International Conference On Indian History

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PART SIX

In his argumentative essay, Shrimali advises archaeologists to investigate medieval India instead of ancient India. However he contradicts himself, and reverses his stance in an official statement made during a press conference held two weeks later on July 17, 2000, to which Shirmali was a signatory, advising that archaeologists should not excavate medieval sites, because they are too communal. Perhaps this problem arose due to differing views of periodization.

Shrimali wrote, continuing his invectives of intellectual superiority over the tainted archaeologists: “The… notion of the ‘medieval’ as understood by Indian archaeologists is out dated. Writings of historians in the last 35 years have underlined that it could be used for centuries ranging from the fourth to the 14th, or perhaps even later in some regions of the subcontinent. Most Indian archaeologists are unaware of this rethinking and have persisted with communal periodization fostered by British imperialist historians, viz. Mahmud Ghazni and penetration of Islam marks the beginning of the medieval period.”

Regardless of Shrimali’s assumption of their ignorance, the issue of periodization is something about which Indian archaeologists and that nondescript group of “third rate, shoddy”, non-Marxist scholars, are very much aware. They have long argued that there was no dramatic break in the archaeological record in northern India until the advent of invaders from the northwest, c.1100 CE. The civilization that existed in India between the first years of the Common Era and the beginning of the second millennium, though considerably variable between widely dispersed sites, attested no marked and dramatic changes, until the advent of the Turko-Afghani invasions. This same record of archaeological continuity is also forwarded by a large number of archaeologists to argue against the Aryan Invasion Theory. The Indo-centric scholars would say that the attempt by Marxists to push back the medieval period is based in part on their efforts to find corollaries to feudalism in early Indian society, in order to fit India into the Marxist paradigm and also to soften that marked change brought to India by the Islamized armies of Central Asia.

In colonial models, on the other hand, Hindu history is almost nonexistent, mythical as it were. British colonialists, and Indian Marxists after them, considered that real, documentable history did not begin until the advent of Islam into the Subcontinent. This colonial perspective has been criticized by Indo-centric scholars who maintain that there were innumerable kingdoms in ancient India that are attested in textual and epigraphical records. In addition, the re-periodization proposed by Professor Shrimali and his leftist/progressive colleagues, that situates the beginning of the medieval era in the seventh or eighth and even, as he mentioned in The Hindustan Times article, the fourth century, has been a serious topic of discussion. The archaeologists and other recently saffronized scholars to whom Professor Shrimali grants very little intelligence, have not embraced the colonial model--their understanding of the dating of the medieval period, rather than being out-dated, is very aware of the on-going debates.

Dr. Meenakshi Jain wrote about this topic: “The arbitrary pre-dating of the medieval period by a couple of centuries, for instance, and the forcible application of the concept of feudalism to this period, seem inspired by political considerations. The intention, in both cases, is clearly to draw attention away from the cataclysmic northern invasions and focus instead, on the alleged political, economic, and cultural decay in India on the eve of the Muslim advent. Credible Western scholars have questioned this methodology and cast serious aspersions on the Indian Marxists’ understanding of history as well as their fidelity to facts.”

Professor M.G.S. Narayanan, a well known scholar from Kerala, who previously served on the ICHR board with Irfan Habib and in the past contributed to volumes edited by R.S. Sharma, was for several years the BJP appointed chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research. I interviewed Professor Narayanan in December 2001, and attended a lecture he delivered analyzing the impact of Marxist historiography on the writing of history in India. Professor Narayanan considered the problem of periodization. Regarding colonially constructed history, he said, “they proposed a division into the Hindu, Muslim and British periods.” Later these religious markers were “changed … to conform more exactly to the division of European history into three periods—ancient, medieval and modern”. Narayanan maintained that these markers were useless in the Indian context, “demonstrating further the meaninglessness of the whole exercise”. He explained that in this tripartite system “there was no sense in searching for the special traits that set apart one period from another in terms of political forms or economic trends or culture”. Pointing out that the Marxist historians, who have guided Indian historiography since the sixties, embraced this paradigm, even though “with each new discovery in the field of archaeology or ancient literature the absurdity of this periodisation became clearer and clearer, but no attempt was made to abandon the frame.”

