IN his recent history of modern India, Ramachandra Guha argues that historians of the more distant past can rely on having more trusting readers than the scholar of contemporary events. Not having experienced the era under discussion, these readers are ‘...usually happy to be led and guided by the expert’, while historians of the recent past must confront stubbornly resistant notions about historical ‘truth’, fixed ideas impervious to new interpretations, even those backed up by hundreds of footnotes.¹

While it is true that no one can reasonably claim direct experience of ancient India, preconceived notions about the ‘truth’ of the ancient past are, it would seem, no less entrenched than those of the modern era. Indeed, specific understandings of the remote past may be even more widely shared, conventional and simplistic than those of more recent periods, because for most people their primary or sole exposure to this material comes from textbooks, a genre not only necessarily simplified to reach a mass audience, but also one which generally fails to promote skills of critical analysis, relying instead on a logic of expert authority. Questions about how we know the past are thus generally subordinated to what we know about the past, at worst a dry recital of dates, dynasties and battles and, for archaeology, of sites, ceramics and excavated objects. Little wonder, then, that most people limit their exposure of deep history to school lessons, leaving them with only a standard outline of events, heros, and moral lessons without the corresponding critical skills to continually re-evaluate those lessons.

 

The use of history for interested political ends is, by now, not news. When mass violence is explained in terms of a dispute over whether or not archaeological remains of a temple occur in a specific location, or research libraries are damaged over perceived slights to Shivaji’s parentage, no one can pretend that archaeological and historical interpretations lie outside of politics, notwithstanding the tenuous causal connections between such contemporary events and the content of scholarly production.

All history (and archaeology) is interested history, a term I use here in two distinct yet related ways. First of all, we begin with the inescapable problem that the past is known only inferentially, through experiences in the present – texts, artifacts, structures, charred seeds, and all the other material objects that constitute evidence of the past all exist now, or indeed their study would hardly be possible. The inevitable interpretive dimension of history writing is thus always mediated through analytical strategies we can gloss as methodology.

Interest, however, also arises because the deep past matters to a great many people, a situation by no means unique to India. Philology, the nineteenth-century ‘queen of the sciences’, has been resurrected from its obscure corner of academia to serve anachronistic arguments about the indigeneity of both Vedic Hinduism and of that deeply problematic conflation of biological, linguistic and ethnic identity that has come to be known as ‘the Aryans’. The anachronism arises, of course, from the geographic framing of postulated population movements within the modern Indian nation state; to say that one group is foreign and another indigenous in the context of a national boundary to be formed only thousands of years into the future is clearly absurd. Such absurdities, however, may have very real contemporary consequences.

 

Given both the necessity of inference in historical reconstruction and often impassioned feelings about past events, it is incumbent upon historical scholars to make clear how, exactly, they translate documents, inscriptions and objects into historical narratives. For the ancient past and especially for times, places and topics known primarily through archaeological remains, the interested nature of research – at once an analytical dilemma and a personal responsibility for scholars – creates an additional difficulty that the contemporary historian does not face. Here we can suggest that the burden of expertise, the intervention of intellectual authority between the producer and consumer of historical knowledge, creates a gulf that has, for the most part, stifled reasoned discussion and encouraged either ad hominem attacks on scholars or wholesale dismissal of expert knowledge itself.

Ancient texts pose challenges to would-be readers, with difficult orthography, archaic vocabulary and, not least, limited access. However, strategies of archaeological analysis are even less clear beyond the inner precincts of the discipline. Broken pots, lumps of metal, bones, layers of sediment and, above all, context – the spatial and temporal relationships that provide the ‘grammar’ of material analysis – all of these require specialized training to analyze or even to critically consume primary information generated by specialists.

 

Given this situation, in which the ancient past both constitutes a potent resource for identity politics and is poorly understood in terms of the methods of its construction, passions run high and critical analyses lag. If non-specialists cannot evaluate conflicting arguments about the past, or indeed if the existence of intellectual disagreement itself appears to threaten the certainty and authority of science, then far from being happily guided by the experts, many will be tempted to jettison expert knowledge altogether or to evaluate it not on its own merits, but on the basis of the nationality or other ascriptive identity of the scholars who produce such knowledge.

Indeed, Dilip Chakrabarti titles his 2008 study of the sociopolitics of Indian archaeology The Battle for Ancient India, a battle not of swords or of scholarship, but of scholars.² What is particularly unfortunate about Chakrabarti’s impassioned essay is the dilution of his insightful theoretical critiques of the dominant modes of archaeological interpretation, especially the persistence of diffusionist logics of change, with charges that link specific intellectual arguments to an insufficient affection for one’s homeland or, apparently, to the misfortune of foreign birth. When archaeology and history are trotted out as justifications for national tragedies, such squabbling within the academy seems petty indeed.

