The problems with Indian Archeology

Ruins, museums, and mummifying a culture

I've always found the archeological tradition to be a fascinating one. Formed out of the field of antiquarianism (a study of ancient artifacts and manuscripts), it is a typically modern tradition. At its core, archeology represents the act of modern man, post his enlightenment, going back to the past to observe the his own "ruins" with a new pair of glasses. When the discipline started, man had been living among, and on top of, these ruins for many centuries. But the process of modernity, and a revival of interest in ancient Greece and Rome during the Renaissance (and the feeling among Western Man that he was coming out of his "Dark Ages"), meant that modern man acquired a new perspective to view old things and ideas. However, this new mindset required him to separate himself from those very ruins he lived on top of - they were a part of history, yes, but his current condition was not connected to them. Modernity was a charging river, and having crossed it with much difficulty, modern man was now inspecting these ruins from the banks on other side. Birthed in these changing times, archeology, and sister concepts like "excavations" and "museums", represents all the best and worst impulse of this period, and the history of the field makes for fascinating reading.

This impulse of Modern Man, of the present being a clean break from the past, is what allows him to examine at the ruins of his own ancestors with an emotional distance, as if they belonged to some other, different, people. This axiom is the key to understanding the seed that bore the fruit that we call archeology.

Because as its founding principle, archeology claims the following axiom - history can be divided into history that is "dead", one whose ruins are to be excavated, studied, and put into museums, and history that is "alive". "Dead history" does not affect the events of the present, and hence is "safe" to excavate and discuss. "Alive history", however, is the history whose legacy is still contested, and whose fallout still affects the politics of modern societies. A great example of this fact is that the references to history in current American culture are essentially restricted to the last seventy-eighty years; the only historical events that matter are the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement. The only history that is "alive" is the one where the good guys fought the bad Germans, and everything before this event is almost treated as prehistory. There will be no repercussions, for example, if one were to shout out at work that they would've supported the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, while there obviously will be if you do the same with the Germans and World War II. This must be understood in the context that, due to various economic and social changes, the memory of modern man is very shallow and short-sighted. Those of us who live in the present day (late 2022) are guilty of this too. We barely remember what life pre-high-speed-internet and social media looked like, let alone what came before that.

The point of making this distinction is to understand the deep historical myopia that inflicts modern man. This myopia followed the same path of intellectual development as the other important axioms of modern society - an unshakable belief in science, "progress", etc. It has culminated into our current paradigm, where the phrase "It's the current year!" is a moral argument regularly used in intellectual discussions. It brings into mind Orwell's chilling phrase from Nineteen Eighty Four, about "history having stopped" and "nothing existing except an endless present". This endless present is the lens through which archeology sees the ruins it excavates.

One can call this phenomenon as "presentism", and a lot can be written about it in its own right. But for the purposes of thinking about the field of archeology, it helps us understand just what the priors of its practitioners are, as they take their chisels to "preserve" our ruins.

It is also important to understand that the British, who introduced the field and its main Indian institution - The Archeological Survey of India - were guided by these very axioms. However, one thing distinguishes the story of British archeology in India (and in other places like Egypt) - in addition to their modern mindset and historical myopia, these archeologists were now faced with a second layer of challenge - excavating the ruins of a civilization that wasn't their own.

Therefore, what actually happened was the somewhat historically absurd situation of an alien aristocracy excavating and cataloging the ruins of a nation and a people they had no historical or cultural connection with. In this story of British archeology in India, we find a lot of answers as to why Indian archeology behaves the way it does today.

The "Good" Colonialists

The story of the Archeological Survey of India begins, in many ways, decades before the organization was founded by Alexander Cunningham in 1861. Cunningham was the protégé of James Prinsep, a singularly interesting figure who bring the "gray" into the usually black-white debate about British colonization in India. The son of a British Indigo plantation owner in India, Prinsep was a trained as a scientist, but found his way into the field of archeology through an interest in numismatics and epigraphy.

Prinsep worked at the Calcutta and Benaras Mint, and his time working and managing these institutions helped him develop his scientific studies and allowed him to hone his various interests. He also later became in charge of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the publication of the famous organization of early Indologists in Calcutta. Among various other things, Prinsep famously deciphered the Brahmi and Kharoshti scripts, and the way he did this has a fascinating history of its own. He is also credited to most modern Indian historians for re-establishing the glories of the great King Ashoka. If Prinsep hadn't figured out who "Piyadasi" was, it is very likely that the Ashoka Chakra wouldn't be India's national symbol.

