Indian archaeology in the shadow of the Babri Masjid.
Gupta, Neha
Sudeshna Guha. Artefacts of history: archaeology; historiography
and Indian pasts. 2015. xiii+273 pages, 15 b&w illustrations. New
Delhi: Sage; 978-93-5150164-0 hardback 47.50 [pounds sterling].
K. PADDAYYA. Multiple approaches to the study of India's early
past: essays in theoretical archaeology. 2014. xvi+213 pages, 46 b&w
illustrations. New Delhi: Aryan Books International; 978-81-7305-4785
hardback $29.75
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Few scholars today would argue that archaeology is practised in a
social and political vacuum, or insist that the history of archaeology
offers little more than a "nostalgic retreat" as David Clarke
(1968: xiii) once remarked. But this does not mean that archaeologists
are in agreement regarding the relationship between the history of
archaeology and the practice of archaeology. These fault lines are
especially evident when we consider national styles of archaeology and
the colonial history of the discipline. In India, recent social and
historical studies of archaeology are invariably influenced by the
demolition in 1992 of the Babri Masjid, a medieval mosque in the
north-Indian city of Ayodhya, and the loss of human life in the
disturbances that followed. Public interest in this social issue has
drawn attention to archaeologists, their methods, aims and
interpretation of the Indian past. In this context, the two volumes
under consideration here examine the study of ancient India and the
writing of archaeology's history in post-colonial India. Guha takes
aim at colonial historiography because, she claims, it dismisses
"the 'indigenous' literature of India in favour of the
'foreign' textual accounts" (p. 1). Paddayya
contextualises the Indian past within "Indological studies" of
"India's heritage" that include "languages, culture,
archaeology, history, religion and philosophy" (p. 164). He argues
that heritage studies in India are not well understood, and he aims to
address this issue through the examination of the "Indian
ethos" (p. 166), or beliefs and values.
Both volumes are published in India and are clearly aimed at
archaeologists and scholars in closely related disciplines who have
familiarity with Indian history and archaeology. Katragadda Paddayya is
a prehistorian and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Deccan College
Postgraduate and Research Institute in Pune, Maharashtra, India. He is a
Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians (London) and was recently awarded
the Padma Shri by the Government of India in recognition of his
contributions to archaeology. Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Researcher
at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Tagore Research Scholar at the
National Museum in New Delhi, India. The careers of these two authors
overlapped in the 1980s during Guha's graduate studies at Deccan
College, where Paddayya taught archaeological theory for over two
decades.
Paddayya's volume presents a collection of lectures given at
institutions across India since 2008. He draws widely from his previous
publications and offers an internalist view of archaeology that
emphasises the progression of analytical techniques and the expanding
archaeological database. Guha's book is primarily post-processual
and is mostly descriptive. It expands on recent studies of the history
of Indian archaeology, which generally divide their treatment into
pre-1947 (colonial) and post-1947 phases (Chakrabarti 2003; Singh 2004;
Lahiri 2006; Ray 2008; Sengupta & Gangopadhyay 2009). With the
exception of Chakrabarti, each of these studies is by established
scholars at an Indian university and focuses on a coloniser-colonised
dynamic and the impact of this relationship on the study of ancient
India. Critiques of colonial histories of archaeology are organised
around three themes: the role of natives' in Indian archaeology;
the influence of the government in the collection of archaeological data
and preservation of cultural heritage; and the place of archaeology in
understandings of the Indian past. In this vein, Guha critiques
"errors of the earlier historicising practices" (p. 2) that
overlooked the "practices and principles of archaeology,
antiquarianism, history, natural history, philology, ethnology and
geology" and that "[distanced] the histories of the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeological scholarship of
India and South Asia from those of the Orient" (p. 3).
Guha's volume is not a critical analysis of histories of
Indian archaeology, nor does it aim to decolonise archaeological
practices or to enhance an understanding of Ancient India. Rather, Guha
aims to create an intellectual space for "manifestations of
antiquarian practices within the pre-colonial pasts of the Indian
subcontinent" (p. 8). A key point of contention for Guha is that
British histories of Indian archaeology, which highlight and celebrate
the achievements of British scholarship, have overlooked the works of
other Europeans, such as the "German Sanskrit scholars" (p. 9)
Rudolf Hoernle (1841-1918) and Georg Buhler (1837-1889). Guha believes
that this situation reflects the disengagement of archaeology from
philology and an overall dismissal of the ancient Sanskrit and Pali
literature, first by British scholars and then by historians of Indian
archaeology (i.e. Indian archaeologists). Her book seeks to address this
oversight.
In Artefacts of history, Guha offers a glance into diverse archival
collections in Norway (Konow Collection) and in the UK at the University
of Cambridge (Fox Collection, Whitehead Papers), Oxford University
(Piggott Archive, Stein Collection), University College London (Wheeler
Archive), the British Academy (Wheeler Papers) and the British Library
(Wilson Papers). These collections are augmented with those at the
Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi and with historical
newspapers (The Bombay Times and the Journal of Commerce 1839-1859).
Drawing upon this broad range of source material, Guha takes a critical
approach to archaeology's past that rejects linear narratives and
that questions disciplinary boundaries.
Interestingly, Guha argues that existing "histories of South
Asian archaeology" have "imprints of the colonial
historiography" (p. 31), and she thus considers the former
extensions of colonial histories. Although Guha does not say so,
linearity is implicit in her enquiry because post-colonial histories
cannot and do not precede colonial historiography. It is not surprising
then that she investigates these objects of enquiry through histories of
antiquarianism, philology and archaeology in colonial India. Guha's
dismissal of historical development, however, weakens her objectives for
reflexivity in the practice of archaeology.
