The development of archaeology in the Indian subcontinent

Dilip K. Chakrabarti
Because of its sheer size, if for no other reason, the archaeology of the Indian subcontinent will
receive primary attention here. Among the earlier writings on this subject are Roy (1961), Ghosh
(1953), Allchin (1961), Imam (1966) and Chakrabarti (1976, 1979, 1981) in the Indian context.
The roots
The first European notices of the living temples and ancient monuments of India are found in the reports of travellers and sailors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. These notices relate primarily to west and south India. The most import-
ant records of living temples are by John Huighen van Linschoten in the late sixteenth century
and Pietro della Valle in the early seventeenth century. While Linschoten (Purchas 1905) was unhappy about 'pagodes, cut and formed most uglie' Valle (1664) was detailed, objective and remains unique among his contemporaries in the sense that he supplemented his descriptions of
south Indian temples with ground plans. Among the ancient monuments the rock-cut caves of the Deccan, particularly Elephanta (Fig. 1), Kanheri and Ellora, attracted most attention (anon. 1785; Sen 1949). The descriptions were sometimes detailed, although there was no attempt at historical explanations, except occasional references to Alexander. The two important archaeological landmarks on the Orissan coast, the Jagannath temple of Puri (the White Pagoda) and the sun temple of Konarak (the Black Pagoda), were also recorded during this period (D. Mitra 1968).
The middle of the eighteenth century
This period saw the beginning of a systematic and scholarly interest. First, accurate and precise
records of monuments began to appear and there was a better appreciation of India as a rich and fruitful area of historical and archaeological investigations. Second, there was also the beginning of theoretical research, primarily concerning the historical geography of the country.
In 1758 Anquetil du Perron (anon. 1785) was interested in the precise measurements and plans of the Ellora rock-cut complex and its associated mythology. About 1760 he investigated
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The development of archaeology in the Indian subcontinent 327
Figure 1 Architectural details of pillar and statue from Elephanta Island, Bombay. From the log of Captain Pyke of the East-Indiaman Stringer, 1712, published in Archaeologia, 7, 1785, pp. 323-33 by Alexander Dalrymple
Elephanta and Kanheri. Carsten Niebuhr's visits to Elephanta, where he 'made drawings of all the most remarkable parts of it', seem to be somewhat later (anon. 1785). In both du Perron and Niebuhr one detects a positive awareness of India as an area of historical and archaeological research. Niebuhr wrote: 'One still finds among the Indians, one of the oldest nations of the world, so many valuable remains of antiquity, which deserve more attention from the literati of
Europe, than has been hitherto bestowed on them' (anon. 1785). The first significant author on Indian historical geography was M. D'Anville (1753, 1775),
who was concerned, among other things, with the identification of historical sites that had been
mentioned by the Classical authors on India, such as the Palibothra of the Classical sources with
Pataliputra. A fuller subsequent study of these problems appeared in a three-volume work by Joseph Tieffenthaler, du Perron and James Rennell (1786-88). About this time Rennell (3rd ed. 1793) published an independent study of his own. In all these volumes the primary concern was with the identification of ancient sites.
328 Dilip K. Chakrabarti
The Asiatic Society
The Asiatic Society was founded in Calcutta on 15 January 1784, primarily at the initiative of William Jones. An annual journal, Asiatic Researches, was first published in 1788 and a museum was established in 1814. The aim of the Society was 'to inquire into the history and antiquities,
the arts, sciences and literature of Asia'. Three historical factors explain the success of this
society. First, it was increasingly clear that the early British role of the trader would be replaced
by that of a territorial ruler, and the time was ripe for a systematic investigation of the country.
Second, as Poliakov (1974: 183-88) has shown, in their attempt to free themselves from Judaeo-Christian thought, Western philosophical thinking, particularly that of the French
Encyclopaedists, turned to India for the origin of culture and religion. This attitude is well reflected in the writings of Voltaire, who was 'convinced that everything has come to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.' (Poliakov 1974: 185).
This particular image of India exerted considerable influence on German Romanticism (Wilson 1964).
