Indigenous Archaeology in India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern 9781407304090, 9781407334400

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The

BAR 1927 2009

Indigenous Archaeology in India Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

PRATAP

Ajay Pratap

ia

Indigenous Archaeology in Ind

B A R

BAR International Series 1927 2009

Indigenous Archaeology in India Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Ajay Pratap

BAR International Series 1927 2009

ISBN 9781407304090 paperback ISBN 9781407334400 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407304090 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR

PUBLISHING

Foreword This is to introduce the work of my colleague Dr. Ajay Pratap. Ajay joined our Department in January 2004. He has completed his M.Phil and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. The topic of his research over there was Some Aspects of Savariya Pahariya Ethnoarchaeology and Paharia Ethnohistory: Archaeological Implications of an Historical Study of Shifting Cultivation respectively. After his return from the U.K. he was In-Charge of the Rock-Art Gallery of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, and then worked for the Asian Development Research Institute, Patna, and the SCADA Computer Centre, Patna. Most lately he was a Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research working on the topic A Micro-analytic Approach to Bihar Neolithic. As a graduate student of the University of Cambridge and as a Fellow of the I.C.H.R. he has already done landmark studies connected with the Ethnoarchaeology and other issues connected with the Archaeology of India. As he has continued to work with the Savariya Paharia tribe in the Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas District, of Jharkhand, continuously since 1981, he is well placed to write a work of this kind. In this book he has presented his findings connected with the Archaeology of the Rajmahal Hills, and discussed the wider relevance of his surface archaeology approach to the archaeology of the rest of the tribal areas of India. He has also discussed the issue of a gendered study of rock-art and landscape archaeology both of which again fall within the domain of tribal archaeology proper. He has also a keen interest in the theory of history and archaeology and has hence written about this subject in several of the chapters. Ajay also has included several chapters that engage in theoretical debates regarding the relationship between history, and archaeology. His conclusion is that we may be able to delineate a separate domain for the archaeology of the tribal areas, which he calls subaltern archaeology. I have had the pleasure of seeing his earlier published work of 2000 The Hoe and the Axe: An Ethnohistory of Shifting Cultivation in Eastern India published by the Oxford University Press, New Delhi. I tend to think that the present work breaks further new ground in historical and archaeological research arising from his fieldwork in the Rajmahal Hills and elsewhere in India. From my point of view the novel idea in this book is that the tribal population of India does have a long-term past. Thus far this issue has not been investigated as thoroughly as has been Ajay’s effort in this work.

Anand Shankar Singh, Professor and Head of Department, Department of History, Banaras Hindu University Varanasi 221 005 India 30th July, 2008.

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Brief note about the author India conference, Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, BHU, 2007; Ethnoarchaeology and ethnohistory: the interface of two disciplines in the context of Jharkhand, in the Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 2007; On Non-Anglo Archaeology in Archaeologies, Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, Vol 4(1), May, 2008; Economic Reforms with a Human Face: some thoughts on the tribal sector, Journal of the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Economic Association 1(1): 117-120, June 2008. His solo published book in 2000 is The Hoe and the Axe: an Ethnohistory of Shifting Cultivation in Eastern India from the Oxford University Press, New Delhi. The book has received no less than ten positive reviews in leading social science journals. He has been a regular reviewer of books related with archaeology, anthropology and history for such prestigious Journals as Book Review and Marg, and has written for National Dailies like the Times of India and The Hindustan Times, The Independent. He has been a contributor to peer-reviewed journals such as Archaeologies, Antiquity, Contributions to Indian Sociology, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Journal of Social Sciences (Banaras Hindu University). Dr. Pratap is a member of prestigious national and international bodies like the Royal Asiatic Society, Royal Anthropological Institute, Bihar Puravid Parishad, The Society of South Asian Archaeologists, Pune, and The World Archaeological Congress (on whose Executive Committee he has served as the Representative for the Southern Asian Region). As a student of Cambridge University and later as a practicing archaeologist he has had the opportunity to travel widely in Europe, U.K., U.S.A. and South Africa. He is presently serving as Reader in History at the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University, India.

Dr. Ajay Pratap took his B.A. (Hons.) in History from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and M.A. In Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology from the Deccan College, Pune. Thereafter he was awarded an Inlaks Scholarship for further studies at the University of Cambridge, U.K. from where he completed his M.Phil. and Ph.D. Degrees. Among his many published books, research papers, and reviews are: The Savariya Paharia: Shifting Cultivators of the Rajmahal Hills, India. In Hodder, I (Ed.) Archaeology as Long-term History, New Directions in Archaeology Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987; To see or not to see: ethnographic film and ethnoarchaeology, Archaeological Review From Cambridge, 1987; with K.N.Momin. Indian Museums And the Public. In Stone P.G. and Molyneux, B (Eds.) 1995. The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education, Routledge, London; Ethnocentrism and Tribal Ethnohistory, India, In The World Archaeological Bulletin, 2003, Archaeology as History: The case of the Rajmahal Hills, in Ray, H.P. and Sinopoli, C. 2004. (eds.) Archaeology as History in Early South Asia. Aryan Books International and ICHR, Delhi; The origin and decline of Paharia Identity: A historical framework. In P. Mishra (ed). Journal of the Vikramshila Institute for Social Sciences, Bhagalpur, 2004; Ethnoarchaeology as history: the archaeology of shifting cultivation, Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand; In Sengupta G, Raichoudhary, S and Sujit Som, Past and Present: Ethnoarchaeology in India, Pragati Publications, New Delhi 2006; Globalization and Tribal Women, 2006. Proceedings of the conference on Globalization in India and Women, Centre for Womens’ Studies and Development, Department of Political Science Banaras Hindu University; The Syllabus of History of Ancient Indian Science and Technology as it is being taught at the Department of History, B.H.U., in Proceedings of History of Science and Technology in

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................................................................ix PART I Archaeology in India 1. Introduction.......................................................................................................................................................1 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Some further observations 1.3 Chapter introductions 1.4 Conclusion 2. Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View and a Survey. ....................................................................... 7 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Theoretical Archaeology in India: a personal view 2.3 Background to discussing indigenous archaeology 2.4 Archaeology: processual and postprocessual 2.5 Agency in archaeology 2.6 Agency reconsidered 2.7 Archaeology and education in India: curriculums and folk heriatge 2.8 Conclusion Part II: History and Theory 3. History and Postmodernist Thought in the Indian Context........................................................................17 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Marginal History 3.3 History, anthropology, and archaeology 3.4 Science, technology, and shifting cultivation 3.5 The 18th century background 3.6 Developments of the 19th century 3.7 The development of railways and forest legislation 3.8 Lessons from history for archaeology 3.9 The problem 3.10 The method 3.11 Conclusion 4. Ethnoarchaeology as History: A Must for India?......................................................................................... 23 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Background 4.3 History and archaeology: the case of ancient Indian history 4.4 History and archaeology: the anthropological angle 4.5 History and ethnoarchaeology 4.6 Ethnoarchaeology in India 4.7 Postprocessualism in the context of Jharkhand 4.8 Conclusion 5. Ethnocentrism and Tribal Ethnohistory, India. ...........................................................................................29 5.1 Introduction 5.2 State (civilized) and tribe (uncivilized) 5.3 Texts, ancient Indian history and subaltern archaeology 5.4 Conclusion Part III: Ethnoarchaeology 6. Ethnography of Archaeology in the Santhal Parganas: A View from the Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand........................................................................................................................................................ 33 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The field 6.3 Antiquarianism and archaeology in the Santhal Parganas 6.4 Prehistoric research in the Santhal Parganas 6.5 Review of archaeology and anthropology in the Santhal Parganas 1771-2008 6.6 Conclusion

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7. The Tribal Heritage of Jharkhand: The Prospects for its Preservation.....................................................37 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Tribal landscapes 7.3 Conservation of tribal heritage: peopling the hills 7.4 Conclusion 8. The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach............................................ 45 8.1 A strategy for surface archaeology 8.2 Surface archaeology in Rajmahal Hills 8.3 Slash and burn agriculture; the status of research 8.4 The stone-tool technology of shifting cultivation 8.5 Introduction to the Rajmahal sites and materials 8.6 On historical analogy in the Rajmahal context 8.7 Paharia subsistence and settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries 8.8 Subsistence and settlement in the present 8.9 Archaeological predictions: settlement and mobility 8.10 Settlement and technology: the diagnostic indicators 8.11 Predictions for Rajmahal 8.12 Conclusion PART IV: Cultural Contexts of Indigenous archaeology 9. Cultural Contexts of Indian rock-art: An Interpretative Approach. .........................................................61 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Approaching interpretation 9.3 Existing strategies of interpretation 9.4 Crosscultural analogy 9.5 Approach to the emic 9.6 The historical approach to emic 9.7 On a positivist methodology 9.8 On the testing of hypotheses regarding emic meanings 9.9 An ethnoarchaeological approach to emic meanings 9.10 Conclusion Part V: Tribes and Indigenous Peoples 10. The Tribal Indigenous Condition in Modern India: a perspective............................................................. 71 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Tribal knowledge: some developmental perspectives 10.3 Who is indigenous in the Indian context? 10.4 The indigenous voice in the modern Indian context 10.5 Conclusion General Conclusions..................................................................................................................................................... 77 Bibliography.................................................................................................................................................................. 79

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List of Plates, tables, and figures Plates Frontispiece. Paharia women. From F.B. Bradley-Birt (1905) 7.1 Approach to Rajmahal hills by road during monsoons 7.2 Foothills of the Rajmahal in floods 7.3 Approach from Sahibganj to Rajmahal hills 7.4 View from northern crest of the Rajmahal hills 7.5 Northern view showing the lowlands and the river Ganges 7.6 View inside the hills with clearances for shifting cultivation 7.7 Plough agriculture in the northern lowlands 7.8 Sunrise on the landscape 7.9 Paharia children 7.10 Paharia children 7.11 Village scene in the morning 7.12 Agricultural plot clearance in progress 7.13 A hill stream 8.1 Hand axe on chert 8.2 Hand axe on chert 8.3 Hand axe on chert 8.4 Hand axe on chert 8.5 Hand axe on chert 8.6 Fluted cores on chert and chalcedony 8.7 Flake tools on chert 8.8 Flake blades on chert 8.9 Mound at Pachrukhi (RJM 2) 8.10 Tools in deposit at Pachrukhi (RJM 2) 8.11 Points on chert and chalcedony 8.12 Mini, polished chisel with finger-grooves (dorsal view) 8.13 Mini, polished chisel with finger-grooves (ventral view) 8.14 Macro-scraper on chert 8.15 Fluted core on chert 8.16 Points on chert and chalcedony 8.17 Triangles on chert and chalcedony 9.1 Panel at Bhimbetka, Madhya Pradesh, showing horse riders holding swords 9.2 Panel at Bhimbetka depicting armed horse riders 9.3 Stylized elephant depicted at Bhimbetka 9.4 depicting man cultivating field with animal and plough, Chamdi Nala 9.5 X-ray painting of crocodile at Gandhisagar Shelter over the River Chambal 9.6 Close up view of the Mythical Boar painting at Bhimbetka 9.7 Remote view of the Mythical Boar painting and shelter at Bhimbetka 9.8 The auditorium rock at Bhimbetka 9.9 Human figure on horseback followed by foot soldier and abstract designs, Bhimbetka 9.10 Human stick figures accompanied by animal figures, Bhimbetka Tables 3.1 Floral species in the Damin-i-Koh 3.2 Faunal species in the Damin-i-Koh 8.1 Labour schedule for khallu (shifting cultivation) 8.2 Diagnostic traits of sedentary shifting cultivation 8.3 Rajmahal industry: site and type distribution Figures 8.1 Paharia settlement pattern today 8.2 The settlement cycle 8.3 Human mobility in Bara Gutibera locality 1981-82, 1983-84 8.4 Spatial contexts of Paharia tool-use

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Acknowledgements

archaeological and historical sources or literary sources. Lately, I have also been assigned quite another paper that also informs this work, over and above the experience of fieldwork in the Santhal Parganas, on-going continuously since the 1990s. This paper called Tribal Histories of India is being taught since 2005-2006 to M.A. students at the Banaras Hindu Univeristy (hereafter BHU). Quite often the issue arose in class as to how old is tribal history in India. Alongwith questions like does the tribal past in India extend all the way back to prehistory? If so, where are the data (that is) publications that irrefutably connect with this subject? Thus, and quite pertinently so, even though some Indian archaeologists believe there existed a longterm tribal past—where indeed is the evidence supporting such a belief? It would be obvious to the reader, although here I have less than stated the case, that those certain parts of the rather large Indian Heritage now need to be broken-up, and that which likely belongs to an ethnic minority, like the tribes, needs to be recognised as such. I am not here calling into question the recent writings (such as Veena Das cited above) appearing in print in the ten or so Subaltern Studies volumes that have thrown much needed and valuable light on the nature of tribal uprisings of the medieval period onwards to the present and their significance to the independence movement. These have just begun to show the way for a larger project to look at what was happening in tribal India during the ancient, medieval and contemporary periods? Their ancient history and archaeology is my concern in this book.

The first emancipatory act that the Subaltern Studies Project (emphasis mine) performs in our understanding of tribes, castes or other such groups is to restore to them their historical being. It is no longer possible to think, for instance, of tribes or inhabitants of the hill regions deprived of their rights to forests…as simply inhabiting a world of nature. This is because it is their very relation to nature that has been destroyed by the enactment of new laws, which favour the commercial use of forests rather than their preservation as the habitat of tribes (pp. 314) From Subaltern Studies as Perspective, Veena Das, 1999, in Subaltern Studies VI, Ranajit Guha (Ed.), Oxford University Press, Delhi. In a sense what one learns as a student stays as training for the rest of an academic life. It was practice at the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge University, U.K., that Ph.D students were subjected to dissertation workshops. In these classes under the supervision of an existing faculty member previously successful and unsuccessful dissertations were subjected to debate by students. I do not recollect exactly who said this, probably Professor A.C. Renfrew himself, that “your thesis is first of all an argument all about your hypothesis related to a subject, that you must elaborate. That in essence, is your thesis. Don’t try to shatter the Earth. No thesis has ever done that.” The call for a review of theoretical methods employed in Indian Archaeology was given by Bruce Trigger’s (1985) monograph Archaeology as Historical Science, among other works, published in that year by the University Press of the Banaras Hindu University (see Paddayya, K. 1990 for a recent review). In this brief volume while considering the relationship between archaeology and history Trigger also speaks considerably about the methods of anthropology and their relevance to the archaeologists’ methods. Thus for archaeologists’ it is old hat that archaeology, history and even anthropology are disciplines that must come together for a thorough study of the past. Not perhaps so for historians and anthropologists—and hence this book. This present work revisits the same issue—how are we to best utilize the combined perspectives of these three disciplines, to best study the (tribal) past. Would that lead to a new approach? May it usefully be termed A Subaltern Archaeology? However, my aim in this volume is not merely nomenclatural or theoretical but to extend this exercise with the specific purpose of demonstrating the benefits of such a unified approach to the study of tribal or ethnographic or the past of one segment of an ethnic minority of India. The reason for this is that not only have I engaged in these three disciplines, to some extent, by virtue of engaging in ethnoarchaeological research on the Paharias of Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand, India (now published in Pratap 1987 and 2000) but also by virtue of teaching an M.A. course in the concerned field at the BHU.

For this effort, I have to thank several individuals and institutions for support for the research, the time for writing, and the finalization of this manuscript. Professor Anand Shankar Singh, Head of Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and other colleagues from the same department— Prof. N.Q. Pankaj, Dr. Aruna Sinha, Dr. Lakshman Rai, Dr. Rajeshwar Pandey, Dr. R.P. Singh, Dr. Rakesh Pandey, Dr. Sumitra Gupta, Dr. Usha Rani Bansal, Dr. Ghan Shyam, Dr. Binda D. Paranjape, Dr. A. Gangatharan, Dr. Mamta Bhatnagar, Dr. Keshav Mishra, Dr. Tabir Kalam, Mr. Dhrub Kumar Singh, Dr. Malavika Pandey, Dr. Anuradha Singh, and Dr. Malavika Ranjan have all helped in their own ways. I also wish to thank colleagues-in-office, Shri Deepak Srivastava, Shri Ajay Kumar Bannerjee, Shri A.K. Singh, Shri Alok De, Shri Deepak Yadav and Shri Rajesh Yadav for their kind courtesies. I have had the benefit of productive discussions, regarding this book, with colleagues in sister Departments of the Faculty of Social Sciences. I would, in particular, like to thank Prof. Madhuri Srivastava, (former) Head, Dept. of Economics, B.H.U. for giving me an opportunity to sit in their mega-conference, “Economic Reforms with a Human Face: Towards New Paradigms of Development.” I have also benefited from the comments of Dr. A.K. Pandey, Prof. A.K. Kaul and Dr. C.D. Adhikari of the Dept. of Sociology. I have also benefited from the publishing advice from Prof. A. Vaishampayan, Institute of Agricultural Sciences, B.H.U; and Prof. A. Hemanttaranjan of the same Institute.

I teach Ancient Indian History which as per the statutes of Banaras Hindu University entails a combined use of ix

this fraternity whose papers (related to the subjects at hand) I have had an opportunity to listen to at the various congregations of the WAC, organised nationally and internationally, since 1994. Archaeologies that was earlier the World Archaeological Bulletin has also provided much important reading material as it has sustained in publishing rather a lot on the issue of Indigenous, Postmodern, Postcolonial and Postprocessual archaeology worldwide. Anthropology Today published by the Royal Anthropological Institute has also carried some important notes and news connected with the subjects at hand.

I have frequently been associated with the activities of the Centre for Women’s Studies and Development (of the Dept. of Political Science, BHU) and those such as Prof. Chadrakala Padia and Dr. Usha Kiran Rai have been a great source of help. They included me in their various forums where I was invited to present papers or to just to sit and listen. I wish to thank Shri Alok Kumar Singh, Librarian, of the same Centre, as I have been a frequent user of his library. I wish to thank the patient custodians of the Sir Sayaji Gaikwad Central Library, B.H.U., Shri B.N. Singh, and the stacks area staff. Finally, I wish to thank our University Computer Centre staff, Prof. N. Prasad, and Dr. S.K. Basu, Dr. R.P. Mishra, Shri Bipin Kumar, Mr. Rajeev Hundoo, Shri R.K. Singh, Mr. R.S. Yadava and all the others for the considerations extended to me.

In this context, it is opportune to say, that the present decade is one of tremendous ferment insofar as the role of indigenous people in studying and constructing or interpreting their own pasts is concerned. In my view, as on date, this trend is not all that developed in India as yet, although our indigenous tradition that is the tribal and folk, is very much extant and very vibrant. India happens to be one of the countries that voted in favour of the UN resolution regarding the rights of indigenous peoples on the 13th of September, 2007. However, it is still a rare sight to find archaeologists or anthropologists, or senior officers in museums, or the archaeological establishment, who hail from an ethnic (in India, in this context, the term tribal is commonly used) background. The attempt of this book is therefore to set a backdrop for tribal or subaltern archaeology in India by discussing its lower limit—the issue of ancient Indian history and archaeology. It does not require a great leap of imagination as to how this would be possible apart from thinking and writing about the subject as this work does. Among many types of archaeologies bourgeoning since postprocessualism took roots is community archaeology. In this, usually, the archaeologist, of whichever origin, tries to involve the local people in the process of uncovering the (local) past. This is archaeology too, and pedagogy to boot.

