1 - Anthropology of Archaeology

Summary

It was my first day at the archaeological site of Hansi, excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The excavation director—a middle-aged, burly north Indian man wearing a white bush-shirt and donning dark shades— took me on a site tour. Hansi was a monumental, multilayered site nestled in a medieval fortification adjacent to a bustling town in Haryana's Hissar district. It is known for its thriving agrarian marketplace. We strolled to the site from the campsite located on the cricket grounds of the local intermediate college. Walking slowly, we meandered through the town's congested streets, marketplace, and Dalit slums encroaching the edge of the site, and reached the citadel at the top of the mound. The excavation director, an upper-caste Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, explained to me, in chaste Hindi, the archaeology of the site and the challenges of excavating a large multilayered site. We walked past a series of deep excavation trenches exposing late medieval Muslim layers and early medieval Rajput layers. Suddenly, during his narration, he paused, removed his dark shades, and peered at me; with pride, spiked with a firm sense of explicatory finality, he declared: “If you don't discover in archaeology, then it is pointless” (archaeology main discovery nahi ki, toh kya kiya). “But what about theory?” I asked. The excavation director of Hansi swiftly quipped: “It is you people who do theory. We in the ASI dig” (Theory-weory aap karthe hain. Hum ASI main khudai karthe hai). “If we do not produce data, what will you theorist do?” (Agar hum ne data nahi nikaala toh, aap theorist kaya karenge?).

The past has played a formidable role in the self-fashioning of the modern Indian nation state. Along with historical narratives, archaeological materiality has significantly contributed to the reimagination of India as a contiguous entity spanning over 5,000 years. The ASI has been the epistemological heart of the production of ancient materiality for more than 150 years. An institution of colonial genealogy, it is now an organization of postcolonial bureaucracy. In the colony, the ASI was an investigative apparatus of a state in search of the ancient at the fringes of the Empire; in the postcolony, the ASI is a custodian bureaucracy protecting the vast monumental heritage of India from disintegration, and a foremost producer of archaeological knowledge.