01-18-2009, 09:27 AM
PART ONE
Yvette Rosser
SAFFRON ARCHEOLOGY AND THE MEDIA
"I have said that it is archaeologists who have been at the forefront of this saffron movement. It is important for the public to know that the same archaeologists â and they are a minority â who spun the tale about an â84 pillar templeâ under the Babri masjid have created this âAryan Harappansâ myth."
--- Shireen Ratnagar
The following discussion concerns a contemporary civilizational controversy regarding contestations in the interpretation of archaeological data. During the summer of 2000, a very public debate arose surrounding the excavation of a 10th century Jain temple in Fatehpur Sikri where a team from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had unearthed the ruins of a temple that revealed, among other finds, a pit filled with numerous damaged, broken statues. The debate about this archeological dig offers an example of not only the ideological gulf dividing social scientists in India, but is indicative of the manner in which opposing camps of scholars have been using the popular media to sensationalize their perspectives.
The newspapers jumped in to report about this particular excavation site. Shortly, Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Prof. K.M. Shirmali, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU and Prof. Irfan Habib from Aligarh Muslim University, D. N. Jha from Delhi University, and numerous other Indian academics who often chime in to condemn the Indo-centric paradigms, issued a statement that accused the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) of acting irresponsibly by excavating the ruins of this Jain temple citing the dig as an example of âsaffron archeology.â
These critics accused the ASI of âcommunalizing archeologyâ. They claimed that the ASI was excavating this site because they wanted to prove that Muslims had destroyed the Jain temple. The historians also contended that the archaeologists at the ASI twist their data, releasing information before it was entirely analyzed, and manipulating the popular media. Many historians have recently assumed that they are more able to understand the nuances of archaeological data than are trained archaeologists whose interpretations are now considered to be tainted by saffron.
Harbans Mukhia, a medieval historian, explained during our interview:
âArchaeology is a discipline that requires a tremendous amount of patience, you dig up things, donât start announcing your conclusions, be patient, fill out your report, and then, reach whatever conclusions. They donât have the patience, they want to get into the newspaper head lines immediately so usually it starts from there, announcing headlines.. which headlines? Usually provocative headlines ⦠for example, their evidence of Aryan settlements. Now that leads to a reaction and a counter denunciation, etc. If there was patience⦠they havenât bothered to publish reports for 25 years not to speak of the ones last year, but suddenly you get these screaming headlines. They donât have the patience.â
The July 2000 press release written by the well known group of Delhi historians, claimed that the ASI was excavating the site to prove that Muslims, specifically the Moghul emperor Akbar, destroyed this Jain temple in order to construct his nearby capitol city. On the other hand, quite a few scholars whom I interviewed in Delhi as well as several journalists and two renowned archeologists refuted this accusation. They maintained that the excavation of the Jain site was significant in its own right, pointing to the discovery of one of the most beautiful examples of an 11th century Sarasvati statue ever found.
The archeologists insisted that the ASI had never claimed a connection between the demolition of this Jain temple, the destruction date of which was yet to be determined, and the construction of Akbarâs fortified palatial city nearby. If this was claimed, the ASI maintained, then it was an extrapolation by the popular media.
There were numerous newspaper articles and op-ed pieces about this archaeological dig. It typified the divisions that are ubiquitous among the prolifically polarized intellectuals in India. Besides speaking with several archeologists in Delhi, I made a brief long distance telephone call to Agra and spoke with the superintending archeologist of the dig, D.V. Sharma who said that he had never claimed that the Jain Temple had been destroyed by Akbar. Several months after the spectacle had erupted across the newspapers, an article in the July 22, 2000 edition of the magazine Frontline confirmed that D.V. Sharma had not made such an extrapolation, but that the media had sensationalized the major archeological discovery of a large and rare catch of statues dating from the 10th and 11th centuries.
Dharam Vir Sharma, Superintending Archaeologist of the Agra Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), was at pains to distance himself from all such interpretations. âThis is purely an academic exercise,â he argued, âand the objective is to reveal certain aspects of the history of Central India from the pre-Mughal periodâ.
The templeâs only relationship to Akbar was that the excavation site is quite near to Akbarâs famous palace, Fatehpur Sikri. The media certainly added to the sensationalization of this dig, and naturally, the Hindu-centric crowd capitalized on it as well, claiming that such desecration looked like the work of Muslim iconoclasts.
