India: Archaeological Investigations

India: Archaeological Investigations

Excavation in India began hesitantly, relatively late in the history of archaeology. The megalithic monuments of the south first attracted attention in 1819, when J. Babington opened graves in Malabar, finding iron objects, pottery and beads. Although he was unable to identify their occupants, other excavations followed.


The linguist and administrator Colonel Philip Meadows Taylor, who dug megalithic burials in Hyderabad and elsewhere in central and southern India in the 1850s, was particularly careful by the standards of the day, observing the stratification of objects within the graves, and concluding speculatively that he had found works of `the great Aryan nomadic tribes of the Eastern Celts or Scythians'.


However, most megalithic tomb excavations were inevitably carried out in the robust spirit of the time. One judge in Madras used convicts to open a grave in 1821, discovering `an old rusty sword, and an earthen jar, said to contain nothing', while others plainly excavated as a diversion from boredom. Such efforts, like barrow-digging in contemporary England, did little more than encourage the collection of antiquarian curios.


In northern India, early excavators concentrated their attention on Buddhist stupas, monuments of solid brick that enclosed a chamber housing sacred relics or texts. In 1830, a general in the army of the independent Sikh king Ranjit Singh, M. le Chevalier Ventura, dug into a stupa in the Punjab, penetrating as far as the central platform, where he found coins dating to the first centuries AD and several gold and copper boxes.


Others soon followed in his footsteps, taking up stupa-digging as far north as Afghanistan. Once again, the motive was antiquarian: a desire to acquire artifacts, particularly coins of the last centuries BC or first century AD , rather than a wish to study early Buddhist architecture.


Increasing numbers of haphazard excavations and the perceptible decay of monuments eventually led to demands for government measures to preserve antiquities and encourage systematic research into India's past.


One notable advocate of such action was General Alexander Cunningham, a military surveyor and chief engineer of the Northwest Provinces, who petitioned the Indian government to sponsor a systematic survey of sites and monuments, on the grounds that `the discovery and publication of all the existing remains of architecture and sculpture, with coins and inscriptions, would throw more light on the ancient history of India, both public and domestic, than the printing of all the rubbish contained in the eighteen Puranas' [Sanskrit historical poems]. It was this plea that ultimately led to the creation of the Archaeological Survey of India.


From the mid-nineteenth century until independence in 1947, archaeology in India was strongly tied to British government policy. Lord Canning, first Viceroy of India and cousin of Henry Layard's patron Stratford Canning, established an Archaeological Department in 1860, with northern India as its area of responsibility.


Cunningham was appointed temporary Archaeological Surveyor the next year, charged with making `an accurate description of such remains as most deserve notice, with the history of them so far as it may be traceable, and a record of the traditions that are retained regarding them'.


The position was abolished in 1866, but recreated more grandly in 1870 as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India; aided by several assistants, Cunningham served in this capacity until his retirement in 1885.


The minutes of the council that appointed Cunningham, published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1862, make British government motives clear:


It will not be to our credit, as an enlightened ruling power, if we continue to allow such fields of investigation, as the remains of the old Buddhist capital in Behar, the plains round Delhi, studded with ruins more thickly than even the Campagna of Rome, and many others, to remain without more examination than they have hitherto received.


Everything that has hitherto been done in this way, has been done by private persons, imperfectly and without system. It is impossible not to feel that there are European Governments, which, if they had held our rule in India, would not have allowed this to be said.


Cunningham had a longstanding and passionate interest in Indian antiquities. Giving his qualifications for writing The Ancient Geography of India (1871), a book dedicated to the Assyriologist Henry Rawlinson, he wrote:


My own travels have also been very extensive through the length and breadth of northern India ... Of southern India I have seen nothing, and of western India I have seen only Bombay, with the celebrated caves of Elephanta and Kanhari. But during a long service of more than thirty years in India, its early history and geography have formed the chief study of my leisure hours.


Yet Cunningham had done more than travel. He had dug Buddhist stupas in Uttar Pradesh, in the 1830s at Sarnath - where the Buddha delivered his first sermon - and in the 1840s at Sanchi (also called Bhilsa). He also collected the Roman coins that demonstrated ancient India's trading connections with the Mediterranean world.


During Cunningham's tenure, the Archaeological Survey conducted annual programmes of mapping and excavation along the lines of army surveys or the cartography sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund in the Levant.


Inventories of archaeological sites and standing buildings were drawn up with the aim of identifying places mentioned in ancient written sources such as the Indian epics, accounts of India by Greek and Roman authors, and Chinese records of Buddhist pilgrimages; in the last category were accounts of India by the Chinese pilgrims Fa-Hian and Hiuen-Tsang who in the fourth and seventh centuries AD visited all the famous sites of Buddhist history.


Limited excavation at key sites added a measure of precision to this essentially topographical study, exposing architecture, sculpture and inscriptions, and providing coins for dating. Although the responsibilities of the Archaeological Survey were extended to western and southern India in 1874, Cunningham himself worked steadily on northern Indian problems, until his retirement at 71.


In this way, he identified the locations of many important places, notably Taxila, the Gandharan capital and trade centre, nestled in the Himalayan foothills near the headwaters of the Indus.


Central to Cunningham's achievement was the way he systematized the knowledge of ancient India won by the Survey and developed a chronological framework into which to fit new discoveries. Indian antiquities were grouped into three basic periods, named Brahminical (before c. 500 BC), Buddhist (500 BC- AD 1200) and Mohammedan (after AD 1200).


Recognizing that this simple classification could not adequately cope with the enormous variation of architectural styles evident in India's ancient monuments, Cunningham also devised a second, more complicated, scheme for identifying and dating Hindu and Muslim architecture.