Although the book has mainly grown out of papers written for conferences and seminars, mainly in and around B.H.U., they have also, in that capacity, been enriched by the comments of those named above and several others. It remains to thank Matthew Edgeworth, Ashish Chaddha, Sheena Panja, Shanti Pappu, Bishnupriya Basak, Prof. M.L.K. Murty, Dr. K. Paddayya, Alok Kanungo, Ian Hodder and Matthew Johnson all for different reasons not possible to state here. Alok and Ashish, who I happened to meet at the WAC5 Conference at Washington D.C. in June 2003, are a very cheerful and enterprising duo. It is their ideas that underlie the writing of a related chapter in this book. Matthew Johnson, now at Southampton University, has taken the trouble of reading a version of this manuscript in its entirety and has given several valuable comments and new ideas pertaining to the style of this book and its academic content. Interactions with Shahid Amin, Dilip Menon, Indivar Kamtekar, Upinder Singh and Nayanjot Lahiri all of Department of History, University of Delhi, has always inspired me to examine the thesis underlying the study of ethnoarchaeology in India. I am beholden to Shahid particularly for commenting positively on one sentence that I had written in a paper that I had shown him for his comments—which is as follows—Ethnoarchaeology is to Archaeology, what Subaltern Studies are to History— perhaps therein lie the seeds of this volume. Dr. Indivar Kamtekar and Dr. Dilip Menon, particularly, as well as Officers of the Teen Murti, Delhi, provided opportunities to present some of the data related with this book, at their departmental seminars, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Delhi University and Teen Murti respectively. In this regard I have also benefited from the reviews and comments given on my earlier work by Professor D.K. Bhattacharya (Delhi University) and Professor B.D. Chattopadhyaya (Jawaharlal Nehru University) respectively. Chapter 5, was published in the World Archaeology Bulletin (AprilMay 2003) and in that process I have had the benefit of comments from its editor Ian Lilley. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Martin Hall and Dr. Claire Smith, Presidents World Archaeological Congress (WAC), Dr. Peter Stone CEO, WAC, and all other members of

I also wish to thank Dr. Bijoy Kumar Choudhary, Director, K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, with whose Institute I have been associated as a Senior Fellow of the Indian Council of Historical Research, Delhi, from 2002 till 2004, working on a project to study the Microwear patterns on the Neolithic implements from selected sites of the Bihar. They, as well as Prof. B.S. Verma, Dr. Ajit Prasad and Dr. Atul Verma (all of The Directorate of Archaeology, Government of Bihar) have been enormously helpful. The patient custodians of Patna Museum: Shri Sahdeo Kumar (Director), Dr. Parvez Akhtar, Dr. Arvind Mahajan and Dr. Pandey (all Curators), have all been very kind to extend to me all sorts of courtesies and facilities associated with this project. The Chirand Collection of this museum is very fascinating indeed. I am, indebted, in particular to the Indian Council of Historical Research, Delhi, for extending their Senior Fellowship, at a time when my academic project was all but getting derailed. It has taken nearly three years to put this book together as a volume. It could have taken longer had not the The British Archaeological Reports Editors intervened to suggest that writing was indeed over. I have read several x

Acknowledgement of published work

BAR volumes as a student at University of Cambridge and admire them and am extremely grateful that this has been accepted by them for publication. I am particularly beholden to BAR Team Dr. David Davison, Dr. David Milson and Gerald Birsch, Editors of this volume, for their kind and supportive interventions.

Some of the essays appearing in this volume have previously been published or have been submitted for publication elsewhere. I have included them here on account of a long time elapsing after submission for publication. I gratefully acknowledge these editors/publishers for permission to reproduce these, although in most cases I have modified the papers for the purposes of this book. It is also a fact that as on date except for chapters.4, and 8, the rest of the chapters stands unpublished. These are: a) History and postmodernist thought in he Indian context; b) Science, Technology and Shifting Cultivation; and c) Constructing Paharia ethnohistory: Lessons for history from archaeology. All in Sinha, Aruna (Ed.) Proceedings of Three Seminars (from 2004-2006) d) The content of Indian Rock-Art: An Interpretative approach. In Singh, K.S. (Ed.) Ramarghya (In Press). National Museum, Delhi. e) Ethnocentrism and tribal ethnohistory. World Archaeological Bulletin, May-June 2003. f) Archaeology as History: The Case of the Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas. In Ray, H.P. and Sinopoli, C. (Eds.) 2004. Archaeology as History in Early South Asia. Aryan International and ICHR, Delhi. g) The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: The Case of the Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas. In Sengupta, G, Roychoudhury, S and Sujit Som. (eds.) Past and Present: Ethnoarchaeology in India. 2006. Pragati Publications, Delhi. H) Economic Reforms with a human face: some thoughts on the tribal sector. Journal of the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Economic Association 1(1): 117:120 I am very grateful to all these publishers and editors.

I wish to acknowledge the students of the department of history B.A. Part I, II, and III and M.A. Semester II, III and IV for their very engaging discussions (from 20042008) and queries related to some of the issues arising in this work. My doctoral students: Nishi Seth, Asha Kumari, Shweta Gupta, Anand Prakash Pathak, Rajeev Pratap Singh and Nawal Kumar have all alike helped in a number of ways that I cannot even begin to thank them for. I would also like to sincerely thank my dear parents, Father Dr. U.P. Singh, Mother, Dr. Kusum Lata Singh, Sister, Varsha Rani, brother-in-law Atanu Roy, Father-in-Law Shri Durgesh Prasad Singh, Mother-in-law, Ms. Shyama Singh, wife, Dr. Madhulika Singh, for their unstinting support over the three years that it has taken to write this book. Our children Amrita and Siddhant have playfully suffered my absences in the quest to complete this work. Not least I most sincerely thank Prabhat and his Kin who made it a point to visit us at Varanasi and share our joys and sorrows on a regular basis, and Javeed Ahmed and Ajay Jha who did so, at a distance, through phone-calls and e-mails. I sincerely thank my school batchmates of the class of 1975 for keeping the batch-network alive with brilliant jokes and the like. I also most sincerely thank my brother-in-law Shri Nawal Singh and sister-in-law Ms. Minu for inviting us to Jammu and Kashmir, in the summer of 2007, where a significant part of the book was edited—in the shade of the glorious Himalayas. Last but not least it would be appropriate to thank the people of my study village in the Rajmahal Hills who have accommodated my wanderings in and about their village since 1981.

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PART I: Archaeology in India

of the matter. Several outstanding works in this direction (Henrietta Moore, Michael Parker-Pearson, Christopher Tilley, Michael Shanks, Ian Hodder, Matthew Johnson, and Pratap) have appeared since the late 1980s that have sought to provide to readers worldwide an introduction to the scope of this approach. The world, however, it seems, is and shall continue to be a big place, and what is said and written of archaeology in other countries may not have immediate relevance elsewhere. India particularly has had a historically informed and an academically distinguished archaeological tradition since the 18th century. It is then the aim of this book to see where and how the postmodernist and postprocessual approaches to archaeology are to find a place here. At a glance it would be obvious to the reader that the title of the work itself suggests that there are postprocessual goings-on in this book. The essays in this volume are exploratory and experimental in nature. In giving shape to this book, my own research predilections, that is, prehistory with emphasis on ethnoarchaeology (even though I teach Ancient Indian History in a very distinguished department of History), do play a role. My inputs to the general debate3 in India about postprocessualism are drawn from this direction.

This first part of the book consists of two chapters. The first introduces the scope of this work and the second surveys some current trends in theoretical aspects of Indian archaeology.

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Introduction This work takes as its cue decaying theories, notions, and strategies to the study of Indian archaeology. Our concern here, in particular, is to address the following questions: Where is Indian archaeology conceptually and theoretically in 2008? What’s its future? What did The New Archaeology have to offer? Does postprocessualism have anything further to offer, or is it just another import? What might a postcolonial critique of Indian archaeology look like? What is its relationship with anthropology and history? What can Indian archaeology offer world archaeology? Therefore this volume includes several new perspectives, to studying the Indian past, and is based on the authors’ research in progress since 1981. It contains critiques of traditional field methods while enunciating latest developments in the field, however, it also engages in debates about more recent approaches, now already deployed in western archaeology—such as the archaeology of the landscape, the ethnography of archaeology and rock art research. This work also suggests that while Indian archaeologists may refine the techniques of enquiry by casting a wider theoretical net, this must be done eclectically. Processual archaeology and postprocessual rchaeology, as currently being practised in the west, must be understood and reinterpreted in the process of its inclusion into our own tradition1. The further novel directions into which this work tries to propel Indian archaeology is by drawing attention to issues of its reconsidered interfaces with history as well as (social) anthropology2. Indigenous Archaeology therefore connects with Indian archaeology, history and anthropology in a postprocessual mode. For the archaeologist, the word postprocessual, these days, needs little introduction. Quite following the Kuhnian ideas (by itself a positivist frame of reference) about paradigm shifts the new archaeology of the 1990s is now giving way to postprocessual archaeology. That said, it must hastily be added, that postprocessual archaeologists are the first to say that, as things stand, this branch of archaeology, as yet, lacks a coherent body of theory. We take a different view

1 2

Indigenous Archaeology in India is therefore an interdisciplinary exercise in History. In commenting upon the paths, in history, archaeology and anthropology, of ancient India, and those not traversed yet, it draws upon readings and insights from the latest perspectives being applied on India, within India and outside it. Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and in archaeology and in ancient Indian history, particularly, the impact of postprocessualism has been, it seems, most profound. From the functionalism and hypothetico-deductive approaches so far informing the writing of ancient history the recent trend at par with those in literature and history is to write not only about the subject but about her/him, and more importantly for her/him. There are many of us who benefited, in the nineties, from the appearance of Marjorie Shostak’s (1981)! Nisa. The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman and Henrietta Moore’s Space, Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of The Marakwet of Kenya. Indigenous Archaeologies draws upon these studies and nearly two decades of my own research on the Paharia shifting cultivators of Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand, where I commenced first as a Ph.D student in 1981. Since then my encounter with texts in ancient Indian history, archaeology and anthropology alike, on the tribal issue, have brought me to realise the appalling, ethnocentric views we researchers hold towards a significant component of our Indian population—the tribes4. Who will rectify these biases, or begin to do so, in the Indian context, if we historians don’t? What perspectives, methodologies are to be adopted, if this is to be done? This book hopes to

See Paddayya, K. (1990) Some ethnoarchaeologists may think that the issue of the interface of Indian Archaeology with Indian Anthropology and Indian history is long since settled. However, it would be good to remember that Indian Anthropology is not a static discipline; and hence ethnoarchaeological methods need frequent revision in the light of advancements in anthropological and historical methods and theory. Anthropology is not ethnography alone, nor history simply a narrative. For the most up todate view of Indian ethnoarchaeology see Sengupta, Roychoudhury and Som (2006).

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See Boivin, N and Fuller, D.Q. 2002, and N. Boivin, Paddayya, K., 1990. For an estimate, the Scheduled Tribes comprise about 7% of the Indian population and number about 68 million individuals, which roughly corresponds to the present population of a whole Indian state.

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

be a small step in that direction. Drawing upon the latest available writings in postprocessualism, postmodernity and postcoloniality, Indigenous Archaeology tries to map out both perspectives and methodologies towards an archaeological discourse that is more equitable to tribes of India on whose cultures we rely willy-nilly for our archaeological (and to some extent ancient historical) models and analogies to interpret the past. In so doing it uses these differing perspectives to examine issues like the place of tribes in ancient India, the archaeology of shifting cultivation, the interface of ethnoarchaeology with history in the aid of ethnoarchaeology, the ethnography of Indian archaeology, and similar avenues, to extend the theoretical limits of our discourses on tribes. We also touch upon field-based research (connected in one way or another) with tribes, such as prehistoric rock-paintings, and shifting cultivation, and we try to impose new interpretations to such texts to enrich our understanding of indigenous archaeology. This book also tries to put archaeology on the national map, in a way not attempted before. We do this by raising issues connected with archaeology and education, such as the curricula of Indian archaeology, the issue of folk heritage museums, and what pedagogic value does Indian archaeology stand to give to us as a people and tribes in particular?

by the local group on their terms. The construction of anthropological knowledge is therefore the fusion of outsider and local knowledge (Geertz, 1973, 1993, and Gupta and Fergusson, 1997).7 Years ago (in 1987) towards the end of my doctoral work when I was asked to write some thing about our field ways and means in India, while considerably younger, I wrote a piece called the Hindu as an anthropologist8. It was not a satire. Anthropology was not a colonial preserve. However, much of postcolonial anthropology in our country is still taken-up with very colonial values even now enshrined in the do’s and don’ts set up, in most cases, by Indian anthropologists. Consider the issue we are debating in this volume, the prospect of a long-term past for tribal groups. How come such an issue arises no less than sixty odd years after independence? In that article, it was opportune to note a) that very little of our anthropology is indigenously driven, so to speak, and b) as an extension, when the majority of Indian anthropologists carry out their field studies these are nuanced with associating with a lesser people, a state of things that, expectedly, would pass soon. Therefore, it is apposite that two recent examples of anthropology/ archaeology from below here be discussed. In most recent literature, emanating from within the folds of Indian anthropology, a good example of anthropology from below is Sita Venkateswar’s book Development and Ethnocide: Colonial Practices in the Andaman Islands. The other is Zarine Cooper’s Archaeology as History: Early Settlement in the Andaman Islands. Sita Venkateswar has lambasted the scholarly tradition of Indian ethnography suggesting that they have stooped to conquer9. After all the Onge, the Jarawa and the Andamanese had been written about from much earlier on (Mann 1932, Mann 1976, Portman 1879) and the post-independence ethnographers instead of highlighting the frightening economic imbalances in native systems have merely continued the colonial legacy. To support her thesis, here, I would draw your attention to the account of Edmund Keero a tribal peon in the employ of the Anthropological Survey of India who has written a remarkably honest and mature account (in Hindi) of his time spent in these Islands in the service of the Officers of the Anthropological Survey of India10. In my view, for all its good intentions, Sita Venkateswar’s work may not stand deep critiquing since her fieldwork is very thin and her ethnographic encounter not very profound, in which she had mere boat-to-boat conversations with her informants. In marked contrast, Cooper’s fieldwork in the Andaman

1.2 Some further observations The two years approximately that a social scientist spends living in the field5 is a very long-time indeed. He/She arrives there lock, stock and barrel to live with a tribe or any other, by way of its lifestyle, unique group. This is often without the prior initiation into the society’s ways of culture even less their language—so the ethnographer, the social scientist arrives there a savage. In the Paharia Hills, where my host and local guardian Keshav offered me a charpoy to sleep in in my very first night (in 1981) in a village deep in the Rajmahal Hills, I accepted it with some deference. Late, in a bitterly cold, winter night I awoke to find that my body was burning hot. A little fact-finding revealed that I was covered with khatmal (bed-bugs), not one but hundreds.6 The next morning, very resolutely, I borrowed, a very big cauldron, from a friend, boiled lots of water, and cleansed the charpoy, washing out all the bed-bugs and killing them presumably, with most people of that village watching the spectacle bemused and laughing to boot. Ethnographic fieldwork requires a period of time after which the fieldworker is accepted

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A recent work (Gupta and Fergusson 1997) has sought to redefine the concept of field in a postmodernist fashion. They argue that increasingly the (anthropological) field, traditionally conceived as across the seven seas, need not be anymore at a (geographical) remove from the anthropologists own culture. It may, however, be pointed out that prehistoric sites do not have a way of being found in the archaeologists’ backyard. Therefore the field so far as archaeology is concerned may for some time still continue to correspond to its traditional and accepted definition. This is a point Gupta and Fergusson (1997) have not considered in their otherwise quite profound work. I must here report, that in my latest fieldwork there, this summer of 2007, I found the living conditions to have improved tremendously. Bed-bugs are now non-existent. The area, however, is still prone to mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.

See Gupta and Fergusson (1997); and Geertz (1973, 1993). This paper, never published, was presented as a Graduate Seminar at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge and at a Departmental Seminar, Institute of South Asian Studies, and University of Heidelberg, Germany in 1988. I am grateful to Dr. Gordon Johnson, Cambridge, and Prof. G.D. Sontheimer, Heidelberg, respectively, for the opportunity to present this paper. 9 See Pratap, n.d. for a review. 10 See Keero, E. (1991). Of course, for our purposes, Edmund Keero’s account opens-up altogether a different debate about anthropological interpretation (subaltern?) that is central to the concerns of this work. His reminiscences on the Onge and the Jarawa, among other tribes he interacted with within India, in States like the north-east, central India, Abhujmar and the Andaman Islands are almost a priceless record. 7 8

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Introduction: Archaeology in India

Islands, and her understanding and reportage of Islander lifestyle, past and present, has resulted from a very long period of stay and study, seventeen years to be exact11. Who, therefore, is to tell which ethnographer would actually be able to write sympathetically and give us anthropology from below or at any rate a truer anthropology? We have today more urban-bred anthropologists who go to the forests and find that there are no tribes at all; that there are only patron-client links amidst tribes (Pathy???), there are yet others who do talk of the Naga system of communal ownership of land; that they in their hallucinogenic trances receive their Gods’ dictats as to which lands they must cultivate in any particular year to get a good harvest. In contrast with Sita and Cooper’s study, for example, it is better known that Verrier Elwin (see Guha 1963, 1983) spent a whole lifetime among the Gonds of Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh. Indeed he married a Gond Lady Ganga Bai.12 Today, his son Vijay Elwin looks more Gond than British and still lives in that old village of his. The leper home that Elwin assiduously built and is spoken about in his book (1990) is no more and on the same hillock there are but pieces of stone strewn here and there.

for analysis would neither be feasible nor appropriate. The approach of this book, therefore, is to look at the problem in terms of themes. If contemporary ethnography has shortfalls of the types mentioned above then this has been addressed, if contemporary history has shortfalls of the types mentioned above then this has been dealt with and last but not least if similar shortfalls attend in Indian archaeology, and given that this is my primary locus for interpretation, then this too has been attended to to the best of my ability. Thus the plan or structure of the book, in eleven chapters, summaries of which are provided in this chapter, is also to elevate the focus of research on tribes to a level of substance that would suggest some relevance. If we are criticizing present approaches then what have we to offer in its place? Evidently such answers are woven into the titles of and the discussions contained within the chapters, a summary of which is being provided below. 1.3 Chapter summaries PART I: Archaeology of India In the light of the foregoing discussion, in this book the first chapter provides an overall Introduction to the subject under study with such preliminary discussion as is felt necessary to introduce the reader to the scope and aims of the present work. We also provide here a summary of the contents of the chapters of the present book.

These are the glimpses that ought to tell us that Indian Anthropology (including prehistoric archaeology and ethnoarchaeology) are still in need of further refinement. Whether this would be for the better or worse will be for the posterity to decide. However certainly, in charting out the terrain for this book, I have been driven to think that the time is ripe for the rise of indigenous archaeology, so to speak, for the indigene, of the indigene and by the indigene. This volume focuses on the tribal population of India that has been the focus of studies through archaeology, anthropology and history. What is the problem in this regard? The problem, this book tries to identify is primarily that all three disciplines mention tribes from an ahistorical perspective. In simpler language, in academic discourse, the day is yet to come when we would look at tribes, their history, and society from just the same point of view as we do ours. I would reiterate here my intellectual debt to the studies appearing in the subaltern series of books (see bibliography) that at least there have been a few case studies of tribal movements as proper historical events. In one case Gautam Bhadra, as spoken of before, has tried to analyse even the mentality of the subaltern. In any case the thinking underlying this school has for me opened-up the very avenue this book traverses.

The second chapter of this work is entitled Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View and a Survey. We are here concerned with locating the status of theoretical archaeology in India. In the past two decades, the world over, there have been considerations about a switch-over from the new archaeology up to the 1980s to postprocessualism of the 1980s and beyond. This has implications both for the theory and practice in Indian archaeology. Where is Indian archaeology located in this context? Where again in world archaeology? These are some of the central concerns of this chapter. As such this discussion anticipates the later discussion of ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical methods and the place of the tribal subject within that. The purpose of this chapter is only to provide some observations, broadly speaking, on Indian archaeology, and is, I repeat, is not meant to be an actual survey of literature on Indian archaeology. Those familiar with the terrain of Indian archaeology would at once understand what I am talking about. With each of our states probably comparable to the size of a European country, including its heritage, large and small, it is for most parts simply too difficult to grasp in its totality, including the complexity of India’s cultural heritage and its management. So underplayed is the Indian heritage that it is often difficult even for our own countrymen to grasp how much heritage we have and therefore how large is the interpretational matrix, never mind the totalizing texts of the past half century, that have sought to cast Indian Archaeology as a unified field that may, in some circumstances, be summarized under a single cover. That we know is a textual tradition corresponding roughly with the growth and development of the new archaeology, when in India, as in other countries, these unified texts labelled typically as The Prehistoric Archaeology of India

Thus when we settle down to look at this problem in detail we have rather more than a handful of causes and consequences to consider. For reasons of my own, I have not divided the book by considering separately each discipline, if such an exercise were at all possible. In 2008, there is much interdisciplinarity that attends the practice of any of these disciplines and a discipline-wise parcellization See Pratap, 2004 for a review. This information is provided on the basis of a personal visit to this village that I made in 1991, in the course of reviewing Elwin’s book Leaves of the Jungle. The visit was made at the request of The Illustrated Weekly of India Magazine that wanted to run a review article rather on an original note.

