Archaeology in India has always been closely linked to the political issues of the time. Yesterday, it served to strengthen British colonial power; after independence, it often relayed nationalist theses on the millennial stability of Indian identity.
Have the assumptions of colonial archaeology influenced Indian national identity even in its most popular expressions? Last year, Mohenjo Daro brought to Indian screens a reconstruction of one of the cities of the Indus civilization, between the second and third millennia BC. By inscribing the famous site in the Indian national epic, this Bollywood peplum defended the thesis of a cultural continuity between these first cities and contemporary India. This idea was not born from the imagination of the scriptwriters of the big entertainment industry of the subcontinent but from the theses of colonial archaeology selectively recycled by nationalist Indian prehistorians.
It is precisely on the genesis of modern archaeology in India that Sudeshna Guha, herself an archaeologist by training, specializing in the history of museographic practices and the cultural studies. In this work, the latter draws on the archives of theArchaeological Survey of India and on the correspondence of several of its pioneers. Artefacts of History, Archaeology, historiography and Indian Pasts reveals how early 19th century archaeology XXe century supported the idea that there existed a stable “Indian identity” that had been transmitted, without discontinuity, for at least 5000 years.
Forgetting previous practices
L’Archaeological Survey of India was established in 1861 by the British administration to supervise the archaeological discipline in the Indian subcontinent. Alexander Cunningham, its first director (from 1861 to 1865) also worked as a historian of the discipline. According to him, the beginnings of archaeology in India corresponded to his own excavations on the Buddhist site of Sarnath, near Benares, between 1834 and 1835. His linear approach excluded any previous memorial practice.
Practices referring to a common memory were, however, numerous and widespread in South Asia. Apart from the tarikhsor gestures of Islam and its kings, and the dynastic chronicles, it is appropriate to cite the numerous commentaries, exegeses and translations of the epic or religious corpus. On the subject of these great epics, prasatis (panegyrics), but also charity, kavya And vamshavali (these oral and written traditions that appeared in the Middle Ages, which referred to canonical texts), Sudeshna Guha mentions the historiographical character of these traditions (p. 46). The intertextuality of this corpus reflected as much an interest in a common past as the competition between the cultures that coexisted and claimed it.
The author rightly points out that the work of European archaeologists, epigraphers and philologists was based – and still is most often based – on the erudition of Indian interpreters or collaborators. The latter contributed to an immense transfer of knowledge on which modern sciences were built. Thus theHortus Malabaricuscomposed between 1678 and 1693 by Hendrik van Rheede, the Dutch governor of Cochin, is based on the system of classification of plants established by the botanists of Malabar, some of whom collaborated on the work.
Moreover, among the Europeans who travelled or resided in India, the British did not have a monopoly on the taste for archaeological investigation. As early as 1534, the Portuguese botanist Garcia da Orta shared his enthusiasm for the rock temples of Elephanta, and four years later his compatriot Joao Castro offered analyses of the aesthetics of the same site (p. 36).
It was therefore by ignoring all these references, although known and sometimes still alive, that the British pioneers of archaeology in India imposed a vision of the discipline and its practice in which they played the founding role and occupied a central place.
The Aryan invasions theory
At the beginning of the XXe century, excavations at the sites of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in northwest India uncovered urban remains dating back to the third millennium. In the absence of a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the Indus alphabet or comparable sites on the subcontinent, the unearthed material proved difficult to interpret. The prehistory of India was therefore written from inferences based on excavations in neighboring regions, particularly Sumer.
For the directors of theArchaeological Survey of Indiaparticularly the archaeologists John Marshall (1902-1928) and Mortimer Wheeler (1944-48), it was also a question of making the first studies of the prehistoric remains of India coincide with a globalizing scheme developed before the said excavations. Current theories associating the idea of civilization with the concept of race, the thesis of the invasions of the “Aryan” populations illustrates this influence. Thus, these invasions would have led to the destruction of the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro around 1900 BCE, thereby putting an end to the Indus civilization.
This thesis was notably relayed by the Australian archaeologist and philologist Vere Gordon Childe. Influential theorist of archaeology at the origin of the idea of the Neolithic revolution and author in 1926 of a work entitled The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European OriginsChilde theorized diffusionism, according to which technological practices spread through population movements – without allowing for the possibility that these practices circulate beyond the communities where they were formed.
Another influence in the interpretation of Indian prehistory and culture must be added: the representation of the village. From its beginnings, at the turn of the XIXe century, the colonial anthropology of Thomas Munro, Mark Wilks or Charles Metcalfe gave central importance to the village, which Nicholas B. Dirks has emphasized. Villages were represented as sanctuaries of Indian culture, offering a protective stability in relation to the movement and corruption embodied by the city, the seat of colonial power. These representations took root during the following decades, until they found in the XXe century a fervent promoter in the person of Mahatma Gandhi. This essentialization of rural culture influenced the interpretation of the evolution of Indian civilization from the Neolithic to ancient history.
In reaction to colonial archaeology and history, Indian archaeologists close to the nationalist movement developed the idea that, after the decline of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro caused by hydrographic changes, the culture of the Indus cities had found a refuge in rural India and was transmitted there, intact, to the present day. This nationalist current was illustrated in the work New Lights on the Indus Civilization by the archaeologist Kedar Nath Sastri, published in 1957. In it, he rejected the theory of Aryan migrations, denounced as a projection of colonial imperialism. On the other hand, this current consecrated the association between the ideas of civilization and the Aryan race, renamed Indo-Aryan, the latter no longer appearing as a migrant and invader but on the contrary as indigenous and founder of the Indus culture.
Furthermore, this nationalist current of interpretation of Indian prehistory found support in the work of the American school of archaeology known as proceduralOr new archaeologyand in particular in the notion of the Great Tradition (Great Tradition) promoted by Walter Ashlin Fairservis. The two currents agreed in fact to essentialize Indian culture, of which the Indus civilization would have been the cradle, and which would have perpetuated itself, sheltered from circulations and their corollaries, reciprocal influences, deviations and mutations.
For a Childean Ethics
Sudeshna Guha, however, does not limit herself to highlighting the presuppositions of the different currents of archaeology in India and their respective limits. She offers a stimulating historiographical perspective. Although she deconstructs the artificial linearity that Vere Gordon Childe helped to establish, she chooses to highlight his methodological contributions. If the broad schemas in which he inscribed his thinking have not withstood the data revealed by the excavations, his approach remains relevant.
When the work of an archaeologist often consisted only of filling in “chronological charts” (p. 178), he allowed the discipline to evolve. He linked artifacts belonging to different geographical areas, proposing the study of the circulation of objects and techniques beyond their supposed groups of origin. He also opened the archaeological approach to social anthropology. Thus the approach of Vere Gordon Childe survives today the obsolescence of his theories.
This is why the author advocates for a Childean ethics, which is interested in “roads rather than roots” (in the words of Michael Rowlands, cited p. 181). She denounces the emptiness of seeing the Indo-Aryan community as an “ethnic” rather than a linguistic group. Her methodological bias urges us to go beyond the culture-population-territory triptych, and to conceive of the study of past artifacts from the angle of their circulation and interpretation, beyond artificial borders, whether racial, linguistic or cultural. Failing this, the presuppositions of colonial archaeology and their nationalist interpretation will continue to shape reified conceptions of Indian culture, including the film Mohenjo Daro is an expression.