Prinsep's life in India is similar to the lives of many western "Indologists" and "orientalists" of this period. These were largely well-meaning men who were of a scientific persuasion, and were guided by a deep desire for knowledge and discovery. If the European Navies were charting the world through their ships, these scientists were charting the world through observation and categorization. These were both parallel and contiguous processes, and have created the world we live in today. These confident, catholic (not the religion) children of the European enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution found themselves at the crest of a wave of a civilization that was exploding in economic growth and cultural creativity, and the contribution of the likes to Prinsep towards the re-emergence of India as a nation cannot be tarred with the same brush as other colonialists, whose aims diverged from "the civilizing mission", to the spread of Christianity, to pure profit-chasing, etc.

The cultural, ideological and economic renaissance of the 1600-1800s engendered a civilizational, religious and cultural confidence in Western Man, which also defined his behavior when he came into contact with "uncivilized" populations, i.e. populations not yet touched by modernity and the primitive forms of techno-capital. Orientalists like Prinsep and Cunningham represent this triumphalism, but they also stand apart, because their complete victory made them more curious about the alien countries they had conquered. They were genuinely trying to apply their new modern scientific methods to unearth the forgotten histories of these complex, diverse, and fragmented societies they now ruled over, ones that had dispersed into a medieval decay. The contact of confident orientalists like Prinsep, with a society as insulated as India - one that had a mostly foreign aristocracy for centuries, one that cared little for the advancement of India's own indigenous and emergent voice, by the time the British arrived - was always going to be fascinating.

India was, at this point, deep in the period of her medieval slumber. As V.S. Naipaul describes in his famous An Area of Darkness, "nothing more negative can be imagined than the conjunction in the eighteenth century of a static Islam and a decadent Hinduism", adding that, "In any clash between post-Renaissance Europe and India, India was bound to lose". It was a battle between a civilization in its Spenglerian Summer, bursting with economic and cultural creative potential, with a society undergoing its worst Spenglerian Winter. There could only be one result.

And "losing" for India didn't just mean losing the right to extract revenue from the depressed masses. It also meant an epistemological loss, a loss in being able to control one's own voice in culture, education, literature, etc. It meant the introduction of an English education system and the consequential creation of an Indian elite who was "English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect". We lost the ability to describe ourselves in our own words, based on our own axioms. And we still do not possess this ability, even in 2022. Even today, when we seek to demonstrate India's recent growth and resurgence, western competence remains our frame of reference. This is why we care so much if a westerner talks about our growth. Even our resurgence is a mimicry.

On a social level, it also meant the destruction of any institutions that could continue traditional Indian knowledge systems, which were diverse and often varied by region, at any kind of scale. It manifests in front of us even in the current year of 2022, with the continued presence of British-made laws and institutions. To this day, an Indian lawyer, dressed in clothes that the British legal system introduced, goes to argue a case to the Bombay High Court (set up by the British in 1862) involving the Indian Penal Code (introduced first in 1860). He addresses the Indian Judge (who in his mannerisms is mimicking 19th century British competence) as "Milord", and "prays" for the desired result, because this is how the British did it. It is, in the words of Naipaul, "… a remarkable thing for a ruling nation to have left behind".

It also means, for the purposes of this article, the continued presence of historical relics like the Archeological Survey of India, an organization which, though built by the British, but one that is now run by Indian archeologists in the same manner and in the same spirit that its founders created. Which obviously means the same axioms, the same historical myopia, the same short-sightedness, is now being exercised by Indian archeologists over Indian history and monuments, through an organization not actually created by Indians. Even in managing our monuments (more accurately, "ruins"), we seem to still need the "arbitration of foreign conquerers", or more accurately in this case, the institutions and ideas they have left behind.

So what exactly is this approach that the British brought to managing India's monuments? What are the impulses behind it? How and why did we end up in a situation where instead of rebuilding our ruins, we instead turned them into open-air museums? In my opinion, the key to understanding this story lies in the word "restoration".

Taking a chisel to "Restoration"

"Restoration" is a word which very simply means, "the return of something to its original condition". But for modern archeology, the "restoration" of ancient monuments and ruins has a completely different meaning.