Dilip Chakrabarti, a well published archaeologist discussed the dominance and hegemony of Marxists historians in India. His observations are quoted here at length:
“Finally, as the ebb of nationalism died down and as the Indian historians became increasingly concerned with the large number of grants, scholarships, fellowships and even occasional jobs to be won in the Western universities, there was a scramble for new respectability to be gained by toeing the Western line of thinking about India and Indian history. There could be no question of loosening the stranglehold of Western Indology in such a milieu. There could not be any thought of looking at its implications very closely either. It is however, also true that rumblings against some of the premises of Western Indology have been heard from time to time, but such rumblings have generally emerged in uninfluential quarters, and in the context of Indian historical studies this would mean people without control of the major national historical organizations, i.e., people who can be easily fobbed off as ‘fundamentalists’ of some kind, mere dhotiwalas of no intellectual consequence.
The social scene of Indian historical studies underwent a slow but sure change in the years after Independence. […] .As the number of university teaching jobs in the subject greatly increased as a result of the expansion of higher education in different parts of the country, people – especially those from the ‘established’ families – were no longer apprehensive of choosing History as an academic career. In all cases these university jobs were centrally or provincially supported, bringing with it the inevitable network of government control and a system of rewards for those who would jostle into the key positions of the network. Since the 1970’s, with the establishment of centralized administrative and research funding bodies in some individual subjects, such as History, the importance of this network increased manifold, and soon the distinction between the ‘mainstream’ or ‘establishment’ historians and their less fortunate brethren became clearly marked.
To join the mainstream the historians could do a number of things: expound the ruling political philosophy of the day, develop the art of sycophancy to near-perfection or develop contacts with the elite in bureaucracy, army, politics and business. If one had already belonged to this elite by virtue of birth, so much the better. For the truly successful in this endeavour, the rewards were many, one of them being the easy availability of ‘foreign’ scholarships/ fellowships, grants etc. not merely for themselves but also for their protégés and the progeny. On the other hand, with the emergence of some specialist centers in the field of South Asian social sciences in the ‘foreign’ universities, there was no lack of people with different kinds of academic and not-so-academic interest in South Asian history in those places too, and the more clever and successful of them soon developed a tacit patron-client relationship with their Indian counterparts, at least in the major Indian universities and other centers of learning. In some cases, ‘institutes’ or ‘cultural centres’ of foreign agencies were set up in Indian metropolises themselves, drawing a large crowd of Indians in search of short-term grants or fellowships, invitations to conferences, or even plain free drinks. Quite predictably Indian historians of this period became great subscribers to the theory of internationalism in the matter of historical belief, with the proponents of the Independence generation taking a severe beating. Honest-to-goodness historical investigations based on a close familiarity with the land where the relevant historical forces were operative in the first place were frowned upon; on the other hand, a great show was made of extolling the virtues of the latest sociological and anthropological approaches emanating from the Western campuses, without bothering to find out if such approaches could be practiced by a large majority of Indian investigators who do not have easy access even to the most elementary sociological or anthropological libraries or whether such a blind fetishism did not sometimes lead to a theoretical position undermining the Indian national identity.”

Several years before the Fathepur Sikri imbroglio, an article by Romila Thapar had appeared in Frontline, on August 12, 1997, in the “India Independent: 50 years” special edition. When discussing the problem of periodization, she seems to concur with Narayanan:
“The periodisation of Hindu, Muslim and British—or its equivalent of Ancient, Medieval and Modern—is being gradually eroded. The line of demarcation has to be made on the basis of fundamental social changes, which do not necessarily coincide with invasions, conquests and dynastic changes.”

Professor Thapar states, “The most substantial contribution in terms of further evidence has been from archaeology”, yet she dismisses the archaeological evidence when it confirms historical constructions with which she does not agree. She wrote, “The pretence at historicity was a new aspect of Hindutva ideology and was used to gull the public. It therefore has to be challenged by historians”. This comment is indicative that the Delhi historians group are politically selective in the archaeological data that they all willing to entertain.