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

(Agarwal 1982) and the like were written. It may be left to yet a future generation of Indian archaeologists to grapple more adequately with this problem. Our purpose in this chapter is to simply point to the diversity of India’s cultural traditions and the varying representations and interpretations that needs rather than encyclopaedic accounts that explain without explaining and unifying without unifying. In this chapter we also consider the issue of archaeology and education, folk museums and the issue of agency in archaeology. We are concerned to see how the tribal past is perceived generally we are concerned to see how much research attention has been accorded to tribal systems. In this chapter, we return, again, to a bird’s eyeview of the archaeological establishment in the country. From college syllabi (which, to say the very least) are very minimalist where archaeology is concerned, to high-profile seminars, where the urban bias of ancient Indian history is decried, the system for archaeological pedagogy in India, needs to be overhauled. How much of the tribal past is disseminated through courses and curricula of school and colleges in India. This chapter derives from much writing now existing on the likely place of archaeology in our school and college curricula. Indeed, in this case, I cite the case of my participation in a seminar to promote the study of archaeology at the primary school level as well. With primary education outreach programs now existing in most rural areas (including tribal) this provides us, in 2008, a most powerful resource for building up a sense of the past even among the tribes and castes to which we have so far denied a rightful place in our overall discourses of history and archaeology. The further point connected with the issue of archaeology and education that we discuss in this chapter is of dissemination of tribal heritage. In such a discussion we are concerned to evaluate just how much of tribal pasts, through the medium of its material correlates, are disseminated to the public through museums. To argue that the rural and tribal pasts in the country are as important as that of the dominant or great tradition (in a Redfieldian sense) would mean nothing, if we were not to, side by side, advocate the curating of that past. If we look at the run of the museums in the country, since Markham and Hargreaves carried out their survey in the colonial era and the great if interesting debates contained in the early postindependence volumes of the Museums Journal of India, it would be evident that they mainly emphasise the past of the larger cultural tradition in the country. The problem gets more complicated when the public seeing these museums is led to believe that there may be no past at all ascribable to the rural and tribal folks of the country. In the colonial period, the largest of our museums, were content with setting up of a few dioramas as to how tribal folks, round the subcontinent, lived. These were in the manner of the day, and still continuing today, are usually juxtaposed with dioramas on birds, the bees, monkeys and apes. This chapter, therefore, lays the foundation for a debate on the pressing need for folk museums and the need for more space for folk culture displays in the big museums of the country, looking at the immense relevance to Indian society of folk culture. Also in this chapter we discuss the issue of

the issue of the subjectively meaningful actions of actors in postprocessual archaeology or agency in archaeology. Here we are concerned with certain flaws that we perceive as existing, at this juncture, in the theoretical apparatus of postprocessual archaeology, and for that particular reason our previous position that these developments in western archaeology need to be re-interpreted for our use. As most of the book bases its efforts on finding Indigenous pasts in India, we have, in this chapter, thought it fit, to examine, some of the central notions attending postprocessual archaeology (such as agency) on which the theory of postprocessualism rests. In this chapter we argue, that while it may be relevant to argue for the place of the individual or the subjectively meaningful actors in certain western contexts, the application of the theories of individuation or individually meaningful actions of actors in the South Asian context is fraught with difficulty (see also Paddayya, 1990). This chapter offers that the South Asian society is better seen as structured in terms of groups or communities that may equally well be considered agency. While this does not rule out the scope for individually meaningful actions, neither do the latter explain fully the relation between the individual and society in the South Asian context, historically speaking. Of course the South Asian context is used here to speak broadly about several other similar societies and the role of individuals in them. Part II: History and theory In the third chapter ‘History and Postmodernist Thought in India’ we undertake a discussion of the impact of postmodernism on Indian history. It is not the characteristic of academic traditions in every country to showcase every change of research strategies and alert the whole world, as it were, instantaneously. In India, wheels of all sorts move rather slowly. This is, in our view, an important point. So often have I met western researchers who are blissfully unaware of the theoretical currents sweeping Indian social sciences that I am often aghast that anyone reads anything at all? The last word has not been said on this issue as yet (Pratap, 2008, 13) but suffice it here to say that Indian social science is and has been coming of-age for a long time now, reflected on the one hand by the redoubtable organizations for scholarly research 13

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See Pratap, A. (2008a). I was recently invited to write an article on the use of the term non-Anglo-archaeologists to denote the nonwhite, non-western archaeologists, of the world and whether such traditions of archaeology infact do exist., by Nick Shepherd, Editor, Archaeologies, Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, of which I am a member. The issue at hand, at least to me has been a matter of great amusement, was set-off by a very interesting process. In response to two of our colleagues wishing to write a volume on notable non-Anglo archaeologists of the world who solicited responses from the WAC community by e-mail, a perfectly, in my view, legitimate, and timely exercise, given the dominance of western presses and western archaeologies the world over, the initial response of various members has verged from surreal to bizarre. There is not the space here to elaborate upon of the very interesting if culturally biased or short-sighted comments. Suffice it to say that it was evident from slurry of negative e-mails that a lot of people thought it would be a complete waste of time, that it would, to be noted, politicise archaeology unnecessarily and some even claimed such a domain of archaeology as chimerical.

Introduction: Archaeology in India

such as the Indian Council for Social Science Research, The University Grants Commission, Indian Council of Historical Research, The Anthropological Survey of India and the Archaeological Survey of India. Last but not least it is our universities and Institutes such as Deccan College that are at the cutting-edge; howsoever we may define that boundary. Further, in my view, we may well continue the way we are going whether anyone else, as well as we for that matter, knows or knows not where we are headed. That is postmodernism too, and the present chapter takes a peek into the impact of such thought on Indian history within the parameters of this book. In the second part of this chapter our attempt is more practical to demonstrate just how much extraneous influence has been active on the tribal realm and particularly on its economic aspects. This chapter, is an over-view, and seeks to redeem the place of tribal agricultural systems within the country. While it is today usual that slash and burn or Jhum systems are decried popularly in lay and scholarly opinion, I suggest that this distorted perception is based on the outcome of the historical process acting upon Jhum systems of the country at least since the colonial period. As things stand, much research within and outside the country has shown that native farming systems are more ecologically stable systems, and thus the blame for ecological disasters should rather be laid with the colonial impact on these systems, as with the neglect they face from post-independence governments. In the third part of this chapter we return to seeing the important relationship between history and archaeology. This chapter is an exercise in methodology. At the very least it argues and reiterates the arguments made in a later chapter that it is not the case that tribal systems lack a history. It is more the case that archaeologists and historians have not thus far worked sufficiently to provide such histories. This chapter then concerns the methods in such a regard.

present in the historiography of ancient India vis-à-vis the tribal formations in the country. This chapter, previously published but here modified, takes issue with the deep biases such as the notions of Aryanism or Aryanhood that have informed colonial and modern historiography alike despite arguments to the contrary. Thus this chapter tries to isolate the conditions that led to the positing of the idea of the Aryan (as an elevated class) and the Dravidian (as somewhat lower) and the case of its academic applications. We argue here for the permanent banishing of these antiquated notions, as they have come to occupy almost a folk status in lay perception in India and damage the perceptions of the tribal condition. Part III: Ethnoarchaeology In the sixth chapter, Ethnography of Indian Archaeology: A view from the Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand we examine the microprocesses of Indian archaeology itself. Several studies are now available outside India (Chaddha 2002 and Edgeworth 2006) that take to task the usual and the ordinary practice of archaeology. This genre of research has grown only in the past few years. The aims of this approach are to study the micro-processes of archaeology and the means employed by archaeologists in their daily practice. Evidently this leads us to a better understanding of the biases present in the archaeological method. This chapter, tests this method, for the first time in India, in the ethnographic setting of the rural Santhal Parganas, which has been the scene of archaeological research since the early Colonial period. As this area has also been the site for this author’s fieldstudy, since the early nineties, it makes for a useful survey of the biases that may be located in the archaeology of the Santhal Parganas, from early colonial period to the present. In chapter seven, Tribal heritage of Jharkhand: The Prospect for its Preservation, we outline the importance of tribal landscapes. This chapter takes its cue from the newly emerging field of landscape archaeology. As world bodies like The UNESCO set their sites on preserving and conserving unique and heritage landscapes together, with monuments, is the time not ripe to offer some of the vast and most beautiful culturally and ecologically exotic tribal areas (the north-east, Jharkhand, Chattishgarh, Kerala) and countless other zones all the way south to the Andamans as areas worthy of preservation?

Chapter four is entitled Ethnoarchaeology as History: A must for India? This chapter concerns approaches to tribal archaeology. It is not sufficient to critique ahistorical approaches to tribal studies. Alternatives must be found. In this chapter, we demonstrate, with recourse to our own past fieldwork and study in the Rajmahal Hills, how ethnohistory of a tribal group, in this case the Paharias of Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand, may serve as a model for ethnoarchaeological studies. we also discuss here, the most important transformation now affecting Indian archaeology, in the transition from processualism to postprocessualism. As with other theories, as yet, the impact of postprocessualism on Indian archaeology is more of a silent current (Paddayya, 1990), and even without a hullabaloo, we may still address this issue as one occupying a central place in considerations of the locus of Indian archaeology in 2008. Therefore in this chapter, we undertake, in the light of some already published literature, the impact of postprocessualist thinking in Indian archaeology today.

In chapter eight, The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach, we are concerned with examining the relevance of surface survey based archaeologies to tribal archaeology. Many of the parts of India where tribal peoples have been residing since many centuries past the geological structure of the terrain is such that no excavation as classically understood is possible. This situation prevails from the regions of Himalayan terai (the sub-Himalayan region) to areas in the northeast mostly mountainous to the central Indian highlands and the plateau regions of the southern Indian peninsula. What is the archaeologist to do in such areas if tribal pasts are to be unearthed? In such circumstances, as this

In chapter five, Ethnocentrism and Tribal Ethnohistory, India, we are concerned with examining the biases already 5

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

chapter argues, the adoption of surface-survey based archaeology may be the only recourse. Thus this method has great significance, for Indian archaeology and for the archaeology of tribal areas in particular. The second part of this chapter attempts to bring up to date the work on the archaeology of shifting cultivation. There are many here still who hold on fast to Childe’s notion of the Neolithic Revolution in Food Production. Without wishing to take away from Marxist thinkers their breakthroughs in this direction, as they say in India, let us agree to disagree. In my view, after over twenty or so years of fieldwork in a shifting cultivating area and its archaeology, I strongly feel that our theoretical apparatus to interpret things should be clearly demarcated from what we study. Let’s not lose the woods for the trees. I am totally at home with Marxist theorists for later historical periods, as with post-Marxian thought, when quite noticeably Capital accumulates, and we see clear demarcation in terms of caste or class. However, Prehistory? No, I think that is a bit too early to start speculating in this direction. As a compromise, I would settle for inducting prehistory into pre-capitalist social formations a buzz-phrase that seems equally acceptable to thinkers left and right. Therefore our aim in this chapter is to give a simple account of how far research has been done on this subject. The sparseness, if any, itself, speaks for what regard, thinkers left and right of centre, (non-indigenous as well) anthropologists and archaeologists, have held the discussion of primitive agriculture in. In the third and final part of this chapter we enumerate the results of our survey in the Rajmahal Hills, where shifting cultivation is practiced even today, and which was the place that was the site of our field surveys, continuously from 1981-2008. As our preferred field area for intensive surveys, it is but natural for us to consider the archaeology of the Rajmahal Hills, rather more intensively. Thankfully, such a tradition of intensive field surveys already exists in Indian Archaeology (the work of K. Paddayya at the Acheulian sites of Isampur, Karnataka, and Shanti Pappu et al at Attirampakkam, Tamil Nadu and that of MLK Murty at the Mesolithic sites of Kurnool

caves, Andhra). It is to the credit of Indian archaeology that many fieldworkers have already chosen to study the archaeological processes operating in one specific location over a long-term. I add this chapter as a contribution to that particular tradition. Part IV: Cultural contexts of Indigenous archaeology In chapter nine Cultural Contexts of Indian Rock-Art: An Interpretative Approach we are concerned with connecting the finds of prehistoric rock-art with the heritage of tribal peoples of the country. For long, the prehistoric art of India has been surveyed, located and studied in a cultural vacuum for clues to understand social life in the prehistoric periods. Only some of the archaeologists concerned with this type of study have enunciated that rock art may more readily be seen as clues to a tribal heritage. This chapter, based on this author’s studies on central Indian rock-art sites of Chambal Valley and Bhimbetka, in Madhya Pradesh and lately Uttar Pradesh, tries to give a case-study approach to the interpretation of Indian rock art. In this chapter we also consider one single issue of Indian rock-art studies: the issue of gender depictions. Based on actual fieldwork and hands-on curatorial work involving Indian rock-art we forward the hypothesis that central Indian rock-art is greatly lacking in female figure depictions. Part V: Tribes and indigenous peoples This final, chapter ten The Tribal Indigenous Condition in Modern India: a perspective like a few others before, takes on more than one issues connected with tribal archaeology. It does not needs any polemics to carve a separate domain for ethnography in anthropology so why should that situation arise in archaeology wherein polemics have to be offered to carve a separate domain for tribal or as we call it here subaltern archaeology. In such a direction we discuss the issue of the indegeniety of Indian tribes, the issue of their developmental status, the issues of tribal heritage and publishing connected with indigenous archaeology in India. In chapter eleven we offer some general conclusions to this work.

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PART I: Archaeology in India

and conducted exploration and ethnographic work in the Rajmahal hills. Prof. M.L.K. Murty, my Ph.D. supervisor, was an accomplished ethnoarchaeologist, having worked with the Irulas, Chenchus and Boyas of Andhra Pradesh and through several interactions with him, I was able to learn much about field methods in ethnoarchaeology and ethnoarchaeological interpretation that proved useful in fieldwork. But the greatest day of them all was when I made my first artefact find in the Rajmahal hills, a fluted core, at the base of a hill on which shifting cultivation was practiced. That core revealed that I was standing on a large (by Rajmahal standards) site and that was the start for the further find of two other similar sites bearing a rich microlithic assemblage. With these finds I was quite inducted into archaeology or ethnoarchaeology. Lady luck smiled after that year of fieldwork (in 1981) and I was awarded a scholarship for further studies at Cambridge University (in 1982) and Prof. M.L.K. Murty proved a very nice man when he let me go. However, even after registering for an M.Phil at Cambridge I was still fired by the idea of continuing work in the Rajmahal hills. However, the M. Phil. Course here involved a great deal of course work and it was a great opportunity to interact with some of the greatest archaeologists I had heard about such as: F.R. Allchin and Bridget Allchin, Colin Renfrew, John Alexander, John Coles, Paul Mellars, G.N. Bailey, Gina Barnes, Catherine Hills and Ian Hodder. Given my own predilections, I was greatly devoted to Ian Hodder whose book the Present Past: An Introduction to Anthropology for Archaeologists was just published in 1982. He had worked in Baringo District, Kenya, East Africa and somehow I felt my interests in Rajmahal hills would benefit from this sort of work. Officially I was under the charge of Prof. F.R. Allchin, who was at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, of the same university. He is an established scholar and certainly an old India hand. His tutelage was very important as he always encouraged me to follow my interests, only correcting me here and there, such that there would be no errors in my thesis. Life at the Department of Archaeology, Cambridge, was simply too good. The tutorial system meant that there was an opportunity to interact closely with these greatest of archaeologists. This is of course is the story of any Ph.D., and with the departments help I was able to register in 1983 and finish in 1987.

Chapter 2 Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View and Survey 2.1. Introduction This chapter examines the theoretical turn at which Indian archaeology is poised in 2008. For this purpose it tries to configure the discourse of Indian archaeology within the multiple contexts of postmodernism, postcoloniality and postprocessualism. 2.2 Theoretical archaeology in India: A personal view I started my career as an archaeologist when one of our favourite history teachers, in the undergraduate class at Delhi, encouraged me to look into archaeology. At that time my imagination was fired by the idea of deciphering the Indus script and that idea alone (not to mention my dislike for the civil services examination) guided me to enrol at the Deccan College at Pune, India, for an M.A. course in ancient Indian history, culture and archaeology. However the course with its broad canvas made us grapple with more realistic and genuine problems in ancient Indian History, and archaeology. We were also very fortunate to have several teachers who took archaeological theory very seriously. Among these were Professors M.L.K. Murty, M.K. Dhavalikar, K. Paddayya, and V. N. Misra all of whom espoused the new archaeology whole heartedly. Lewis Binford himself was to conduct a summer school at the Deccan College in 1983 under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. I found myself getting interested in prehistory, ethnoarchaeology and a paper called races and cultures of India. The latter paper was taught mostly from very old books and bored with this I planned to see a tribe for myself. Through consultations with friends I planned a small fieldwork of my own. Not far from Bhagalpur, in Bihar, where I lived with my family were the Rajmahal hills inhabited by an ancient people called the Paharias. I spoke to many people about them to understand that their notions about the Paharias were not very good. The more enlightened ones knew that they, the Paharias, practiced a form of agriculture unlike that of the plains. But not much was published by way of modern ethnographic studies about their agriculture. Even as an M.A. student I made my way to the hills with a friend and spent a good day in one Paharia village. I was surprised because they had an excellent material culture, and save a few people the rest looked healthy and even though we were complete strangers some Paharia sat and talked with us. I returned home with some satisfaction that I had at last seen a tribe.

I finished my thesis fast enough and decided to return to India and engage in archaeological activities here. My Cambridge markings helped enormously and within a few months I was hired by a leading Arts Centre in the national capital, Delhi. Much may be said about my time here as that was really the formative period of working in India. The Director Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan was really a person of many parts. Her command over and interest in Indology was astounding and the project of the Centre was really all encompassing and fascinating. I was handed the charge of the upcoming gallery of prehistoric rock art and I worked for three years to put together a bibliographic and pictographic database on the rock art of India. There was also the opportunity here to interact with a great variety of practitioners of Indology and I also had the opportunity to

Back again in the M.A. class, I paid greater attention to races and cultures of India and when we came up to study ethnoarchaeology I was most interested. Soon the M.A. was over and like many others I registered for a Ph.D and chose ethnoarchaeology as the area of research with a plan to do some exploration in the hills where the Paharia lived. In all I spent one year on this Ph.D. while at Deccan College 7

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

do a field-survey of rock art in Central India and produce a short documentary of the rock-art of central India14. After three years of work there when I found I had not chalked up a single academic publication my thoughts turned to joining a line of work where that would be possible and where I could return to practice ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, at least in some sense, again. Academic posts and positions are not easy to come by in India and I had to see the years 1991-93 doing some basic research on a grant from the Indian Council of Historical Research. This was with the Deccan College at Pune as a base. Some fieldwork and writing did emerge, however15.

attempted a reconstruction of the periods from which the discovered material was known to have come. The great discoveries of Southern India Arikkamedu, Tinnelvelli, Pikhlihal, of Central and Western India (Bhimbetka, Kaothe, Chirki, Nevasa, Malwa, Daimabad, Inamgaon) along with its historical archaeological counterparts like temples and forts; the discoveries in Northern India broadly speaking (in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Assam and other parts of the North-east) like Rajghat, Chirand, Daojalihading and Chandraketugarh all point to the very valuable achievements of early Indian archaeology. Starting largely in the 1980s the interpretative revolution within world archaeology has been very distinct. As discussed before, in India such work started with H.D. Sankalia (his well-noted book The New Archaeology) and continued through the works of his students V.N. Misra and K. Paddayya, M.L.K. Murty, S.N. Rajguru, M.K. Dhavalikar, S.B. Deo, Mukund Kajale, P.K. Thomas, S.B. Deotare, G.L. Badam, S.R. Walimbe16 and their students Pradeep Mohanty, Binda Paranjpe, Vasant Shinde, P.P. Joglekar, Shubha Atre, myself, and later off-shoots of the Deccan College School, like Sheena Panja, Shanti Pappu, Bishnupriya Basak, Kaushik Gangopadhyaya, Jitendra Misra and Anup Misra.

I subsequently returned to Patna, Bihar, and was offered a position in a computer centre that was working on a GIS project, in 1994 a great novelty and an area with some relevance to archaeology. The work at the Scada Computer Centre on a project to bring out an Atlas of the Sites and Monuments of Bihar was a most engaging commitment Bihar (in 1994 before the bifurcation of Jharkhand from it in 2000) was one of the largest states in India and its archaeological heritage starts from the early Palaeolithic and it is very rich in historical period monuments as well. Hence the cartography project here was path-breaking since it has mapped out for the first time the enormous archaeological heritage of the state. The real turn around for the purposes of this book came in 2004, when I joined the Department of History, Banaras Hindu University. This University has provided a very congenial atmosphere for academic work, and this book owes a great deal to that environment.

2.4. Archaeology: processual and postprocessual The rise of the new archaeology in India owes its origin to the west. Western archaeologists such as Lewis Binford, Colin Renfrew and David Clarke, and Graham Clarke, before them, have made an indelible impression upon Indian archaeological community. The pre-1960 work in which period those such as F.R. Allchin and Bridget Allchin, and F.E. Zeuner made their contributions has recently been regarded as the old school although postdating colonial period studies that were less useful in terms of interpretations applied to surveyed or excavated material17. The talk of a design, for research and the hypothetico-deductive method has been given to us by the processual school starting in the 1990s. In his book The New Archaeology and its Aftermath Paddayya (1990) undertakes to estimate the impact of this method, but also that of postprocessualism and its consequences worldwide and in Indian archaeology.

