The prospect of British ascendancy in India had also become clear by then, and consequently, from the administrative and economic points of view, there was a great need to know systematically about the country they were to rule. There was a further need to relate India to the contemporary framework of European knowledge of human history. William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society, came to India as a judge of the East India Company court in Calcutta after a career as an oriental scholar and poet in England. The founding of this Society did not initiate archaeological research in India, as is the common belief, but it acted as a kind of catalyst in that the study of antiquities found an institutional focus among the Europeans’ in India. Jones was interested in Indian products including plants and timber, the traditional system of Indian jurisprudence and the study of Sanskrit literature. He edited the Society’s journal, Asiatick Researches, where his ‘discourses’, before the Society were published between 1788 and 1793. There were ten such ‘discourses’ which constitute the basic source of his ideas about ancient India.
Jones is credited with the first clear statement about the linguistic affinity between such languages as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. In this sense he has been credited with the foundation of what later came to be known as the discipline of comparative philology. The truth, however, is more complex. In the late eighteenth century, the Biblical theory of creation was the accepted belief, and if, according to this, various human groups or families descended from Noah’s progeny, they had to be mutually related. All that remained for scholars to do was to trace or discover the evidence of such relationships. Jones’s main concern was to relate Indian history to Universal History as it was then understood. It was left to Jones to relate the Indian past to the progenies of one of the sons of Noah, ‘the just and virtuous man, whose lineage is preserved from the general inundation’. The original centre of dispersal of ‘the whole race of man’ was thought to be Iran. In his ‘discourses’, Jones traced the ramifications of this idea in various fields—language and literature, sculpture and architecture, religion and philosophy, etc. His idea that Sanskrit was related to Latin and Greek was formulated in his third ‘discourse’ delivered on 2 February, 1786, but what is ignored is that in the same sentence he brought in the Peruvians and the Japanese as well. The speakers of Sanskrit were supposed to have ‘had an immemorial affinity’ with them too. These basic historical and linguistic ideas of Jones were shared by many of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries, although not everybody agreed with him that the centre of dispersal was Iran. Thomas Maurice, for instance, in his seven-volume study of Indian antiquities, went to great lengths to argue that the position of the equator was once further north, resulting in a better climate in central Asia, and that the Brahmins, the original inhabitants of that area, travelled as far west as Scotland, spreading civilization along the way. Maurice proposed many similarities between the Druids of Britain and the Brahmins of India.
Although archaeological discoveries were scanty till the 1830s, certain major publications date from the early part of the century, the most important of them being Francis Buchanan’s three-volume report on his Mysore survey in 1807 and his survey of Bengal Presidency, submitted in 1816. A three-volume summary of the latter was published in 1838. These were mainly statistical surveys but contain a fair amount of archaeological information. Another set of report of this period was not published, but its author. Colin Mackenzie, made a beginning of the study of antiquities in south India through his collection of inscriptions and manuscripts.
The 1830s
By the early 1830s, James Prinsep, Assay-master of the East India Company mint in Calcutta, became the Secretary of the Asiatic Society and played a major role in the initiation of field research. His own contribution to Indian studies makes him a legendary character. He was primarily responsible for the decipherment of the two most important historical scripts of India—Brahmi which was current everywhere outside the north-western region, and Kharoshthi, which was prevalent primarily in north-western India. First, the ninth-century eastern Indian inscriptions were read by Charles Wilkins in the late eighteenth century on the basis of his knowledge of medieval manuscripts of the region, and then it became a case of proceeding from the known to the unknown. The process culminated in James Prinsep’s reading of the inscriptions of king Asoka of the third century BC between 1834 and 1838. The breakthrough in the decipherment of the Kharoshthi script came in the wake of reading two royal names in Kharoshthi on the coins of two Indo-Greek kings, Agathocles and Pantaleon (c. 1st century BC-c. 1st century AD), whose names in Greek also figured in them.
With the decipherment of these two ancient scripts rapid progress was made in the fields of epigraphical and numismatic studies. This, in turn, led to a proper understanding of the chronology of historical sites. This was also the time when attempts were made to understand Buddhist legends on the basis of the two Sri Lankan chronicles—the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa. An important result was the discovery of the name Piyadasi or Asoka in these Buddhist chronicles.
