International Conference On Indian History

[Guest]

PART SEVEN

Professor Pande explained:
“When the Babri Masjid was destroyed, immediately the same group of persons who had joined hands with the Babri Masjid Action Committee started accusing the Archaeology Survey of complicity and some of them used to come to the Archaeological Survey ... they had meetings and wrote numerous articles in the newspapers.”

Prof. Pande had personally been insulted by this "usual gang" as he called them. He said they got in the habit of greeting respected members of the ASI with the RSS hand salute, instead of a simple Namaskar. They publicly and privately abused the archaeologists. “In the press and elsewhere they asked, ‘Why did the archaeological survey allow the destruction of the Babri Masjid?’.”

Prof. Pande was irate at that insinuation. He pointed out:
“#1, ASI is not in the picture at all because it was not a protected monument. And #2, No archaeologist worth his salt would like any ancient structure to be destroyed. Irrespective of the fact whether it is protected or not protected. Even if it was, presuming for a moment the Babri Masjid was protected, was it possible for an organization like the ASI to have saved the destruction from thousands… when the entire might of the state could not stop it? But what happened was that all the time they were making allegations against the ASI. Why didn’t ASI do this or that... rubbish.”

That is the time when the well known group of Marxist scholars started attacking B.B. Lal, whom Professor Pande knew well and considered him to be "a very objective archaeologist". Pande had worked with Lal at Kalibangan for six seasons. He said:
“I have seen how meticulous he is, how thorough he is. He does not tamper with the evidence. These critics have not even gone for a picnic at an archaeological site… not even a picnic. And they make all kinds of allegations... that the ASI is dominated by the RSS... The ASI was not dominated by anyone else but archaeologists.”

In 1994, at the World Archaeological Congress the ASI was called communal and fascist and the Indian archaeologists were decried as hyper-nationalists and accused of advocating the destruction of ancient sites. This was sheer propaganda according to many, but the historians who forced the issue at the international meeting in Delhi, were, nonetheless, given lots of news coverage and succeeded in painting India's premier archaeologists black, or saffron, as the metaphor extends. Then as now, there were many articles in the newspaper "Frontline" and "EPW" that continue to condemn the archaeologists as nationalists. The politicized abuse continues.

At the 1998 World Archaeological Congress held in Croatia, K.M. Shrimali presented a paper against the ASI,

“Regrettably, archaeologists in India were only muted spectators when 450 year old monumental Masjid was demolished at Ayodhya. Let us all rise at least now to redeem the sullen and scarred prestige of Indian archaeology. May we hope that henceforth the Indian archaeologists will not emulate the German archaeological community that played a pivotal role in legitimating notions of Germanic racial and cultural superiority and thus contributing to the political legitimisation of the Nazis in the 1930s.”

Also at the 1998 Croatia WAC conference was a panel of Indian historians with several archaeologists, including S.P Gupta and B.B. Lal, who discussed the Ayodhya situation dispassionately, referring to the artifacts and the facts, instead of falling back of politicized accusations of Nazism, as their critics have done for decades.

Amid all this mudslinging, B. B. Lal and several other prominent archaeologists went digging for ancient Indian history and found it, layer after layer, much to the chagrin of the members of various academic associations founded by elitist historians, such as the “Association for the Study of History and Archaeology”. In spite of Lal’s publications, reports, and rejoinders, which were forthcoming, within the on-going barrage of abuses leveled against B.B. Lal and the ASI, his rebuttals and responses are usually ignored, and at best distorted. His critics continue to repeat the exact same objections year after year, though Lal has published several papers clarifying and explaining.

To conclude this discussion on fiery battle lines drawn between conflicting interpretations of Indian Archaeology, that inevitably trigger a response from the media, the case of Professor B.B. Lal, will be examined a little further. Professor Lal, was awarded the Padmabhushan in 2000 a coveted national prize. In 1998, he was nominated to the board of the ICHR (Indian Council for Historical Research). This brief discussion of Professor Lal will lead into the subsequent discussion of the ICHR and the controversial recall of two volumes of the Towards Freedom project.