2.3. Background to discussing Indigenous archaeology Having given a brief view of the processes of my induction into archaeology in this chapter, I shall now set the stage for the discussions in this book. In recent years the interpretative techniques deployed in Indian archaeology is increasingly under the scanner (see Paddayya, 1990). I agree that given India’s great landmass the task of survey and excavation, shall continue to dominate the scene for years to come. However, the interpretation of these finds cannot wait for a time when all survey and excavation is over. This idea is chimeric. It is basic that interpretation proceeds simultaneously with survey and excavation, if only, because the research community and the public at large are informed simultaneously about the latest finds and as to its significance.

According to Paddayya, interpretatively, the shift from On the intellectual descent of Indian archaeology there exist many tomes by F.R. Allchin and Dilip Chakrabarti. See also Singh, U. (2004); See Panja S… and for a recent view see Pratap, A. (2006 and 2008a). 17 Here it is apposite to add that I do not at all intend to convey the impression that the work of the Allchins and other Indologists has declined in any significant way under the influence of the new archaeology. This is because theirs and others contributions such as that of the South Asian Archaeologists Group to Indian iconography, epigraphy, numismatics and culture history including interpretations of the Harrapan material as well as the geomorphologic studies carried out by Bridget Allchin have all continued to be of abiding relevance and interest to Indian archaeology. Their book the Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan and others till date are going through one reprint after another and are prescribed reading in syllabi round the country. However, starting the nineties Middle-Range Theory did have an immediate influence upon latter-day students of V.N. Misra, M.K. Dhavalikar, K. Paddayya and MLK Murty. 16

Indian archaeology since its inception in the 19th century has covered a lot of ground by way of survey and the excavation of new sites. Even the early archaeologists The Rock Art of Chambal Valley. 30 min. VHS. IGNCA Visual Archives. New Delhi. 15 See Momin, K.N. and Pratap, A. 1995. Indian Museums and the public. In Molyneux, B. & Stone, P.G. (Eds.). The Presented Past: Heriatge, Museums and Education. Routledge, London. I was also to be able to conduct one field visit to the Rajmahal Hills and one to Lohardagga (both now in Jharkhand) to look at the Birhor Huntergatherer systems in Bihar. I also wrote extensively on cultural issues for national dailies in and around Pune, Mumbai and Patna (see bibliography). 14

8

Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View

processualism is that the postprocessualist does not regard the hypothetico-deductive method as the be-all and the end-all of modern archaeology. Hodder (1982), as MLK Murty in the Indian context18, first of all espoused a revolutionised ethnoarchaeology in which he suggested that all archaeological interpretation, particularly say up to the Neolithic, should be informed by actual fieldwork, among groups practising the economy hypothesised for the Neolithic or any other period under study. His other contribution leading up to postprocessualism has been to regard archaeology as history. In his recent work (Hodder 1987) he has outlined very clearly the many new ways archaeological interpretation may be taken, as opposed to the one point programme of the processualist—the hypothetico-deductive method or middle-range theory.

sorts we suggest, later in this volume (and also Pratap, 2003), that the colonial period historiography of Indian archaeology did possess an Orientalist trope.20 This is easy to understand. Even in our earlier work (Pratap 1987, 2000), we have provided enough examples that during the colonial era an enlightened approach to archaeology was not prevailing as a matter of rule (the views of A. Rea see footnote)21. Lahiri’s work on Sir John Marshall (see Lahiri 1998) is a moving and empathetic account of Sir John’ Marshall’s individual, and at the beginning amateurish efforts, that find effervescence only as Sir John ages a bit. Upinder Singh’s account of the contributions of the early orientalists such as Sir William Jones, James Prinsep, and Charles Wilkins and other Indian antiquarians is equally an empathetic history of the development of the discipline (Singh 2004). Indeed Upinder Singh, for the first time, has allowed us a peek into the contributions of those such as Bhagwanlal Indraji (see also Ray, H.P., and Sinopoli, C. 2004) and others, who worked under Alexander Cunningham, and did most of the foot-and-spade-work connected with the discovery of various monuments and inscriptions round the country. Side by side, Chakrabarti (1988) and Allchin and Chakrabarti (1979, 1993, 2003) have given us an encyclopaedic rendering of the overall development of Indian archaeology that allows us to reflect on the growth of the discipline (also Lahiri 1998 and Singh 2004) as a whole from the 18th century onwards. However, it would be pedestrian to observe that there may be no historiography without some filters and biases and my own exception to these historiographies, rich as their intervention is, is that they are not tethered to the rise of critiques in the light of Orientalism (Said 1978), Postmodernity (Lyotard…, Latour…) and postcolonialism (e.g. Loomba…), that I wish to add to this debate in this book.

The other issue is Indian archaeology as a postcolonial exercise. In 2008, as a practice in postcoloniality, is a simple one. If at par with the domain for postcoloniality most of the world over, the literatures emanating from former colonies, after decolonization, has been termed post-colonial, then why may we to denominate post-1947 archaeological production in India, as also in someway postcolonial, with all the ramifications of the latter term? In this analysis of Indian archaeology and its history, we may not overlook the tremendous scholarship (of recent times) sponsored both officially (by the Archaeological Survey of India) and non-official ones such as those Chakrabarti (1988), Allchin and Chakrabarti (1979, 1993, 2003), Singh, and Lahiri19. These are all of great of significance. The official histories such as those by the Archaeological Survey of India (Roy, 1996) do not usually distinguish the colonial exercises in archaeology as having any more biases than those associated with post-1947 Indian archaeology. In the epochs-making discoveries in Indian archaeology these are the only benchmark for judging archaeological development. In these respects the official histories of Indian archaeology still glorify the colonial-era. This is all very well, but in 2008, the world-over such eulogies to the contributions of the colonial era are coming under the scanner of post-colonial critique (Chaddha 2002). the second type of history of Indian archaeology, are the non-official category of works on Indian archaeology that are of another predisposition. Whether it is Lahiri’s work on Sir John Marshall’s or Upinder Singh’s work The Discovery of Ancient India, regarding the establishment of a paradigm of research on ancient India under the colonial umbrella, or it is Dilip Chakrabarti’s profound and useful forays into the different phases of the development of the discipline in India, these studies find the common bond that it was individuals more and institutions less that led to the gradual development of Indian archaeology even in the colonial period. At a remove from this eulogy of

In our view, the much touted postprocessualism of the 1990s and later, is in a way, also taking us a step back. How is this? In a recent article, and in line with postprocessual critique of Indian archaeology, Chaddha (2002) has argued that there are definite scientific and colonial biases in Indian archaeology, prior to 1947, and to be fair he has in this article successfully located some of these markers in his period of study (see Chaddha 2002)22. However, if one See Pratap, A. 1987. The Savariya Paharia. Shifting Cultivators of the Rajmahal Hills, India. in Hodder, I (Ed). 1987 Archaeology as long-term History. New Directions in Archaeology. Cambridge, University Press. 21 A. Rea of the Madras archaeological Department wrote: “Archaeological research has proceeded far enough to enable us to know what classes of buildings—the work of various religions sects, belonging to a particular date—we may expect to find in certain localities: and this combined with a knowledge of the style of the works these races erected, enables us to carry out the work of excavation in a scientific manner. After one has gained some experience in the work…one can almost instinctively tell what sort or class of building is in a mound…” (1890, 185-6). 22 Chaddha, for instance, has shown that the use of human bodies as scales for measuring the depth of trenches in archaeological excavations, a practice particularly, of the colonial era, are markers, or examples of subduing the colonial subject. See Chaddha, A. 2002. Visions of discipline: Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the archaeological 20

See bibliography for a complete list of Murty’s ethnoarchaeological works. 19 Chakrabarti, D.K. (1988) A History of Indian Archaeology from beginning up to 1947, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi; Archaeology in the Third World; Singh, U. 2004. The Discovery of Ancient India. Permanent Black. Chakrabarti and Allchin; Lahiri on John Marshall. Delhi 18

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

were to extend his argument and find that those markers (let’s call them Chaddhan markers) are still in employ in Indian archaeology, post-1947, then we would be left with no choice, but to call the bulk of Indian archaeology in 2008 as still colonial. This line of analysis is not very helpful and does not give us a fair view of the status of modern archaeological practice in India. There must be another approach. There are some of us, who despite the presence of these markers, would claim, that in 2008, Indian archaeology is anything but colonial. How is this?

The project of The New Archaeology, otherwise also labelled processual archaeology has from its inception been scientific. In such a circumstance, as Chaddha (points out, the use of human bodies as markers has continued as a practice in post-colonial India under the banner of scientific archaeology. However, there is much archaeological practice, mostly non-governmental, where these markers are not to be seen in use, and they are not therefore in this sense colonial. What about the vast domains covered by Ethnoarchaeology, History of Art, Epigraphy, Numismatics and the now emerging fields of Virtual archaeology and anthropology. These are surely (as Chaddha misses) quite devoid of such markers that he posits as colonial. The second reason for our difference of opinion with Chaddha is regarding the rise of postprocessual Archaeology (Hodder 1987)25.

Firstly, for all the persistence of these markers, it is also true that we as Indian archaeologists have given the New Archaeology a truly long rope. Much, of the essential work of surveying, excavation, classification, and interpretation of finds has been done using the standards of the processual school and that is where a bulk of Indian archaeology remains to this day. A good point to strengthen this argument is that the bulk of presentations at a recent conference23 clearly espoused a processual, or new archaeological line of thought: whether pertaining to survey and excavations, or to emphasis on the geomorphology of all things archaeological (as if there is no archaeology beyond geomorphology), or whether the very functionalist and tedious interpretations of the Harappan material were concerned. Some of us in this world are truly tired of hearing and using such approaches as teaching materials for students or for research. As has been stressed by workers such as Chakrabarti, Allchins, Lahiri and Ratnagar, much work still needs to be done to understand and interpret the Harrapan material over and above the hackneyed images that have passed into Indian curricula from immemorial24. What was the symbolic content of the civilization? What did they do beyond craft, trading and agriculture? The issues of its decline need not bother us all that much and certainly not at the expense of understanding how the civilization arose and how it worked? Gregory Possehl (2002) says that the mature Harappans were possessed of a nihilistic philosophy, and that is the reason, and the only one, that may explain the abandonment of full-fledged and fully-functional cities and urban complexes. However, ethnographic evidence from South Asia is replete with examples of site—abandonment for much simpler reasons: either agricultural contingency or diseases. However, at least Possehl, has made an attempt to arrive at the cognitive or philosophical cognates of the Harrapans, but in our view not very successfully (see Pratap 2004). In our view this issue will be hanging fire until we bind the Harrapan civilization into an Indian matrix (Chakrabarti 1996).

There are several voices now rising that indicate that new directions must be charted under the impact of the emergent ways of thinking—postmodernity and its offshoot in archaeology—postprocessualism. In a recent survey to assess the impact of postprocessualism in Indian archaeology, Boivin and Fuller (2002)26 make some important points. On the whole they emphasize, as we have stated above, that much of Indian archaeology remains dominated by processualism even today, as if it were a bad thing. They emphasize further that at this point all efforts in the postprocessual direction in Indian archaeology is less indigenous development and more a western import. However, at a remove from Boivin and Fuller we feel that often the nature of ethnoarchaeological field-data: the presence of tribes, folklore, epics, myths, tribal landscapes, and a more than rich tradition of traditional arts and crafts, existing today allow Indian archaeologists the base from which to at least try to post-processualize Indian archaeology to some extent. In our own view, the very fact that Indian archaeologists have always been happy enough with the marriage of history with archaeology27, did not need a postprocessual turn of events elsewhere for us to be doing this type of work. If this is not postcoloniality, hybridity, and an independent genesis of a postprocessual Ian Hodder (1987) has amplified his earlier postprocessual views (1987a and 1987b) rather more clearly. For Hodder, context is all. There can be no history without context. There can be no archaeology without context. The term postprocessual is meant only to distinguish his rather different goals for legitimate and socially sensitive archaeology. In an interesting article Vanpool, T.L and Vanpool, C (2001) have argued that postprocessual applications still form a part of a scientific enquiry and are therefore not that distanced from processual approaches. 26 In this article the authors do not seem to have given us much clarity on this subject. Modern academia constitutes an open, world-wide, unified field. It is therefore not, as in Boivin and Fuller (2002), find legitimate to see the `west’ or the `east’ as the source of any one idea. 27 Cf. Hodder, Ibid. See also the work of R.S. Sharma (2001), State and Varna Formation in the mid Ganga Plains: An ethnoarchaeological approach. Manohar, Delhi, Romilla Thapar, K.M. Shrimali and Anila Verghese, also Pratap, A. 1987. The Savariya Paharia: Shifting cultivators of the Rajmahal Hills, India, In Hodder, I. (Ed.) Archaeology as long-term history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; and Pratap, A. 2000. The Hoe and The Axe: Ethnohistory of shifting cultivation in eastern India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. 25

method in India (1944-1948). Journal of Social Archaeology 2(3): 378-400. Oxford. 23 My reference here is to the First International Conference of South Asian Archaeologists held at the University of Mumbai, Dec, 2006. 24 At one level the myth of standardization of this civilization over an area of 1.5 million sq. miles cannot any longer be sustained. Even more surprising is that those working with the decipherment of the harappan script also claim that this is standardized! Those familiar with the South Asian rubric would know that the area over which the harappan civilization is spread can only make for regional diversity of culture and languages rather than standardization of any sort.

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Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View

type then what is it? Boivin and Fuller completely fail to identify this tradition to its full extent.

Ian Hodder’s approach to archaeology (as text) has come under favourable review. But at least the latter authors fail to find any significant strains of post-processualism within Indian archaeology thus far. The reasons for this could be interesting as the authors may well be applying a western filter in their assessment of the theoretical status of Indian Archaeology. Fortunately, archaeological-theory is not as implosive that checks and balances need to be maintained as some authors of younger calling like to perform from time-to-time. Contrarily, however, Paddayya speaking here for a majority of Indian archaeologists (as processualism and postprocessualism both are equally popular here.) finds that Indian archaeology as it stands really in need of the two approaches since our discipline, as it stands, might only benefit from systematic and coherent fieldstrategies and middle range theories (processualism) as well as sophisticated interpretative techniques (postprocessualism). I agree with such an approach fully.

Where is Indian archaeology then theoretically located in 2008 is a salient question? Nobody would disagree that the domain of archaeological data, and therefore theory and practice, in the subcontinent is mind-bogglingly vast. The spectre of a simultaneous practice of archaeology by government institutions, private individuals and organizations, universities, research institutes; conjures an overall picture that is, practically speaking, as vast and diverse as post-colonial hybridity in any context could possibly be. As this scenario is ongoing in 2008, this is another yardstick with which we may say that Indian archaeology, as it stands, is and seemingly will continue to be postcolonial. 2.5. Agency in archaeology It should be pretty clear by now that we broadly support the parameters within which postprocessual archaeology is being carried-out. However, it must be pointed out that the canonization of this genre, within the AngloSaxon archaeological tradition thus far may not be an entirely healthy precedent. If proof be needed that some of the precepts of postprocessual archaeology are not all that original then we have clearly stated that history and archaeology have always enjoyed a blissfully wedded life in India, and this marriage by far precedes the rise of postprocessual archaeology. This is one of the points this chapter elaborates upon. The other aspect, we take issue with in postprocessualism, is that the broad canonisation of postprocessual archaeology within the Judeo-Christian tradition confines28. Its main proponents (Hodder 1987, Miller 1985, Shanks, Tilley 1990, 1994, Miller and Tilley 1984) consider the human past in terms of what it means to be human within the Judeo-Christian terms of reference. The example of insistence on finding the individual actor or agency in prehistory is a case in point.

In our view postprocessualism is found charming by both these authors as well as the younger lot of Indian workers because we get to do the types of analyses that a proper archaeology should take into account meanings of actors be they small scale societies such as subsistence farmers, pastoral-nomads, hunter-gatherers, be they ethnic minorities, feminist groups, post-colonial nations all get to be included in this. For the South Asian mind, generally speaking however the issue of individual or agency as conceived in postprocessual archaeology is a bit puzzling. We did not and to some degree still do not regard the individual as amounting to much in any circumstance. For fear of being taken transcendentally, I would put it another way as well. In rural South Asia it is the collective that has really mattered in the evolution of simple and complex society, at least since the beginning of the historical period. At least that is what we say and this may, it seems, largely be practically true when over 80% of our population is still land (that is agriculture) -based. I do not here wish to venture into the diacritics of early Indian society and polity where organisations such as the Vidatha existed (which were really a Council of village or Clan elders) whose collective decisions could overrule the diktat of Kings of the pre-Christian era city-states. And then again with the evolution of Indian polity from about 4th century B.C. till the rise of the Empires such as the Mauryan and Gupta we still find that alongside the growth of sorts of central control there still are collectives that safe-guarded the individual by clan or council29.

The birth of Ian Hodder, in a manner of speaking, in India is datable to around 1986-7 with the publication of Archaeology as long-term history. Seeking long to upset the applecart of processual archaeology, Ian Hodder hit pay-dirt when he stated in this volume that archaeology should be regarded as a sub-discipline of history. In the Indian sub-continent, history has long held a sway over archaeology. The Hodder combination of archaeology as history was therefore timely, and also fortuitous, since in the late nineties, post-modernism, within archaeology, was already advocating, among other things the correspondence between these two disciplines (Pratap, 1987 in the same volume and Allchin 1997). In recent articles in India (Paddayya, 2003, as well as Fuller and Boivin, 2002) the

2.6. Agency reconsidered From such a viewpoint, without denouncing the merits of archaeology as long-term history and the role of agency within it, I would like to say that the over emphasis on the individual (lately emerging) smacks of a sort of globalisation or globalizing the Judaeo-Christian individual as previously described to non-western locals. If Hodder initially objected to cross-cultural laws in processualism then how might he advance a cross-cultural being such as

Marshall Sahlins’ essay The Sweetness of Sadness is a brilliant exposition of the archetypes of western ethnography being carried out within the perceptual categories of the judaeo-christian tradition. In this essay he tries to communicate how the archetypes of emic perception stand to change etic categories of thought (see also Johnson, M. Archaeological Theory Today. Bibliography).

28

29

11

See Jha, D.N. and Shrimali, K.M. (2006) and Habib (2001).

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

the individual? If he still seeks to defend this individual as context-related or culture-specific then how would this be commensurate with the view of South Asian society as we have given? For the purposes of making post processualism relevant to non-European contexts, let us bring back the Danny Millers from their shopping malls and Christopher Tilleys from their discourses bazaar and the Structuralists, the Marxists and other Western Style transcendentalists of the semioticist kind. Friends, individuals matter, but are they as free? And if ultimate freedom were obtained would we not promptly be a part of yet another ‘(free)’ society—a collective? So we would argue let us not over-look the circularity even in the discourses we favour, as we set the agenda for archaeology in the new millennium. What is this global individual? There are significant ethnic minorities in the Western World too. Yet how many ethnoarchaeologies of these ethnic minorities have emerged (with apologies to Lewis and Sally Binford, Carol Kramer, Nicholas David, William Longacre) in the period that processualism and post-processualism have existed? In the ethnoarchaeologies of those such as Henrietta Moore, Keith Ray, and Mike Parker-Pearson have we demonstrated individuals in non-western societies as quite other things? Is this not therefore a sort of lip service to individuals of marginalized societies? How many ethnoarchaeologies of the Europe’s underprivileged or folk society, the Greek pastoralists, the near tribal Saamis and Lapps and yes even in the American context how much history that purports to elevate the lot or does elevate the lot of the rural poor? in my humble opinion this comment sort of chapter is merely to point out that in an era of ascendance of minorities, western archaeology stands isolated in its performance of academic lip service to the rural poor by simply suggesting that their actions are also meaningful at an individual level?

a student of Indian history and archaeology, particularly that of the tribal areas, for the past 20 or so years, I have found this comment of abiding interest. It is also accurate because indeed our undergraduate syllabi, even in the premier universities, include but one paper in Ancient Indian History or Archaeology. Such a course summarises developments in the subcontinent from the earliest times up to 600 A.D or the Gupta Period. There may be an additional course that takes the curriculum from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1200.The remaining part of say a three-year course in history (for gaining Honours) consists of courses such as medieval and modern Indian History as indeed the study of European, West Asian, The Far East and other histories and historiography. Thus a sequence of some ten lakh (1.5 MYA) years of human development on the Indian subcontinent (formally called Prehistory) up to the Indus civilisation and three thousand odd years of Civilisation after that, including the discovery of writing, founding of cities, and other diacritics are the subject of study in that one paper. At a time when the Ayodhya dispute has woken up the nation to the fact that the history of our civilisation is not anything to ignore or treat lightly, ought we not to be paying greater attention to how much more we, but most importantly the young, should be learning about Indian history. This is the puzzling part. Yet, and thankfully, it has become tradition that the study of History in schools in India has come to be very closely monitored in the past decade or so. The government is investing rather a lot of effort through institutions such as the National Council for Educational Training and Research (The NCERT) to bring out a multitude of school text books whose writing, editing and production is overseen by a multitude of scholars of national repute. In the past there has been a tendency that the content of these books may shift according to the likes and dislikes of the government of the day increasing the burden of both teachers and students. This is to say that the input of Archaeology into Ancient Indian history should be standardised and increased in school curricula as well as that at college-level. Yet, it is the case, very obviously, that our historians, of whichever hue, are quite conditioned to see Indian History as something quite different from its archaeology. Archaeology is neither all that highbrow nor, in their view, at once all that important that the young should be learning about it in as much detail as history. Equally we are actually saddled with very nondynamic and hackneyed syllabi where college curriculum in archaeology is concerned. This is also a time when research programmes in the west, as certainly here too, are gradually shifting emphasis from theory and methods of archaeology to training students in heritage conservation and such more worthwhile subjects.

