Inside the ASI: A history beyond decolonisation debate

What emerges is not a story of colonial continuities or nationalist awakenings, as has been argued by contemporary writers on ASt, but the story of a discipline trying to find its own footing at the moment a nation was trying to find its voice.

The authors seek to question the assumption that Mortimer Wheeler set the template for the ASI even in its post-independence journey; that even Amalanda Ghosh, the DG of ASI from 1953 to 1968, was a product of Wheeler’s training. In the book, Ghosh is not introduced as a corrective to Wheeler, or as a nationalist redeemer, but as an intellectual of a particularly Indian kind – a Sanskrit scholar, an epigraphist, a field archaeologist, and above all a builder of institutions. It argues with evidence that Ghosh’s coming into his own preceded Wheeler’s arrival; he agreed with him on some matters, disagreed on others.

It cites files to make the point that Wheeler wanted an extension and to that effect had red-inked confidential reports of all his possible Indian successors like N.P. Chakravarti and even M.S. Vats, who had done a fine excavation at Harappa and produced a two–volume report of a high order. Wheeler never produced a report of his own excavations at Harappa or Bhir near Taxila. Sardar Patel, the then Home Minister, had remarked on a file: “Dr Wheeler’s comments on Mr. Vats cannot be implicitly relied upon. There is prejudice and bias practically in every word of his report.”

The book discusses fieldwork in Bikaner, drawing on Ghosh’s Bikaner diaries and the field notebook of a young German archaeologist, Olaf Prüfer. Prüfer’s diary, read alongside Ghosh’s, records moments of heat and exhaustion, the annoyance of broken jeeps, the thrill of a stray microlith found while waiting for the post train, and the weary humour of stumbling upon a liquor shop with a handwritten sign in Urdu: “credit has gone to Pakistan, only cash remained in India”.

This Rajasthan story also complicates the idea that such surveys after Partition were driven solely by patriotic zeal to discover India’s “own” Harappan sites – a point repeatedly made by chroniclers of Harappan history, possibly following B.B. Lal’s account. The archival evidence narrates a different story. Sardar K.M. Panikkar, then the prime minister of Bikaner, wrote to Jawaharlal Nehru expressing worry that India’s Indus heritage now lay across the border. Nehru agreed. Committees were formed, estimates drawn, proposals circulated and stalled not because of ideology, but because ministries hesitated to sanction a modest field allowance, the authors contend. By the time approvals arrived, Bikaner had merged into Rajasthan and Panikkar was away as ambassador in China. The surveys that followed under Ghosh and Prüfer produced not a nationalist reclamation but a layered archaeological landscape Harappan, Painted Grey Ware and Rangmahal pottery în stratified succession, argue Ray and Yadav.

The book traces Ghosh’s Pan Asian outlook, a dimension rarely talked about. In the 1950s and 60s, India was not looking inward; it was building archaeological conversations across Asia. Ghosh travelled to Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia as a UNESCO expert, welcomed trainees from Nepal and Burma to ASP’s new training school, and encouraged Indian archaeologists to learn field methods and ancient languages from West Asia and Southeast Asia.

One of the book’s prime insights concerns the myth that development naturally safeguards the material past. The authors note that Nagarjunakonda’s Buddhist remains were saved only because archaeologists raced against the rising waters of the Nagarjuna Sagar dam, relocating stupas and monasteries stone by stone onto a hilltop island. Telkupi, a medieval temple town in today’s Jharkhand, was left to drown under the Panchet dam. The book also makes it clear that conservation rather than excavation is what the ASI has primarily focused on – something not known to the lay reader.

The book brings into view figures such as Debala Mitra whose rise as first female Director-General in 1981 broke the long Wheeler-trained line – she was Ghosh’s trainee – and earlier nationalist scholars like Ramaprasad Chanda and the Varendra Museum circle. It also acknowledges the ASI’s internal frictions without reducing the institution to pettiness, and it distinguishes everyday bureaucratic tussles from the real craft of fieldwork. A telling moment appears in Ghosh’s review of the Hastinapur excavations being carried out by BB Lal, where he warned against collapsing archaeological evidence to suit textual readings.