Few scholars today would argue that archaeology is practised in a social and political vacuum, or insist that the history of archaeology offers little more than a “nostalgic retreat” as David Clarke (Reference Clarke1968: xiii) once remarked. But this does not mean that archaeologists are in agreement regarding the relationship between the history of archaeology and the practice of archaeology. These fault lines are especially evident when we consider national styles of archaeology and the colonial history of the discipline.

In India, recent social and historical studies of archaeology are invariably influenced by the demolition in 1992 of the Babri Masjid, a medieval mosque in the north-Indian city of Ayodhya, and the loss of human life in the disturbances that followed. Public interest in this social issue has drawn attention to archaeologists, their methods, aims and interpretation of the Indian past. In this context, the two volumes under consideration here examine the study of ancient India and the writing of archaeology's history in post-colonial India. Guha takes aim at colonial historiography because, she claims, it dismisses “the ‘indigenous’ literature of India in favour of the ‘foreign’ textual accounts” (p. 1). Paddayya contextualises the Indian past within “Indological studies” of “India's heritage” that include “languages, culture, archaeology, history, religion and philosophy” (p. 164). He argues that heritage studies in India are not well understood, and he aims to address this issue through the examination of the “Indian ethos” (p. 166), or beliefs and values.

Both volumes are published in India and are clearly aimed at archaeologists and scholars in closely related disciplines who have familiarity with Indian history and archaeology. Katragadda Paddayya is a prehistorian and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute in Pune, Maharashtra, India. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquarians (London) and was recently awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in recognition of his contributions to archaeology. Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Tagore Research Scholar at the National Museum in New Delhi, India. The careers of these two authors overlapped in the 1980s during Guha's graduate studies at Deccan College, where Paddayya taught archaeological theory for over two decades.

Paddayya's volume presents a collection of lectures given at institutions across India since 2008. He draws widely from his previous publications and offers an internalist view of archaeology that emphasises the progression of analytical techniques and the expanding archaeological database. Guha's book is primarily post-processual and is mostly descriptive. It expands on recent studies of the history of Indian archaeology, which generally divide their treatment into pre-1947 (colonial) and post-1947 phases (Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2003; Singh Reference Singh2004; Lahiri Reference Lahiri2006; Ray Reference Ray2008; Sengupta & Gangopadhyay Reference Sengupta and Gangopadhyay2009). With the exception of Chakrabarti, each of these studies is by established scholars at an Indian university and focuses on a coloniser-colonised dynamic and the impact of this relationship on the study of ancient India. Critiques of colonial histories of archaeology are organised around three themes: the role of ‘natives’ in Indian archaeology; the influence of the government in the collection of archaeological data and preservation of cultural heritage; and the place of archaeology in understandings of the Indian past. In this vein, Guha critiques “errors of the earlier historicising practices” (p. 2) that overlooked the “practices and principles of archaeology, antiquarianism, history, natural history, philology, ethnology and geology” and that “[distanced] the histories of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeological scholarship of India and South Asia from those of the Orient” (p. 3).

Guha's volume is not a critical analysis of histories of Indian archaeology, nor does it aim to decolonise archaeological practices or to enhance an understanding of Ancient India. Rather, Guha aims to create an intellectual space for “manifestations of antiquarian practices within the pre-colonial pasts of the Indian subcontinent” (p. 8). A key point of contention for Guha is that British histories of Indian archaeology, which highlight and celebrate the achievements of British scholarship, have overlooked the works of other Europeans, such as the “German Sanskrit scholars” (p. 9) Rudolf Hoernlé (1841–1918) and Georg Bühler (1837–1889). Guha believes that this situation reflects the disengagement of archaeology from philology and an overall dismissal of the ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature, first by British scholars and then by historians of Indian archaeology (i.e. Indian archaeologists). Her book seeks to address this oversight.

In Artefacts of history, Guha offers a glance into diverse archival collections in Norway (Konow Collection) and in the UK at the University of Cambridge (Fox Collection, Whitehead Papers), Oxford University (Piggott Archive, Stein Collection), University College London (Wheeler Archive), the British Academy (Wheeler Papers) and the British Library (Wilson Papers). These collections are augmented with those at the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi and with historical newspapers (The Bombay Times and the Journal of Commerce 1839–1859). Drawing upon this broad range of source material, Guha takes a critical approach to archaeology's past that rejects linear narratives and that questions disciplinary boundaries.