Harbans Mukhia wrote an op-ed critique of the ASI Fatehpur Sikri excavation. He proposed a tentative supposition that perhaps intolerant Brahmins had destroyed this Jain site. His comments are discussed at length because they fueled the resentment of non-leftist intellectuals, bitter about what they perceive as the tendency among leftists to blame Hindus for imagined crimes of the past and exonerate Muslims invaders, whom they see as iconoclasts. Mukhiaâs article in the Hindustan Times, that took a pot shot at the ASI, infuriated several archaeologists who responded passionately to his critique.
The details of this controversial dig are far simpler than its repercussions. The excavation was conducted by D.V. Sharma, Superintendent Agra Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India, on a mound called Bir Chhabili, where, based on âtextual references and other indicationsâ, they suspected an old temple may have stood. They found one. There was a pit at the temple site in which numerous broken statues, bearing marks of vandalization, had apparently been carefully buried after having been damaged. Among the statues uncovered was a large exquisite statue of the goddess Sarasvati. Though a statue of the Hindu Goddess of music and learning, it is in the distinctive Jain style.
Sharma had proposed, in his initial analysis, that this pit was a kind of visarjan where broken statues had been placed for burial.
The media, when reporting about the remarkable find, erroneously associated the ruins of the Jain temple with Akbar, since the excavation was going on only a few hundred meters from the walls of Fatehpur Sikri â though the desecration of the temple may have predated the construction of the city. Shortly after the news about the excavation was published in the press, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU visited the site with a group of students and spoke with the junior archeologists at work there. Mukhia returned to Delhi and a few weeks later wrote âDemolishing Temples Wasnât the Pastâs Only Languageâ which appeared in The Hindustan Times on Sunday, March 19, 2000.
In this article Professor Mukhia claimed that in the medieval period, Hindus also destroyed temples. He took a very negative view of the Bir Chhabili archeological project. In the first few paragraphs he gave a little lesson in historiography vis-à -vis state sponsored violence and asked the reader to note that, âthe wrapping of political nuances around the discipline of historyâ is common in all nationalist histories. He went on to state that destructions of religious sites âreflect the assertion of state power by the rulers ⦠and their search for legitimisation in a vision of historyâ.
After describing the archeological site as he viewed it, during the few hours that he had visited, Professor Mukhia speculated that since numerous statues of the Jain deity, Mahavira, were found broken into smaller pieces, and bore âseveral marks of deliberate or indeliberate vandalismâ but the âJainia Saraswati⦠[was] almost in tact, with one hand broken off, but laying by its sideâ that, as a historian, this information leads him to âa suspicionâ.
He therefore speculates: âIs it feasible to consider the possibility of Brahminical intolerance, which spared the one goddess with clear Brahminical association, but not others which were, as it were, on the other side of the fence, that is, Jainism?
Professor Mukhia, in this rather far-fetched âsuspicionâ of Hindu on Jain violence, contradicts his assertions at the beginning of this article when he explained about historiography and stressed that religious clashes were not the only language of the past. We should not assume, he emphasized, that the âstate did nothing else except demolish temples and subjugate people of other faithsâ.
He criticizes historians who ânever view history except as interminable religious clashes organized by the state. It is thus that just about any testimony, textual or archaeological, bearing upon history is immediately constructed as a proof of the statesâ religious intolerance.â
Yet, by the end of his article, Mukhia is asking his readers to consider that it is âfeasibleâ that Brahmans mutilated these Jain murtis. This speculation is based on his negative evaluation of Brahmans of the medieval era. In so doing, Mukhia politicized his analysis of the excavation. He uses mocking tones to describe the motivations of the archaeologists. Mukhiaâs contemporary political opinions about the neo-Hindu Revivalists movement, caused him to blame their Sanskrit spouting ancestors for the desecration. Albeit, this is, he stresses, only a suspicious possibility.
He fails to see that his claim, that history has been politicized, is in itself politicized. To continue to miss the point of his whole essay and attempt to sharpen the political point, he caps his claim that Hindus may have been responsible for the destruction of this Jain temple, with a jab at the current BJP government and the ASI, when he wrote regarding âMuslim demolitions of non-Muslim templesâ that âa former professor of physics and a former journalist let it be known from their ministerial platforms that this is the only correct version of Indian historyâ.
The physics professor and the former journalist alluded to, are M.M. Joshi (Ph.D. in Physics, former Professor at Aligarh University) the controversial Minster of Human Resource Development (HRD) that served under the BJP government and Arun Shourie (former journalist and Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse) and at that time a BJP member of the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha.
Two weeks later, in a rebuttal to Harbans Mukhiaâs article, Dr. Meenakshi Jain, a historian in Delhi, wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in the April 4, 2000 edition of The Hindustan Times, âBrahmins Werenât Iconoclastsâ. She wrote, âThe recent discovery of Jain statues in Fatehpur Sikri is evidence that communalism was âconstructedâ much before the colonial periodâ.
