3 - Bureaucratic Hierarchy in the ASI

Summary

It was around 8.30 in the morning at the site of Baror in western Rajasthan, at the sprawling edge of the India–Pakistan border. The sun was shining gingerly, and the early morning mist was slowly clearing away. It was a short walk from the camp to the site—from a barricaded spatiality to another. As I climbed the excavated mound, I observed that the floor of the trenches was still damp. The outline of the famous mud-brick walls of Harappan architecture, common in this part of the Indus civilization, was visible. An assistant archaeologist (AA) cautiously accompanied me. We were prudently walking across the excavated areas, balancing ourselves on the balks of the Wheelerian Grid, careful not to let dirt fall into the trenches. He was a stout, middle-aged man with a coarse beard, sporting a white baseball cap. A black woolen muffler protected his neck. He was wearing a full-sleeved blue check shirt, dark blue rugged jeans, and white Nike sport shoes (a knock-off bought from Delhi's Palika Bazaar). He tucked a fake steel-rimmed black Ray-Ban sunglasses in his shirt's breast pocket. The trenches were 2 or 3 meters deep—empty, devoid of structural features. Five laborers were working in each of the trenches, huddled together in a circle, crouched with brushes and knives, methodically removing dirt from the floor of the trench. There was winter chill in the air but the bright sunlight's warmth embraced us gently. The AA was sharing details, cheerfully, about his career trajectory in the ASI. In the course of the conversation, he narrated a mesmerizing analogy—a “theory” he had “inherited” (viraasat mein mili hai) from a senior, retired ASI archaeologist, who, after spending a career in the ASI, merely (kewal-matr) retired as a deputy superintending archaeologist (Dy SA).

The AA elaborated that the Dy SA had often compared the hierarchy in the ASI to the divisions proposed in the “Purusha Sukta” in the tenth mandala of the Rig Veda, Book 10, hymn 90 (Griffith 1897: 517–20). These hymns describe the ritual sacrifice of the primordial man. The “Purusha Sukta” has become the quintessential fragment from the Rig Veda, often invoked in popular culture in contemporary India to illuminate the mythological foundation of the caste hierarchy in India: “The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made.