"The conservation and restoration of archeological sites is the collaborative effort between archeologists, conservators, and visitors to preserve an archeological site, and if deemed appropriate, to restore it to its previous state. Considerations about aesthetic, historic, scientific, religious, symbolic, educational, economic, and ecological values all need to be assessed prior to deciding the methods of conservation or needs for restoration. The process of archeology is essentially destructive, as excavation permanently changes the nature and context of the site and the associated information. Therefore, archeologists and conservators have an ethical responsibility to care for and conserve the sites they put at risk".

A few questions come to mind here: How does one determine when it is "appropriate" to restore a site to its original state? Additionally, there seems to be actual no possibility of actually restoring the ruin to its original state (through reconstruction) and purpose. These sites and ruins belong to the whole society, not just to archeologists - so why should the decision of whether to restore a ruin or to "conserve" it, also not belong to the society as a whole?

How and why have Indian archeologists determined that the Shore Temple in Mamallapuram, whose broken Shiva Lingam you can still vividly see at the back of the monument, is not a site worthy of being "restored" to its original function as a living temple, where prayers can be offered?

If history is too important to be left to historians, then surely our historical monuments, that speak the trajectory of our civilization and culture back to us, are too important to be left to archeologists. The Shore Temple deserves better than to stand abandoned, facing the wind and the salt on the Coromandel coastline, alone and broken. It is a Shiva Temple, not a lighthouse, and it deserves to have Shiva devotees come to its Lingam, and offer their prayers.

And the management of the ruins of Indic structures - temples and secular structures alike - deserves a less-confused guiding principle than the one that essentially mummifies ruins.

Embalming ruins

If you were to visit Vladimir Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow, you will be treated with the uncanny sight of the embalmed body of a man who died in 1924, ninety-nine years ago from the current year (late 2022). The amount of effort and resources that must have been spent making this happen over the course of almost a century boggles the mind. Here's a good description of how Lenin's body is preserved:

During the 1924 autopsy, the pathologists also removed all of Lenin's arteries and veins. Thus, the preservation team could not infuse embalming fluids through those vessels - the most common way to deliver such chemicals through a body. Instead, they developed micro-injection techniques where individual hypodermic syringes filled with embalming agents were injected directly into the portion of the body that required preservation at any given time. They also invented a two-layered "rubber suit" to fit over the corpse in order to keep a thin layer of embalming agents circulating around his body at all times. The dark, business suit Lenin currently "wears" was specifically tailored to fit over the rubber suit.

Every other year, the entire corpse is re-embalmed by submerging it in several different solutions: glycerol, formaldehyde, potassium acetate, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, and acetic sodium. Each submersion takes about six weeks.

Lenin's body is constantly under surveillance for areas of deterioration and immediate repair. Painstaking attention is paid to the corpse's external features. According to Yurchak's findings, Lenin now has artificial eyelashes because his were damaged in an early embalming process. His nose, face, eye sockets, and several other parts of his body have been "re-sculpted", with a material made of paraffin, glycerin and carotene, to help keep his facial appearance close to its original, and far more lively, look.

It is an incredible amount of effort, and very sensitive work. It makes sense when it is done as a part of someone's last rites. But extending this from a normal process of embalming, to the embalming of Lenin's body for almost a century, brings into picture the rank absurdity of the task.

It takes us into the minds of the persons who work for the Mausoleum Group, a group of anatomists, biochemists, and surgeons, and what they must be thinking as they perform these delicate tasks, year after year, to achieve this endless-treadmill that is essentially a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Thousands of people, mostly highly educated scientists, have been working for nearly a century to achieve this feat, but one must stop and ask - has all their effort been worth the outcome? Additionally, the ethics of all this force us to ask - is the "body" of Lenin, so assiduously preserved, even his "body" to begin with?

Now, you might ask, why am I telling you all this? How is the process of embalming related to the topic of this essay? Well, if you haven't already made the connection, I believe that the way the Archeological Survey of India "preserves" our Indic monuments is no different from the way Lenin's body has been painfully embalmed.

First, the Indian archeologist sees the ruins of an ancient or medieval Indic structure, and starts with the incorrect assumption that just like a dead body, the ruin cannot be brought back to life. So what does one do with something that one assumes cannot be brought back from the dead, but still wants to preserve? You freeze it in time, and work to fight the laws of entropy. He essentially admits a form of spiritual defeat - he admits he cannot reconstruct the monument to its original state and glory, so he sets about to perform the lesser task of "restoration" and embalming.

