Bureaucratic Archaeology

'This book breaks completely new grounds in shifting attention from the history of archaeology in colonial India to the bureaucratic infrastructure and the epistemological landscape of the field in post-colonial India. It undertakes a rigorous ethnography of the inner workings of the gargantuan, state-sponsored edifice of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), to uncover the deep entanglements of the ideology of Hindu nationalism in determining its policies of excavations and the nature of the evidences it has produced on the nation's ancient pasts. Avikunthak's focus on this single institution, its controversial Saraswati Heritage Project, and its excavations of Harappan sites in western India allows for a thick description of materiality and practice - of sites and trenches, of digging and documentation protocols, of the transformation of artifacts into facts, of the hierarchy of personnel, and (not least of all) of the absence of reports. All of this comes together in a gripping narrative that acts as an expose' on the compromised state-sponsored discipline in contemporary India. Unsparing in its criticism of the institution and the archaeology it performs at the commands of the state, this book offers a hitherto-untold ground-level account of the workings of the ASI and its modes of excavating pasts for the present. This is a powerful study whose implications go beyond the domain of archaeology to a larger critique of the institutional apparatus of the nation-state and the politics of knowledge-production.' Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta 'In this meticulously researched and elegantly written, hard-hitting ethnography of archaeology, Ashish Avikunthak examines what he calls the 'largest archaeological bureaucracy in the world,' the Archaeological Survey of India, in the seemingly 'postcolonial' period. He demonstrates that through the protocols and habitual practices of bureaucracy, this apparatus produces 'facts on the ground' while the regime of coloniality remains intact and maintains oppression and corruption. At the same time, it becomes the vehicle for advocating and enforcing extreme nationalist discourses and practices, with deadly consequences. This is a rare book and an important contribution to the field of archaeological ethnography, the politics of archaeology, and the ethnography of the state, and it deserves to be read widely. I expect that it will be an inspiration for many other researchers around the world.' Yannis Hamilakis, Brown University 'A curious feature of postcolonial studies in archaeology is how scholars from the very countries involved in colonial enterprises dominate its discourse. Avikunthak's brilliant book not only counters that dominance but also provides an extraordinary analysis of the micro-politics of archaeological practice unmatched by his western peers. Through meticulous study of the bureaucratic intricacies and tentacles of the ASI we are presented with an account of a postcolonial scholarly reality rarely acknowledged. By following the entire assembly line of meaning production from the artefacts uncovered in ASI excavation trenches to their transformation into published facts and court evidence, he painstakingly uncovers the convoluted and mediating networks between archaeology as a scientific discipline and nationalistic fundamentalism. He argues that the epistemology of archaeology in India is a symptom of a postcolonial bureaucratic rationality where science, state, and religion are contrived to manufacture a nation with a seemingly empirical past.' Bjornar Julius Olsen, The University of Tromso - The Arctic University of Norway