Professor Thapar continues to be one of the most strident voices challenging “Indigenism” which she maintains is “historiographically barren with no nuances or subtleties of thought and interpretation”. She concludes with what is almost a reversal of this stance when she states that “the obsession with the past will continue and historians will thrive. In fact the greater the contentions, the more will there will be a honing of historical generalizations”. These two contradictory statements give rise to issues of authenticity and the politics of who gets to decide whose historiography is invalid and whose is to be promoted and patronized. Nowhere are these countervailing tendencies are more vivid than in the disdain with which Romila Thapar and her colleagues view archaeologists with an indigenized bent. Characteristic of their challenges, the Delhi historians rarely engage the data brought forth by these “indigenous” scholars, but have a compulsion to focus almost exclusively on the contentiousness.

In his op-ed critique of archaeology written three years after Thapar’s above quoted article, Delhi University historian K.M. Shrimali “pointed out a curious asymmetry in the ASI's methods of reporting between two sites--Fatehpur Sikri and Khajuraho”. In the opinion of Shrimali, at Fatehpur Sikri there was a “rush to judgment and little effort to dispel the growing confusion in the public mind”. In contrast, he pointed out that “the reporting procedures adopted [at Khajuraho] have been cautious and restrained”. Shrimali discussed the discoveries at the Bijamandal Temple in Khajuraho, explaining the similarities of the two ASI sites, where there are “figures of Saraswati, Vishnu, Jain tirthankaras” side by side. Shrimali speculated: “The site has raised questions of whether assimilative tendencies led to the carving of Jain tirthankaras in a Shaivite temple, or whether subsequent to abandonment by the Jain community, the sanctity of the place was maintained as a Shaivite shrine.”

In D.V. Sharma’s lengthy letter to The Hindustan Times, most of which was not published, he had also referred to this aspect of the Khajuraho cite to make another point. Sharma suggested that such overlapping of Jain and Hindu shrines generally indicates that among Hindus and Jains during that era, “toleration and co-existence was a way of life, as is evident from the cluster of temples of different faiths” that existed at Khajuraho. Harbans Mukhia had used a misreading of the same sort of evidence to try to make the point that if there was a demolished Jain temple, and Jain statues that had been desecrated, it was just as likely to have been the result of Hindu bigots as it was Muslim iconoclasts.

The historical evidence simply does not substantiate that hypothesis. Yet the newspaper audience is told a few months later that the ASI had rushed to judgment and practices a “motivated reconstruction” of the past and that Mukhia had only been “pleading” for academic objectivity. Shrimali, ends his July 4th article, with the question:
“Will Mr. Sharma tell us how many decades shall we have to wait to find out if it was really a visarjan and not the repetition of a Khajuraho-type development? Till then, his instant archaeology is bound to be suspect and disturbing.”

In his rejoinder to Mukhia, written several months earlier than the Shrimali op-ed piece, D.V. Sharma had mentioned the differences and similarities between the two sites. Obviously he considered the analysis proposed by Harbans Mukhia, a close associate of K. M. Shrimali, to represent the very sort of instantaneous interpretations for which he was now being publicly criticized. Undoubtedly, by the tone of his earlier quoted letter, Sharma found such instantaneous speculations to be equally “suspect and disturbing”.

Shrimali asked, playing off the title of Mukhia’s original essay, “is ‘the language of destruction’ the only language that the ASI alone can understand?” Some archaeologists, “from certain quarters” would maintain that Marxist historians, of whom Mukhia and Shrimali are two, manipulate data and propose preposterous justifications to negate the historically attenuated violence of the medieval period. Though Professor Thapar had argued that the divisions were not that simplistic, they certainly play out that way in the popular media, and in the insulting names that each side hurls at the other. Historiography, archaeology and polite academic discussions are lost in the fray.

During the summer of 2000, there were at least two more media events concerning the dig near Fatehpur Sikri. The continuing unsavouriness of the politicization of the controversy, and the seemingly unending stream of trumped up accusations leveled against several renown archaeologists, compelled the director of the ASI to make a public statement, which the article in The Hindu a few weeks latter called, “a long overdue clarification”. Speaking to a news agency on July 6, two days after Shirmali’s critique of the ASI came out in The Hindustan Times, Director-General Mrs. Komal Anand “authoritatively confirmed that there was no basis to believe that any religious structure was destroyed or damaged during the construction of the Fatehpur Sikri palace complex”.