We broadly support the growth of postprocessualism as an alternative or as an adjunct to processualism that (in the latter day) sought to set world-level standards of meaningful archaeology. This it failed in doing. Postprocessualism, however, came into being with the explicit recognition of the differing ways and means of culture and its contextspecificity. Yet the canonization of its central concepts reveals its rootedness within the western Anglo-Saxon tradition. While espousing the general precepts within which postprocessual archaeology is being carried out we have in this chapter only sounded a note of caution that, as things stand, the meek shall still inherit the earth! 2.7. Archaeology and education in India: curriculums and folk heritage In this part of the chapter, we consider the issue of the proper dissemination of archaeological knowledge in Indian society through curriculums and through other means such as folk museums as an indispensable part of archaeological practice.

Returning, however, to the comment of the noted scholar cited above, which forms the entry point for this part of the chapter, presumably the scholar, in speaking of the bias, had the period from Indus Civilisation onwards to the historical period in mind. What have we taught, or researched most in the period after independence? Have we directed our energies solely towards urbanization: the rise of cities (ancient, medieval, modern), kingdoms and

At a much publicised conference of historians and archaeologists in Delhi, some time in 2002, the following observation was made by a very notable historian “…the study of Indian history suffers from an urban bias…” As 12

Indian Archaeology in 2008: A Personal View

a hagiography mainly? I cannot here speak much for the medieval or later periods, but certainly the period from prehistory to early centuries B.C. is greatly lacking in the past of our rural base which continues to predominate our Civilization. It was therefore not a bad idea when a minister of the previous government mooted the idea of an Indian Archaeological Service the recruitment to which would be through a national exam. That, at the very least, would have given us many more properly empowered young archaeologists to conserve and preserve better the heritage. Returning to the well thought comment of the noted scholar cited above it seems the urban bias in Indian History arises from the limited nature of our current archaeological workforce, but also in the way we would like to imagine our past as a country.

usually a record of empires and kings in which students evince little interest. These theses about archaeology in college and high school education could be debated better with recourse to specific textbooks; however any one who has been studying ancient history/archaeology in India for some time is aware of these pan-Indian frameworks in which Indian archaeology is usually taught. As such there appears no problem with this set-up although Chakrabarti (1997) has advocated strongly that the premises on which archaeology is taught in colleges and high schools need to be examined thoroughly. His book Colonial Indology is replete with examples of archaeological frameworks it dubs plainly colonial. Here he means that there are some core areas of archaeological thinking in India, which have to be revamped. These include issues ranging from the racial theory as taught in India (including the still current Risleyan racial classificatory system) to a critique of regarding ancient Indian texts as relevant bases for building chronologies of ancient India (see also our own comments in this regard in Chapter Five). His most studied attack is in the way the Indus Civilization (taught popularly in Indian colleges and schools) has been usurped by western academia as a near-eastern phenomenon. Many would argue that at these levels (colleges and schools) the vast data and debates of Indian archaeology need necessarily to be whittled down to some basics that the student may imbibe and that should not confuse them. Whether these are colonial or not is another issue.

In the previous paragraphs, we argued that the writing of ancient Indian history suffers from an urban bias. Whether this is because under colonialism historians and archaeologists alike were concerned with depicting India’s past as one of (urban) achievements and not stagnation and savagery, therefore the concern the histories of rural and tribal areas seems to have been minimal. In a properly academic context some studies exist to point to the rather feeble emphasis placed on tribal history or archaeology in school and college curricula; however overwhelming evidence exists that the past of tribal minorities is almost never disseminated in any form at all in school and college curricula, except perhaps as anthropology at the college level. How can this be justified? An inescapable conclusion is that the national past, such as we understand, is although poorly disseminate is still biased in favour of the dominant castes and classes in India. Reviews from a national perspective elucidating the relationship between archaeology and education are already available (for example Dahiya 1995 and Chakrabarti 1997). Separately these authors have examined, to some extent, the issue of teaching of archaeology in universities as well as schools. These may not be considered the final or absolutely conclusive reviews of the situation prevailing however these are there and there may be several other writings not immediately available. The long gap between Sankalia’s (1974) Pre and Proto-history of India and Pakistan to Agrawal (1982) has not diminished in the least the panIndian coverage of archaeological textbooks in India. For pedagogic purposes, it may be concluded that we may study the archaeology of India as a series of mostly uniform (period-wise) typo-technological developments, the country over. Both these books, alongwith several others, adopt such an approach and are recommended in undergraduate and postgraduate curricula.

Those such as Chakrabarti (1999) would argue that it is in these whittled down basics that we pass on codes and formulas already existing since the colonial period. Chakrabarti has already argued against the Aryan invasion of Indus valley and their subsequent spread in the Ganga valley, but it is with ease that we may locate the textbooks at school level even today that reiterate that the Aryans came in about 1500 B.C. demolishing all prior civilized formations in front of them, cleared and settled the Ganga valley since the first millennium B.C at least. The population they displaced fled southwards in India and could be labelled Dravidian the precursors of present day tribes). This is only a small example of myths existing in the teaching of Indian archaeology till date. Chakrabarti has already also commented on the curricula and the need to change them. It is well known that with the exception of a few universities like Baroda University, Calcutta University, Madras University, the Deccan College, and the Banaras Hindu University, archaeology is not taught at the undergraduate level at all. B.A. Honours courses in history have but one paper entitled Ancient India in which the topical coverage is from prehistory to the late historic period (650 A.D.). This offers the undergraduate but a glimpse of this vast historical period and they have to take in everything from chopper-chopping tools to early urbanization; the rise of heterodox sects and early kingdoms, Buddhism, architecture, coins, inscriptions and sculpture of the late historic period, up to the Guptas. Something therefore has clearly to be done about increasing archaeological inputs at school and college levels and improving their quality,

Dahiya (1995) in contrast with Chakrabarti makes some very important micro (classroom level) observations. Even at the school-level, today, archaeology, taught as history, is disseminated as a series of pan-Indian, mostly uniform typo-technological developments from the stone age up to Neolithic and then Chalcolithic onwards to bronze and iron-ages leading to the origins of urbanization. She comments further that this (hagiography) archaeology is 13

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

even as we debate the new frameworks advocated so well by Chakrabarti and Dahiya.

sites like Sanchi, Sarnath, and Bodh Gaya, that may take a few hours to go through, as well as, larger ones like the National Museum (at Delhi) and the Indian Museum (at Kolkata) that may take a few days to see completely. These museums particularly the bigger ones have also become repositories of objects whose price may be valued very highly. A display of traditional jewellery of India at the National Museum held a few years ago is a case in the point about the wealth and opulence of Indian museums. This is also to say that in popular opinion objects of the past have high value. Indeed mere Jharokhas (ornately carved windows) of Western India have also a great display value today as seen at an exhibition organized by the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, in 1992. In contrast, in states like Bihar, and Jharkhand, that are the states forming the rural heartland of this country, museums are overburdened with just such valuable items from successive cultural periodsprehistoric, Vedic, Indo-Greek, Mauryan, Kushana, Gupta, Pala and later periods. Jharkhand has a few folk culture Museums. In this sense museums educate the public that the past has value. But what of adequate representation of the very large folk heritage tradition that India, particularly states like Jharkhand have to offer?31

A far greater constituency for the extension of archaeological pedagogy in India lies amongst primary learners. I attended a workshop in 1998 on improving the quality of primary education in government schools hosted by the Government of Uttar Pradesh’s DPEP (The District Primary Education Programme) as a resource person for history. I was amazed to find how little archaeological or historical knowledge is included in curricula up to the third standard and only minimally so from standards three to five. With new experiments being tried out in the field of primary education in India, it is a great challenge, a problem requiring careful analysis, as to how primary learners, of widely varying socio-economic backgrounds, may be made archaeologically aware. India is simply too vast a domain for any one strategy or formula to be uniformly effective. But there is clearly room for devising some strategies that may be tested and modified to suit locales varying widely in terms of culture, language, economy and geography. In the context of the above workshop I suggested that irrespective of the social background of the primary learners, and since under the DPEP Program environmental studies are being made compulsory, that at least buildings and monuments of local archaeological significance must be made to figure in cognitively suitable ways in text books. This could preferably be done in ways that pertains to the primary learner’s local social environment. Innovation by primary teachers would also play a very important role in making young learners better aware about monuments as well as local histories.

Thus the gaps in museum display have a lot to tell us (Stone and Molyneux, 1995). The high sculptural tradition descending to us from the Mauryan period onwards speak of a stratified social system in which the labour of the subordinate classes was probably used to deliver the items most favoured by the elites. This of course is a common pattern all over the country, save perhaps the tribal areas where different types of wood work, arts and crafts obtain32. But where is the evidence for the traditions of the subaltern classes from the Mauryan period onwards? From these same periods, such as Mauryan, we get only bricks representing houses, pottery, stupas and domestic structures. In the Ganga valley most of the excavated sites Chalcolithic onwards have yielded terracotta figurines, Ochre Coloured Pottery and Northern Black Polished Wares but nothing by way of sculptural material relating with the folk populations that may be regarded as high or significant art.33 Thus since our museums are largely devoid of evidence for folk life in successive historical periods, we may deduce the following messages from our current displays A) There is no significant evidence for folk life in early India. B) The folk lifestyles of the Mauryan period onwards to the present day are not worthy of representation, and, C) That we must perforce display

Having discussed syllabus reform in school and colleges we turn next to the issue of folk museums as a means of disseminating folk and tribal history. In 1990, this author was commissioned by a leading geographic magazine of India to do a feature article on the displays relating to tribal people of India as existing on date in Indian museums. In the process of this survey, was shocked to see that leading museums of the country had displayed tribal culture using dioramas that showcased them much like monkeys and baboons. So outrageous and incommunicative were these displays that instead of conveying to the public that tribes are people of this country like any other group, perhaps the viewer (especially in the case of minors) would likely return with the impression that they had just seen ape-man or the yeti. It is no use lambasting the colonial masters and their like for this anomaly in our museums system existing today30 that we have ourselves clearly endorsed.

This discussion is based on the author’s experience of working with Dharohar, a folk heritage museum, of Bihar. 32 Mention may be made of a few galleries like Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, and Museum of Man, Bhopal, both of which showcase tribal culture, art and crafts. 33 Here we must post a caveat that much sculptural material has been and continues to be discovered entirely from rural areas of Bihar, where they are found in clusters in village shrines, and were used for religious purposes. However, none of museum displays are likely to display these as heritage of the rural areas. They are, as it were, usually, mounted and presented as examples of high tradition found in one rural locale or another. Who is to ask the question, why such pieces of high art are being found in utterly rural locales? 31

Museums have come to occupy a very important place in modern times. The Indian public is presented with small museums like site museums at important archaeological I do not here wish to run aground the entire museum movement in India. I have had a chance to see the debates in the 1940s (Chandra 1945, Sarkar, 1979, Verma 1947) connected with the importance of museums in reconstructing Indian national identity. Markham and Hargreaves (1936) redoubtable survey and assessment of Indian Museums is also an important work (Momin, K.N.and Pratap. A. 1995).

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our grand traditions most of the time since folk life for the periods in question might not be recoverable.

In this chapter we considered briefly the national scenario vis-à-vis the dissemination of the past in the Indian context through the medium of our curriculums as well as representations in folk museums and the like. The fact that the past of ethnic minorities, particularly tribes, is usually neglected, even sixty years after independence is not a very pleasing scenario. It is an inescapable conclusion that this culture of silence surrounding the past of ethnic minorities is a serious lacuna in our curriculums that needs to be addressed and rectified. In a context when history writing in India is increasingly being identified as an exercise in postcoloniality, how can we possibly justify the deletion of the pasts of ethnic minorities?

as a whole we should not be looking for conformism to a specific set of standards (to be prescribed by whom?) but be prepared to see the growth of archaeology in just the way local circumstances and peoples have taken it. I could add as an ethnoarchaeologist, that the issues and ambit of archaeology, in tribal and rural Santhal Parganas, or any other tribal domain within the country shall always have notable differences, say, from the archaeological issues arising in urban Delhi or Mumbai. The latter cities stands for grandeur (often colonial) and lately nationalism or nationhood, whereas the villages the ethnoarchaeologist studies stand for the other for rural simplicity and that which very obviously stands for the people that constitute the better part-of the nation36. What is the Indian archaeologist to do in such an enterprise? To valorise the urbane that already outruns rural hinterlands in terms of garnering funding for research or conservation, or to stand squarely for the values of the countryside, and in so doing bringing to the purposes of Indian archaeology a new role of conscientising the country of the human values that are still to be found in simple rural locales? it is in this sense too, as would be obvious, that Indian archaeology is postcolonial. At another level, the many compendia that have summarized Indian archaeology under single cover do us a bit of disservice. This they do by not pointing to the diversity in field methods, excavation techniques, and interpretative techniques being practiced within the vast space described by Indian Archaeology. No doubt these are the modernist archaeological texts, that convey to us that all is organized, systematized and to quote from a colonial sources “it is the same mind that works in all the grooves’’37. That is not the view we can possibly take in 2008. Instead of emphasizing standardization of archaeological theory and practice the country over, we are in this book concerned with displaying, and boldly so, the (ultimately democratic) hybrid nature of Indian archaeology. In this chapter we have taken a quick look at various strands of research that coexist within Indian Archaeology. The next chapter takes a look at the impact of postmodern thought in Indian History.

2.8. Conclusion Thus the issue of where is Indian archaeology at in 2008, in terms of the gamut of approaches: field methods, methods of specialized analyses, excavations techniques and interpretative methods, can only begin to be comprehensible if we may be allowed to develop adjectives like postcolonial, under which rubric the many subcultures into which India falls, is allowed, to do its own kind of archaeology. Here my clear reference is to those of our colleagues who have been working in the areas of heritage conservation, a field that is only just beginning to open up outside of government sponsored archaeology in India35. This is to say that when we consider Indian archaeology

36

Within the context of the orientation of essays in this book, I would like to pose a contrary view that it is our urban bias (Momin and Pratap, 1995) that needs to be cast aside for us to be able to understand why high art associated with Kings and Empires is recurrently to be found in rural locales. The fact that these are found in rural locales, not just in Jharkhand, but from personal observation, in Andhra Pradesh in Southern India as well, leads to the conclusion that consumption of high art was a common feature through rural areas as well34. After all the most famous sculpture of the Mauryan period, the Didarganj Yakshi was retrieved from Didarganj on the outskirts of Patna where it had been found being used by the local washerman to wash their clothes on! This point alone should allow us to conceive of setting-up displays on rural lifestyles and networks of exchange between rural areas and urban metropolises. In the previous paragraphs, we have but attempted to uncover, so to speak, the mere tip of an iceberg—the under representation of the rural and tribal past and present in our museums. As yet the representation of the dominant ethnicities is considered modern, culturally informative and interesting while that of the rural and tribal areas as anthropological and exotic.

In a recently concluded address, the former Governor of Maharashtra and now the President of India Dr. Pratibha Patil, while addressing the faculty and students of Banaras Hindu University (13th Dec. 2006) stressed that the future of India lies in the development of her villages—a point that was separately made by doyens such as Mahatma Gandhi and Madan Mohan Malaviya the founder of the Banaras Hindu University. 37 See Oppert, Gustav. 1894. The Inhabitants of Ancient India or Bharatvarsha.

I cannot recall any publication as such that I may direct the reader to, to emphasize this point further. 35 A good case in the point is the recent recognition given to the Medieval Site Champaner, in Gujrat. After years of local effort The World Monument Fund and The UNESCO have given the site a protected heritage status. 34

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Part II: History and Theory

Engels in his Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State sought to show that the origins of a communist state lay well in the preindustrial era, when private property was largely unknown and lands were usually owned by groups of people a phenomenon we know still existing, in villages in India, that were not touched by permanent settlement even today. In such a case, History was marshalled to demonstrate that the development of a utopic society may have followed as an obvious corollary, into modern times, had the imperialist and colonialist eras or the era of capital not intervened. Social Scientists on the other side of the Atlantic, particularly in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, marshalled history in quite other ways. Morgan tried to demonstrate, much later though, as a counterpoint to Engels communitarian ideology that the seeds of the development of the capital lay in primitive accumulation and hence, as a corollary, as history would have it, it is capitalism that is the natural and irrefutable outcome of social development. Thus both schools of thought gave history a determinist role.

In these next three chapters we take into account the impact of postmodernism on Indian history. The first discusses how these ideas have placed a subaltern archaeology on the agenda. The next chapter deals with ethnoarchaeology and the final one with ethnocentrism and tribal ethnohistory.

Chapter 3 History and Postmodernist Thought in India 3.1 Introduction In our view, there could have been another title to this chapter: Indian History in the 21st century: Is the History of Marginal Groups the Way Ahead? This is because under postmodernist impact one of the central issues confronting Indian history in the 21st c. is the extent to which historians that is ancient, medieval and modern, are willing to accommodate the history of marginal or subaltern groups of India. This problem is of course created by growing interdisciplinarity that is the hallmark of postmodernism and has been part and parcel of archaeological practice even in the new archaeology phase. For all practical purposes then in the Indian context postmodernist thought demands that Indian’s past must reflect the present.

For neutral historian or a historian who denies any political or ideological positioning, it has remained an enigma, that for the past two hundred or so years, historians of both these camps have claimed their camps to be doing and professing real history. The question, then, under post modernist impact has been that neutral historians have in most cases adopted the postmodern position that if history is so determinist then it may as well all be fiction. For a neutral historian the following concern is central: Is the history we profess in the new millennium a history objective and true to its purposes, or is it simply doctrinaire intended to justify one desirable and imagined system or another?

History, in the service of the nation, may mean many things to many people. But it is obvious that in the period after independence, the service that history has provided has been largely to the cause of elite contributions to Indian society. only now attention is shifting gradually to the larger picture. It may be said that the rest of the country was not sitting twiddling thumbs, while the elites, brought, various services to the nation, be it the national movement or economic and social advantages and reforms in the country.

Whose interests has our history largely served, in the Indian context, particularly since and after Independence? Even for a historian of Ancient India such a I it is a simple conclusion that we have largely, valorised the elites in our society again and again, and I may be pardoned for saying this offhand, if we are to write a rounded history, then let us not pretend that we may be able to do this only by writing the history of the lesser privileged or the subaltern either!

What then was the marginal groups’ role is a question that emerges as important. At first sight, in India, new schools of thought like the subaltern studies, and environmental history have provided the background against which developments that is in whichever period, within marginal or indigenous society has been charted. Both these schools, including, lately, feminist history, are all drawing eclectically upon oral accounts as well as new sources in the reconstructing histories. I have deemed it fit to include feminist history here because in most cases women are increasingly putting themselves forth as a marginal community. These indicate, already, a quantum leap, over the concerns of the prepostmodern histories in India immediately beforehand and after the Independence—both in content and method. History in the service of the nation in the 21st c. then must increasingly mean widening the palimpsest against which further explorations in marginal history ought to continue. What are the further issues in this direction?