Ostriches and Archaeologists: B.B. Lal and the “Unalterable Facts of History”

“The fundamentalists want to establish the superiority of the Sarasvati over the Indus because of communal considerations. In the Harappan context they think that after partition the Indus belongs to the Muslims and only the Sarasvati remains with the Hindus.”
--R. S. Sharma, Advent of the Aryans in India (1999)

Two archaeological controversies dominate the debates between the vocal scholars of the Delhi Historians’ Group (DHG) and the rather unassuming if persistent Professor B. B. Lal. Most recently Lal has been criticized for his extensive work on the Sindhu/Sarasvati Civilization, a topic about which he continues to publish, long past his retirement. And, though his work on the “Archaeology of the Ramayana and Mahabharata” was retroactively downgraded by the ivory citadels to the moats of “nationalist archaeology”, it was his discussion and analysis of his excavation on the perimeter of the Babri Masjid complex that drew the attention and the ire of the DHG. Because of these two contested topics, the DHG has painted all of Lal’s previous work saffron, beginning right from 1946 and his excavations in pre-partition Pakistan. Psychoanalyzing the ASI, assuming that the loss of the IVC sites had created an almost addictive lust for finding Harappan and Mature Harappan sites in post-partition India, the DHG, et al, could scoff at the findings as motivated by a Indian nationalist need to create an imagined trail of historical continuity.

A vehement and very public criticism was raised and sustained by the Delhi Historians’ Group and other loosely formed alliances of leftist scholars, against the ASI archaeologists. This pattern didn’t begin with the Babri Masjid/Ram Janma Bhumi (BM/RJB) controversy in the late eighties, it rather jelled over several decades. Though the chasm created by BM/RJB fueled and accelerated the divisions between contesting theoretical and methodological perspectives, the main reason that such abusive discourse became the norm was because the semi-autonomous bodies directing historiography in India were for several decades dominated by leftist intellectuals such as Irfan Habib, R.S. Sharma, K.M. Shrimali, who were, so to speak, the leaders of the crusade against the ASI.

Their stance was official and well known, there was little room for debate. Far fewer Marxists opted for archaeology than history, perhaps because historiography is more theoretically based, and archaeology is concrete, with surprises constantly rising from the earth to shatter old theories. In this brief final section about archaeological disputes, I draw from rebuttals written by Mr. B. B. Lal, juxtaposing these with the critiques leveled against him that continue to appear in the popular media.

In the early l950s B. B. Lal began his study of the archaeological sites associated with the Mahabharata. His work at Hastinapura Indraprastha, Purana Qila and other related excavations revealed a common material culture of “Painted Grey Ware […] ca. 1100 to 800 BC”. His path breaking findings were first published in Ancient India, (Cambridge) in 1954-55.91 Several other publications were forthcoming. Through the years, Lal trained many of India’s foremost archaeologists. He served as the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India and as the Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, among other academic and bureaucratic posts.

Lal undertook the Ramayana phase of the project, using the same methodology applied to his Mahabharata excavations. In order to investigate the historicity of the epics, he carefully selected several sites, based on descriptions of geographical locations mentioned in the ancient texts. This methodology reflected a worldwide interest in textually referenced archaeological investigations that had provided rich information from Israel, Persia, Greece, and could be applied to areas where recognizable geographical references were part of indigenous narratives. The work on the Ramayana project lasted twelve years, from 1975 to 1986 and was first reported in Antiquity, vol. LV, England, 1981, pp. 27-34. Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Lal has produced a long bibliography of excavation-reports and research papers, published in India and abroad.92

In 1988, at an international conference, New Archaeology and India, organized by the Indian Council of Historical Research, Lal presented a lengthy paper titled “Historicity of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana: What has Archaeology to say in the Matter”. According to Lal, he submitted his 60 page paper to the ICHR and though he made “numerous enquiries” for several years, he was repeatedly told that the proceedings were, “in the press”. Lal later surmised, that because his report “went counter to [the] views [of] the then authorities of the ICHR [they] withheld the publication of the paper”. Finally, according to Lal, due to the long delay, the 60 page, fully illustrated paper was “hijacked”, because of its great interest, and published in a Hindu-centric journal, The Manthana.