This wrangling represents a leakage into academic discourse of the dominant mode of dealing with the distant past – the rigid binding together of specific arguments about the past with defined communal, national, or political stances. Combined with the real threat of violence that such positions have come to entail, it is no surprise that actual intellectual debate has been stifled. This is true even for seemingly mundane topics as ceramic typology. When a pottery type such as Painted Gray Ware (PGW), for example, comes to be associated with later Vedic Aryans or the events of the Mahabharat, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for scholars to engage in the ordinary business of analysis, leaving our understanding of the chemical composition, ubiquity, distribution, and stylistic variation of this ware stalled in the disciplinary past.

 

The recent (2008) publication, then, of Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India constitutes a critical event in the writing of Indian history and archaeology, a welcome addition to the literature and, one hopes, the beginning of a new era in which the history and archaeology of the more distant past is presented with the same level of analytical sophistication that we have come to expect of contemporary history. An advanced-level textbook, this up-to-date, lavishly illustrated, and thoughtfully-designed volume is clearly the new standard against which future texts will be measured. With its high production values, extensive bibliography, and extra features, Singh’s history will be an expensive but necessary addition to every university and college library.

 

As useful as its substantive treatment of the archaeology and textual history of the period from the Paleolithic to the twelfth century is, however, it is the inclusion of at least the beginnings of some critical methodological tools for evaluating how the past is known that really distinguishes this work. Not only does Singh’s overview of early Indian history deftly integrate archaeological and historical data in a way few, if any, other reviews have achieved or even ventured, but it also adopts a level of methodological self-awareness that promises to help transform historical education. Coupled with its clear exposition of historical detail, this history gently advances an interpretive framework based on the notion of Indian history as a mosaic of diverse peoples, practices and traditions rather than forcing this complex and diverse story into the more common, and clunkier narrative of the march of progress. Finally, this volume takes clear positions on some of the more controversial issues such as the ‘Aryan debate’, carefully reasoned discussions which acknowledge the existence of diverse and often polarized views.

The overall conception of the work owes its form, one assumes, to the structure of university course offerings and to the needs of students in particular programmes of study. Clearly, this adds significantly to the book’s value for both teachers and students, but it is unfortunate that the two major framing devices of the work – space and time – remain confined to the Indian nation state and to that rigid tripartite periodization of history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods that owes so much to colonial historiography. The geographic restriction of the volume to post-1947 India creates some odd situations in which, in order to support the narrative at hand, the author engages in ad hoc boundary raids, using archaeological sites and, less often, texts from beyond the Indian nation state to fill out her history of ‘India’.

Sri Lanka, for example, is left out of most chapters, but the existence of several well-excavated Paleolithic sites with very early microlithic tools is sufficiently interesting and important to warrant inclusion in the text, even though the island more or less drops out of the story after that. Similarly, the region containing the remains of the Indus or Harappan civilization is cut by the India-Pakistan border, with most of the larger sites and the majority of the core area lying across the border in Pakistan. Fortunately, Singh chooses in this chapter to ignore contemporary boundaries and present a reasonable account of what is known about this early urban society, steering a middle course between competing interpretations of its degree of political centralization and varying explanations for its demise.

 

All histories, of course, defy delimitation to some extent, and the focus on the land within the boundaries of contemporary India is entirely understandable in the context of textbook production. However, this volume’s selective use of examples from beyond India – Pakistan is home to the early agricultural settlement of Mehrgarh and to Harappan cities, but has almost no role to play in the early Medieval period, for instance – does create the rather unfortunate impression that only India has a coherent story to tell, an impression that could have perhaps been countered by some of the otherwise exemplary self-awareness and methodological openness that characterizes the discussion of historical and archaeological method.

Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India crosses boundaries other than national borders. As noted, a key feature of this work is the way in which information from archaeology and text-based history are brought together in a single historical account, an integration that one hopes will become the new standard for historical exposition. Where this integration fails, the problem lies more with the way in which archaeological data are represented in the primary literature than with the author herself. If the chapters relying entirely upon archaeology sometimes devolve into lists of artifacts, this does faithfully reflect the dominant mode of exposition in the archaeological literature. While Singh does highlight existing archaeological work that addresses broader social and cultural concerns, as an archaeologist I would suggest that it is incumbent upon members of the discipline itself to bridge the current division of labour between those who specialize in the generation of primary data and those who synthesize such information.

 

Archaeologists close to the source – that is, those who excavate sites and analyze artifacts – are well aware, for example, of the ambiguity inherent in the construction of artifact types, classifications which impose a rough order on a world of material diversity. Some typological constructs are relatively robust, while others are very imperfect labels applied to structure the diversity visible within a corpus of millions of pieces of broken pottery. When these types are named and studied as entities in themselves, the underlying complexity of the data can become entirely lost and it becomes possible to entertain, for example, very dubious correlations between ceramic types and ethnic groups.