For how does subaltern arise if there are no elites? If we do not examine the histories of the elites side by side with the subaltern then how come we may really understand what came about with those they dominated and rack-rented and basically ground into the ground? Nevertheless in my opinion the chief agenda for history in the present century is that only the histories of the marginal, so-called, groups of our country needs to be paid attention to. Satyajit Ray was much valorised, nationally and internationally, but also criticised for his portrayal in his films of our country’s rich zamindars and their lifestyles as well as that of the downtrodden, the peasantry, and the unemployed. Replying to these critics in his own book, Our Films, Their Films, Ray has set the record straight by stating that he only sought to portray both sides of the coin, the rich and the poor. Ray’s films were very meticulous, in depicting; the

The main pitfall in considering the role of historians and history in this millennium would be to repeat the uniformitarian approach, followed by both Marxist and Conservative Historians of the preceding era. Frederick 17

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Bhadrolok (the genteel) down to the very last detail, their mansions and dominions down to the last oil-lamp-post, trinket, servant and bauble. However, Ray did go to great lengths to give a sympathetic portrayal to the subaltern as well.

a sufficient historical perspective for the marginal classes would also be best served if the two disciplines history and archaeology collaborate. 3.3 History, anthropology, and archaeology For those who may not be aware of this we may say that there is a branch of archaeology called ethnoarchaeology in which typically history, anthropology, and archaeology co-exist as subcomponents. In India itself this branch of study is over fifty years old and all workers have typically spent up to two years at least living amongst traditional subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers, and pastoralists and traditional craftsmen like potters, ironsmiths and so on to understand their history, ecological behaviour and material culture use. It is true that ethnoarchaeology has its origin some where in the west but for its development in India only Indian workers like Allchin (1966, 1993) Basak (1997, 2005) Cooper (1983, 2002), Dhavalikar (1983), Misra (1971, 1974, 1978, 1990, 1994), Murty (1979, 1981, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), Nagar (1982, 1990, 1993, 1994) Nagar and Mishra (1989), Mohanty and Misra (2002), Paddayya (1979), Panja (1996), Pratap (1987a, 2000, 2004b, 2006a), Sengupta, Roychoudhury ans Som (2006). Ansari (2006), Kanungo (2006), Gangopadhyaya (2006) and others stand to be lauded. Two studies particularly give us an updated picture—Mohanty and Misra (2002)—who have reviewed such research in India over the past fifty years, and Sengupta, Raychoudhary and Sujit Som (2006) who have given us an anthology of the latest and cutting-edge research being carried out by Indian ethnoarchaeologists. While these varied types of ethnoarchaeological studies give us a good picture of how marginal groups have and are surviving the issue of their history leaves much to be desired.

What I am trying to say is that one-sided history may not be defensible whether it valorises the elite or the poor. In simple language, one may not have food without the plate and certainly not the plate, without the Jevan or food. In the quest for the profound some times the simplest eludes us. Thus if fifty years have been spent, writing about, the Bhadralok, then perhaps a few years could be allowed to write about those who propped-up the Bhadralok’s payjamas or dhotis or his mansion or his the hookah? What was with her? Who was she? What language did she speak and what she ate? What her children and family members did and where she lived? How did she commute to Bhadralok’s residence? What were her thoughts as she commuted to his palace? Did she swear to high heavens? Did she pray? What did she wear, what did she cook, how she cooked it, how did she serve the food, what was her salary, was she paid in coins or currency—in new or soiled currency notes,, was she paid her salary every week, month, or otherwise, or did she say to her employer: Malik jama kar ke rakh lijiyega aur haam ek baar mein le lenge38. What she id with the bounty, did she send her children to school, what the children, and elders and so on did while she was away and when eventually she came back with the bounty? Historians in the 21st century have a head-ache. We have to turn our gaze to those who have actually made the system work in Indian history from the earliest times. 3.2 Marginal history Anthropologists mainly cultural and physical and ethnoarchaeologists of various hues have already been working to uncover Robert Redfield’s little tradition in India, since the Colonial period. The finding of Indus Valley Civilization sites, on the one hand; and the enumeration of the tribes of India, on the other, really laid the foundation, on which the subalternists, environmental historians and feminist theorists (Conkey and Jero 1997, Conkey 2005, Ray 2004) are all drawing upon in order to reconstruct the histories of marginal societies, one way or another. One of the central issues to confront Indian history in the 21st century would therefore be the extent to which historians ancient, medieval, and modern periods are willing to accommodate the writing of the history of marginal groups of the country (Shiva 1989). Interdisciplinarity-in this sense; and archaeologists of various hues are to be lauded for their work as well. The further directions in which the history in the twenty-first century could be enriched are that there could be a greater collaboration between historians and archaeologists in times to come. The pooling together of the data bases-of the ancient historians and archaeologists is likely to provide the new paradigms for history in the twenty first century. The issue of yielding

3.4 Science, technology, and shifting cultivation In this part of the chapter, with recourse to Paharia ethnohistory (Bainbridge 1905, Bradley-Birt 1905, Browne, 1788, Das et al 1966, Dey, 1919, Hodges, 1793, Mohan, 1959, O’Malley 1910, Oldham 1930, Pratap 1984, 1987a, 2000, 2004b, 2006a, Ray 1974, Sarkar 1933a, 1933b, 1934, 1935, Verma, 1959, Vidyarthi, 1963), that is a marginal history (Pratap, 1987, 2000) we propose to examine in greater detail the precise nature of the impacts of modern developments on a subaltern society. This would only serve to reaffirm that local society was very much linked to the transnational processes of colonialism that affected India in general. It would be the purpose of this part of the chapter to take a look particularly at the developments in science and technology from the 18th century onwards on fragile production systems such as slash and burn agriculture that the Paharia practised and is prevalent in many other parts of India such as Assam, Meghalaya, in the north-east, to eastern India and the south in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and so on. The resilience of traditional production systems to change to better or more advanced systems such as plough farming is always a difficult thing to comment on since any profound economic change in certain contexts implies a transformation of identity consciousness.

Hindi Translation; Sir, kindly keep my salary saved, with you. I shall ask for it at a later date.

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History and Postmodernist Thought in India

At the out-set of our own archaeological research on shifting cultivation in 1981 we consulted newspaper abstracts as well as erudite reports of the Anthropological Survey of India as well as FAO as well as those produced by the North-East India Council of Social Science Research to understand the status of shifting cultivation systems in India as a whole. For a researcher newly embarking on a study of this subject it was totally shocking to see that this form of cultivation has always attracted the governmental ire as well as that of the print and electronic media. These categories of opinion have held this form of cultivation as inimical to the environment if they do not blatantly denounce it as totally destructive. Of course there are the more informed and sympathetic discourses of scholarly books and journals that are rather more affirmative of shifting cultivation39.

pointed out were to affect the Paharia, as they were the group the British engaged with at first in Jungleterry, to bring the Jungleterry district or the Rajmahal hills area under their undisputed control. In the 18th century, particularly due to the famine of 1770, public life was in profound turmoil. The failure of rains that year took a heavy toll on agriculture and resulted in some violence as people struggled to survive the famine40. There is also evidence that suggest that people from the lowlands emigrated and settled with the Paharia until the famine was over. The interesting thing is that when these migrants returned to their native place they were regarded as outcastes since they had commensal relations with a people who ate pork and beef. these latter people then resorted to brigandage and looting for survival. Thus at the time of British accession to landlordship at Jungleterry (or Rajmahal) opposition to Company rule prevailed in a countryside posed by lowland Zamindars, of mixed castes, and scheduled caste and tribes such as Paharia, Bhuiyan, Agaria, Kol, Ahir (O’ Malley, 1910). Insofar as the Paharia were concerned they also posed impediments to lowland agricultural operations and aspirations for any permanent settlement to a significant degree. This upset the British who wanted the local countryside to be peaceful so that rent settlements could be levied.

3.5 The problem As archaeologists we seek not only to locate, excavate, and date ancient sites, but it is also our duty to try to explain the form and variation within archaeological material associated with prehistoric people. Typically we answer questions such as—how does the material culture of the present, of any particular, area throw any light on the prehistoric subsistence? May we posit a historical continuity in technology and settlement from the past to the present? And, in that sense, say for predicting technology, may we use the historical present in any way to explain the earlier cultures of that area? Finally, another consideration also looms up, is the construction of the past an opportunity to examine the discourses of archaeology? As part of our strategy to understand the lithic assemblages of the Rajmahal that were found we thought it best to construct analogies based on the current material culture (tools, technology, settlement and economy). In theory such a strategy may sound easy to follow but for the purposes of this chapter, thereby hangs a tale and points of Paharia history need stating.

Therefore i n the 18th century the British approach towards pacifying the Paharia was twofold: to meet aggression with aggression, but to also initiate conciliation where that was possible. When armed expeditions such as those of James Browne were over, Augustus Cleveland, the first Collector of the district, initiated a pacification programme. The mantra was simple: he fixed certain monetary monthly stipends to be given to the Paharia Sardars and Manjhi (chiefs) in return for peace in the hills and allowing the British surveyors access to the same. Cleveland subsequently affected a system of hill-watchmen, called the Ghatwals, in the Hills and obtained an assurance from the Stipendiary Chiefs that the Paharia raids on the lowlands would stop. This system was successful in buying peace because Paharia leadership had been co-opted (see Cleveland 1784). When the political situation simmered down towards the close of the 18th century, we find the Paharia receding to the background of Jungleterry affairs. From 1800’s till about the 1850’s we find the Paharia left well alone by the British as rent operations were initiated in the lowlands. It is altogether another matter that the changes in the Paharia system have their roots in the period after 1810 when the administration found out that the emigration of a people called Santhal to the Jungleterry had started (Oldham, 1930).

3.6 The method It can hardly be denied that in the mid-18th century when the hilly tracts of Rajmahal came under East India Company rule that it was only the beginning of an era of profound social and economic changes. The British were to induce armed conflicts, migration of peoples, and introduction of large-scale plough cultivation, landlord-tenant relations, clearance of forests and other measures including a new system of land revenue administration called for permanent settlement. Thus if historical changes did affect the Paharia then how confidently could an archaeologist use Paharia history at the time of field-work in an area whose colonial history was largely unwritten, to draw inferences about prehistoric technology and subsistence of the area? For most of this period, the 18th century onwards, changes as

Apparently the Santhal emigration was caused by usurious rent conditions in Birbhum and noticing them inching towards the Damin the British provided them a welcome as future Raiyyats (see Pratap 1987, 2000). The Santhal,

P.S. Ramakrishnan has been at the forefront of those who advocate that there are no apriori reasons that this form of cultivation should in all cases be destructive. He has suggested that such systems be made sustainable. See Ramakrishnan, P.S. Shifting Cultivation and Sustainable development. Unesco Man and Biosphere Series. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

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Oldham, C.E.A.W. 1930. The Tour of Buchanan Hamilton. Notes during a survey of Bhagalpur and Munger Districts. Superintendent. Government Printing Press. Patna.

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Table 3.1 floral species in the damin-i-koh in the 18th century

subsequently, settled there and cleared much of it’s proliferate forests and converted them into rice paddies. In some cases, they made their settlements in Paharia lands as they could adapt even the hilly terrain for rice agriculture41.

Common Name Scientific Name Tamarind Tamarindus indica Pindara Randia uliginosa Banyan Ficus indica Asan Terminalia tomentosa Khair Accacia catechu Teak Tectona grandis Palas Butea frondosa Kurum Adina cordifolia Kadam Naucleas parvifolia Palmyra Borassus flabelifera Date Palm Phoenix dactylifera Palm Phoenix sylvestris Wood Apple Aegle marmelos Bamboo Bambusa Sal Shorea robusta (Source: Pratap 2000, 37)

Thus and coming to the main argument of this chapter, if historical changes did effect the Paharia, then how confidently may an archaeologist use their history to draw analogies about prehistoric subsistence and technology in the Rajmahal hill. I had therefore to take recourse to archival sources pertaining to administrative (land revenue, forest legislation) policies of the East India Company in this area to glean what after all was the condition of Paharia subsistence prior to colonial arrival. Additionally I also consulted travellers’ accounts and ethnographic notes such as those of, Bradley-Birt, W.S. Sherwill and R.B. Bainbridge to name just a few that allow us a good view of the period under study (Pratap, 2000). These classes of documents such as land revenue records prove particularly useful as they cast much light on Paharia cultivation.

Table 3.2 faunal species in the damin-i-koh in the 18th century

3.7 Shifting cultivation in the 18th century At the beginning of the 18th century when the East India Company gained control of the Damin-i-Koh (Modern Santhal Parganas) through the Diwani granted by Shah Alam the Rajmahal forests were absolutely diverse and extensive. The Paharia resided in their hilly abodes and their cultivation had at least ten to fifteen year fallows. An example of the success of their ecologically balanced cultivation system was simply that in the famine of 1770, when both Rabi and Kharif crops failed in the plains, the Paharia were still able to extract some produce. This is the evidence of its stability. indeed several lowland groups migrated to Paharia territory to survive the famine. However the beginning of the decline of their cultivation system coincides with the enactment of permanent settlement legislation by the British in the Damin in this century and the next42.

Common Name Tiger Leopard Hyena Wild buffalo Spotted deer Barking deer Black buck Elephants Rhinoceros Bear Rabbit Wild pig Imperial pigeon Racket-tailed Drongo Peacock Pink headed duck Ducks and Waders Partridges (3 varieties) Scarlet minivet Mountain Thrush Paradise fly-catcher

3.8 Shifting cultivation in the 19th century In this century we find the British going about the business of making Paharia tenants (raiyyats) by several measures connected with land. The first of these is the encouragement of the rice cultivating Santhals of Birbhum (South of the Rajmahal Hills) to migrate and settle in the Gangetic strip in and around the Rajmahal hills. Buchanan Hamilton records (MSS.EUR.D.81/82/83) that this migration took place between 1810-1835 at a time when the building of the East India Railway was also in progress involving much investment by way of timber, labour and other resources.

Scientific Name Panthera tigris tigris Panthera pardus Hyaena hyaena Bubalis bubalis Cerbulus axis Muntiacus muntijac Antelope cericapra Elephas-maximum Rhinoceros sp. Ursinus sp. Lepus negricolus Sus scrofa Carpophaga oenea Dissemusus grandis Pavo cristatus Anas caryophullacea Anas sp. Francolinus sp. Pericrocotus specious Oreocincla dauma Chitrea paradisi

(Source: Pratap 2000, 38) However, the main blow to the Paharia political and administrative system and their cultivation takes place due to Santhal emigration into the Rajmahal lowlands and highlands since the proliferate forests of the Santhal Parganas were in due course mostly felled for the establishment of Santhal villages and paddies.

Detailed description of Santhal fields and their Agriculture may be found in a very useful account of the hills provide by W.S. Sherwill. (1852) A tour through the Rajmahal Hills. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 20, 544-606. 42 A more considered discussion is already provided in Pratap 1987 and 2000. Here we are only offering a summary of the arguments presented before. 41

The Santhal we learn were also adept hunters and tended to venture into Paharia territory in search of game. They usually practised mass hunts. Records of the Survey and Settlement operations of Santhal Parganas (O’Malley, 1910) show that numerous litigations piled up in the 20

History and Postmodernist Thought in India

history and what lessons this has for ethnoarchaeologists. The author’s fieldwork details in this context have already been published (Pratap 1987, 2000) and discussed in a later chapter (8). Although at the outset, this project involved a survey of the forested and hilly zones of the Rajmahal Hills in a hunt for sites however once the sites began to appear, the strategy of research changed somewhat in that we were persuaded to adopt historical methods as well.

local courts (Kachaharies) and were known as SanthalPaharia boundary disputes, egging the then Government to undertake to build a chain of masonry pillars all around the circumference of the Rajmahal hills, to demarcate Paharia territory clearly. However this measure was to no avail since settlement patterns of the older and newly arrived peoples was random and populations of both increased over time increasing the pressure on land and having its most outstanding effect—the depletion of the biomass of the Rajmahal hills. Once the Paharia were circumscribed from all sides by the new settlers, there remained no other option for them but to accept permanent settlement of their lands—to have their lands evaluated for rent purposes to establish ownership beyond doubt. Thus, it should be noted, that this is perhaps the only example of slash and burn agriculture in the country where it is practiced on privately owned land.

3.11 Conclusion To conclude it would be appropriate to say that insofar history or ethnohistory has a role in India archaeology we have in the present millennium to pursue such questions as whose history is being written; who is writing this history, and with what aims is this history being written. This is the case since in the Indian context that the ethnoarchaeologists must often double as historian, as many of the groups that we study do not have as yet have a written history even if it is from the colonial period onwards. In the course of my work on the Rajmahal hills I have often pondered over these questions. A field worker is limited in many ways by his fieldwork: that is to say the nature and terrain, language, accessibility and so one (see Gupta and Fergusson 1997). Firstly the fieldworker would like to minimize the biases inherent in fieldwork. Clearly we reconstruct marginal histories because arguably they need highlighting, but this is of course the vested interest of reaching deductions that would help field workers whether anthropologists or historians achieve their goal. This is significant since archaeological research is often largely a one-way process of taking more than giving in any concrete sense. At least this is comparatively less in historical sciences than possibly in field and action oriented research such as in social work, social anthropology, and psychology and economics. The ethnicity of the researcher also often structures research observation. That is informants tend to reveal aspects of their society in ways that would enhance their status visà-vis that of the researcher. This is not to decry fieldwork as some sort of a bogus exercise but to suggest that the researchers must establish their relations with the observed community in such a way that free dialogue may take place. I believe that in my own study so far I have been able quite reliably to draw an estimate of how shifting cultivation operated before the arrival of the British. From this model I was able to isolate (see chapter 9) the relevant information regarding the archaeological record of the Rajmahal hills—tools, settlement, and mobility, landscape, agricultural practices and so on. The next chapter turns to examining in further detail the relationship between ethnoarchaeology and history in India.

3.9 The Development of railways and forest legislation The 19th century largely saw the further circumscription of Paharia land by the enactment of Forest Regulation Acts as well as the development of railway networks. The issue of expansion of railways is simple enough since Rajmahal timber was extracted for sleepers, and the boulders for ballast were also mined from the hills43. It is conceivable that while some Paharias were emigrating from the Rajmahal Hills to Duars and Assam as labour for tea-plantations that they were also recruited to work as labour on the loopline of the eastern railway being built from Kiul to Kolkata via the Rajmahal hills. Essentially the railway opened the door to systematic and continuous exploitation of the Rajmahal region44. The issue of forest acts is a bit more complicated since in the 19th century Rajmahal forests were demarcated as reserved and protected forests which became the exclusive preserve of the Government. In sum, it should be noted that the Forest Acts deprived the Paharia the free access to forests they had enjoyed for centuries over and above the areas already occupied by the Santhal immigrants. 3.10 Lessons from history for archaeology In conclusion to this part of the chapter it would be appropriate to say that in this part of India, the growth of Colonial Science and technology was fuelled by local resources, and therefore had a disastrous effect on local ecology and indigenous production systems such as shifting cultivation. Shifting cultivation, however, did not disappear but adapted to the constraints. In the following part of the chapter we turn to consider the essential link between history and ethnoarchaeology in the Indian context given the undeniable effect of historical changes upon indigenous groups. Therefore in this part of the chapter we wish to draw attention to knowledge construction in We have noted in our fieldwork since 1981 that boulder-mining as a practice continues to outlive the colonial period. 44 In a literary context in his latest novel The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh notes that the British induced migration of labour from the Santhal Parganas to the Sunderbans to populate that area. It is likely some Paharia may have also gone there as well apart from Duars in Assam. 43

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encouraged under the banner of processualism (Binford, pp) as well as partly postprocessualism. Ian Hodder (1987, 1987a) demonstrated ably how it becomes necessary for archaeologists to take on the mantle of historians, due to the contingencies of field situation. However it must be added here that owing to the peculiarities of the Indian situation Indian archaeologists have for long used historical methods and sources in various ways. However, a conscious formulation for a place in archaeology for the historians’ methods is still lacking in Indian archaeology. In my view these are the two essential relationships between Archaeology and History that need to be examined.

Chapter 4 Ethnoarchaeology as History: A Must for India? 4.1 Introduction Taking the cue from the previous chapter in this one we wish to take a little further the discussion about the relationship between history and ethnoarchaeology. This is for the following considerations: but what is the necessity to observe these changes? Why must archaeologists venture into reconstructing such histories? There are several reasons for this loss of innocence. For any group subsisting on forest resources in India the impact of the colonial period is deep and profound45. How can we then use these societies as windows to the past: an approach most common to the processual school?

4.3 History and archaeology: the case of ancient Indian History In India from at least 6th century B.C. there is a proliferate existence of texts and inscriptions relating to Buddhist, Jain, and Sanskrit canons to say nothing of the earliest of them all the Vedic and associated literature. Under the conventions of Indological vein of research these texts have been regarded as definitive historical source material, which informed us directly about the periods in which they were written. This has both its advantages and disadvantages for the project of a subaltern archaeology insofar as these texts seldom pay any attention to the subaltern classes of India (see Pratap, 2003). We know only too well about the ‘text based archaeology’ (Malik, 1968, 1968b, 1974, 1975, 1990) and in its hey-day about those such as General Alexander Cunningham and his exploits with Hieun Tsang’s Si Yu Ki (see Pratap 2008). We may not deny the significant role this approach played in the archaeology of its day. However the silence these texts maintain about the rural and tribal folks of the contemporary times leads indeed to a neglect of their history. This application gets even more focused when we emerge into the early centuries A.D. of Indian history and texts are historically continuous and in abundance. Chakrabarti (1997) has also separately argued that an excessive reliance on these texts chronologically speaking is unwise47.

