Fwd: The way we were

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IndiaArchaeology , " S.Kalyanaraman "

<kalyan97@g...> wrote:

The Way We Were

 

A fascinating account of how the story of Ancient India was put

together, says Sagarika Ghose

 

Posted online: Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 0000 hours IST

 

Ancient India, roughly the period from the Indus Valley Civilisation

to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century, has

acquired potency in contemporary politics. The pristine " Hindu " past

is ballast for ideologues of cultural nationalism, seen as the golden

age of " indigenousness " . Yet much of the material remains of those so-

called glory days were unearthed by British colonial officers and the

present day conviction that the ancient past was so much more lofty

than the degraded present, seems like a faithful imitation of the

thoughts of those 19th century colonial excavators.

 

In The Discovery of Ancient India Upinder Singh tells the story of

the politics of 19th century archaeology. She traces the careers,

lives and thoughts of the first " discoverers " of Ancient India and

shows how they evolved from surveyors to antiquarians to professional

archaeologists. She shows how interpretations of the ancient were in

many ways part of the Orientalist vision of an " ahistorical East " and

how colonial biases lay hidden under much of the early reports. Many

of the early discoverers were military adventurers like Charles

Masson, Great Gamers tied up with the imperial enterprise who

stumbled upon important sites during border wars. Yet at the same

time, many important breakthroughs were made in the 19th century such

as the decipherment of Kharoshthi, the identification of Ashoka

with " piyadassi " and James Prinsep's decipherment of Ashokan Brahmi.

Singh shows that these breakthroughs could not have been made without

the assistance of traditional scholars and individuals like

Rajendralala Mitra and Visvanatha Sastri played a significant,

although unknown, role.

 

The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784, remained an exclusive

European club until the middle of the 19th century, with Indians not

being allowed membership, revealing to what extent the official

investigation into the past was a European endeavour. She argues that

the beginning of a distinct field of inquiry known as Indian

archaeology began in the latter half of the 19th with the setting up

of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1871. She also importantly

argues that while many colonial diggers may have been motivated by

bias, there were those who, in their own way, resisted Orientalist

readings and championed the cause of Indian monuments and Indian

ancient history for its own sake. For every colonial archaeologist,

there was also an Alexander Cunningham and an H.H Cole, who in

Singh's vision, were motivated by genuine curiosity and sympathy.

 

The refreshing aspects of Singh's work include the absence of

ideological bias and the attempt to reach out to the general reader

by telling the stories of such colourful characters as Cunningham,

the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, his

assistant, J.D.M. Beglar, the hilarious accounts of A.C.L. Carlleyle

who in the course of discovering Indian megalithic burials

or " cairns " let loose some choice abuse on Indians and

their " flatulently fulsome dedicated books " .

 

Yet it is Alexander Cunningham, India's first official archaeologist,

who dominates the story of early archaeology. Dedicated collector,

relentless digger who scoured the north Indian countryside for

decades, covered extensive ground, discovered the Bharhut stupa

regularly acknowledged Indian scholars who helped him and identified

and listed unknown sites in north India and wrote meticulous reports

over two volumes. He comes across as far too large and enthusiastic a

personage, too much in love with Indian antiquities, to simply be

cast in the mould of an Orientalist. He may have failed to understand

the significance of Harappa and contemporary scholars have criticised

his work as scrappy, unplanned, unaware of the global trends in

archaeology, ignorant of south India, and perhaps too preoccupied

with Buddhist travellers and their accounts, yet Cunningham emerges

as not only an " unusual and exemplary archaeologist " , but also a

solitary figure toiling through north India, often at odds with the

remote colonial government.

 

Another noteworthy character is H.H. Cole who made impassioned

attempts to preserve Indian monuments in situ and not have them

removed to the British Museum and in fact was a persistently vocal

critic of the damage that the British government was doing to Indian

monuments. Singh also points to the histories written by the Begum of

Bhopal, Shahjahan Begum, as well as the essays of Ram Raz, whom she

calls the first modern Indian architectural scholar to disprove the

colonial notion that the " ignorant natives " had no sense of their own

history.

 

The Discovery of Ancient India is rich in narrative detail: dozens of

Englishmen who created the study of early India are brought to life,

opening stupas or stumbling, unknowingly, on Harappan artifacts.

Singh constantly points to the fashionable theories of Orientalist or

colonial scholarship but these theories seem redundant and even fall

away in the light of her own tremendous research on the work of

nuanced individuals.

 

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=50685

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