Diggers and the mappers mapped

The history of early archaeological exploration of South Asia illustrates the many ways in which the emerging social sciences of the 19th century nurtured, and were nurtured by, the contemporary politics of imperialism. The British pursuit of knowledge of India followed the East India Company's rise in status, in 1765, from a trading company to the revenue collector of Bengal.

The translations of Persian and Sanskrit texts by the 18th-century Orientalists facilitated the subsequent historical recovery of ancient India. This, in turn, allowed the British to produce authoritative accounts of South Asia's cultural achievements and to judge its civilisational worthiness.

The British sought justification for their governance in India through this recovery by presenting themselves as moral improvers of a decadent society that was once a great civilisation. Archaeology, or what was by the 1830s perceived as undertaking archaeological investigations, was fully roped into this politics of manufacturing a history of India.

By then, the rational scholars of the progressively utilitarian Britain began to accord Indian ruins and antiquities higher value as sources than the indigenous texts. These they increasingly saw, in the words of Mountstuart Elphinstone, the Scottish statesman and governor of Bombay, "so mixed with fables, and so distorted by a fictitious and extravagant system of chronology, as to render it hopeless to deduce from them any continued thread of authentic narrative". Thus judged, the ahistorical textual tradition of the native population was henceforth historicised through the archaeological mapping of the sub-continent.

Upinder Singh's book presents a detailed account of the history of this mapping and the careers of the key British archaeologists who planned and developed this work. Hers is a documentation of the development of archaeology as a field science that to some extent evaluates the "discoveries", the interpretations that were accorded to them and the nature of the text-aided fieldwork and occasional excavations that heralded a separate discipline.

She provides a context to the work of the Archaeological Survey of India, the most visible feature of the colonial administration of South Asian archaeology despite its chequered institutional presence during the 19th century. The survey, unique to Indian archaeology, was an institution established by the Raj that continues its control over archaeological research in India to this day.

Singh's study is inclusive, in that it incorporates almost all the archaeological work that was carried out in India during the 19th century, and it is informative, in that it provides details of nearly every policy related to archaeology formulated and passed by the imperial government.

Her main focus is on Alexander Cunningham and his archaeological reconnaissance of northern India between 1862 and 1885, during which time the survey was established twice with Cunningham at its head. She investigates his fieldwork and his scholarship in detail and assesses what she reckons to be the "Cunningham era".

She provides a wealth of information on the conservation of monuments, a work that was initiated towards the end of Cunningham's directorship of the survey and over which his influence was rather limited.

Singh brings into this narrative the participation of Indian scholars and princely durbars and offers many examples of the consequences of archaeological work, of which her prime story is the dismemberment of the Amaravati stupa. Her study contains many little-known facets of personal and professional relationships between archaeological officers, and between them and their superiors in the colonial administration.

Although Singh hints at the vast disparity of what qualified as "doing archaeology" during the 19th century, and mentions the various organisations apart from the Archaeological Survey that participated in this work, she does not probe her sources further. Hence, her presentation reads like a sequence of events.

The imbrication of the authority of archaeological investigations within the emerging political ideologies of colonialism and nationalism, growing appreciation for Indian classical art, emphasis on scientific methodologies and representations of modernity during the latter half of the 19th century suggest that knowledge established as archaeological became intellectually valuable through its various uses.

What Singh offers are myriad references for the historiography of this knowledge formation, and in this respect her book is a great databank.

However, she barely touches on the ways in which the archaeological "discovery of ancient India" was historicised. We can hope that Singh's rendition of "the beginnings of archaeology" in India leads to engaging histories on the ways in which her "early archaeologists" fixed the relevance of their antiquarian practice for its perpetuation and dissemination as archaeological knowledge.

Sudeshna Guha is lecturer in South Asian history, Cambridge University.