The Buddhist stupas, especially those in the north-west, came in for attention during this period, and the process gained momentum after two European generals employed in the Sikh army excavated the Manikyala stupa in Punjab near present-day Rawalpindi. Lieutenant Alexander Burnes and Charles Masson were among the major discoverers of stupas, Indo-Greek coins and sculptures in the north-western part of the subcontinent and Afghanistan. Military men on active duty in these areas generally amused themselves by getting ancient sites dug up by their soldiers and acquiring the so-called Grecian remains. Certain settlement sites in north India were studied and reports on miscellaneous antiquities began to increase in number. For instance, in his four days at Kurkihar near Gaya in Bihar, Markham Kittoe dug up and collected ten cart-loads of Buddhist idols. Another interesting feature of this period was the excavation of megaliths in south India, and ‘barrow-hunting’ was, in fact, a pleasant pastime for European officers in the cool of the Nilgiris. At Jiwarji, a megalithic site in the Deccan, Captain Meadows Taylor published his excavation results with sections, which was certainly exceptional for his time.
Alexander Cunningham and His Successors till 1902
Meanwhile, a young military engineer, Alexander Cunningham, who came to India at the age of 18 and rose to the rank of Major-General, was deeply inspired by Prinsep and took off on his own, deciding to go beyond individual sites and areas. There were two major Chinese pilgrims in India: Faxian (Fa-Hien) in the fourth-fifth century and Xuanzang (Hiuen-Tsang) in the seventh century. The latter’s itinerary is much more detailed. Entering the subcontinent through the north-west, he travelled extensively and wrote detailed descriptions of the areas he visited and their distances and directions from each other. The accounts of these two Chinese pilgrims were translated into French and published in the 1830s. Cunningham realized the great significance of these accounts in fixing the locations of major archaeological sites. If only one followed the footsteps of these pilgrims, it would be possible to identify archaeologically the places mentioned by them. It may be noted that Cunningham did not depend exclusively on the Chinese pilgrims; in the north-west, he copiously cited the accounts of the classical writers who also figured in his discussions elsewhere.
By the 1840s, Cunningham formulated his methodology; in 1843 he identified the ancient site of Sankisa, and in 1848 he offered a scheme of archaeological investigations to the Government of India. He argued that this would be
an undertaking of vast importance to the Indian government politically, and to the British public religiously. To the first body it would show that India had generally been divided into numerous petty chiefships, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion; while, whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled foreign conquest with determined resolution. To the other body it would show that Brahmanism. instead of being an unchanged and unchangeable religion which had subsisted for ages, was of comparatively modem origin, and had been constantly receiving additions and alterations; facts which prove that the establishment of the Christian religion in India must ultimately succeed.6
It took a long time for this scheme to be implemented, but eventually in 1861 the Archaeological Survey of India came into a tentative existence with Alexander Cunningham as its head. He was provided with a budget, an exploratory staff of draftsmen, etc. and the services of three (two, to begin with) assistants—J.D. Beglar, A.C.L. Carlleyle and H.W. Garrick. With a gap between 1866 and 1870, when the Government of India discontinued the work of the Survey, Cunningham continued his work till 1885. The results of his and his assistants’ surveys were incorporated in a series of volumes which still constitute essential reading for anybody interested in Indian archaeology. Cunningham had the specific target of reconstructing the ancient historical geography of India by peopling it with actual sites and monuments. It was a grand exercise in topographical archaeology. He did not undertake detailed excavations except occasional clearance work and deep trenches. It must be emphasized that his work did for Indian archaeology what the great Trigonometrical Survey of India did for the land mass, i.e. gave it its features and bearings. His personal scholarship can only be marvelled at; he could write authoritatively on anything from ancient architecture to medieval coins. He was criticized by some of his contemporaries on various grounds, which in retrospect sound generally malicious and invariably trivial. From the Bengal marshes to the arid hills of the North-West Frontier Province—he was everywhere, going around, mostly on horse, elephant and in palanquin. The dust of the Indian countryside hangs low over the pages of the reports written by him and his assistants; theirs was not an India seen through the unreal world of dry-as-dust manuscripts.