Throughout, Guha alternates between 'Hindustan',
'India', 'the Indian subcontinent' and 'South
Asia'. The author acknowledges the distinctiveness of "British
India" (p. 29) and distinguishes between scholarship in India and
Pakistan, reflecting her awareness of colonial and national contexts.
Yet she glosses over the meanings of other terms and uses them
interchangeably. For example, South Asia is a term dated to the Cold War
and refers to a geopolitical region. Thus, when Guha refers to histories
of 'South Asian archaeology' she could mean archaeological
research in the independent states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India,
Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but this is not
clear to the reader. This situation is particularly problematic because
Guha seeks to examine the circulation of ideas and influences across
social and physical geographies through time.
Artefacts of history is organised into an introduction, five
chapters and a conclusion. The introduction and chapters are classified
by theme, including antiquarianism, curation, histories of philology and
archaeology, the Indus Civilisation, heritage claims and nationalism in
the Indian past. Overall, the narrative moves from colonial to
post-colonial contexts. And yet there are missed opportunities,
particularly in the final three chapters. In her examination of
philology and archaeology, for example, Guha could have unpacked the
relationship between philology (the broader study of language),
palaeography (the study of manuscripts) and epigraphy (the study of
inscriptions on stone, wood or pottery). While she is cognisant of
"departmental archives of Archaeology and Epigraphy" (p. 138),
and remarks on an apparent neglect of Sanskrit within the colonial
government, she conflates philology with epigraphy. Greater attention to
these nuances could have provided insight into the ways scholars used
these sources, their aims, methods and interpretations of the Indian
past. This in turn might have highlighted the nature of disciplinary
boundaries.
In the penultimate chapter, Guha briefly discusses the Vedic
origins of Hindu civilisation through the works of Romesh Chunder Dutt
(1848-1909), and how archaeological investigations were undertaken to
enable reliable dating of the Sanskrit texts (p. 189). Guha, however,
misses the chance to examine critically the influence of these beliefs
and values on the overall role of archaeology in colonial and post-1947
India. This would have been a most fruitful endeavour as Guha seeks to
promote the use of the Sanskrit corpus as a source on antiquarian
practices in pre-colonial India.
Paddayya offers some context on Indian beliefs and values. He
remarks that India has a "long preliterate past spanning one
million years and beyond", followed by "a recorded history of
about four thousand years" marked by "many intrusions,
invasions and convulsions" (p. 166). Despite these changes, Indian
identity or "ethos", Paddayya argues, "has not changed in
any drastic way" (p. 167). But what is Indian identity? According
to Paddayya, Indian identity "is basically Hindu in character with
later accretions derived from the Buddhist, Jain, Muslim and colonial
sources, all blended together harmoniously over a long period of
time" (p. 167). Paddayya makes explicit that some Indian
archaeologists consider the Vedas a source for understanding the past,
and that he believes these texts are unchanging archives. Yet others,
such as Arvind Sharma, a specialist in religious studies, have remarked
that religious texts that were transmitted orally are not the
"place to look for a historical sense" (Sharma 2003: 192) and
point instead to the tens of thousands of inscriptions found across
India as a source (Sircar 1977).
What of the practice of archaeology in twenty-first century India?
This is glimpsed in Paddayya's final two chapters where he
discusses the misuses of the past for "politico-religious and
communal interests" (p. 184). Although he does not explicitly say
so, Paddayya has in mind the demolition of the Babri Masjid when he
discusses the relevance of archaeology in India and calls for
"liberal education" (p. 195). Few Indian archaeologists would
argue otherwise, yet, Paddayya's appeal is lost in his problematic
dismissal of ethnic and linguistic minorities, reflected in the absence
of discussion on the influence of social and political factors in Indian
archaeology, such as political crisis, that rocked India throughout the
1970s and 1980s. Guha, likewise, misses the chance to expand on themes
such as ethnicity, language and gender in Indian archaeology, remarking
only briefly on "gendered archaeology" (p. 242), which
affected her studies at Deccan College. These issues seem pertinent in
Indian society, if recent public outrage following the so-called
Nirbhaya case in 2012--where a group of six men brutally raped a young
woman on a New Delhi bus and left her for dead--is any indication.
Taken together, these two books offer some insights into Indian
archaeology, past and present, yet the authors could have done more to
reflect themes of interest in contemporary Indian society.
doi: 10.15184/aqy.2016.20
References
CHAKRABARTI, D.K. 2003. Archaeology in the Third World: a history
of Indian Archaeology since 1947. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld.
CLARKE, D. 1968. Analytical archaeology. London: Methuen.
LAHIRI, N. 2006. Finding forgotten cities: how the Indus
civilization was discovered. New York: Seagull.
RAY, H.P. 2008. Colonial archaeology in South Asia. New York:
Oxford University Press.
SENGUPTA, G. & K. Gangopadhyay (ed.). 2009. Archaeology in
India: individuals, ideas and institutions. New Delhi: Munishiram
Manoharlal.
SHARMA, A. 2003. Did the Hindus lack a sense of history? Numen 50:
190-227.
SINGH, U. 2004. The discovery of ancient India: early
archaeologists and the beginnings of archaeology. New Delhi: Permanent
Black. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156852703321506169
SIRCAR, D.C. 1977. Early Indian numismatic and epigraphical
studies. Calcutta: Indian Museum.
Neha Gupta, Department of Geography, Memorial University of
Newfoundland, St John's NL, A1B 3X9, Canada (Email:
nguptag@gmail.com)