As will be seen in the following discussion of the recall of the Towards Freedom project, this is not the only research that was withheld from publication by the pre-BJP era ICHR. Under the directorship of Irfan Habib, P.N. Chopra was also censured for not privileging a left-centric presentation. There are many internal rumblings disassembling the hegemonic discourse. The big question is, can the multiple voices survive the changing of the generational guard, embracing and publishing theoretically polished “indigenous” historiographies, with an interest that transcends religious circumstances?

Given the independent nature of the press in India, there does exist English language as well as vernacular journals that discuss with articulate dispassion the issues that are taboo or ignored in the major English dailies, from where social scientists and humanities scholars in the West get their quick fix social and political updates. In the March 14, 2002 Free Press Journal93 M.V. Kamath brought to the readers’ attention, that “Archaeologist (Madras Circle), K. K. Muhammad said:
“I can reiterate this (i.e. the existence of the Hindu temple before it was displaced by the Babri Masjid) with greater authority - for I was the only Muslim who had participated in the Ayodhya excavations in 1976-77 under Prof. Lal as a trainee. I have visited the excavation near the Babri site and seen the excavated pillar bases’. […] ‘The JNU historians have highlighted only one part of our findings while suppressing the other. I often wondered why Prof. Lal is keeping quiet about it while JNU group went on a publication spree’. Muhammad was to add; ‘Ayodhya is as holy to Hindus as Mecca is to Muslims; Muslims should respect the sentiments of their Hindu brethren and voluntarily hand over the structure for constructing the Rama Temple’.”

Unfortunately this type of quote rarely makes it to the pages of The Hindu, and would be considered by “Babri historians” such as Irfan Habib and R.S. Sharma to be an exploitation of an Islamic name for the nefarious treachery of the likes of B.B. Lal and his usual cast of archaeological Nazis.

For several decades, B.B. Lal was on the “p-sec” shortlist for imminent saffronization, primarily because of his archaeological investigations into the “Indic past”. However, Lal’s reputation remained relatively in tact until February 10, 1991 when he delivered a lecture at the Annual Conference of the Museums Association of India, titled, “The Ramayana: An Archaeological Appraisal”. According to Lal, a reporter at the lecture asked him about the “interrelationship between the pillar-bases encountered in the trench excavated by me and the stone pillars incorporated in the Babri Masjid and further whether there was any temple underneath the Masjid. I replied, as any archaeologist would have: ‘If you do want to know the reality, the only way is to dig underneath the mosque.”

The news report went on to say:
“Some of the pillar-bases, Prof. Lal said, lay under the edge of the trench on the side of the Babri Masjid and it was likely that there may exist more such bases in that direction. It was also probable that the stone pillars incorporated in the mosque and the pillar bases found in the excavation hardly half a metre below the surface may belong to a structure that existed at the site prior to the construction of the mosque. In order to verify this and to obtain a clear picture of the preceding structure, it would be necessary to carry out further excavations in the area including that underneath the mosque. Prof. Lal said it was essentially a politica1 issue rather than an archaeological one and added that the sooner it was settled amicably the better would it be for the country.”

Professor Lal was astonished that, though his above quote appeared on 12th of February, by “the very next day twenty eminent historians [had already] issued a statement [picked up by the media] casting serious aspersions on my innocuous suggestion”96. He later added, curious about the efficiency of the orchestrated condemnation,
One really wonders at the secret mechanism devised by these historians to prepare and align the statement in a single day when they are physically located variously at Kurukshetra, Delhi and Patna?