Ian Hodder (1987, 1987a) has already demonstrated that one of the mainstays of the postprocessual method is to relate archaeology with the methods of social and particularly historical sciences (see Paddayya, 1990). We have already argued that this relationship is not new to the Indian context where archaeology has always been regarded as a part of Ancient History (Allchin 1961, Murty 1994, Misra 1974). However, what are the ramifications of relating these two branches of study in the Indian context, how indeed is it relevant particularly to a subaltern archaeology? The answer, it would appear, is relatively simple. In contexts such as India, the period of colonial rule effected the tribal population just as it did the mainstream. The prospects then for a proper ethnoarchaeology in rural and tribal areas, then, surely lies with our appreciating this fact, and to then attempt useful ethnoarchaeology. Therefore the case for archaeological contributions to be considered historical contributions is not new in India. However, the trend to teach and research archaeology as history needs clarifications. This is because history in the academic hubbub itself is a catch all category46. In this theoretical chapter we return to our earlier discussions of Santhal Parganas (Pratap, 2000), Jharkhand, to argue that ethnoarchaeology as practiced in India needs an interface with history.

4.4 History and archaeology: the anthropological angle In the North American context, Binford’s classic archaeology as anthropology essay argued the case for archaeologists to consider themselves part and parcel of anthropology. There is no comparable text here, to argue the case for archaeologists to consider themselves a part of history. This is often taken for granted with the result that infact the rigorous methods of historical analysis are often overlooked for ethnoarchaeological purposes. Many in India would also argue for the separate special place for archaeology, as a discipline, no matter the interfaces it has with history. However it is heartening to see how many historians of repute have in the past decade written archaeological text books48.

4.2 Background Before we start debating the case for archaeology as history, in South Asian context, I would suggest that there are at least two levels to view the relationship between archaeology and history: the first of global conventions— just as archaeology is sometimes treated as anthropology in the American context so archaeology has been treated as a branch of ancient history in India. Secondly elsewhere, in the west, the interface of archaeology with history has been

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See Gadgil, M. 1993, This Fissured Land. 46 For this chapter and later discussions of the impact of postmodernism on history we have consulted Fulbrook, M. 2002. Historical Theory. Routledge, London. 45

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See Chapter 5, section 5.3. Among others Habib (2001) and R.S. Sharma’s (2001) State and Varna Formation in the Ganga Plains: an ethnoarchaeological approach and lately Upinder Singh’s (2008) book have made a very significant contribution.

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

4.5 History and ethnoarchaeology Insofar as ethnoarchaeology is concerned, there is yet another case for a rapprochement with history. Ethanoarchaeology, we know is about understanding behavioural patterns behind material culture, or the significance of these objects, by direct observation. But when, under the impact of colonialism, the behavioural pattern may itself have undergone transformation, due to changes in the macro social order, then how do we proceed to study the material correlates of any culture as if they exist in some pristine unchanged environment? Thus we can and will, with demonstration, argue that a recourse to the historians’ method is indispensable in the Indian context.

especially in two recent volumes, it has now been recommended, that an historical approach to archaeology in general and ethnoarchaeology in particular is advisable (Ray and Sinopoli 2004 and Sengupta, Raichoudhury and Som 200651). This is very timely as the bulk of Indian ethnoarchaeologists still regard the adoption of the historians’ method by ethnoarchaeologists as an anathema (see Mohanty and Misra 2002). One reason for this attitude, in our country, of ignoring the history of ethnographic groups has been the impact of the processual approach in archaeology in which the encounter with tribes has been largely problematic. Under the influence of The New Archaeology ethnohistoric research was engaged in but was meant to provide only a database (see Binford 1972, 1978, 1980, Yellen 1977, Jochim 1976 and Kramer 1979, Kramer and David 2000, Mithen 1990) against which hypotheses directed at the archaeological record could be tested52. In this vein of research no further time with regard to the cultural or social history of tribes in the present or historical past was seen as relevant to the archaeological method53. This is to say that the archaeologists named above were in their studies content with describing the economic and settlement systems, measuring the time-spent in various subsistence and settlement activities and by these means generating models for predicting or simulating prehistoric behaviour using the ethnographic parallel. The logic of such measurements and modelling (particularly in Yellen, Jochim and Mithen’s work) has been that once these models are generated by using tribal subsistence and settlements systems of the present as an analogy then these could be used predictively to model prehistoric behaviour. Using artefact scatters from prehistoric sites activity areas could be identified sources of raw material extraction could be found and reasonable inferences about subsistence, technology and settlement could be derived. The final step

As stated in the previous chapter, in the course of doing field and archival work on the Paharia of Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand, I found that a lot of historical changes had come about in the native economy of shifting cultivation of the Paharia, due to historical processes of the 18th and 19th centuries. What then must an Indian ethnoarchaeologist do a) ignore the historical changes wrought upon these native economies and draw analogies between archaeological cultures and modern ones in a one to one manner, or b) be prepared to examine the current ethnographic record under the glare of historical sources? 4.6 Ethnoarchaeology in India Largely speaking, an interest in exploring the historical antecedents, of ethnographic groups, or native communities, in India, has been sparked off—after the publication of Ian Hodder’s, The Present Past (1982) and Archaeology as long-term History (1987). This is, even if ethnoarchaeological work has been carried out, for decades in India, simultaneously with and preceding the publication of these volumes. A recent survey of ethnoarchaeological writings in India in the past fifty or so years (Mohanty and Misra 2002) shows amply that an historical approach to the study of native groups has been largely absent even in recent archaeological works. However we may see Nagar and Misra’s (1989) work as a first attempt at ethnohistory in the Indian context49 (see Mohanty and Misra 2002 for a review of the gamut of ethnoarchaeological studies in India in the past fifty years50). In the Indian context,

In the first volume Archaeology as History in Early South Asia that is devoted to a survey of the variety of approaches to the study of early historic South Asia the editors are concerned to see the entire historical exercise up to say the Gupta Period as archaeological. Indeed the title of the work Archaeology as History in Early South Asia is self-evident. In the second work Past and Present: Ethnoarchaeology in India the authors contributing to the volume are at least beginning to concede that there is a place for historical methods in ethnoarchaeology. This is at variance with, for instance, the knee-jerk reactions to the first attempts to relate history and ethnoarchaeological evidence, as seen in Mohanty and Misra’s survey (op cit) of ethnoarchaeology in India in which they dismiss studies such as (Pratap 1987) as largely works of a historical kind. 52 This is Binford’s approach in his Smudge Pits and Hide smoking paper as well as that of John Yellen and Michael Jochim in their studies of hunter-gatherer settlement and subsistence systems. Mithen (1990) follows suit too. See also Binford (1980) paper in which he clearly dismisses ethnography as a reliable method. 53 Indeed in David, N and Kramer’s (2000) work, references to ethnohistory are scarce, even more scarce are ideas that a study of history of tribes allows archaeologists to be more certain about what material culture processes are ancient and which are modern. See Pratap (2002) for a review of this approach. The further critique of this work that I had seen fit to do was that western workers in ethnoarchaeology seldom take into account the field and interpretative techniques being advanced by third and fourth world ethnoarchaeologists. 51

F.R.Allchin, Archaeology and History, in Man and Environment, has also recently recommended that a fusion of problem-oriented research in which historical and archaeological methods are combined is a welcome addition to this meagre corpus. 50 Mohanty, P. and Misra, J. (2002) in Settar and Korisettar (Eds) Indian Archaeology: A Retrospect. Manohar Publishers, New Delhi and Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi. In addition to Nagar and Misra’s (1989) work referred to above, Murty’s work on the Pastoral Nomads of Southern India is partly historical in nature. This is inasmuch as he draws on the myths and folk-tales related with these groups. See Murty, M.L.K. 1993. Ethnohistory of pastoralism: a study of Kuruvas and Gollas, Studies in History 9 (1):33-41; as well as Murty, M.L.K. and G.D. Sontheimer 1980. Prehistoric background to pastoralism in the Southern Deccan in the light of Oral Traditions and Cults of Some Pastoral Communities, Anthropos 75:163-84. In the same category also are the further works of V.N. Misra (1974, 1990, and 1994). Not least in the order of significance are also the works of Malti Nagar (1990, 1993, and 1994). 49

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Ethnoarchaeology as History: A Must for India?

in such a hypothetico-deductive approach has been to try to pattern-match the models of subsistence, settlement and mobility behaviour derived from ethnographic situations with those derived independently from archaeological sources in the Popperian vein. This verification of hypotheses or falsifications of alternate hypotheses, are the approaches of the new archaeology. In some cases this has also been termed as hypothesis testing. What empirical injustice does this do to the tribal or ethnographic record? In our opinion the message implicit in the processual method is that archaeologists must engage in the ethnographic situations only so far as to derive models for testing against the archaeological record. This approach is in prominence in India even now where an engagement with the history of native communities is seen as an activity best left to historians or cultural anthropologists. As suggested by postprocessualists this is clearly a case of straight-jacketing of archaeological method and is less sensitive to the concerns of interdisciplinarity and proper deductive methodology.

frameworks of the new archaeology and in emphasizing narrative and other textual methods as important to the production of archaeological knowledge, postprocessual archaeology espouses postmodernity. In suggesting that the cross-cultural laws of human behaviour generated by the new archaeologists were and are quite useless, as human behaviour is itself local, and that, therefore, archaeology must strive to reconstruct culture specific to the local context it espouses the cause of post-colonialility. In this way we may put together the various strands of thought underlying postprocessualism as distant from the new archaeology. Thus in contrast to processualism postprocessualism sees the practice of archaeology in society as also enmeshed with the politics governing the creation or interpretation of the past55 in its local context. As this politics varies, from the country to country, therefore methods of creation of archaeological knowledge, may not, it is argued, by postprocessualists, be regarded as a constant across countries and cultures. For example unlike in the first world where much has been written about the `ethno-history’ of ethnic peoples, countries of the third and the fourth worlds are only now beginning to pay attention to the history of marginal or subsistence groups. It is important to point out here that, in the case of India, where subaltern history does exist and much important research and publications regarding the role and nature of ethnic society especially with regard to movements of protest during the medieval and colonial periods is being brought to light; that it is equally important that archaeologists too, who do fieldwork among tribes, must also engage in writing ethnohistories of the tribes; albeit with an archaeological-end in mind.

Thus the suitability of a historically informed ethnoarchaeology in the Indian context is in our view very relevant. The simple answer, perhaps first provided by Ian Hodder, even though he writes from a European context is that we must not use traditional subsistence economies as `windows to the past’, an assumption implicit in the processual approach. In the two of his works cited above and subsequently as well, Ian Hodder has enunciated alongwith his co-workers like Christopher Tilley, Matthew Johnson, Michael Shanks, Henrietta Moore, Michael Parker-Pearson a postprocessual approach. Already being regarded as the successor paradigm to the New Archaeology, a large body of literature has already accumulated in this field of postprocessual studies (see bibliography), in which work has been progressing at least since the late 1980s. There are a few questions that now arise. Where is the postprocessual approach at positive variance with the earlier approach? And what is its feasibility in the Indian context insofar as ethnoarchaeology is concerned? As these questions are central to this chapter there are several preliminary comments in this regard. Firstly, postprocessualism has been conceived as advancement over processual archaeology fundamentally due to its interdisciplinary nature beyond hypothesis testing. Whereas processualism only appealed for ‘archaeology as anthropology’, postprocessual studies have expanded the archaeological horizon by taking into account not only anthropology, but also cultural studies, social theory as well as history as methods that are useful in the archaeologists’ arsenal and this is to mention only a few of the new theoretical perspectives now being espoused by postprocessual archaeologists54. Secondly, postprocessual archaeology also tries to be sensitive to the eco-political situation in the world by setting the economic context of archaeology within the pre-existing and broader frameworks of postmodernity and postcolonialism. Of course this is just a part of seeing archaeology ultimately as a local practice. In setting aside the hypothetico-deductive

4.7 Postprocessualism in the context of Jharkhand In the context of Santhal Parganas where many ethnic groups exist, it would not be out of place, here, to point to the very scanty work done thus far by way of relating ethnoarchaeology and history. Undoubtedly, much anthropological writing too numerous to mention here, does exist on Jharkhand by way of ethnographic accounts from the colonial and postcolonial periods. Many significant archaeological finds have also been made through these periods (see Narain 1990). However most of these are shorn of a diachronic focus. Most of these studies describe the ways and means of the many tribes of the region, only in the present. This may suit the social anthropologists’ purpose; very well: however it does not further one bit the cause of the archaeologist. some light has been shed on this claim, with reference to my own work on the Paharia Shifting Cultivators of the Rajmahal hills, in Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand State (Pratap 1987, 2000, 2004a and b and 2006), and a long-term study under progress since 55

I have browsed Michael Shanks’s website…more than once.

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Ian Hodder’s ongoing work at Catal Huyuk, Turkey, is perhaps the best example alongwith say Johnson (Arthaeological Theory Today), Michael Shank’s Social Theory and Archaeological and Christopher Tilley’s (Re-constructing archaeology). At Catal Huyuk Hodder has tried to reconstruct how various sections of the Neolithic Society would have figured the site in different ways, like a habitus, or subjectively meaningful actions of various actors, inhabiting this site.

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

1981. Of course when archaeologists’ engage in the history of a tribal group with an archaeological end in mind, this really means that she/he would pay close attention, in a diachronic perspective, specifically to those elements that would help us to understand archaeological behaviour in the past. Thus in my work on the Rajmahal Hills I have used archival records as well to elucidate the details of shifting cultivation, settlement behaviour, mobility patterns and types of early habitations, the evidence for or against tribal boundaries with extraneous groups, early flora and fauna etc all of which have been derived from colonial records (see Pratap 2000). A re-construction of Paharia society and economy in the 18th and 19th centuries helps us in two ways primarily. Firstly, towards the contemporary period, it helps us to understand the state of their economy and society, and by the backward projection, (for the archaeological purpose) archival research helps us to envision the present state of the Paharia economy before imposition of colonial rule and the subsequent transformation of the ecology and landscape. Thus under the postprocessualist banner as archaeologists we have now the latitude to construct histories specific to locations round the world. Where processualism forbade engagement with local histories beyond the purpose of testing of hypotheses and modelling; post-processualism has encouraged the pursual of such histories as legitimate archaeological practice.

further also be added that variation is also likely to occur insofar as aspects such as language, religious practice, dress, social relations (that is the superstructure) despite similarity in tools. Neither is similarity predictable in terms of their relations with their neighbouring groups that are their geopolitics. In the language of postprocessualism Ian Hodder is quick to term this situation as the context of each prehistoric group. B) Indeed his volumes such as Reading the Past and Archaeological Theory Today emphasize emphatically the overarching presence of the local. This has many implications, however, we shall confine ourselves to discussing post-processualism within the ambit of the purposes of this chapter. C) Like any other society, contemporary marginal economies, the world over, have been impacted upon by the general historical processes particularly colonialism of one kind or another. This therefore adds to specificity of their context. D) Further in most of his publications, Ian Hodder has already discredited the aim of The New Archaeologists of trying to develop cross-cultural laws of human behaviour as smacking of scientificism that is neither appropriate, nor desirable, nor indeed possible. We may all agree with this that there is a limit to how much can be said to be behaviour typical of human beings across cultures. E) In the present context then when postmodernism, postcoloniality and postprocessualism are already changing the shape of archaeology the world over; it is easy for us to appreciate the caveats and suggestions of Ian Hodder and his coworkers such as Christopher Tilley, Matthew Johnson, Michael Shanks and Daniel Miller. Thus the project to relate ethnoarchaeology and history in the context of Jharkhand is helped all the more by the approach of postprocessual archaeology.

The further epistemological reasons for advocating the postprocessual approach in the context of santhal Parganas are more than many and may be listed as follows: a) Prehistoric cultures, the world over, are described as Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and so on, even though they have some typo-technological dissimilarity, in terms of shape and raw materials used for manufacture, they may also be dissimilar, in terms of their functions. As the ecological niches in which they occur despite their typological similarity (in some cases) their functions are likely to have been different too56. The early archaeologists in India regarded that there were typo-technological similarities between the Eastern and Southern ground and polished Neolithic tools traditions— especially where axes, adzes, chisels were concerned. Indeed as was the fashion of the day, it was suggested by early Indian archaeologists (e.g. F.R. Allchin, M.N. Deshpande, and B. Subbarao) that this similarity meant that either the makers of these tools migrated from the south of the country to the north or vice-versa57. However, today such a theory has been totally rejected by archaeologists of the postcolonial era. Today there is little doubt that as ecological niches vary so do similar looking tools in disparate ecological niches, find differing uses58. It may

4.8 Conclusion Thus in studying Paharia agriculture in the present any historian or archaeologist may scarcely argue that such societies are untouched by history and that their system of cultivation or any other economy is pristine. Of course so far as my own Rajmahal Project was concerned, I had to adapt my research design and take into account these historical changes. As a path forward I would regard Hodder’s (1987) much acclaimed work where he has developed a number of approaches that lend themselves to the creation of a more context sensitive archaeology. These include Structural approaches, Marxist approaches, Archaeology and History, Indigenous archaeologies and (ICHR/SRF/ACAD-III/2001/) conducted by the author from 2002 till 2004 to study the microwear traces on a select sample of tools from various Neolithic sites of Bihar, I made some interesting findings. Despite typological similarity in blades, adzes and axes from sites like Chirand, Chechar, Sonepur, Taradih and Maner, all in the Gangetic fringes of Bihar, these tools had most likely a possible diverging functional pattern according to micro-climatic regimes of each of these sites. Chirand, during the Neolithic period was a heavily wooded site and blades, axes and the tools found there were used for hunting-gathering, fishing and a variety of uses connected with wild game. It is predictable that a similar environment did not obtain at the other sites. Therefore the tools obtained from them, although typologically similar, to those from Chirand; do not exhibit a micro-wear that would support the conclusion that they were used for similar functions.

This argument was supported by a specious linguistic diffusion theory that since pockets occur (in the North) where languages or dialects of Dravidian family are spoken so this serves to prove such migrations. 57 Here our simple argument is that the Indian subcontinent has great variation geographically speaking. From the hilly high-rainfall and wooded North-East and East of India, to the semi-arid western India, to the moderate centre, and a very tropical South (see Sankalia, H.D. Pre and Proto History of India and Pakistan.) 58 A case in the point is the Neolithic tradition from Bihar. In a study 56

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Ethnoarchaeology as History: A Must for India?

Feminist archaeology. Again such developments must be read against the rising dissatisfaction with positivist theory and method in the last two decades the world over. There is more. Postprocessualism has also, in keeping with the growth of post-modern and postcolonial studies, argued

that there is no single objective truth that is being chased, thus the avenues to it, the narratives deployed in social science that is, may also aim to be different to suit specific purposes. The next chapter considers the biases inherent in the study of tribal history. .

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and to history, if the tribe is not incorporated as the initial rung in the sequence of the growth of civilization (for example Indus Valley), and then consistently as its binary opposite (until the modern times). It is evident that although it is seldom the exclusive focus of modern historical analysis (other than in the discourse of Subaltern Studies and some Indological writings of MLK Murty and G.D. Sontheimer and all ethnologists, anthropologists, and ethoarchaeologists, broadly speaking), the attention that it attracted through the 18th and 19th century studies was primarily for its contrastive appeal. As a fuzzy entity— Non State, besides the State, it allowed for a marginally more effective focussing on the latter. The latter perceived as Hindu Civilization and the prime subject of historical, philological and textual reconstruction, through two centuries of diverse scholarly traditions has, paradoxically, become the chief referent and the source even for the history of the tribe. That is, the textual and philogical sources, that are by convention ascribed to the Sanskritic tradition are also supposed to inform us about the NonSanskrit peoples, who in any case provided the initial pivotal step for establishing that which appears a cogent, coherent and natural culture: the Hindu Civilization.

Chapter 5 Ethnocentrism and Tribal Ethnohistory in India 5.1 Introduction This chapter is historiographical in nature. We have thus far suggested that historical methods are of relevance to the archaeologist. In this chapter we undertake to isolate the main biases, according to our reckoning, that exist in the Indian context in the writing of a proper tribal ethnohistory. Since our focus in this book is archaeology of the subaltern therefore we have considered it fit to limit our examination only to ancient Indian history. Of course such a framework does not rule out the existence of similar biases in medieval and modern historiography of the tribal subject. Thus our aim in this chapter is to isolate the biases and presumptions that exist in ancient Indian history vis-à-vis the tribes. Not many compendiums exist that would even in theory try to give us a history of the tribal people down from the earliest times to the present on the subcontinent. Instead, we have some very dull views of where the tribes were located in that distant past. This chapter finds its relevance here, No other subject within ancient Indian history is as much speculated upon as the coalescing of prehistory into historical formations, which revolutionized the ancient Indian landscape irreversibly, in terms of the formation of the State (Basham 1971, Fairservis 1975, Thapar 1985, Sharma 2001, Choudhary 1999). So far as the role of tribes is concerned in this significant event is concerned it is always assumed that the tribes preceded the (sixteen) mahajanapadas, or early city-states (the Sodasamahajanapadas as so called), co-existed with them and finally outlived the early and medieval states into modern times. In our view, this is without doubt one of the foremost assumptions in the debate on state formation and it has helped us keep (pre) history alive within history. Thus it is asserted that modern tribal groups are still in Neolithic/Mesolithic stages (e.g. Dhavalikar 1982). The tribe, popularly conceived and described in its silent (largely documentless), sub-urban, otherness has made even the Vedic literature, irrevocably bound as it is in its metaphors, yield a quasi-history (but see Choudhary 1999, and Thapar 1985) that later begins to appear increasingly real and historical.