In a symbolic sense, by imposing the assumption that it cannot be reconstructed, the archeologist has already removed the arteries and veins from the body of the ruin. Once the possibility of revival has been eliminated, the archeologist then proceeds to introduce the metaphorical embalming fluids into the ruin. He does so by freezing the structure in time - in the very state in which it was found. If the hands of the statues of the Yakshas were cut-off by foreign invaders, then the hands must remain cut-off - the act of the barbarian must be "preserved" for all to see. Then, the archeologist fits out the ruin with a metaphorical rubber suit. He does so by making sure that the structure looks authentically old, broken and destroyed. This "rubber suit" will protect the authentic "broken" look from those who mischievously seek to make it look new and beautiful again. The archeologist then employs his various "conservation" techniques to protect the material integrity of the ruins (they are run-down, and thus prone to environmental degradation), sometimes even adding layers of chemicals on the older structure to protect the authentically broken look. In doing so, the archeologist completes his process of embalming a ruin. He turns a structure that was once a living monument and a center of activity, and turns it into a museum - a dead object of history that is there to be just observe and "learn" from.

Maybe I'm the crazy one here, but I'm still actually flabbergasted when I think about the fact that a core idea behind archeology is to make sure things continue to look authentically broken. It goes against the natural instinct that any person feels when he sees a ruin - an urge to rebuild and restore, both in form and function. Instead, the archeologist pumps the brakes of revival. He considers the prospect of trying to revive these broken monuments as proofs of "trying to undo history", as machinations of dangerous "Hindu revivalism", or desires that could "harm the integrity of the monument". In doing so, the archeologist puts dozens of Hindu temples that could be hosting prayers today, and serving as a social and economic nerve center of their communities, into a cage of broken purgatory. While I don't think archeologists are evil or mean ill, I unfortunately must confess that I consider their actions, particularly against the ruins of temples, as a crime against our civilizational vitality.

Not a call to turn back time

Generally speaking, Indian archeology, represented primarily by the Archeological Survey of India (ASI), has a very benign reputation among the Indian people. It is seen as a harmless organization that is working towards "preserving" India's heritage and culture. Indeed, given the role the ASI played in popularizing the glory of Emperor Ashoka, or the return of the Saraswati-Sindhu civilization to the Indian consciousness, one can argue that they deserve an unabashedly positive reputation.

Firstly, I do not want to deny credit where it is due. The ASI has made some truly important contributions to how Indians view the history of Indian civilization. Indeed, after the centuries of indifference from foreign rulers and aristocrats about India's ancient (wrongly categorized as only "Hindu") history, the ASI played a vital role in bringing back ancient India to the front of the Indian mind.

However, I intend to take a stance against the current functions of the organization. And I do so not out of any hatred for the people who currently work there or have worked there in the past, most of whom will probably be kindred spirits for me in terms of a fascination with India's history. My problem with the ASI is not a factual problem, rather, as I have laid out, it is a spiritual problem.

More precisely, as I have explained above, my main issue is the axioms that guide the practices of the ASI. The whole approach, especially towards ancient temples and other ruins, is the wrong way to understand and manage the ruins. Simply put, the correct approach to "managing" ruins, especially of ancient religious structures like temples and stupas, is not to make them "the most beautiful ruins possible", but to rebuild them and grant them back the function that was taken away from them.

Take the example of the medieval city of Hampi.

Hampi is a city usually associated with the Vijayanagara Empire, but it is a city with a long and proud history. Unfortunately, what is left of Hampi today is, in the clearest sense of the word, a ruin. Beautiful ruins, but ruins nonetheless. Hampi wasn't always a ruin, of course. It took its current form after the sacking of the city through a series of events that rhyme through the course of medieval Indian history.

The sad fate of Hampi is to end up with the sterile and lifeless name "The Group of Monuments at Hampi"

When the European archeologists first discovered Hampi, they must've felt the same thing that every person who visits Hampi feels today. If these ruins are so awe-inspiring, what would the real city, thriving and bustling with economic activity, with temples full of devotees and pilgrims, have looked like? One can't help but feel the desperate urge to go back in time to the Vijayanagara King and tell him to not trust the generals that betrayed him.

