4 - Spatial Formation of the Archaeological Field

Summary

The ritual of bhoomi pujan, or earth worship, often preceded the inauguration of an ASI excavation. This is a Hindu ground-purification ritual usually observed at the start of an architectural construction, which involved the breaking of a coconut, the lighting of incense, and the uttering of Sanskrit mantras. At Juni Kuran, the chief guest conducted this ceremony—R. S. Bisht, who was then the additional director general (ADG), director of the Excavation and Exploration Department, and the director of the Saraswati Heritage Project (SHP). Bisht had recently been on a whirlwind tour of the various SHP sites in western India. The director of the Juni Kuran excavation had invited him to inaugurate the excavation at this site. On a bright sunny winter morning, when the chill of the desert air was yet to be soaked by the warmth of the sun, all the members of the excavation unit gathered at the center of the campsite. On a newly made mud floor, still smelling of the cow dung with which it had been freshly plastered, stood a brown molded plastic table and three green molded plastic chairs. On these sat the ADG, the director of Juni Kuran excavation, and the director of the Dholavira excavation. In the company of staff and students, the excavation director of Juni Kuran gave the ADG a bouquet of flowers. After obligatory words of thanks and some perfunctory remarks on the significance of Juni Kuran in the context of the SHP, the ADG unwaveringly smashed a coconut on a flat slab of weathered limestone. Then, with a few quick swings of a new pickaxe, he dug the earth to symbolically inaugurate the Juni Kuran excavation. This rather simple ceremony was both an allegorical act of domesticating the wild and a resolute reiteration of the official hierarchies that govern the daily practice of the ASI. Through the symbolic sacrifice of the coconut, which was a substitute for the human head in Hindu rituals (Doniger and Smith 1989, 214), the wild was placated. The act was performed as a secular statist ritual devoid of its sacred context but still keeping its religiosity intact. The ceremonial excavation by the ADG with a pickaxe suggested that even in the wild field, official hierarchies had to be iterated. The gesture served to reinscribe the ADG's authority and rights over the knowledge produced at the site.