Third, the closing years of the eighteenth century witnessed the growth of many literary and
philosophic societies in Britain (Plumb 1966: 167):
By 1815 every provincial town of importance had its society, supported by both the local aristocracy and the local manufacturers who were equally aware of the social value of scientific discovery . . . The results of this activity were vast and valuable. The flora and fauna of Britain, the nature of its soils and rocks, were examined in detail, catalogued, and given a scientific order and arrangement.
The foundation of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta was entirely in keeping with the scientific
spirit of late eighteenth century Britain.
Early theoretical approaches
There were two early theoretical traditions. The first was distinctly geographical in content and
a continuation of the earlier historical-geographical studies. In the late eighteenth century its
chief exponent was Rennell (1793), who identified ancient Pataliputra with modern Patna. He was also aware that ancient Ujjayini was the Ozene of the Periplus and Ptolemy. On some sites, such as Gaur, he made precise measurements. By and large Rennell's was a factual approach that tried to bring an element of objectivity into the reporting of ancient Indian monuments and sites.
The primary exponent of the second theoretical tradition was William Jones, who tried to link Indian history to Universal History as it was then understood. Its important source was the ten 'discourses' Jones delivered on various topics between 1784 and 1793 (published between
1788 and 1793) as President of the Asiatic Society. When he delivered his discourses, the biblical theory of human creation was still dominant. There was no doubt about the unitary origin of mankind from a common ancestor. In this way all branches of the human family were
thought to be linked and likely to show survivals in various spheres of life that would reflect their commnon ancestry and spread from a single place of origin. One of the main issues before Jones was to understand these survivals in the Indian context and to demonstrate how ancient
India and Indians were historically linked to other human groups in the world. This theme is
recurrent in virtually all his discourses. Jones's idea of the affinity of Sanskrit with several other
ancient languages neatly fitted into this thought-pattern. In the third discourse delivered on
2 February 1786 (1788: 430-1), he argued that the speakers of Sanskrit
had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians and Egyptians, the Phoenicians, Greeks and Tuscans; the Scythians or Goths, and Celts; the Chinese, Japanese and Peruvians; whence, as no reason appears for believing that they were a colony from any one of these nations or any of these nations from them, we may fairly conclude that they all proceeded from some central country ...
Jones's ideas were echoed by many of his contemporaries, although in a different form. T. Maurice (1800-1) wrote a seven-volume study of Indian Antiquities in which antiquities themselves hardly figured, but there were discussions of such esoteric issues as the Indian origin
of Druids. This was not an isolated idea but may be found in the works of a number of authors
until the middle of the nineteenth century (Chakrabarti 1976). With his emphasis on India as the centre of all things, Maurice echoes the tradition of the Encyclopaedists. Francis Wilford
(1792) sought to trace the origin of the Nile on the basis of 'Hindu sacred books'. The point which must be stressed is that William Jones and many of his contemporaries were
not interested in accurately observing and reporting on Indian antiquities and monuments. For
them, the basic problem was to integrate the emerging historical knowledge of India with con-
temporary notions concerning the origin of culture and civilization and within the framework
of the unitary origin of man as laid down in the Bible. These provided a significant framework for interpreting the Indian past. Jones's linguistic hypothesis linking Sanskrit to Greek,
Latin and other languages, is only a part of this interpretive framework evolved in the context
of pre-evolutionary thinking. If to Jones (1792) the centre of population, knowledge, languages and all the arts was Iran, some of his contemporaries made India the centre of all things (cf. Maurice 1800-1). Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was believed that different cultural influences along with actual migrations of people went out of India, ultimately pen- etrating as far north as Scotland. From the middle of the nineteenth century, however, an
entirely contradictory hypothesis was generally promoted: India was at the receiving end of various cultural influences and migrations of people emanating from regions further west.
Whether this reversal of opinion had something to do with the establishment of the Raj in the
post-Mutiny period is, of course, difficult to determine, but the coincidence is too clear to be
overlooked (Chakrabarti 1976). Both these hypotheses have one thing in common: emphasis is placed on movements of people as an explanation of historical change. In the historical studies on ancient India this explanation, which is rooted in pre-evolutionary thought-patterns, has served as the cornerstone of almost all historical explanations. It is also forgotten that the linguistic hypothesis of William Jones, which gave rise to the Aryan hypothesis, is part of the
paradigm of pre-evolutionary Universal History.