But of course, we cannot turn back time. We cannot un-ruin Hampi. We cannot rebuild Hampi as a flourishing medieval city in the year 2022. So are the archeologists right in wanting to accurately preserve the barbaric destruction of one of medieval India's great Dharmic cities? Are they justified in wanting to freeze the ruins in time?

Or would it be better to rebuild Hampi? Not as a dazzling medieval city, but as a new, beautiful temple town? To actually restore the broken temples, the shattered statues, and the charred stone. To make it look new again, but in a manner that's authentic to its past. And most importantly, restarting prayers at the temples in the complex. Because without the revivifying act of worship, those temples are nothing but slabs of stone.

I don't think is some of sort of far-fetched dream either, nor is it an attempt to erase the past. The act of restoration could revive Hampi as a thriving tourist destination and pilgrimage spot. An actual museum could be built to chronicle the acts of barbarism that currently mark the complex like pox-marks on a body, but the actual ruins need to be rebuilt in an manner authentic to their style and time. We possess the technique and technology to be able to do so. All we lack is the will. Our entropy is what has allowed the ASI to turn Hampi into a open-air museum, where Hindus can go and feel terrible and demoralized about their own history. I have said this countless times before, but a culture that ends up in a museum, is automatically a dead culture, and therein lies the urgency of unshackling our monuments from the embalming/mummifying grasp of the ASI.

Somnath vs. Konark

The Somnath Temple in Gujarat and the Konark Sun Temple in Odisha are both well known places in India. They have tragic and notable histories, and both serve as popular tourist destinations for Indians from every part of the country. But crucially, both monuments also look very different from one another in the current year.

Somnath is a living and breathing structure. Having taken its current form in the year 1951 - after the temple was finally clawed away from the hands of the Nawab of Junagadh - it is a thriving religious and tourist destination on the pristine Saurashtra coast, with plans for a new "Corridor" to enhance the beauty of the surrounding area.

Konark, in contrast, is a ruin. It holds no prayers, and it remains authentically preserved to look as broken as it was on the day the Europeans first "discovered" it. It is visited by thousands of tourists every year, who marvel at the remarkable carvings and the splendor of a now-broken temple that was built to resemble a chariot. Almost all of them leave with a bittersweet feeling of seeing a loved-one who's now fallen on hard times. Because they haven't really visited a temple - they've visited the carcass of a temple, carefully preserved to look pristinely broken.

What's interesting to note, is that in the year 1947, both Somnath and Konark were in the same position. Both were authentically broken ruins, with Somnath in an presumably even worse condition due to the internal autonomy of the Nawab of Junagadh. Today, the contrasting fates of these two monuments are simply due to the fact that the proponents of rebuilding Somnath - people like Sardar Patel and K.M. Munshi - were powerful people at the top of the Indian National Congress ladder.

Konark had no such supporters. Even if it had its proponents, it would have had to face the apathy and soft-opposition of India's first Prime Minister. So would structures like the Martand temple in Kashmir, or the Shore Temple in Mamallapuram, and countless other such mummified temple carcasses.

The only question remains: what is stopping us from changing this reality now? Why do we continue to allow these once-great structures to sit in purgatory of brokenness and decay? Why does a government that supposedly cares about the emergent culture of this country not strive to change these realities?

The red portions are the ones that have collapsed

There are no mosques or mausoleums standing in the way of rebuilding these temples, which means that there would be no real social conflict or opposition from other communities. The only thing standing in the way is our timidity, and lack of imagination. It is our inability to break away from the frame of 1861, and internalization of the assumptions of archeology and mummification. We simply lack the adventure and cultural vitality to believe that we can undertake such a project, and to imagine a structure so beautiful that it would be the pride of Odisha and India.

If we achieve this, then maybe Konark can truly live up to what Kavi Guru Rabindranath Thakur once said of the ruins: Here the language of stone surpasses the language of humans.

If I am to end this essay on any note, I hope that, one day, this vitality does return to us, and hold of archeology over many of our structures can be removed. For its part, the ASI can focus on excavation work and technical protection of monuments. In this manner, it can more honestly live up to the Sanskrit motto it was given post-Independence - प्रत्नकीर्तिमपावृणु (meaning, "let us uncover the glory of the past"). To do so, it must give up its stewardship and mummification of ancient Indic structures, and temples in particular. With a focus on excavation, it can still serve an important function in contributing to how Indians understand our own history.