Nonetheless, the article in The Hindu, accused the ASI of complicity in communalism,
“This delayed intervention from the top [of the ASI] may have temporarily laid to rest the controversy. But the larger questions about the political uses and abuses of archaeology are unlikely to disappear quite so easily.”

I asked Romilar Thapar about the worry that many historians expressed about the ominous saffronization of archaeology, pointing to Mukhia’s newspaper article regarding the Jain temple that was excavated near Fatehpur Sikri. She replied:
“You have to understand it not in terms of archeology but you have to understand it in terms of political propaganda. If you are building up a theory that the Muslims were dreadful on all scores and therefore one has to project them in the blackest of colors the logical thing that you do is you focus on the one Muslim ruler that everybody has said was very tolerant, secular, gave patronage to all kinds of people, and so on, Akbar. And try and make him appear in the worst possible light. So how do you do this? You’re conducting excavations at some distance from Fatehpur Sikri and you pull up this Jain temple now, you let slip to the media, ‘This is very interesting, there is a Jain temple next door to Fathepur Sikri.’ So the press rushes off and you start saying ‘well we don’t know, it’s a Jain temple and it is very close to Fathepur Sikri’. So immediately the connection is made that, like in the case of the Babri Masjid, a theory can be now built up that says Fathepur Sikri was built on the destruction of Jain temples. And this goes on being discussed in the press. The excavator doesn’t say a word to deny it. One historian [Harbans Mukhia] goes there with a bunch of students to look around and writes this article that openly challenges the archeologists, Then they reply, and the reply was not in terms of ‘why this site was chosen’ and ‘what was the significance of the site’, ‘what is its relationship to Fathepur Sikri’. It was not in terms of the ‘archeological relationship of stratification’ and so on, which every archeologist should know when you are digging a site that is supposedly close to a monument. None of that, it goes on and on accusing Harbans Mukkia of not knowing anything about archeology. It is neither here nor there, whether he does or he does not, he has raised some questions, answer those questions. Okay. Then they get their wind up because in Parliament the opposition says that are going to raise this issue. Then the archeological survey becomes scared because it becomes a direct political issue. The opposition would realize the issue: ‘why they are saffronizing archeology’ and ‘what do they mean by saying that there is a link between this Jain temple and Fathepur Sikri’? Then they come out with an official statement saying that there is no connection. Now why does one have to go through many months of this gentle suspicion that there is a connection and Akbar isn’t really as good as he is made out to be because he destroyed a Jain temple to build his monument?”

Though well meaning regarding an anti-saffron agenda, Thapar is conversant with only one side of the situation. She could not have been unaware of the seven page rebuttal written by D.V. Sharma, alluding to above, he mailed her one. But she chose to ignore the many pages in which Sharma did indeed engage the issues raised in Mukhia’s article, “why this site was chosen” and “what was the significance of the site”. He also somewhat retaliated the hostile tone. Sharma’s letter, in its entirety, was, according to Mukhia, circulated widely among hundreds of Delhi intellectuals, historians at JNU, journalists, and scores of social critics. As one of the most prominent of those Delhi intellectuals at JNU targeted to receive Sharma’s rebuttal letter, Thapar was sent a copy of that rejoinder that was specifically directed at her group of colleagues. She said she remembered something to that effect, full of vile invectives, not worth reading. However, had she read it she would have seen that he carefully addressed Mukhia’s questions.

In that detailed letter, Sharma had dealt extensively with “what was the significance of the site”. Sharma had stated very clearly, in that letter sent across New Delhi several months before my interview with Prof. Thapar, that the excavation of the Jain temple had no ‘relationship to Fathepur Sikri’. That his response was irrelevant to Prof. Thapar, reveals a pattern. It is similar to the manner in which she and her colleagues have continued to blithely ignore, while at the same time misquoting, a decade of careful rejoinders from B.B. Lal and his discussion of data to back up his explanations. In this way, scholars associated with the Delhi Historians’ Group continue to chose to pretend that their original critiques remain unanswered and the object of their criticism has only pointed a politicized finger, not pointed out details of the data under dispute. Case closed.