Interestingly, Guha argues that existing “histories of South Asian archaeology” have “imprints of the colonial historiography” (p. 31), and she thus considers the former extensions of colonial histories. Although Guha does not say so, linearity is implicit in her enquiry because post-colonial histories cannot and do not precede colonial historiography. It is not surprising then that she investigates these objects of enquiry through histories of antiquarianism, philology and archaeology in colonial India. Guha's dismissal of historical development, however, weakens her objectives for reflexivity in the practice of archaeology.

Throughout, Guha alternates between ‘Hindustan’, ‘India’, ‘the Indian subcontinent’ and ‘South Asia’. The author acknowledges the distinctiveness of “British India” (p. 29) and distinguishes between scholarship in India and Pakistan, reflecting her awareness of colonial and national contexts. Yet she glosses over the meanings of other terms and uses them interchangeably. For example, South Asia is a term dated to the Cold War and refers to a geopolitical region. Thus, when Guha refers to histories of ‘South Asian archaeology’ she could mean archaeological research in the independent states of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but this is not clear to the reader. This situation is particularly problematic because Guha seeks to examine the circulation of ideas and influences across social and physical geographies through time.

Artefacts of history is organised into an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion. The introduction and chapters are classified by theme, including antiquarianism, curation, histories of philology and archaeology, the Indus Civilisation, heritage claims and nationalism in the Indian past. Overall, the narrative moves from colonial to post-colonial contexts. And yet there are missed opportunities, particularly in the final three chapters. In her examination of philology and archaeology, for example, Guha could have unpacked the relationship between philology (the broader study of language), palaeography (the study of manuscripts) and epigraphy (the study of inscriptions on stone, wood or pottery). While she is cognisant of “departmental archives of Archaeology and Epigraphy” (p. 138), and remarks on an apparent neglect of Sanskrit within the colonial government, she conflates philology with epigraphy. Greater attention to these nuances could have provided insight into the ways scholars used these sources, their aims, methods and interpretations of the Indian past. This in turn might have highlighted the nature of disciplinary boundaries.

In the penultimate chapter, Guha briefly discusses the Vedic origins of Hindu civilisation through the works of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), and how archaeological investigations were undertaken to enable reliable dating of the Sanskrit texts (p. 189). Guha, however, misses the chance to examine critically the influence of these beliefs and values on the overall role of archaeology in colonial and post-1947 India. This would have been a most fruitful endeavour as Guha seeks to promote the use of the Sanskrit corpus as a source on antiquarian practices in pre-colonial India.

Paddayya offers some context on Indian beliefs and values. He remarks that India has a “long preliterate past spanning one million years and beyond”, followed by “a recorded history of about four thousand years” marked by “many intrusions, invasions and convulsions” (p. 166). Despite these changes, Indian identity or “ethos”, Paddayya argues, “has not changed in any drastic way” (p. 167). But what is Indian identity? According to Paddayya, Indian identity “is basically Hindu in character with later accretions derived from the Buddhist, Jain, Muslim and colonial sources, all blended together harmoniously over a long period of time” (p. 167). Paddayya makes explicit that some Indian archaeologists consider the Vedas a source for understanding the past, and that he believes these texts are unchanging archives. Yet others, such as Arvind Sharma, a specialist in religious studies, have remarked that religious texts that were transmitted orally are not the “place to look for a historical sense” (Sharma Reference Sharma2003: 192) and point instead to the tens of thousands of inscriptions found across India as a source (Sircar Reference Sircar1977).

What of the practice of archaeology in twenty-first century India? This is glimpsed in Paddayya's final two chapters where he discusses the misuses of the past for “politico-religious and communal interests” (p. 184). Although he does not explicitly say so, Paddayya has in mind the demolition of the Babri Masjid when he discusses the relevance of archaeology in India and calls for “liberal education” (p. 195). Few Indian archaeologists would argue otherwise, yet, Paddayya's appeal is lost in his problematic dismissal of ethnic and linguistic minorities, reflected in the absence of discussion on the influence of social and political factors in Indian archaeology, such as political crisis, that rocked India throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Guha, likewise, misses the chance to expand on themes such as ethnicity, language and gender in Indian archaeology, remarking only briefly on “gendered archaeology” (p. 242), which affected her studies at Deccan College. These issues seem pertinent in Indian society, if recent public outrage following the so-called Nirbhaya case in 2012—where a group of six men brutally raped a young woman on a New Delhi bus and left her for dead—is any indication.

Taken together, these two books offer some insights into Indian archaeology, past and present, yet the authors could have done more to reflect themes of interest in contemporary Indian society.