As often happens with people with towering obsessions, they have very poor opinion of the ability of their successors. So, before he retired from the Archaeological Survey of India, Cunningham recommended the discontinuation of a centrally organized ‘Survey’. Consequently, the responsibility fell on the shoulders of the provincial governments, who employed a number of regional surveyors. Their work was coordinated by James Burgess, who was interested only in architectural surveys. His monographs on the monuments of west and south-east India are monuments to his pioneering endeavour in this regard. In this field of study he was joined by James Fergusson, an indigo planter who was interested in working out a typological sequence of Indian monuments, principally temples, and his history of Indian architecture is an important contribution to this field. It was during this period that a separate epigraphist was employed for the editing of ancient Indian inscriptions. As the volumes of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum and the subsequent Epigraphia Indica indicate, the creation of this post had far-reaching academic results. Among the few major field-archaeological discoveries of this period one may mention the excavations at Kankali Tila in Mathura, the explorations in the Nepalese terai and the identification of various topographical features of ancient Pataliputra. The work at Pataliputra was done not by any government archaeologist but by an officer of the Indian Medical Service, L.A. Waddell.
The Role of Indians in Indian Archaeological Studies till the Close of the Nineteenth Century
It is not generally remembered that virtually all early western scholar-administrators in India had their native ‘pundits’, i.e. the traditional scholars of the land. It was through their expertise in diverse branches of Indian learning that western scholars could relate them to the framework of western knowledge. However, regular antiquarian research in the western sense had to wait for a general dissemination of western ideas which, in turn, could not properly take place before an effective system of English education was introduced in 1835. In the second half of the nineteenth century, several Indians became prominent in the field of Indology: Babu Rajendra Lala Mitra who undertook the editing of Sanskrit manuscripts on behalf of the Asiatic Society, published articles on inscriptions and subsequently researched the antiquities of Orissa and the ruins of Bodh Gaya under government patronage; Ram Raz, a ‘native’ judge of Tanjore, who wrote a manual on the principles of Indian architecture around the middle of the nineteenth century; Bhau Daji of western India, who principally published inscriptions from that region; R.G. Bhandarkar, who wrote on the antiquity of sites like Sopara and Kolhapur, both in Maharashtra; and P. Mukherji, who explored the Nepalese terai and published a report on it towards the end of the century. This is an area where virtually no modern research has been undertaken; especially rewarding would be an attempt to find out how the gradually emerging sense of the ancient Indian past affected the consciousness of the English-educated Indian élite in different parts of the country.
Some Operative Forces in the Study of Ancient India
At this point we must draw attention to the fact that the sense of the Indian past in the nineteenth century and later was conditioned not so much by archaeological discoveries, including those of inscriptions and coins, but by textual scholarship. Quite logically, the language studies were in the forefront of the needs of the East India Company administration. A detailed textual scholarship was needed to have access to, and to understand, the principles of Hindu religion, philosophy, jurisprudence, etc. which, in turn, would make the colonial administration appear more acceptable and less interfering in the eyes of the vast majority of its subjects. However, in addition to the needs of administration, three extraneous factors came to be closely associated with the development of Indology and had effects over the acceptance and expansion of the discipline in the academia. The first was the close association of the Romantic Movement in early nineteenth-century Germany with the comparative study of languages and the reconstruction, on that basis, of a master, unsullied race.
Contemporary German nationalism often imagined such a master race at the roots of the Germanic identity. Around this time this master race was given a name too—the Aryans. This intellectual development greatly furthered the cause of comparative philological studies in the universities of Europe. In this scheme the study of Sanskrit figured prominently. The second factor was the concept of race and its amalgamation with both language and culture. If one compares the methodology of racial classifications done in the late eighteenth century with that undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s, one realizes that throughout this period there have certainly been elaborations of various racial classificatory systems but the basic methodology and its linguistic and cultural overtones have remained unchanged. Also, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, each of these classificatory systems is value-laden in the sense that it has a built-in belief in a superior/inferior hierarchy of races. Some tentative ideas about Indian ‘races’ were aired in the second half of the nineteenth century, but towards the end of the century a systematic racial classification of Indian people was in place, with the Aryans at the top of the postulated hierarchy. Virtually all the major groups, including the Aryans, were interpreted as having come from outside. The early corpus of Sanskrit literature was also the earliest extant record of the Aryan literature, and from this point of view, it is hardly a matter of surprise that the German Romantics would be enamoured of the beauties of Indian literature and philosophy. The third major ingredient of Indology of this period was a carefully constructed dichotomy between ancient India and the modern India and Indians. By the time the British came as rulers, the ancient Aryan civilization of India was degraded, and its rejuvenation could take place only under the British rule which in fact was a modern Aryan rule, because linguistically and racially the Anglo-Saxons were placed within the pristine Aryan fold.