1784 to 1830
There are at least three records of field discoveries (Davis 1790; Duncan 1798; Babington 1823) and some descriptions of ancient monuments (Chambers 1788; Harrington 1788; Goldingham 1795, 1798; Mallet 1799; Stirling 1825; Alexander 1830) during this period but it deserves
attention primarily because of two, basically non-archaeological, surveys which also recorded monuments and sites. Colonel Colin Mackenzie was a military engineer who subsequently became the Surveyor General of the Topographical Survey of India. Much of his antiquarian work, which was done principally in south India, remains unpublished, but his notes and drawings have been used by many later authors. It has been said that 'Mackenzie visited nearly
every place of interest south of the Krishna river, and prepared over 2,000 measured drawings
of antiquities, carefully drawn to scale, besides facsimiles of 100 inscriptions, with copies of 8,000 others in 77 volumes' (Imam 1966: 17). The second important surveyor of this period was Francis Buchanan, whose south Indian surveys were published in 1807. His surveys in east India remained unpublished for a very long time. Buchanan noted archaeological sites, and his field observations are still useful because they recorded details which have since been lost.
1830 to 1861
The period beginning in 1830 witnessed a significant increase in archaeological activities. This
was due largely to the personal enthusiasm and influence of James Prinsep, the assay-master of
the Calcutta mint who became the focal point of the Asiatic Society and guided its activities along a new line. His call must have sounded inspiring to many of his contemporaries: 'What the
learned world demands of us in India is to be quite certain of our data, to place the monumental
record before them exactly as it now exists, and to interpret it faithfully and literally' (1838).
Another factor which gave considerable impetus to archaeological research during this period
was the decipherment of ancient Indian scripts in which Prinsep himself played the key role. The process of decoding the Brahmi script began in the late eighteenth century with the
decipherment of two ninth-tenth-century inscriptions by Charles Wilkins (1788a, b). It culminated in the reading of the Asokan edicts of the third century BC by Prinsep in about
1837 (Prinsep 1838). About the same time Prinsep and others read the Kharosthi script which
had been current, principally in the northwest (Sircar 1976). The decipherment of these two main early scripts resulted in a better understanding of the ancient Indian historical framework,
within which it became possible to appreciate archaeological discoveries. It was also during this period that the foundations of the study of ancient Indian numismatics were laid down.
Perhaps the most significant numismatist of the period was James Tod. Many well-known series of coins which were to revolutionize the study of ancient Indian history were brought into promi-
nence by Tod, a task in which he was soon joined by Prinsep among others (Imam 1966: 17). As far as the discoveries are concerned there were two major geographical foci, the north-
west and the north Indian plain. In south India, the digging of megaliths (plate 1) was a popular pastime, but this did not lead to anything (Harkness 1832). Barrows of a different form, the Buddhist sepulchral stupas or, as they were called in the contemporary literature, topes, provided the main attraction in the northwest. The process began with M. le Chevalier Ventura, a
general in Ranjit Singh's army, who opened the Manikiyala stupa in Panjab by driving a shaft through its centre (Prinsep 1834a, b, c, d). A. Court, an engineer in the same army, provided further information about this stupa and thought it to have been a 'royal tomb' (Court 1834).
Alexander Burnes of the Bombay army, seeking 'the topes and Grecian remains in the Punjab', found himself being directed to from place to place 'like one in search of the Philosopher's
stone' (Burnes 1833). Increasing attention was paid to the sites in the north Indian plain.