As one of the few outspoken ânon-leftistâ historians in New Delhi, Dr. Jain describes her view of the battlefield that is contemporary Indian historiography: âFrightened by the growing avalanche of archaeological evidence which threatens to pulverize Marxist historiography, the desperation of leftist academics to salvage their rendition of the past is entirely understandable. Decades of labour expended in effacing references to the destruction of Hindu temples, shifting the focus instead to sectarian Hindu conflict is now in jeopardy.â
She continues: âGiven the Jain communityâs impeccable non-militant credentials and Akbarâs reputation as the best face of Indian Islam, this casts an entirely new light on inter-community relations in medieval India. That is why, though Jain-Hindu reactions have been muted so far, Marxists have rushed in to defend their carefully sanitised version of the past.
For the leftists, Akbar is sacrosanct, the âFather of Indian integrationâ--a model of communal harmony because he is seen as less âfanaticalâ and more âIndianizedâ than his ancestors or his offspring, which included some of the more notorious iconoclasts in Indian lore, such as Babur and Aurangzeb. The leftist intellectuals, who extrapolate their historical narratives about medieval India outwards from the benevolent âsecularismâ of Akbarâs fifty-five year reign, were therefore particularly pained to discredit an archeological excavation that might indicate that Akbar was not as liberal as depicted in the history textbooks they had written.
Ironically, as mentioned, the ASI officer, D.V. Sharma, had not made the claim that Akbar had destroyed this Jain temple, neither had the junior archaeologists working at the sight. However, the famous vocal group of concerned historians in Delhi, inferred that if a temple was destroyed around the time that Akbar built his capital at Fatehpur Sikri, then obviously the âsaffron archeologistsâ must be trying to connect the destruction of the Jain temple with Akbarâs construction of Fatehpur Sikri.
Four months after the initial media hoopla, the Delhi Historians Group called a news conference to condemn the excavations on the hillock near Agra, and issued a press statement signed by two dozen professors. Included in this list were the names of historians who have taken the lead to write historical pamphlets and op-ed pieces designed more to inflame Hindu sentiments than to offer a nuanced, culturally sensitive, multi-perspectival approach to controversial topics such as temple desecration and beef eating in ancient India.
Yvette Rosser
SAFFRON ARCHEOLOGY AND THE MEDIA
"I have said that it is archaeologists who have been at the forefront of this saffron movement. It is important for the public to know that the same archaeologists â and they are a minority â who spun the tale about an â84 pillar templeâ under the Babri masjid have created this âAryan Harappansâ myth."
--- Shireen Ratnagar
The following discussion concerns a contemporary civilizational controversy regarding contestations in the interpretation of archaeological data. During the summer of 2000, a very public debate arose surrounding the excavation of a 10th century Jain temple in Fatehpur Sikri where a team from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had unearthed the ruins of a temple that revealed, among other finds, a pit filled with numerous damaged, broken statues. The debate about this archeological dig offers an example of not only the ideological gulf dividing social scientists in India, but is indicative of the manner in which opposing camps of scholars have been using the popular media to sensationalize their perspectives.
The newspapers jumped in to report about this particular excavation site. Shortly, Prof. K.N. Panikkar, Prof. K.M. Shirmali, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU and Prof. Irfan Habib from Aligarh Muslim University, D. N. Jha from Delhi University, and numerous other Indian academics who often chime in to condemn the Indo-centric paradigms, issued a statement that accused the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) of acting irresponsibly by excavating the ruins of this Jain temple citing the dig as an example of âsaffron archeology.â
These critics accused the ASI of âcommunalizing archeologyâ. They claimed that the ASI was excavating this site because they wanted to prove that Muslims had destroyed the Jain temple. The historians also contended that the archaeologists at the ASI twist their data, releasing information before it was entirely analyzed, and manipulating the popular media. Many historians have recently assumed that they are more able to understand the nuances of archaeological data than are trained archaeologists whose interpretations are now considered to be tainted by saffron.
Harbans Mukhia, a medieval historian, explained during our interview:
âArchaeology is a discipline that requires a tremendous amount of patience, you dig up things, donât start announcing your conclusions, be patient, fill out your report, and then, reach whatever conclusions. They donât have the patience, they want to get into the newspaper head lines immediately so usually it starts from there, announcing headlines.. which headlines? Usually provocative headlines ⦠for example, their evidence of Aryan settlements. Now that leads to a reaction and a counter denunciation, etc. If there was patience⦠they havenât bothered to publish reports for 25 years not to speak of the ones last year, but suddenly you get these screaming headlines. They donât have the patience.â
The July 2000 press release written by the well known group of Delhi historians, claimed that the ASI was excavating the site to prove that Muslims, specifically the Moghul emperor Akbar, destroyed this Jain temple in order to construct his nearby capitol city. On the other hand, quite a few scholars whom I interviewed in Delhi as well as several journalists and two renowned archeologists refuted this accusation. They maintained that the excavation of the Jain site was significant in its own right, pointing to the discovery of one of the most beautiful examples of an 11th century Sarasvati statue ever found.