The statement of these twenty scholars in The Hindustan Times, complied for the press with incredible speed, appeared on February 13th, a day subsequent to the article reporting Lal’s suggestion that an excavation of the Babri Masjid could help to prevent the social divisions that had arisen around the contentious site. The leftist historians’ group in a collective reprimand, lamented that B.B. Lal had crossed over to the Saffron side. The scholars who signed on to the instantaneous critique
“deplored as unfortunate that professionals should tend to lose proper sense of India’s past ‘under the impetus of the current Hindutva campaign’. The statement referred to the observation made by Mr. Lal in his lecture two days ago.”

This group letter argued that when Mr. Lal had suggested “fresh excavations at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya [he was] fulfilling the demand of those who wanted the Babri Masjid to be demolished to construct the temple at that site.” Though he had only suggested that an investigation under the mosque was technically the best way to determine if there had been a temple there, the article submitted to the press by the group of concerned historians, asserted that they had found his suggestion, to be “highly disquieting”. These scholars, many of whom were witnesses for the Babri Masjid Action Committee, commented authoritatively that “the pillars found in the structure of the Masjid ranged from the 14th century and ‘seem to have been brought from various structures outside the Masjid to decorate it‘.”

Professor Lal “issued a rejoinder which appeared [five fast days later] in The Statesman, New Delhi, dated February 18, l991:
“Further excavation within the floor area of the Babri Masjid without in any way harming the structure is necessary to know what actually preceded the mosque at Ayodhya, according to former Archaeological Survey of India Director General, Mr. B. B. Lal, reports UNI. If both the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the All-India Babri Masjid Action Committee had honest intentions to know what actually preceded the mosque, they should not shy away from further excavations, the noted archaeologist said in a lengthy rebuttal to the comments made by some historians in regard to his lecture at Vijayawada recently. ‘Why should the contending parties shy away from further excavation, unless they are afraid of facing the truth?‘ he asked.

From this moment on Lal has been repeatedly accused of “falsifying records and withholding information”. The above described controversy cycled back through the pages of the English dailies in the summer of 1998 when the newly elected BJP government made its first round of nominations to fill vacancies on various boards. As in the past, when the council is reconstituted every three years, some of the scholars who have been serving on the board are retained and some are replaced. In 1998 B.B. Lal was asked to continue serving on the ICHR board. Because K.N. Panikkar and several other leftist scholars who had served multiple terms in the past, were not asked to remain on the board, they raised a hue and cry that the ICHR was being saffronized.

This view was carried widely in the English media, and it was during this period of time when Arun Shourie publicly took on K.N. Panikkar and K.M. Shrimali. Typical of the media’s treatment of the BJP is this “verbatim account” of an interview that appeared in Frontline in July 1998.99 Sukumar Muralidharan, an avowedly anti-BJP journalist of The Hindu, interviewed Murli Manohar Joshi, the Union Minister of Human Resource Development (HRD) regarding the “reconstitution of the Indian Council for Historical Research”. I have quoted most of the questions and answers from what I consider to be a mockery of an interview because it clearly shows that journalists who are lined up with the leftist historians to oppose the policies of the BJP are blatantly biased.

Muralidharan asked Joshi, “There is a view that only historians of one particular persuasion have been accommodated in the reconstituted ICHR”. Joshi replied, “Each one of them is a highly qualified historian. Each … is either a Professor or an ex-Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. None … is a member of any political party”. Muralidharan then asserts, ignoring the qualifications of the appointees, “Some of them do have an association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, perhaps not formally, since the RSS does not maintain membership rolls”. Joshi, responding that none of the scholars attended RSS “programmes or shakhas”, added that he thought it was wrong spirited to make a scholar in to a “persona non grata” just “because [he] has a different view from you or me”.