In one sense this offered a kind of legitimacy to the British rule and European dominance in general, and the premise could also satisfy the Indian upper castes because through their ancient Aryan affiliation they could claim cousinship with their rulers. The German Romantic concern with the ancient Sanskrit literature and philosophy has had the effect of partly hiding the belief that all major changes in Indian culture and society could come to India only from outside. This model of the study of the ancient Indian past replicates the approach to the study of the past of Black Africa during this period when the black Africans themselves were dubbed as mere passive recipients of various impulses coming from outside their geographical domain. It is now an acknowledged part of modern historical scholarship that various socio-political issues affect the way in which the past is reconstructed at a given point of time. In this context, it is important to try to understand the basic forces and attitudes shaping the study of ancient India. This issue is doubly significant in the context of Indian archaeology because as long as the old sense of the ancient Indian past prevails, the archaeological approach to the history of the Indian land is unlikely to make much impact.
Indian Prehistoric Studies till the End of the Nineteenth Century
Some earlier discoveries notwithstanding, the most important milestone in this field was achieved by a geologist of the Geological Survey of India, Robert Bruce Foote, who discovered a handaxe belonging to the lower palaeolithic stage in a gravel pit at Pallavaram near Madras in 1863, four years later than the acceptance of the prehistoric antiquity of man by the Royal Society of England. This discovery inspired geologists working in other parts of India, and soon they were reporting palaeolithic and other types of prehistoric tools and their contexts from those areas. Foote himself went on making discoveries in Andhra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Gujarat. Eventually, his collection came to be housed in the Government Museum in Madras, and the two volumes of catalogue of this collection, which were published posthumously under his authorship in 1914 and 1916, gave the study of Indian prehistory a clearly visible shape. The association between the palaeoliths and the Pleistocene extinct fauna in India was also established in the second half of the nineteenth century by geologists. Further, by the end of the nineteenth century they highlighted the occurrence of various types of rocks and minerals used by prehistoric Indians. It was during this period again that an archaeologist, A.C.L. Carlleyle, an assistant of Alexander Cunningham, discovered mesolithic remains not merely in the Kaimur hills section of Uttar Pradesh but also on the bank of the Ganga between Ghazipur and Banaras.
Indian Archaeology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Impact of Lord Curzon
From the beginning of notices in the early sixteenth century to the closing years of the nineteenth century, the tentative footsteps of Indian archaeology can easily be traced, its dominant theoretical frame of field-enquiry being a concern with the issue of ancient Indian historical geography. Sites, inscriptions, coins, sculpture, architecture—all had their place in this overriding scheme. At the dawn of the twentieth century there was a definite archaeological shape of India’s ancient past. However, this achievement should not detract us from a number of important considerations. First, the government’s role in this was both brief and limited. The Archaeological Survey of India was organized as late as 1861 and suffered at least two major interruptions before the end of the century, first between 1866 and 1870, and then again for a longer period after Burgess’s retirement in 1889 when, although provincial surveyors like H.T. Cousens did a fair amount of work, there was no central archaeological leadership. Second, in the important task of preserving the Indian monuments there were only brief and generally half-hearted attempts. The special post of a Curator of Ancient Monuments was no doubt created in 1880, but that lasted only for three years, after which the responsibility of conservation passed on to the provincial governments who, in turn, passed it on to their Public Works departments. Third, there was no policy of systematically excavating ancient historic settlements. Whatever excavations had taken place were haphazardly done and were only of marginal significance. In fact, in the closing years of the nineteenth century the government had no bigger plan for archaeology except a province-wise listing of the major monuments and sites.