In this technique of dismissal any kind of dialogue is precluded. Most ironic is, though they charge that the archaeologists are not sticking to academics but are keeping the issues politicized, this is, in fact, the precise methodology employed continuously by Thapar and the Delhi Historians’ Group themselves. They question a scholar for having a saffron agenda, then, act offended when the object of their ridicule in defense responds to the jab by returning the retorts, case by case. As mentioned above, many of these scholars who are pejoratively labeled saffron go into great detail to explain the content and the context of the facts they are presenting. They are opposed to only rebutting the political accusations. However, the numerous spokesmen and women of the Delhi Historians’ Group do not lower themselves to consider these carefully laid out arguments from whom they consider blithely, “Hindu Nazis”.

Sharma’s letter did accuse “Harbans Mukkia of not knowing anything about archeology” but it also went into detail about how Mukhia’s lack of knowledge had caused him to miss many details when he visited the site and how that misinformation had caused him to make gross generalizations. Mukhia “raised some questions”, but Prof. Thapar chose not to acknowledge the seven pages that Sharma had written attempting to “answer those questions”. Ignoring all rebuttals and explanations, Thapar can then state with conviction that the ASI has saffronized archaeology. She can accuse the archaeologists of hurling “vile invectives” in response to “observant” politically correct op-ed pieces such as Mukhia’s.

Romila Thapar spoke to me about what she considered to be the archaeologists’ penchant of “running to the press” with each new sensational discovery. She told me:
“There was a time, and I wish to God that we would go back to that time, when professionals, and especially archeologists, because they are in the field and there are things coming out of the earth unexpectedly all the time. There was a time when archaeologists excavated and found something, the first publication was always in a professional journal, or at a professional seminar where other professionals would also evaluate the materials and sometimes the person that had done the digging would backtrack a little bit. After that had been done it would go into your Illustrated London News or wherever it was, National Geographic. It would be picked up and it would be sort of hyped up a little bit, this that and the other. But nowadays it’s the reverse, here at least, the first thing that they do is to go to the press and say, look we have found such and such or the press comes to them and says what have you found and they are ready to talk. Instead of saying to the press, sorry this has first to be evaluated. There isn’t that concept of peer group evaluation before you open your mouth publicly and make a declaration.”

Romila Thapar neglected to mention that more often than not, it is the Delhi Historians’ Group that makes controversial statements to the press, which the saffronized archaeologists feel compelled to engage. In response to simple announcements, such as planned archaeological digs, the Delhi historians read in communal intensions, and they are ever ready to run to the press without ever contacting the ASI or the archaeologist in question for more information.

Year after year at annual events such as the Indian History Congress the scholars have passed resolutions condemning the supposed abuse of archaeology in India. Press announcements of this kind are continually forthcoming. S.P. Gupta’s counter comments in this regard are relevant here,
“[T]he 'academic debate' … initiated by the JNU historians through their pamphlet "The Political Abuse of History" … quoted several times Prof. B.B. Lal's archaeological findings about the antiquities of Ayodhya [that he found nothing predating the 8th century] because it helped them in their arguments, and Prof. Lal was portrayed as a great archaeologist. [….] The problem began when another set of evidence from Ayodhya - namely the discovery of pillar-bases immediately to the south of Babri Masjid, almost touching the boundary wall - again known through the researches of Prof. Lal - came to be used by another group of scholars involved in the debate. This evidence goes against JNU and other Marxist historians. Rather than accepting the evidence and beginning a proper academic debate the Marxist historians began throwing mud on Prof. Lal's unblemished career of over 45 years as a field-archaeologist. Overnight from 'amongst a few greatest living archaeologists in the world 'he became' a ‘VHP archaeologist' and whatever he had done, right from the beginning of his career, from 1944, became questionable. But what was more unfortunate part of the whole affair is that his work is being questioned more through the letters in newspapers and not through the academic articles in archaeological, historical or indological journals. This shows their motive.”

Mukhia’s op-ed piece had concluded with the comment that the ASI was conducting this dig to bolster the communal politics of M.M. Joshi and Arun Shourie. Since Mukhia had originally made this allegation, it would seem to be within acceptable conventions of debate for Sharma to respond to the insinuations. The other pages upon which Sharma explained the details of the dig, to counter Mukhia’s less informed theories, were not noted by scholars such as Prof. Thapar. Only his defensive response to politicized insults were worth repeating, not the fine academic lines, about the actual excavation site, were remembered from Sharma’s widely circulated letter. This lack of engagement with the issues, the complete black out of the arguments of the “other side”-- so that the debate remains on the polemical politicized plane, is the on-going strategy to paint the ASI saffron.