The archeologists insisted that the ASI had never claimed a connection between the demolition of this Jain temple, the destruction date of which was yet to be determined, and the construction of Akbarâs fortified palatial city nearby. If this was claimed, the ASI maintained, then it was an extrapolation by the popular media.
There were numerous newspaper articles and op-ed pieces about this archaeological dig. It typified the divisions that are ubiquitous among the prolifically polarized intellectuals in India. Besides speaking with several archeologists in Delhi, I made a brief long distance telephone call to Agra and spoke with the superintending archeologist of the dig, D.V. Sharma who said that he had never claimed that the Jain Temple had been destroyed by Akbar. Several months after the spectacle had erupted across the newspapers, an article in the July 22, 2000 edition of the magazine Frontline confirmed that D.V. Sharma had not made such an extrapolation, but that the media had sensationalized the major archeological discovery of a large and rare catch of statues dating from the 10th and 11th centuries.
Dharam Vir Sharma, Superintending Archaeologist of the Agra Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), was at pains to distance himself from all such interpretations. âThis is purely an academic exercise,â he argued, âand the objective is to reveal certain aspects of the history of Central India from the pre-Mughal periodâ.
The templeâs only relationship to Akbar was that the excavation site is quite near to Akbarâs famous palace, Fatehpur Sikri. The media certainly added to the sensationalization of this dig, and naturally, the Hindu-centric crowd capitalized on it as well, claiming that such desecration looked like the work of Muslim iconoclasts.
Harbans Mukhia wrote an op-ed critique of the ASI Fatehpur Sikri excavation. He proposed a tentative supposition that perhaps intolerant Brahmins had destroyed this Jain site. His comments are discussed at length because they fueled the resentment of non-leftist intellectuals, bitter about what they perceive as the tendency among leftists to blame Hindus for imagined crimes of the past and exonerate Muslims invaders, whom they see as iconoclasts. Mukhiaâs article in the Hindustan Times, that took a pot shot at the ASI, infuriated several archaeologists who responded passionately to his critique.
The details of this controversial dig are far simpler than its repercussions. The excavation was conducted by D.V. Sharma, Superintendent Agra Circle of the Archaeological Survey of India, on a mound called Bir Chhabili, where, based on âtextual references and other indicationsâ, they suspected an old temple may have stood. They found one. There was a pit at the temple site in which numerous broken statues, bearing marks of vandalization, had apparently been carefully buried after having been damaged. Among the statues uncovered was a large exquisite statue of the goddess Sarasvati. Though a statue of the Hindu Goddess of music and learning, it is in the distinctive Jain style.
Sharma had proposed, in his initial analysis, that this pit was a kind of visarjan where broken statues had been placed for burial.
The media, when reporting about the remarkable find, erroneously associated the ruins of the Jain temple with Akbar, since the excavation was going on only a few hundred meters from the walls of Fatehpur Sikri â though the desecration of the temple may have predated the construction of the city. Shortly after the news about the excavation was published in the press, Prof. Harbans Mukhia from JNU visited the site with a group of students and spoke with the junior archeologists at work there. Mukhia returned to Delhi and a few weeks later wrote âDemolishing Temples Wasnât the Pastâs Only Languageâ which appeared in The Hindustan Times on Sunday, March 19, 2000.
In this article Professor Mukhia claimed that in the medieval period, Hindus also destroyed temples. He took a very negative view of the Bir Chhabili archeological project. In the first few paragraphs he gave a little lesson in historiography vis-à -vis state sponsored violence and asked the reader to note that, âthe wrapping of political nuances around the discipline of historyâ is common in all nationalist histories. He went on to state that destructions of religious sites âreflect the assertion of state power by the rulers ⦠and their search for legitimisation in a vision of historyâ.
After describing the archeological site as he viewed it, during the few hours that he had visited, Professor Mukhia speculated that since numerous statues of the Jain deity, Mahavira, were found broken into smaller pieces, and bore âseveral marks of deliberate or indeliberate vandalismâ but the âJainia Saraswati⦠[was] almost in tact, with one hand broken off, but laying by its sideâ that, as a historian, this information leads him to âa suspicionâ.