The viceroyalty of George Nathaniel Curzon is significant in the growth of archaeology as a subject in the subcontinent. It has been pointed out that after the Boer War there was a crisis of confidence in the Empire, which led to the notion of its ‘civilizing mission’ in the controlled territories. Further, in Britain this was also the period of the first major Conservation Movement. It is probable that the new viceroy’s attitude was to some extent shaped by these developments. What he planned for and achieved was a centralized government direction for archaeology in India in each of its hitherto recognized branches—conservation, exploration, excavation and epigraphy.
All are ordered parts of any scientific scheme of antiquarian work. I am not one of those who think that Government can afford to patronize the one and ignore the other. It is, in my judgement, equally our duty to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher and to cherish and conserve.7
In retrospect, another decision of the viceroy was highly significant. He consistently opposed the attempts of western ‘Oriental scholars’ to take over the reins of Indian archaeology. This manifested itself, first, in his rejection of the idea of establishing an International Association for Archaeological Research in India and an Indian Exploration Fund. Second, while laying down the qualifications of the proposed post of a new Director-General of a freshly organized Archaeological Survey he did not consider oriental scholarship essential. The racist dictates of colonial Indology did not apparently cut much ice with the viceroy.
For years the necessities of Indian Archaeology have fallen into the hands of philologists who have made a preserve in pressing home the exploded theories of Professor Max Müller, largely responsible for the exaggerations of Western Civilization.8
Eventually, John Hubert Marshall, possessor of a First Class Classical Tripos and a First Class Archaeological Tripos Pt II at Cambridge, was given preference over the claims of Vincent Smith who was by then a senior member of the Indian Civil Service and had written on the history of Indian art with an unshakeable belief in its inferiority to western art. The formal offer of the post was made to Marshall on 20 November 1901 and he arrived in India in February 1902.
The John Marshall Era in Indian Archaeology, 1902–44
Marshall retired from his post in 1928, and there were four Directors-General—H. Hargreaves (1928–31), D.R. Sahni (1931–35), J.F. Blackiston (1935–37) and K.N. Dikshit (1937–44)—before Mortimer Wheeler came in 1944. However, the period 1902–44 was the Marshall era in the fullest sense of the term, and in many ways the tradition set by him still persists. The administrative history of the Survey does not concern us here; all that can be noted is that by 1906 the Survey was put on a permanent footing by the government and along with it came the basic still-continuing administrative shape of the Survey, i.e. its division into a number of ‘branches’ and ‘circles’ with the Director-General’s office at the top. The basic principles of the conservation policy of the Survey were laid down by Marshall in a manual first issued in 1907. A highlight of this policy was that the originality of the structure to be preserved had to be kept as closely unchanged as possible. Moreover, there was a steady emphasis on the tasks of exploration and excavation in different parts of India, undertaken not merely by him but also by his officers. In fact, it was his officers who played an increasing role in the field-work, with his own role being principally confined to the three cities of Taxila, which he dug assiduously from 1913 onwards. The emphasis was on the excavation of the principal early historical cities of north India and the associated stupa and monastic sites, with Marshall himself leading the way at Rajagriha (1905–6) and Bhita (1911–12). For the first time, the early historic urban past of north India was being given a touch of reality by the archaeologist’s spade. Marshall’s own major work at the religious site of Sanchi still remains a work of grandeur. Another major achievement of his time was the discovery of the Indus civilization. The principal sites of this civilization excavated during this period are Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the first subjected to excavations by R.D. Banerji in 1922, and the second a year earlier by D.R. Sahni. Both sites had been known for a long time but their archaeological significance was not appreciated till these excavations were undertaken. The site of Harappa was much destroyed by the depredations of the railway contractors of the Lahore–Multan railway, and thus Mohenjodaro became the major focus of horizontal excavations, the first phase of which culminated in a publication edited by Marshall himself, who also wrote some of the core chapters. His assessment of this civilization and observations on some of its crucial aspects, as revealed in the monumental Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization, have stood the test of time. The implications of the discovery of the Indus civilization in the archaeology of the subcontinent were fully understood by him, with several exploration programmes in this regard being initiated soon after (cf. Aurel Stein’s explorations in north and south Baluchistan). On a different plane, Aurel Stein’s discovery of buried Buddhist ruins in the deserts of central Asia in 1900–1, 1906–8 and 1913–16 was made on behalf of the government of India, and for the last two spells Marshall’s Archaeological Survey of India can certainly claim some credit. However, Stein’s early work in Central Asia was more as an arm of the British diplomacy in that region and less as an Archaeological Survey of India operation, and his loot of the Buddhist antiquities and manuscripts from such places as Dun Huang serves as a good illustration of the kind of archaeological brigandage which used to be once conducted with the blessings of the strong western nations.