Several times Muralidharan uses the phrase, what “they” or “the people” “are saying”. By invoking this amorphous and highly informed “they” the journalist can assert that the majority of Indians think that on previous ICHR boards, “all viewpoints used to be accommodated, whereas now only one has been”. Joshi countered that in his opinion, earlier there had been “a predominance of one viewpoint”. He added that now, “the boot is on the other leg”. Muralidharan challenges this assumption, referring again to the unnamed “people” are claiming that “this is not quite correct”. Joshi rehashes his stance, reiterating that, “The ICHR is a body which should contain persons of high academic qualifications. It is not a body of a particular political view or a particular 'ism'.” However, Muralidharan again brings up the issue of the Babri Masjid controversy and accused Joshi of stacking the ICHR board with scholars “associated with […] the Vishwa Hindu Parishad”, four of whom “were actively involved in the campaign” to bring down the mosque.

At this point, though the printed word does not really shout, it can be inferred by the tone of the interview, that there was a lack of decorum between the journalist and the minister. Joshi told Muralidharan that his view of the situation was “myopic and untrue”. Muralidharan responded by naming four names he associated with the VHP, “B.P. Sinha, B.R. Grover, B.B. Lal, K.S. Lal”. Joshi explained that “They were all Directors-General of the ASI much before the BJP was born”, but Muralidharan insists “they were all associated with the VHP's panel of historians”. Joshi pointed out that on the previous board, there were scholars associated “some other panel”, he added but that “does not mean I should condemn him”.

When Muralidharan, drawing from that pool of popular knowledge from which he commonly draws says, “the point is made that earlier there were both Mandir and Masjid historians in the ICHR. Now there are only Mandir historians”, the tit for tat takes over. Joshi counters that such a view is false and that other people might “say that formerly there were only Masjid historians”. Muralidharan is convinced that all the newly appointed ICHR board members are saffron and will not concede that the earlier boards also had a bias and had been involved in politicizing historiography during the BM/RJB episode by supporting the AIBMAC. He retorts to Joshi, “That is incorrect” to which the minister responds in kind, “That is correct” While Joshi explained, “nobody in [the recently appointed] group has ever supported [the] Mandir”, Muralidharan points to “Professor M.G.S. Narayanan [who] was Member-Secretary of the ICHR”.

The two argue about whether Narayanan actually came out in favor of the Ram Temple, and Joshi concluded, “In history, the basic thing is that persons who are fully qualified… should be there. I can understand any criticism on the basis of academic incompetence”. But Muralidharan states, “The question is not of incompetence but of bias. B.B. Lal, for instance, was accused of the suppression and falsification of evidence”. When Joshi pointed out that this was only said by “some people” Muralidharan added, “Also by the World Archaeological Congress”.101 Joshi retorts, “That is again a body. If you accept that there are groups of historians, then one group says something, the other group says something else. In another conference somebody else could be castigated for something else”.

Muralidharan then castigates the minister, saying that “differences […] are normally dealt with in a spirit of openness […] it is all placed on the table”, to which Joshi replies, “It has been placed on the table. But it is up to you whether you close your eyes or keep your eyes open”. Muralidharan again brings up B.B. Lal saying that he ”has refused to submit his site notebooks and excavation records from Ayodhya for scrutiny by other historians”. At this point, Joshi ends the interview by saying, “Is this an interview or are you entering into a debate? You may have your own personal view, but as a correspondent you should be conducting an interview.”

