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”.