A great strength of Indian archaeology under John Marshall was the initiation of a new publication series, Annual Reports, incorporating the Survey’s work from 1902 onwards. The series continued till 1935–36. Specialized themes were treated by different Memoirs.
The post-Marshall years till 1944 certainly saw some good work done, notably at the Indus civilization sites of Mohenjodaro, Chanhudaro and Harappa and at the early historic site of Ahichchhatra, but otherwise this period is marked by severe economic cuts and the consequent stagnation of the Survey’s activities. The government of India took a renewed interest in the Archaeological Survey by inviting in 1938 a British Mesopotamia specialist, Leonard Woolley, to report on it. He came down rather heavily (without any serious justification) on the standard of excavations practised by the Survey since John Marshall’s time and recommended the appointment of a new Director-General from outside the Survey. This led to the appointment of Mortimer Wheeler as the Director-General for the period 1944–48.
Mortimer Wheeler and the Archaeological Survey, 1944–48
Wheeler was strident in his condemnation of the lack of stratigraphic methods of excavation under John Marshall and his successors. He overlooked the simple fact that by their emphasis on the total excavation of a site, floor-level by floor-level, they could certainly have been careless about the succession of some (not all) structures and objects, but at the same time they were successful in offering a kind of total image of the character is tries of a site, which in fact was necessary to impart an archaeological reality to India’s ancient past. The hard truth is: various scientific protestations notwithstanding, it is still Mohenjodaro which stands out as the epitome of a major city of the Indus civilization. Many of the later ‘scientific’ excavations, including Wheeler’s own excavations at Mohenjodaro in 1950, remain unpublished in detail. A good number of them were also not conducted widely enough to yield anything except stratigraphy. Indian archaeologists were introduced to Wheeler’s methods at a training school which the Archaeological Survey of India set up at Taxila and at his excavations at Harappa, Arikamedu and Brahmagiri. The principles of stratigraphy were rigorously emphasized in these excavations, which were soon duly published in a new Survey publication titled Ancient India. More than this, however, archaeology was emphasized both as an academic subject and a craft. As an academic subject it had to be problem-oriented and based far more widely than the confines of a government department, and as a craft its practitioners had to be familiar not merely with the succession of layers and structures but also with a whole range of practical details, down to the successful running of an excavation camp. Wheeler’s clarion call to take the subject to the universities and enrich it by a wide application of natural–scientific techniques played a role in the development of the subject after Independence. His creation of a new and separate branch for prehistoric studies in the Archaeological Survey also highlighted his concern for an uninterrupted archaeological history of India covering all phases of human development. Wheeler no doubt paved the path to modernity in Indian archaeology.
Archaeology in Post-Independence India
Despite the achievement of archaeology in British India, there is no denying that in the total scheme of historical investigations archaeology was only a marginal, vocational activity undertaken by a government department. It is difficult to attach even this amount of significance to archaeology in India before the advent of John Marshall, i.e. before 1902. The twenty-three volumes of Cunningham’s reports and many other miscellaneous monographs on architectural remains, the editing of inscriptions, etc. need not blind us to the fact that archaeology was a pursuit followed by a few enlightened members of the ruling class and that the government was mostly unwilling to offer support even to this limited endeavour.
