The proceedings of a 2005 conference, Ancient India: New Research collects the work of nine scholars affiliated with the University of Delhi and Jawarhalal Nehru University. After a clear and helpful introduction by the editors, the book delivers nine chapters, which I will summarize before offering my assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.
In Chapter 1, Samyukta Datta chronicles the efforts of Bengalis in carrying out “non-official” archaeological investigations in Bengal and beyond during the Raj. Datta thus contradicts what she says is the prevalent stereotype presented in histories of Indian archaeology, namely that Indians as “ignorant natives” could not carry out research on their own.
While the first chapter is solidly a historiographic one, the next six chapters are archaeological. In Chapter 2, Mudit Trivedi presents the results of his survey of the Delhi ridge. A fair fraction of Trivedi's paper concerns the geochemical makeup of the region, but he also treats chipped stone hand tools. While Trivedi claims that the Delhi ridge has “considerable implication and much further scope for study,” he gives no indication as to what those might be (p. 64). In a somewhat similar vein, Shibani Bose “endeavours to synthesize available archaeobotanical evidence relevant to the understanding of human-plant interaction…up to c. third century bc in the Middle Ganga Plains and the eastern Vindhyas” (p. 76). Bose demonstrates that ancient Indians ate a variety of cultivated and wild grains, and urges us to reconsider the dates for the earliest cultivation of rice in India.
Chapters 4 and 5 address “literary and archaeological landscapes of death” (p. 5) using “the idea of landscape as a physical and conceptual category” (p. 6). Uthara Suvrathan examines the Vidarbha region of eastern Maharashtra through study of megaliths and other mortuary sites, as well as Sanskrit literature. Meera Visvanathan questions how we can “locate the experience of martial heroism within the larger structures of early historic south India” (p. 174), and juxtaposes burial sites with literature, in this case ancient Tamil poetry.
Chapters 6 and 7 consider religious sites in Gujarat, and potentially religious terracotta finds in Mathura and Ahichchhatra (sic). In these two chapters in particular, the authors frequently point out how their finds challenge received notions about the shapes and trajectories of religion in ancient India. Susan Verma Misra's treatments of Gujarati religious sites also discredit long-held notions about the relationship between Buddhism and trade, for example, and about the interrelations between various “Hindu,” Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jainian formations. Similarly, Shivani Agrawal advocates that “any interpretation with regard to the nature and function of these [terracotta] figurines will have to move beyond the arbitrary ‘Mother Goddess’ tag” (p. 231), which her chapter very much succeeds in doing.
The final two chapters move from archaeology to literature as Shonaleeka Kaul examines the sexual mores of urban culture as presented in kāvya; Shivani Agrawal mines texts such as Kalhana's Rājataraṅgiṇi to assess the political and other roles of women in early medieval Kashmir.
I find several problems with this volume. The chapters on archaeology and its history do not unite well with the final two on literature, especially after several authors make the claim that literature and archaeology should be used in conjunction with one another. Singh and Lahiri, in their introduction, fault earlier writers for treating literature “in a positivistic manner, extracting empirical data from it” (p. 9), but neither Agrawal nor Kaul make any real attempt to think through the relationship of text to historical reality; instead, each treats literature as factual reporting. Conversely, the archaeological chapters present masses of facts, and though each attempts to provide some implications or conclusions, these efforts are often scant and difficult to reconcile with the foregoing material.
Most importantly, while the authors and editors rightly insist on the need for new research paradigms and methodologies, in most instances the actual chapters never really fulfill this mission. Time and again, the authors make a convincing case for the importance of analysis, interpretation, and inter-disciplinarity, and so on, but all too often that task lies uncompleted. The chapters give no explanation of what the evidence can tell us about ancient India or why. The editors present the clearest vision of how these analyses could work, but the chapters themselves never make good on the promises.
All that said, this work clearly surpasses much earlier work on ancient India. Scholars in Indian universities are famous for their vast mastery of both information and the relevant languages, but (with notable exceptions such as Romila Thapar) have underemphasized interpretation and analysis. While repeatedly demonstrating the need for further work in this direction, Singh and Lahiri have clearly lead this cohort into a much-needed new perspective on writing ancient Indian history. Though their work is not yet finished, the contributors to this volume clearly mark a new historiographic chapter in which conscious use of penetrating analytical and interpretive tools will allow us to learn a great deal more about ancient India. I hope we can look forward to further contributions from them.