These same historians who in 1989, authored the now famous pamphlet "The Political Abuse of History”, have continued their assault on the ASI for over a decade. In 2000, they were unwilling to let the confusion regarding the demolished Jain temple outside the walls, versus the underground water tank, inside the palace walls, sort itself out and be duly dismissed as a conflation of issues. Twenty-three scholars representing the “Association for the Study of History and Archaeology”, which is housed at the SAHMAT office in New Delhi, held a news conference and issued a three page statement, with the names of those who attended the meeting listed on the forth page. The date of the document is July 17, 2000, titled, “Press note: The ASI and Indian Archaeology Today”, the same week that I interviewed Prof. Thapar.

In this statement issued to the media, the historians first presented a paragraph about the value of archaeology and then gave a short history of the Archaeological Survey of India, mentioning some of the big names in colonial archaeology, Cunningham, Wheeler, Marshall. They refer to the ASI’s association as a department of the government. But by the third paragraph they begin their case against the ASI and particularly they singled out the work of B. B. Lal.

Lal’s excavations became retroactively controversial in the mid-eighties after which time he was systematically condemned by the vocal group of Delhi Historians. Prior to that, his scientific and detailed excavations of ancient sites conducted by the ASI, which he headed up for decades, were commended for bringing forth valuable information. His work confirmed that there were strata in the sediment that could be traced to textual references about ancient settlements such as Hastinaapura, a city near Delhi mentioned in the epic The Mahaabhaarata. Earlier, in less polarized years, these same “Delhi historians” sited copiously from Lal’s work. They held each other in mutual respect. The intellectual chasm cleaved by the Babri Masjid debates drove a political wedge between Indian intellectuals, pitting the “Delhi historians” against a whole slew of scholars, especially archaeologists. Until that black and white, left and right, day and night division dramatically divided the field of Indian social sciences, Lal’s work was considered groundbreaking.

The SAHMAT sponsored press release had this to say:
“[In] the case of B.B. Lal’s Ayodhya excavations carried out in the 1970’s, new claims began to be made well over ten years after the excavations were completed: there is legitimate suspicion of afterthought here. Surely if findings are fully and promptly published, there would be no room for suspicion.”

The media statement accused the ASI of ignoring “transparency…[regarding] methods adopted in excavations and technical studies of finds”. They lamented that during “British times” things were more “systematic” and efficient.81 They stated that, “the ASI has increasingly begun to adopt a narrow and parochial approach to archaeology”. This began, they maintain, with the “publication in 1955 of B. B. Lal’s report on Hastinapur, which aimed explicitly at providing an archaeological proof for the Mahabharata tradition”.

They claimed that Lal’s report:
“drew upon him the reproof of the … director general, A. Ghosh … [and] the ASI’s official disavowal of his conclusions. But now as the “Saffron” forces have come into power, a complete shift is noticeable in official archaeology […] proving that the Harappan or Indus Culture was really based on the Saraswati, and was Aryan and not Dravidian, in its ethnic basis.82 Several official publications of the recent past have also adopted this new fangled designation83…. The new nomenclature “Sindu-Sarasvati culture” is on its way to being given official recognition to replace the more neutral “Harappan” or “Indus” culture. [….] Such chauvinistic attempts are drawing ridicule from archaeologists in other parts of the world.”

There are a great number of scholars in “other parts of the world” who do not subscribe to this critique that dominates Marxist Indian thinkers. Some recent world history textbooks for US students mention that the discovery of numerous IVC sites in India is prompting a reevaluation of the theories concerning the Indus Valley Civilization. In the past, from Chinese pilgrims and Arab chroniclers, there were numerous investigators who explored the possibility and brought forth data concerning the Sarasvati River.

“In 1844, Major F. Makenson, looking for a safe route to connect Sindh with Delhi, discovered a huge riverbed, over which he wanted to build an eight-way lane. In 1869, archaeologist Alex Rogue found Himalayan alluvial deposits in the Gulf of Cambay (now Khambat) which could not have been brought there by the non-Himalayan Sabarmati or Narmada. This led him to suspect that the Saraswati must have left them there before she vanished. C.F. Oldham of the Geological Survey of India asserted in 1893 that the dry bed skirting the Rajasthan desert was that of the Saraswati.”