What fundamentally changed in the post-Independence period was the scale of government support to widen the base of archaeological research in the country. The basic shape of the central Archaeological Survey remains the same, but in scale there can be no comparison between the official strength of the pre-1947 Survey and that of post-1947 India. In terms of approved manpower, budget and the number of its ‘circles’ and ‘branches’, the modern Indian ‘Survey’ is truly an archaeological juggernaut. On a different level, the state governments have assumed the responsibility of archaeological research and conservation within their own territories, thus sharing a substantive amount of archaeological power with the central government. On another level, the Indian University Grants Commission has injected large amounts of money into the university system to establish units of archaeological research in different parts of the country. The number of archaeological museums and miscellaneous organizations interested in archaeology has also increased manifold.
Compared to the pre-1947 scenario, the result of all these efforts has been spectacular. The prehistoric and protohistoric roots of every part of the country have now been put in sharp focus. In the historical field too there has been a sharp increase in the quantity of both explored and excavated data. As far as the natural–scientific techniques are concerned, a beginning has been made in most of the major fields. The questions which are being asked of the archaeological data are also manifold and refute the allegation aired in some quarters that theoretically Indian archaeology has not moved forward after Wheeler. Archaeology in Indian universities has been traditionally built around history departments, and in a country with a rich past such as India archaeology is considered quite logically a historical discipline. Other disciplines like anthropology, geology and geography can certainly have archaeological components just as the hard-core natural science subjects like physics and chemistry can play major roles in archaeological dating and analytical techniques. However, because of certain constraints of the Indian university system these multi-disciplinary aspects are yet to make a systematic headway. But to argue that archaeology in India has only to be anthropologically structured and not historically oriented is unacceptable.
If Indian archaeology has significantly progressed since Independence, it has also made us aware of the manifold issues and problems (both organizational and academic) associated with it. The area-wise uncertainties of knowledge and the inadequacy of research will emerge in the course of our discussion in the later chapters. Here we shall only outline the two fundamental issues which continue to obstruct the progress of the subject as a whole in India. The first is related to the traditional Indological framework of ancient India in terms of race, language and culture. If one believes in the inevitability of this framework, one has also to believe in the archaeological inevitability of the Aryans, Dravidians, etc. If one considers, for instance, the Aryans to be a real group of people, one also believes in the geographical and chronological coherence of the Vedic texts. And if one accepts these texts as historical sources indicating a chronology-bound and geography-bound ‘Vedic Age’, one has also to think of such issues as Vedic archaeology and Aryan archaeology. Many scholars continue to do so, forgetting that archaeology by itself can lead to the reconstruction of grassroots history and that a racial approach (the term ‘race’ being somewhat unpopular in modern times, some scholars have taken recourse to terms like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic groups’) should not, methodologically, be a part of it. They tend to ignore, either deliberately or through ignorance, the vicious socio-politics of the racial approach to the past. Although strong voices have been raised in recent years against this approach, this has not gone out of scene in archaeological literature either in India or abroad. As long as this antiquated and overtly racist approach to the past persists, which it does in the framework of traditional Indology, archaeological emphasis on the grassroots history of the land is unlikely to be appreciated. It is this mind-set which provides the greatest stumbling block to the progress of archaeological research in India as a full-fledged academic discipline.
The second major issue offsetting the progress of archaeological research in India is rooted in the way archaeology developed in the country. It got systematized only as a government activity and even now, to a very large extent, it is dominated by provincial and central bodies. A strong bureaucratic and authoritarian element runs through the organization and execution of archaeological research in India, and in this sense archaeology in India is not a free academic subject like other subjects taught in the universities. Besides, Indian archaeological bureaucracy has been unable to take stock of the changing dimensions of archaeology as an academic subject and orient its planning accordingly. What is perhaps worse is that it has not yet woken up to the sheer scale of destruction of archaeological sites of all kinds due to the ever-mounting population pressure. Further, in an authoritarian bureaucratic structure of management a lot depends on the quality and commitment of the people in higher echelons of the structure. The progress achieved by Indian archaeology in the post-Independence period, especially in its first twenty-five years, was possible because of the presence of some who had the necessary education and mental frame to look beyond their personal interests and the interests of their caste-groups and regions and focus on the evolution of a national archaeological policy even within the bureaucratic constraints. That policy now lies in tatters, in an increasingly politicized and factious world of higher education and bureaucracy. The only sign of hope is a heightened awareness of archaeology as an academic discipline among the general educated class of the country.