 

For those who have worked with the vast data sets out of which categories are drawn, the reification of those categories is more evidently problematic. Such issues pose a significant problem to the author of any synthetic work. Too much fretting about the complexities of typology and the reader becomes not only bored and alienated, but also perhaps suspicious of the possibility of understanding the past at all, a stage all postgraduate students in archaeology pass through at some point, it seems. If readers can be challenged to face difficult textual information (as they are in this volume), I would suggest that they could also be pushed even harder and given some primary archaeological evidence – measurements, attributes, and counts rather than simply numbing lists of types of objects – and be asked to create order from the information. Exercises like this can illustrate the multiple ways in which material evidence can be made to ‘speak’, a lesson Singh develops beautifully for ancient texts, thus taking some small steps toward spreading the burden of expertise and making readers active producers rather than simply consumers of knowledge about the past.

It is, indeed, Singh’s exemplary treatment of the textual corpus lying behind the construction of Indian history that prompts me to hope for similar tutorials on material culture. The five pages of the book devoted to the methods of archaeology focus on technical issues and conservation, while the more than twenty pages devoted to the interpretation of texts present a nuanced account of the possibilities and challenges presented by diverse written sources. Jumping right into the contemporary textbook mode of including internet-linked resources, the author includes many useful addenda with additional images, discussions, and even selections from primary texts. If archaeologists want material evidence brought to bear on discussions about social and political organization, diet, gender relations, agricultural practice, trade, and other key historical issues, then we will need to make the implications of our analyses clearer and more accessible, presenting not only lists of excavated objects, but also cogent accounts of why these might be important and what (and how) broader social, ecological and chronological patterns one can infer from these objects and their context.

 

Although textbooks tend to adopt a detached, dispassionate tone, they necessarily represent a point of view, as recent controversies over history texts in both India and the United States have so graphically illustrated. The selection of time and place, of topics and evidence, of organization and emphasis, all require decisions about relative importance and credibility.

All scholarship confronts such choices, the human sciences more than most. In India, as elsewhere, history-writing has occasionally been taken captive by specific interest groups, groups for whom questions of origins, language, religion, or past cultural practice are deployed in the service of contemporary claims to place, to sectarian or national pride, or to other tangible rewards in the present. In this politically charged atmosphere, conventional narratives of history as an onward march of progress tend to create winners and losers – those who drive the course of ‘civilization’ and those left behind.

Some of the most contentious issues in early Indian history – the ‘Aryan question’, the status of ‘tribal’ groups, the existence of untouchability – suffer from their framing within narratives of unidirectional progressive change or, its obverse, of a fall from a previous golden age. Forcing the diversity of human experience within the Indian subcontinent into either framework not only violates the integrity of the textual and material evidence as best we understand it, but it also requires heroes and villains, falls from grace or emergences out of darkness. It is in this context that Singh’s explicit interpretive metaphor – the mosaic – is so valuable. She stresses the complexity and diversity of experience across this broad region while also crafting a composite image, a mosaic, of a unified Indian past. That she is able to do justice to regional specificity, occupational diversity, and cultural complexity is a testament to Singh’s powerful historical vision that lies behind the welter of detail that makes up this massive text.

 

If the politicization of history texts and, more ominously, the manipulation of historical claims to fuel contemporary conflict, are any indication, Ramachandra Guha’s wistful claim that writers of pre-modern history can rely on more trusting readers than can contemporary historians appears more hopeful than true. Advocates of specific historical interpretations, reliant on pronouncements from the archaeological and historical priesthood, often simply reject empirical evidence that flies in the face of their position all together or impugn, not scholarship, but scholars.

Thus, so many debates that appear on their face to be about some point of historical interpretation are actually based on assertions rather than evidence, especially if the latter is proffered by scholars with ‘inappropriate’ national or communal credentials. What is lacking in such debates, as I have suggested, is the existence of a widespread critical apparatus, a basic intellectual tool kit that would allow readers of archaeology and history to make informed decisions about scholarly debates – and to see these debates as a normal and necessary part of the production of knowledge.

 

It would be easy to dismiss these interested advocates as unreachable, and perhaps this is true. However, far greater stakes lie in the education of new generations. Educational strategies that rely on rote memorization without a concomitant development of critical analytical skills are bound to produce consumers of history either entirely trusting (and hence vulnerable to interested manipulations of the past) or else skeptical of expert knowledge all together. As valuable as the empirical evidence marshalled by Singh in this volume is, and as nicely integrated the archaeological and historical data are, to my mind the most enduring value of Upinder Singh’s new synthesis is the way in which it aims to create not simply consumers but producers of historical thought.

It may be utopian to believe that new generations, armed with the critical skills to evaluate historical and archaeological claims, who, though not experts, have some sense of how both texts and objects are made to speak, will eschew political battles based on pseudo-historical claims. Nevertheless, Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India should be lauded as a step in this direction, a step away from battles for ancient India. Knowing how we know the past feeds us for a lifetime; knowing what we know of the past, while valuable, is a single meal.

 

* Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, Pearson Education, Delhi, 2008.

Footnotes:

1. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi, Picador India, 2007, p. 15.

2. Dilip Chakrabarti, The Battle for Ancient India: An Essay in the Sociopolitics of Indian Archaeology, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2008.