He therefore speculates: âIs it feasible to consider the possibility of Brahminical intolerance, which spared the one goddess with clear Brahminical association, but not others which were, as it were, on the other side of the fence, that is, Jainism?
Professor Mukhia, in this rather far-fetched âsuspicionâ of Hindu on Jain violence, contradicts his assertions at the beginning of this article when he explained about historiography and stressed that religious clashes were not the only language of the past. We should not assume, he emphasized, that the âstate did nothing else except demolish temples and subjugate people of other faithsâ.
He criticizes historians who ânever view history except as interminable religious clashes organized by the state. It is thus that just about any testimony, textual or archaeological, bearing upon history is immediately constructed as a proof of the statesâ religious intolerance.â
Yet, by the end of his article, Mukhia is asking his readers to consider that it is âfeasibleâ that Brahmans mutilated these Jain murtis. This speculation is based on his negative evaluation of Brahmans of the medieval era. In so doing, Mukhia politicized his analysis of the excavation. He uses mocking tones to describe the motivations of the archaeologists. Mukhiaâs contemporary political opinions about the neo-Hindu Revivalists movement, caused him to blame their Sanskrit spouting ancestors for the desecration. Albeit, this is, he stresses, only a suspicious possibility.
He fails to see that his claim, that history has been politicized, is in itself politicized. To continue to miss the point of his whole essay and attempt to sharpen the political point, he caps his claim that Hindus may have been responsible for the destruction of this Jain temple, with a jab at the current BJP government and the ASI, when he wrote regarding âMuslim demolitions of non-Muslim templesâ that âa former professor of physics and a former journalist let it be known from their ministerial platforms that this is the only correct version of Indian historyâ.
The physics professor and the former journalist alluded to, are M.M. Joshi (Ph.D. in Physics, former Professor at Aligarh University) the controversial Minster of Human Resource Development (HRD) that served under the BJP government and Arun Shourie (former journalist and Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse) and at that time a BJP member of the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha.
Two weeks later, in a rebuttal to Harbans Mukhiaâs article, Dr. Meenakshi Jain, a historian in Delhi, wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in the April 4, 2000 edition of The Hindustan Times, âBrahmins Werenât Iconoclastsâ. She wrote, âThe recent discovery of Jain statues in Fatehpur Sikri is evidence that communalism was âconstructedâ much before the colonial periodâ.
As one of the few outspoken ânon-leftistâ historians in New Delhi, Dr. Jain describes her view of the battlefield that is contemporary Indian historiography: âFrightened by the growing avalanche of archaeological evidence which threatens to pulverize Marxist historiography, the desperation of leftist academics to salvage their rendition of the past is entirely understandable. Decades of labour expended in effacing references to the destruction of Hindu temples, shifting the focus instead to sectarian Hindu conflict is now in jeopardy.â
She continues: âGiven the Jain communityâs impeccable non-militant credentials and Akbarâs reputation as the best face of Indian Islam, this casts an entirely new light on inter-community relations in medieval India. That is why, though Jain-Hindu reactions have been muted so far, Marxists have rushed in to defend their carefully sanitised version of the past.
For the leftists, Akbar is sacrosanct, the âFather of Indian integrationâ--a model of communal harmony because he is seen as less âfanaticalâ and more âIndianizedâ than his ancestors or his offspring, which included some of the more notorious iconoclasts in Indian lore, such as Babur and Aurangzeb. The leftist intellectuals, who extrapolate their historical narratives about medieval India outwards from the benevolent âsecularismâ of Akbarâs fifty-five year reign, were therefore particularly pained to discredit an archeological excavation that might indicate that Akbar was not as liberal as depicted in the history textbooks they had written.
Ironically, as mentioned, the ASI officer, D.V. Sharma, had not made the claim that Akbar had destroyed this Jain temple, neither had the junior archaeologists working at the sight. However, the famous vocal group of concerned historians in Delhi, inferred that if a temple was destroyed around the time that Akbar built his capital at Fatehpur Sikri, then obviously the âsaffron archeologistsâ must be trying to connect the destruction of the Jain temple with Akbarâs construction of Fatehpur Sikri.
Four months after the initial media hoopla, the Delhi Historians Group called a news conference to condemn the excavations on the hillock near Agra, and issued a press statement signed by two dozen professors. Included in this list were the names of historians who have taken the lead to write historical pamphlets and op-ed pieces designed more to inflame Hindu sentiments than to offer a nuanced, culturally sensitive, multi-perspectival approach to controversial topics such as temple desecration and beef eating in ancient India.