THE DIGGING STICK Volume 34, No 2 ISSN 1013-7521 August 2017 ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE INDIAN IMAGINATION Dilip M Menon When we think about archaeology, the disci- pline as much as the practice brings up images of time out of mind as well as the more proximate question of recorded history. Geology, palae- ontology, history: each of these is associated with the idea of the past, and of what is over. However, recent developments, in- cluding the growth of industrial and urban arch- aeology, suggest a method of dealing with material remains in relation Great bath and citadel, Mohenjodaro to questions of time alone. We are reminded that the discipline has a deep job, even as the book went on to win awards for relation to the contemporary and to our understanding scholarship. of the present as much as to the philosophical Archaeology sits at the heart of the Indian nation’s questions of History and Memory. Moreover, despite imagination of itself as the inheritor of an ancient claims to scientific method and the rigours of objective civilisation. This statement is objectively true. It also enquiry, the fact remains that archaeology is located addresses the subjective need of an independent within political projects of nationhood, narratives of nation to have a narrative that is not about the civilis- conquest, and claims to antiquity and classicism (‘we have been around longer than you’). A striking example of this came up in 2001 when a young American scholar, Nadia Abu El Haj, published Facts on the Ground: archaeological practice and OTHER FEATURES IN THIS ISSUE territorial self-fashioning in Israeli society. Using the 7 Walter Battiss and South African rock discipline of Israeli archaeology as the subject of her art – David G Pearce et al. study, she argued that the facts generated by archae- ological practice influence ‘cultural understandings, 9 Bored stones and a stone ring – Ansie political possibilities and “common-sense” assump- Hof tions’. She argued that in the case of Israel archae- 14 The great Thulamela gold heist ological practice worked in the service of the 15 What happened to Gqawukile – Elwyn ‘formation and enactment of its colonial-nation Jenkins historical imagination and ... the substantiation of its 19 Transforming the discipline: Education territorial claims’. Her arguments led to an academic syllabus and archaeology in township controversy and attempts to deny her tenure in her schools – Mpho Maripane 22 A 1903 Transvaal Colony dog tag – Rob Burrett Dilip Menon holds the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and is a Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand. [email protected]. South African Archaeological Society ing mission of an imperial power alone. Colonialism everywhere damaged the self-perception of subju- gated peoples. As the world came to be conceived in terms of the political categories of the modern and modernity, nations and peoples were characterised as being on one or the other side of the divide. Modernity was presented as being characterised by reason, secularism and individualism, and each of these was given a short and special history of origins within the European space dating back to the Enlightenment. Concepts of time One of the first conflicts that arose in the colonial encounter was over conceptions of time within societies like India and China in contrast to European Christian notions of the origin of the universe and the time of history. In the classical Hindu system of know- ledge, the universe had gone through four yugas or ages. The four ages were named after four possible throws of a dice (the Indian dice was of an oblong shape with four sides) and the notion of time was both Shore Temple, Mahabalipuram cyclical and degenerationist; from a golden age to the degraded present. One of the yugas, the Kritayuga, was believed to have lasted 1 728 million years and mated the age of the world to be about 75 000 years in the present age of Kali would run for 432 000 years. 1774. He jettisoned the Christian calendar for a new, These philosophical conceptions made of time an secular chronology. James Hutton, in his Theory of eternity, as opposed to the then Biblical culture of the Earth (1788) went a step further beyond this human time, which was short, to say the least. St imagination of a definite beginning (and thus of Augustine in his Civitas Dei (c. 5th century CE) Creation), when he wrote that, ‘from the top of the believed that ‘not 6 000 years have passed’ since the mountains to the shore of the sea … everything is in a creation of the world. Moreover, this notion of time in state of change … a succession of worlds … we find addition to its brevity was directional, teleological and no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’. The progressive in contrast to ancient Indian notions. This late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe teemed contrast between too-much time and measured time with ideas of illimitable time, strata, lost species and seemed to sit at the heart of the primitiveness of catastrophism. George Cuvier, in his Discourse on the Indian thought in the eyes of the British colonisers. Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth and on the Changes Which They Have Produced in This ‘eastern obsession’ with vast swathes of time the Animal Kingdom (1812), argued that ‘numberless drew the condescension as much as the ire of Euro- living things were victims of … catastrophes: some, pean scholars. James Mill in History of British India inhabitants of the dry land, were engulfed in deluges; (1817) wrote that, ‘Rude nations seem to derive a others, living in the heart of the seas, were left peculiar gratification from pretensions to a remote stranded when the ocean floor was suddenly raised antiquity. As a boastful and turgid vanity distinguishes up again; and whole races were destroyed forever; remarkably the Oriental nations, they have in most leaving only a few relics which the naturalist can instances carried their claims extravagantly high.’ Karl hardly recognise’. By the late 19th century Charles Marx wrote, not without a tinge of regret, that, ‘Indian Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Charles Darwin’s On society has no history at all, at least no known history. the Origin of Species had almost displaced the Christ- What we call its history is but the history of successive ian view based on the Biblical chronology. However, intruders who founded their empires on the passive the views of prominent churchmen like Bishop James basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.’ He Ussher, Primate of All Ireland, with a dating of the went on to add that, ‘England has to fulfil a double origin of the universe to 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC mission in India: one, destructive, the other, regener- were a long time dying! ative – the annihilation of old Asiatic society and the laying of the material foundation of Western society in Recovering the Indian past Asia’. Arguably, archaeology could only arise as a discipline Within Europe, the struggle between Biblical time and once Europe moved beyond its inherited Christian historical time came to a head in the 18th century. temporality. Moreover, the emergence of geology and Ideas of ‘deep time’ were being articulated in the the Darwinian idea of evolution meant that Indian 1780s and the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) esti- conceptions of time began to seem less outlandish. The Digging Stick 2 Vol 34(2) August 2017 After the ‘savage wars of peace’ (Kipling) in India the famous lines, ‘Their golden summits in the noon- between 1757 and 1830, when most of India came day light/Shone o’er the dark green deep that roll’d under the control of the East India Company and laws between/For domes and pinnacles and spires were and revenue settlements were in place, scholars and seen/Peering above the sea…a mournful sight’. The administrators began to come to terms with Indian account of architecture in India in the picturesque civilisation. Much of the knowledge of India’s past was mode was pushed to another time, that of the ancient, gained during strategic campaigns and route marches and presented with pathos as a set of ruins. Hence the as military men and doctors, influenced by the Scot- story of architecture became one of decline from tish Enlightenment, began to think about comparative ancient times: the story of decay. civilisations. James Ferguson, itinerating intellectual, There was another intention that lay behind Fer- decided to put together his travel diaries of 1837–39 guson’s venture. It was to move an account of India Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient and published away from what he saw as myth, fable and legend Architecture in Hindoostan (1848). His record of what (ironic considering his admiration for Southey) and he termed ‘ancient architecture’ – mostly temples and what Mill had termed the ‘ungoverned imaginings’ of ruins dating to what we would now call the early medi- Indians to fact. His 1866 manifesto posited architec- eval period – was based on the diary, draftsman’s pad ture as a more reliable index of the past than litera- camera lucida and the . The very idea of the pictures- ture. The ‘great stone book’ would prove a better que provided a civilised standpoint from which to view th guide than the late 18 century recovery of India’s the wilderness that was India; it was a viewing of the classical literature, which had swayed even the past in the present. British rule was India’s present German imagination and had sparked off Indophilia and future; what India had to offer and what she had among figures like Schlegel, Schopenhauer and achieved could only be represented as past and Goethe.