Plate 1 A megalithic site with a monolithic anthropomorph on top (Mottur, North Arcot District, Tamil Nadu). Megalithic sites in the south of India excited attention since the first half of the eighteenth century (courtesy B.K. Sinha)
Plate 2 General view of an excavated tank complex (lst-2nd century AD) at Sringaverpur, Allahabad District, UP (courtesy Archaeological Survey of India)
In 1834, at Behat near Saharanpur, P. T. Cautley (1834a, b) made an attempt to correlate an early historic settlement with the broad geographical features of the locality. The settlement was dated to the 'commencement of the Christian era' on the basis of coins. In 1837 Edward
Conolly (1837) made 'observations upon the past and present condition of Oujein or Ujjayini'. In 1843 Alexander Cunningham gave 'an account of the discovery of the ruins of the Buddhist
city of Samkassa' or Sankisa. This publication is important because for the first time it lays
down the basic methods employed in Cunningham's subsequent surveys (Cunningham 1843). The main guide in this case were the writings of Fa xian, whose travels in India in the fifth century AD provided the basic geographical bearings; all that Cunningham did was make a topographical survey of the ruins with comments on their probable identification. In 1856
A. F. Bellasis (1856a, b) described in considerable detail the early historic city of Brahminabad. Descriptions of ancient sites during this period may easily be multiplied, but what is
important is that by the middle of the nineteenth century there was a clear understanding of
the archaeological wealth of India. And in Meadows Taylor's megalithic excavations at Jiwarji (Taylor 1856) one also encounters a concern for stratigraphical details and careful recording, although Taylor must be considered far ahead of his contemporaries in this matter.
Alexander Cunningham
The need for a methodical survey under government sponsorship was being increasingly felt and
this was clearly expressed by Alexander Cunningham (1848). Apart from emphasizing the need for a government-sponsored survey, he clearly stated his preferences and methods in this publication. Monuments and antiquities had to be published in a systematic manner and adequate consideration given to those associated with Buddhism. In the proposed survey the accounts of the two Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, Fa xian in the fifth century AD and Xuan zang
in the seventh century AD, would be the geographical guides. Imam (1966) has explained
Cunningham's enthusiasm for Buddhist relics. The publication of Fa xian's travels in French in
1836 and Stanislas Julien's translation of Xuan zang's work in 1857 and 1858 along with the
proof of the historical authenticity of Buddha through textual researches in Nepal, Burma and
Sri Lanka, where Buddhism was still a living religion, marked a significant breakthrough in Indological studies and Cunningham was one who was deeply influenced by it. His concern with the Chinese travel accounts was also rooted in his interest in the topographical survey of ancient
settlements which he, as a military engineer, could hardly escape.
Interestingly enough, Cunningham also thought that a search for Buddhist ruins would
demonstrate that Brahminism was not the only paramount religion in India and this knowledge
would facilitate the propagation of Christianity there. Second, 'it would show that India had generally been divided into petty chiefships, which had invariably been the case upon every successful invasion; while whenever she had been under one ruler, she had always repelled
foreign conquest with determined resolution' (1848). In other words, he was trying to justify the systematic archaeological exploration of India on the grounds that politically it would help the British to rule India and lead to an easier acceptance of Christianity in the country. As the head of the newly constituted Archaeological Survey in 1861, Cunningham himself initiated the
explorations he proposed, but it must be understood that by the middle of the nineteenth century the basic nature of the monuments and historical sites in India was well understood.
It is worth while to recall that around this time the study of Indian architecture took a
systematic shape. The primary credit here goes to James Fergusson, who undertook an architectural survey between 1834 and 1845 and arranged the Indian architectural remains in an evolutionary order on the basis of his analysis of structural features (Allchin 1961).
Cunningham headed the Archaeological Survey for two spells, 1861-5 and 1871-85. The Survey was disbanded in 1865 and organized again in 1871. In the first phase he worked alone; in the second he was allowed two assistants. Over a total of nineteen years he went over the ground, sometimes repeatedly, of a surprisingly large amount of territory which included the
whole of the Gangetic valley, Panjab and the Northwestern Frontier Province, central India and
Rajputana. No archaeologist in India, before or since, has had such a close personal familiarity with such an impressive stretch of territory. The results of surveys done either by him or by
his assistants are contained in the twenty-three volumes of his Reports, published between 1862
and 1887. Along with his basic field reports one must also consider…

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