Two weeks prior to the publication of this aggressive ill-informed interview, an editorial titled “Tampering with history” had appeared in the June 12, 1998 edition of The Hindu the parent publication of the magazine Frontline. The Editor of The Hindu, had criticized B.B. Lal because of his nominated to serve another term on the ICHR. A similar hoopla had not accompanied his nomination three years earlier by a non-BJP government. Since B.B. Lal was the object of the editor’s scorn, he took it upon himself to respond and point out what he perceived to be errors in the editorial. On July 1st, Lal’s rejoinder was published in The Hindu, and three days later in the same paper the confrontational interviewer, Mr. Muralidharan again accused Prof. Lal of suppressing facts and falsifying evidence, completely ignoring the rebuttal that had just been published. Lal had written:

“Since I happen to be one of the eighteen persons nominated by the Government on the Council, the editor took the opportunity to have a dig at me. He made three distinct allegations. To quote:
(i) His (i.e. my) initial conclusion was that there was no evidence to suggest the “historicity” of the Ramayana;
(ii) Even now he refuses to hand over his field diaries to ASI and throw these open to fellow archaeologists; and
(iii) Professor Lal began echoing the Sangh Parivar and even claimed to possess “clinching” evidence suggesting that the Babri Masjid stood on the ruins of a Hindu Temple.”

These three accusations are still brought forward against Prof. Lal, even as recent as 2002, yet there are many places where he has published his response to the above critiques including in the proceedings of the 1998 World Archaeological Congress. He has pointed out numerous times that a few lines of his conclusions about “the ‘historicity’ of the Ramayana sites” are constantly taken out of context. Accusations that he his hiding field notes and refusing to let other scholars read them peppers many of the on-going critiques of B.B. Lal, whereas there is no evidence that any field notes are missing.

Lal confronts these three critiques, but to little avail, since journalists such as Muralidharan are predisposed not to believe B.B. Lal upon whom they continue to heap immeasurable abuse. Responses and rejoinders, if read at all, are not seriously considered, except as enemy propaganda. “In regard to the first allegation”, B.B. Lal wrote: “[L]et me make it absolutely clear that at no point of time did I ever say that there was no evidence about the historicity of the Ramayana story.” He then lists several of the papers he published on the subject beginning in 1981 and explaining that the ICHR had not brought out the research he had presented in 1988, he noted that in 1993 the first volume came out “under the project ‘Archaeology of the Ramayana sites’,” wherein, Lal,
categorically restated [that] the combined evidence from all five sites excavated under the project shows that there did exist a historical basis for the Ramayana.

The frustration of the scholar is apparent when he writes, “I do not know why the editor has chosen to misrepresent my viewpoint and give an altogether opposite impression to the reader”. Dismissing the allegation that he withheld information from the ASI as “outrageously baseless”, Lal reminds the reader that the “Babri Masjid historians” saw the field notes “a few years ago.” He asked in this op-ed rejoinder, almost a decade later, “Why all this fuss now?” But the issue that he confronts head on is the third item that taunts him for inventing evidence that a Ram Temple stood on the grounds of the Babri Masjid. Lal wrote “in some detail” about this third objection to his work, “since it is an issue about which the entire country would like to know the facts”. Lal briefly describes his excavations at fourteen different areas in Ayodhya, “Janmabhumi area was just one of them [where] a trench was laid out […] at a distance of hardly four meters from the boundary wall”. Lal, in response to his critics, described the “pillar foundations encountered in the trench” and compared them to “the pillars incorporated in the mosque, which evidently originally belonged to a temple”.

Lal chides :
“an over enthusiastic Babri Masjid archaeologist [who] in his effort to deny the entire pillar evidence, published a propaganda booklet in which he stated that these were not pillar foundations but walls. The most amusing part, however, was that he just drew some white lines interconnecting the pillar bases on the photographs concerned and thereby wanted us to believe that these were walls. What a mockery of archaeology! Another Babri Masjid archaeologist, while conceding that these were pillar bases all right, suggested that the structure concerned was no more than a mere cowshed. No doubt for a person coming from a rural background the cowshed idea was a very exciting one, but he conveniently overlooked the fact that this structural complex had as many as four successive floors made of lime, something unheard of in the case of cowsheds. […] In this trench, just below the surface, parallel rows of pillar foundations, made of bricks and stones, were met with. While some of these fell well within the excavated trench, a few lay underneath its edge towards the boundary wall of the Mandir Masjid complex.”