The oldest Hindu style, which he called Archaic and dated to 1000-250 BC, contained the various types of `rude monuments' and localities associated with the Buddha and with Alexander the Great. His view that the earliest Indian monuments were no older than 1000 BC endured until the early 1920s.


Cunningham worked before the principles of stratigraphic excavation had been developed, and before archaeology had any means of dating except through documentary sources, inscriptions, coins, and styles of architecture and art. Even with these disadvantages, he was remarkably perceptive about India's ancient monuments.


Digging into the brick terrace of one Sanchi stupa, he was struck by artifacts he found deliberately placed in small chambers as foundation deposits, among them `various specimens of red and black pottery, especially those which are covered with a dark metallic glaze'.


This black-glazed pottery, today called Northern Black Polished Ware and dated to the period after 500 BC, confirms Cunningham's original dating of the stupa to the third century BC.


Cunningham did not establish the foundations of Indian archaeology singlehandedly - others came before him, and his assistants in the Archaeological Survey also achieved significant results. James Fergusson and James Burgess drew up many detailed architectural surveys, particularly of Buddhist sites.


But Cunningham was the dominant spirit through much of the nineteenth century, first petitioning the government for an archaeological survey, then lending his energy and enthusiasm to guarantee its success. He might have written an appreciation of his entire archaeological career with these lines of poetry from The Bhilsa Topes (1854):


Nought but the Topes themselves remain to mock

Time's ceaseless efforts; yet they proudly stand

Silent and lasting upon their parent rock,

And still as cities under magic's wand;

Till curious Saxons, from a distant land,

Unlocked the treasures of two thousand years.


James Burgess, Cunningham's successor as Director General, continued the Survey for three years until his own retirement (1886-9). It fell thereafter into a period of stagnation that endured until the appointment of the young John Marshall in 1902.


The Marshall years

It was in the mid-nineteenth century that India's remote past was discovered for the first time. As early as 1842, Meadows Taylor had reported a polished stone axe from Lingsugar that he compared with prehistoric axes from Europe, and he continued to collect stone artifacts while excavating the cairns on the Deccan plateau that he published, complete with plans and sections, in 1862.


In 1860, H. P. LeMesurier, a chief engineer on the East Indian Railway, found scores of neolithic polished stone axes under trees in villages. Finally, on 30 May 1863, Robert Bruce Foote of the Geological Survey of India, the `Father of Indian prehistory', discovered a palaeolithic handaxe in a gravel pit at Pallavaram near Madras; he returned later that year, and again in 1864, to find many more palaeolithic tools, some of them still in situ.


Foote communicated his finds to John Evans, barely five years after the idea of fossil man became accepted in Europe; his natural assumption was that the palaeolithic implement-makers of Europe and India were contemporary.


Archibald Carlyle, a naturalist and geologist who had gone out to India as tutor to a rajah's son, became First Assistant to the Archaeological Survey soon after. Despite the general concentration on historical antiquities at this time, Carlyle began collecting stone tools such as arrowheads and microliths as early as 1867.


Subsequently, in rock-shelters at Morhana Pahar, above the Ganga valley, he discovered paintings in a stiff and archaic style that represented `scenes in the life of the ancient stone chippers'. He identified animals and hunting scenes featuring men with bows, arrows, spears and hatchets, concluding that the paintings were of various periods, including that of the makers of the thousands of small stone tools, or microliths, he had been finding.


Although he published nothing on these discoveries until 1883, Carlyle's recognition that some of the Morhana Pahar paintings must be prehistoric predated the discovery of prehistoric rock art in Europe.


It was in 1902 that the fortunes of the Archaeological Survey of India recovered with the appointment of John Marshall (1876-1958) to the revived post of Director General. Marshall had read classics at Cambridge and was already a seasoned field-worker, having dug in Greece, Crete and Turkey. Over his long tenure (1902-28) he reinvigorated the Survey, working to conserve the subcontinent's ancient monuments and excavating to provide new information.


The nineteenth-century practice of clearing monumental architecture was abandoned in favour of the controlled excavation of more ordinary, residential sites, and the methodical evaluation of pottery and other finds.


Reporting his work at Charsada, near Taxila in the Himalayan foothills, Marshall provided a special section on the classification of pottery, hoping that it `would be of particular value to explorers among the innumerable dheris [mounds] of Northern India, where the ever constant presence of pottery fragments on the surface of the mounds makes them the most serviceable index to the date of the remains buried beneath'.


This move towards using pottery as a dating device, inspired by early experience of the developing standards of archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, was characteristic of his systematic approach.


Like Cunningham, Marshall's personal interests lay in the north of India, with its strong connections with the classical world. He began by investigating early Buddhist sites, working methodically backwards to earlier periods as time passed.


At Bhita, near Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, Marshall exposed `for the first time in India, well-preserved remains of houses, shops and streets, dating as far back as the Mauryan epoch', and recovered `numerous minor antiquities ... which help us materially to visualize the everyday life of the towns-peoples of those early days'.


Equally importantly, the Bhita excavations detected a succession of settlements through time, from before the Mauryan period (third century BC through to Gupta times (mid-first millennium AD ). Marshall's early work, assiduously published and matching in quality anything being done elsewhere in Asia and the Mediterranean, in this way made good his intention of refocusing Indian archaeology.


Marshall later excavated for many years at the great city of Taxila itself (1912-36), continuing even after retiring from his duties as Director General. Now in northwestern Pakistan, the site has multiple mounds, some representing Buddhist stupas and monasteries, others repeatedly occupied settlements.


Marshall exposed large areas of the city defences, town streets and houses, Buddhist monasteries and schools, and other features of a regional capital occupied for a thousand years between the fifth century BC and the fifth century AD . The Taxila excavations made a fundamental contribution to understanding the history of northern India, and stand as a monument to Marshall's archaeological career.