Wheeler’s discovery of Mohenjo-daro in the next century put a dogmatic end to such speculations. However, the term Indus Valley Civilization is itself based on incomplete information obtained in the early years of archaeological explorations of the Subcontinent that focused exclusively on sites along the Indus River. Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s theory that Vedic Aryans raided and sacked the “Dravidian cities“ has been enshrined in schoolbook histories for over seven decades. Nonetheless, since the discoveries of Sir Mortimer, literally hundreds of Indus Valley-type sites have been found in Gujarat and along a large swath of dried up riverbeds across western India, more in fact than are located in present-day Pakistan. The renaming of the ancient civilization so that it does not exclude the parts that are located in what is now India, would seem to be a more neutral nomenclature, than simply Indus Valley.

Members of the “Association for the Study of History and Archaeology” (AHSA), which consisted primarily of the same group of “Concerned Delhi historians”, several of whom often write op-ed pieces in the English dailies and many of whom testified on the behalf of the All India Babri Masjid Committee (AIBMC) attempt to give authority to their views by associating their pronouncement with foreign scholars. Supposedly, the foreign scholars alluded to, who are presumably more objective than ASI archaeologists, have ridiculed the idea of reassessing the naming of the Indus Valley Civilization because they consider that such reevaluations are driven by chauvinistic nationalistic motivations. Many concerned scholars in western educational institutions do shun this interesting if controversial debate based on these fears articulated and circulated internationally by Indian elitist intellectuals

Broadly speaking, this claim about the ridicule coming from non-Indian archaeologists is overblown and not representative of the growing Occidental academic interest in the topic. Such a dismissive handling of the question does not take into account its inclusion in high school history textbooks in the West that now often consider the alternative theories of the Indus Valley/Sarasvati Civilizational region. For careful scholars, fifty years of documentation has become too overwhelming to ignore.

The leftist historians of the DHG and ASHA want to imply that the remarkable finds that have emerged from IVC excavations in India are less striking than those discovered by colonial archaeologists in Pakistan. Though the same Harappan era sites, with terracotta seals, uniform bricks and weights, and so forth, have been unearthed by archaeologists to the east of the Indus in present day India, these group of Indian scholars, primarily historians, nonetheless prefer to focus predominately on the sites located on the Pakistani side of the boarder They invariably discount the sites found in India as politically motivated and too tainted by saffron to even consider.

This public critique, compiled by ASHA for the media, claimed that some “archaeologists in other parts of the world” are predisposed against and therefore refuse to examine new information coming from India. Perhaps these respected foreign scholars, heeding the dire warnings issued through SAHMAT, prefer to bury their heads under the ground, rather than examine the data found there. In so far as there are numerous “archaeologists in other parts of the world” who have taken notice of five decades of remarkable discoveries, ignoring selective data seems to be the only strategy suggested by this group of scholars often known as the “Delhi historians”.

B.B. Lal called this syndrome “blindfolding ourselves under a spell of bigotry” and had this to say about this tendency to deny paradigmatic shifts:
“It is interesting, nay even amusing, to look back and see how historical theories take birth, are sustained and become so much ingrained in the psyche that it becomes next to impossible for conservative scholars even to have a look at the mounting new evidence which goes counter to their long-cherished views. And this is precisely what has happened in the case of the theory known as ‘The Aryan Invasion of India’.”

In 1994 the World Archaeological Congress was held in Delhi. According to B.M. Pande, whose work as an archaeologist has always been considered to be thorough and objective, along with many other esteemed professionals with long careers in the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India), the 1994 World Archaeological Congress hosted in Delhi was "a disaster". The agitation by a group of Marxist scholars humiliated the ASI urging that it be censured by the World Archaeological Congress, an international body. This group of "progressive" (formally called Marxist) scholars, who often author stridently worded op-ed pieces created a "hue and cry" during the 1994 World Archaeological Congress and "tried to malign the Archaeological Survey of India." According to Prof. Pande, whom I interviewed in Delhi in 2000, "they created such drama we were ashamed". He said that the "gang" responsible for the tamasha was the usual cast of characters, "Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, Shrimali, and a few more".