Thus we are here dealing with a disguised conundrum of which came first and which must be the initial object of analysis. Given this conundrum, it may be argued that the hypothesized interaction between these two entities in Ancient India is simply a backward projection of the current patterns of the interaction between the two observable today. This is a wholesale imposition of the present on the past. For, as we shall see, even a cursory look at the picture of ancient society will prove the dichotomy between the State and the Tribe to be riddled with convenient assumptions. In the next section we also discuss the StateTribe distinctions that are indeed based also on notions about the ethnic identity and descent of the groups in both categories, i.e. the Aryan (state) and Dravidian (tribe). This formed, for the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th century, the most celebrated explanation of the differences between the tribal and non-tribal. Aryan theories of the 18th century have come into disrepute almost everywhere and in India its most recent critics (Chakrabarti 1968, Shaffer 1984, Erdosy 1988, 1995) have also laid the matter to rest insofar as archaeological cultures are concerned. Is this exorcism also evident where archaeology meets ancient history, as it invariably does in India?

The Vedic and antecedent Sanskrit and Prakrit texts including Kautilya’s Arthasashtra, (Kangle 1960-63), all of which constitute writing of an order different from historical documents per se, yield that history of the Aryan State and the Gaudian-Dravidian Tribes (see Oppert 1894), because this scheme was perceived as the natural order overlying the Indian ethnic diversity which would otherwise be in greater confusion for comprehending. In this respect, the discourse on tribes is unique in the Indian context. In Europe, the moulding of early history to give just such political divisions to the past was arrived at differently (Olsen 1986). In our view, in the Indian context, it is the case that prehistory would scarcely yield to protohistory

5.2 State (civilized) and Tribe (uncivilized) The 18th century oriental scholars in India had asserted that Asia was the source of all civilization and Asian peoples were the cultural ancestors even of the Europeans. Sir William Jones argued this by tracing similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages. As the progenitor, at least linguistically, of the progressive west, it became essential, while classifying South Asians, to create from a confusing mass of physical, cultural and economic variation, the outlines of a category that would be suitable as the original South Asian group. Thus, the Aryan theory served a purpose larger than simply than 29

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

that of explaining the diversity of people in India and provided practical subspecies social categorizations of the humankind. It earned credibility also because it provided resolution to three major problems of Oriental research: it was deemed to rationally explain the physical and cultural difference between the caste-Hindus and the tribal and, more significantly, the variation also within Hindu and Tribal societies. The latter was accomplished in different ways for both. Hindus as part of a larger Aryan stock were at one end of the spectrum of variation that started in West Asia and culminated in the eastern-most reaches of the Ganga Valley, well north of the Vindhyas from where the Tribal domains were assumed to have started in ancient times. In the case of the so-called tribes, the first step was to see them as the pre-Aryan deposit that helped to provide the Aryans with the catalyst, by way of labour or slave labour, for their own social and economic evolution.

abusive language.” (Choudhary 1977, 81). C) The proof of the existence of pre-Aryan peoples (as tribes) is given by the ancient texts, which provide elaborate taxonomies of peoples (which it is assumed, the modern reader of these texts can identify as reference to non-Aryans). D) The veracity of this taxonomy is evident from the painstaking detail in the description of physical characteristics and “ethnic affiliation” (Choudhary 1977, 66) of the subjects— “skin colour, stature, types and colour of hair, ears, facial appearance—forehead size and colour of eyes, nose, lips, chin, teeth and the general build of the body: chest, navel, thighs and arms, cultural patterns and social life” (Ibid., 67-70). E) The taxonomy, so far consistent in other respects, it is written is also precise in naming the shifting geographical locations of tribes, finally traceable to their twentieth century locations, providing proof of the texts, veracity. Thus, “on the basis of similarity of names and localities of settlements (Bengal) the origin of the present Males (Mals) and Mal Paharia may possibly be traced to the ancient Malas.” (Ibid.103). F) The process of urbanization, development of kingdoms, States and Empires take place (naturally) among the Aryans, setting them off on an independent course of social evolution, while the GaudianDravidians remain static, and on the Hills. G) since the Aryans, and their city states and later the empires, need the labour of the tribe for the development of services of the city the “tribes naturally tried to improve their social and cultural status by seeking admission into the Aryan or Hindu fold even as members of an inferior caste” (Ibid. 111). H) The view taken in terms of history is that, this course of development of ethnicities in the subcontinent provides the origin and ancestry of the modern Indian tribes—many of whom are the descendants of those mentioned in the vedic and antecedent texts, although, the course of time (some 3000 years) has altered their names slightly.

The basic tenets of this method were stated clearly in Gustav Oppert’s (1894) classic The Original Inhabitants of Bharatavarsha or India. In this work he set out: “to prove from existing sources….that the original inhabitants of India, with the exception of a small minority of immigrants, belong all to one and the same race…spread over the continents of Asia and Europe….which is also known as Finnish-Ugrian or Turanian. The branch which is domiciled in India should be called Bharatan after whom the country received its name Bharatavarsa” (Ibid. preface). By 1894, British control, direct or indirect, of tribal areas had taken shape. information available in the form of published accounts and short notes in the journals of the Asiatic Society provided the core literature for the creation of a Pan-tribal stereotype and given empirical flavour with the citation of textual examples. A consideration of these leaves little doubt that the image of a coherent uniracial tribal society was present long before Oppert’s attempt, Oppert however, tried to show that while physical dissimilarity among the Gaudian-Dravidians “can be accounted for by the physical peculiarities of the localities they inhabited, by the various occupations they followed, and by the political status which regulated their domestic and social habits” nevertheless, “The mind that directs and animates both is the same, so that though they work in different grooves, the process of thinking in both is identical” (Ibid.,vi).

For such a pervasive view to emerge and consolidate its place in 18th and 19th century oriental scholarship and serving in some academic and lay contexts in India and elsewhere even today (Chaudhuri 1955, Choudhury above, Jain 1970),59 there are several reasons and background conditions. Consider the most important one—the problem of need for an overall scheme of historical change within the subcontinent, and the need for it to fit with and causally explain the locus of various population groups and their characteristics as found in India on colonial contact. Surely the trajectory of Indian Civilisation, over three thousand years could not be constructed with notions other than those which that neatly interlock the posited history with the social reality, understood to be prevalent at the time of British colonial arrival.

This imagined uniformity thus became the aesthetic binary opposite to the Aryan Hindu one and the basic framework for the positing of the social evolutionary process of civilization in the subcontinent was only a logical step away. Briefly, the precepts of this were as follows: a) Ancient India (mainly the Indo-Gangetic plain) prior to Aryan migration was inhabited by ethnic groups, tribes, which were mainly of the same stock (Oppert’s, view, 1894) or marginally differentiated. B) With the coming of the Aryans (c.2, 500 B.C.), who were initially also separated into tribes, the primary divide between Arya and Dasa/Dasyu develops: “The ancient tribes who did not follow the Vedic rites and were outside the Aryan fold were usually looked down upon by the Aryans and described by

The influence of the Indian present over its soon to be constructed past was then not only available, but was 59

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However for a refreshing unbiased view of ethnic groups say in the Vedic Period, see Choudhary, Bijoy, (1999). From Kinship to Social Hierarchy: the Vedic Experience. K.P. Jaiswal Research Institute, Patna. See also Sharma, R.S. (2001) State and Varna formation in the Ganga plains: an ethnoarchaeological view. Manohar, New Delhi.

Ethnocentrism and Tribal Ethnohistory in India

extant to provide important clues and analogies as a source of reconstruction. The notable urban-rural distributions and some distinctiveness in geographical location provide the non-tribe (urban) and tribe (rural) distinction. The amenability of the landscape and peoples of India to this demographic distinction, suffused with sociological underpinnings of dubious merit, was quite simply extant in the state of nature. How else could the forest-dwellers come to have neither writing, state, or urban structures and the plains-dwellers all of these, unless, there had been separate historical processes acting on the two? This proposition, provided for tribal society a perfect fit with current Indian reality, marked with social asymmetry. Except, the term tribe was used both for the ancestral Aryans and the ancestral tribe tribe: the former tribe containing the seeds of future civilization and the latter of stagnation and savagery.

Archaeological excavations and data (primarily relevant to art history), before for 1870’s had no existence beyond being examples of textually derived conceptions about State and early society. Text based deductions not only preceded but also significantly determined the growth of archaeology and the course of its development. Most ancient Indian Texts, by the late 18th century, had been examined for their philological content. This work went together with a chronological view of the development and dispersal of Indo Aryan peoples and languages. The texts then provided through their own assumed chronology, the first articulated age system for the passage of historical time for the Indian civilization. This chronology of successive periods of Indian Civilization: pre-Vedic (Tribal), Vedic, the age of Buddha and Mahavira, the early republics and oligarchies, and the following Kingdoms and Empires— in its first formulation in the 18th century was not based on any archaeological data at all. It was based rather on conjectures. With the development of archaeology and art history, the ages of ancient history (Pre-Vedic, Vedic, Mauryan etc.), were worked out based on the study of archaeological materials (under the metaphors provided by the textual chronology). This assumed chronology (as no radiocarbon or other precise dating methods.....)was reimposed upon the texts. The texts now appeared within clear cells of time (given by the compounded age system), seemed contextualised and obtained the flavour of period pieces, even documents. The growth of archaeology then was not as a discipline progressing from antiquarianism to science as in the European case, but through a mixture of several indigenous and extraneous predilections both of which held ancient texts in primacy. Text-aided archaeology (see Malik 1968a, 1968b, 1974, 1975, 1990) is therefore, for India, a precise and specific formulation, which is, not yet entirely out of favour.

5.3 Texts, ancient India history and subaltern archaeology In India oriental research is distinguishable from modern archaeological research primarily by the formulation of the latter as a separate exercise involving excavations and preservation of monuments. But even after the establishment of the latter, both forms of scholarship continued to share at least the same data sources in common—texts and monuments—that linked both to a third discipline—ancient Indian history. Oriental research preceded the growth of these latter forms of scholarship and did not relinquish its own consideration of what were often the primary subjects of study in a nascent archaeology or history. It would also be true to see that the practitioner of the latter disciplines did not really cast themselves in an image radically different. from the Orientalists, by researching the enigmas of Orientalist concern. Orientalism thus continued as the only coherent source of research inspiration and methods. The profound gain for archaeology, from efforts made in the past century, to delineate races (and their concomitant cultures), was the location of styles of architecture connected with them (Rea, 1890, 185-6).

But what is apparently a happy coincidence of the feasibility of texts and archaeology has had an entirely negative effect in at least two respects. The veracity of a text over place names and objects has been instrumental in ascribing of them writing degree zero. More importantly, the writing degree zero has been used for constructing a historiography of the tribe (conceived as static) and a scheme of their descent from Ancient of Modern India that is often conjectural and methodologically highly dubious. In these two respects as probably in others, the existence of texts as period—pieces has brought problems rather than windfall solutions and records of ancient social structure where tribes are concerned. As traces of the past in the present, a text like the Arthasastra has served generations of archaeologists and historians as a mine of information to reconstruct the Mauryan period (c. 400 B.C.) in which it was apparently written. With textual materials available from c.1500 A.D., and archaeological evidence much before that, the question of selecting methods of enquiry suffers several dilemmas. The seduction of assuming fully self-conscious and socially, politically and economically discrete groups has characterized Indology and, surprisingly, recent scholarship. If it is possible to show with Paharia society under early periods of Colonial rule, that ethnicity

Clearly, tribal monuments were not to be any part of this breakthrough for Orientalist Research or archaeology60. All three disciplines then, used texts and monuments as their primary material and in this respect retained the basic position that texts and monuments were not mere examples of the doings of the ancients but were adequate representations or reportages of the periods in question. Thus, there was little debate about the historicity or the truth content of these texts. The mention of sixteen mahajanapadas or ancient republics was assumed as real and these could be represented on maps, providing empirical flavour. The Arthasastra’s extensive discussions on the nature and stratagems of State administration were also taken to mean that such States were in fact extant. The 19th century Journals that are replete with notes and news of discovery on issues of Orientalist or Indological concerns scarcely touch upon any issue connected with the antiquity of tribes and so on.

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

(both internal self-image and awareness of their place in the general social context) was not a simple process, at least not coherent and consensual to the degree imagined by the proponents of the Dasa and Dasyu concepts, then how can we possibly argue the same for the remote past, the evidence of the texts notwithstanding?

questions then anything else. The perceivable elegance in the continuity of the narrative must then be ascribed to the historians’ craft rather than to the lucid translation of a real or natural flow of time and events. This criticism is made specifically with reference to the fallacy of assuming the uninterrupted descent from Ancient to Modern India of clearly discrete and spatially segregated identity groups such as urban-dwelling castes and rural-dwelling tribes who are relegated to the inhospitable hilly and frontier zones. New sources for reconstruction of tribal history have to be found.

it is a tendency of history writing to project the early texts as predecessors to the documents, and this is clearly based upon the concealment of the difference between them, rather than the similarity, which arises from the contexts of their production. Certainly no student of civilization worth his salt would classify the Rig Veda or the Arthasastra in the same category as medieval or modern historical sources, and indeed this seems to be the point in the cliché that ancient Indians lacked historical sense. However, is it possible that the actual narrative of history writing has coerced the reader into ascribing the same writing-degreezero to the ancient texts? In the compendiums of Indian history that attempt the narrative of an uninterrupted flow of history from Neolithic to the present, in my opinion, the easy passages of eras and periods throws up more

5.4 Conclusion In this chapter we have tried to isolate the biases existing within the domain of ancient Indian history vis-à-vis the tribe. How much attention have we given this issue, even if we cannot deny that the Indian tribes as seen today have had a continuous presence on the subcontinent from prehistoric times? The next part of the work turns to considering Indian ethnoarchaeology and the place of tribes within its discourse.

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PART III: Indian Ethnoarchaeology

that which constitutes rural India and its Archaeology. The Vikramshila monastery of the Palas at (Antichak), the Udhwanala where the East India Company forces defeated Shah Shuja, the Mughal Mint and Singhi Dalan at Rajmahal, the Sicry-gully Pass from where the Mughal and Maratha armies marched to Bengal, and not least the fort Teliagarhi on the Ganges which was so important as to be the subject of several Company Artists’ attentions in the 18th and 19th centuries (e.g. William Hodges, 1793, William and Thomas Daniell’s Oriental Sceneries). But what does a shifting cultivating hill man of this area, the Savariya Paharia, or for that matter the lowland rice cultivators called the Santhal know about all this—the history, the geology, the prehistory as indeed the national history or the various other histories with which this area is connected. In 1981-1982, 1983-84, I happened, in the course of a survey, to locate some predominantly microlithic assemblages in the hilly regions of the Rajmahal that now lend greater antiquity to human habitation in the hills than hitherto fore deduced. Earlier workers of postcolonial period such as R.C.P. Singh and Mr. Sita Ram Roy were able to locate artefacts but that only from the foothill regions of the Rajmahal. After my finds, we now know that even these hills were populated in the times approaching the Neolithic (period), a fact not known about the highlands before my survey. I may therefore well argue that my finds substantially changes the Regional Archaeological picture of the Rajmahal area.

This part of the book consists of three chapters that discuss aspects of Indian archaeology in the light of postprocessual concepts. First, we engage in an ethnography of the archaeology in Santhal Parganas, to locate the inherent biases in research so far. Second, we consider the issue of tribal heritage and its presevation in the context of Jharkhand. Third, we consider the tribal heritage of Jharkhand and the best means of its preservation. Finally, we discuss the archaeology of the Rajmahal Hills from a surface archaeology approach.

Chapter 6 Ethnography of Archaeology in the Santhal Parganas: A view from the Rajmahal Hills, Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand 6.1 Introduction The ethnography of archaeology has emerged in the postprocessual context recently as a method for examining the biases in the microprocesses of archaeological methodology61 and is a term ascribed to an approach recently used by archaeologists to study the methods they employ to uncover and interpret the past62 The emphasis in this chapter, needless to say, from the use of the term ethnography, is the attempt to analyze archaeology itself, to understand the biases that attend the time-honoured conventions of this practice. In this chapter therefore we shall focus on Santhal Parganas in order to grapple with the broad parameters of this emerging method of analysis, in the Indian context63.

6.3 Antiquarianism and archaeology in Santhal Parganas However, For the purposes of this chapter and in keeping with the framework of analysis proposed (in Chaddha 2002 and Edgeworth 2006) here, there are in this context two simple question to ask. 1) What do these finds tell us about the positioning of Indian archaeology in this region in the long-term? 2) Why are the hilly and forested areas in this region and elsewhere in Bihar in neglect from an archaeological point of view? The answer to the first question is that the finds of prehistoric assemblages in the Rajmahal almost fifty years after India gains independence is fraught with meaning. Are our hills and forests any less significant than the plains, where one after another thousands of archaeological discoveries have been made before and after Independence?64 It seems to us that the comparatively slower rate of finds connected with prehistory of areas forming the hinterland to the Indo-Gangetic plains seems inextricably linked with the view Indian archaeologists hold even today about the possible ethnic affiliation of such finds—with the present day Scheduled Tribes. it goes without saying, that during

6.2 The Field As we approach the Rajmahal hills (see plates in chapter 7), lying on the southern bank of the Ganges, but a few miles from where the mighty river turns southwards, we enter an ancient and singularly significant domain. It is conjectured that these hills were once a part of the Southern African Plate and therefore a lot of Jurassic flora are found here along with mines and minerals of great importance, all owing their origin to the Basaltic Lava Flows that constitute the Rajmahal. The Rajmahal Archaean Gneisses are thought to be among the oldest in the world. From the vantage of these hills much may be seen of I am grateful to Matthew Edgeworth for his comments on this chapter. given sometime in 2006. I may add here that he does not agree that the analysis that I have undertaken in this chapter constitutes an ethnography of archaeology at all (pers. comm.). In his reckoning, as I have understood, the ethnography of archaeology is constituted by the study of the microprocesses of archaeology. Why then have I persisted in labelling this chapter as such? This is because in my reckoning we never arrive at a micro view of things without first going macro! 62 I have first encountered the term in a session named as such at the fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC5) at Washington D.C, 2003. 63 See Chaddha, A. 2002. Visions of disciple: Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the archaeological method in India (1944-1948). Journal of Social Archaeology 2(3): 378-400. 61

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Researches in the Indo-Gangetic Plains by Lal (2005), Narain (1976), Makhan Lal (1997), VK Thakur, Singh (2005), Jayaswal (2008), Vibha Tripathi (1998), Dilip Chakrabarti, B.P. Sinha (1998) and Bijoy Choudhary are landmarks. There is no comparable list of names of archaeologists who have worked in the modern Jharkhand area in the post-independece period. Some notes and news occur relating to Asura sites (iron-working, megaliths etc.) in colonial accounts and Barudih, Chandil and Lota Pahar are sites surveyed in independent India (see Narayan, 1996).

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

the 18th and 19th centuries, when the first of the prehistoric artefacts were being discovered, informed opinion about their ethnic affiliation was also very similar65. The answer to the second question lies in the fact that much of the discoveries of ancient and pre-historic India were guided through the 18th and the 19th centuries by Indological concerns. According to this, the discovery of Prehistoric assemblages or palaeoliths was certainly ascribable to very ancient peoples, the remnants of whose cultural practices were to be found in the castes and tribes of the day66. A contrary view could have emerged, say from the Nationalist archaeologists and historians of the day. However for the better part of the 20th Century (prior to Independence) the historians and archaeologists of the nationalist school did not in anyway pose a counterargument to this long-held argument hypothesis; concerned as they also were with finding the great and the grand in the Indian tradition. More recently the greats of Indian Archaeology, B.K Thapar, H.D Sankalia, F.R Allchin have not either effectively countered the notion that it would be erroneous to draw a one to one correlation between prehistoric cultures and extant tribal populations. Prehistory was also neglected because it was largely the nationalist concerns prevalent among Indian antiquarians of that period that only by discovering the great and the grand could they best serve the purposes of an Indian Archaeology. Therefore topics such as the origin of State and Government in Ancient India or reconstructing Indian civilization after 6th century B.C. (cf. K.P. Jayaswal’s Hindu Polity) proved to be the hot topics of the day. Naturally the historians and antiquarians such as A.S. Altekar, K.P. Jayaswal, D.R Bhandarkar, and R.K. Mukherjee of this period had an eye on communicating these ideas about Indian tradition prior to colonial contact to the British reading public as well as the Indian. The emphasis on discovering the great and the grand by the British was quite another project. This was mainly with a view to glamorise a colonised nation, “see what great people we rule” sort of attitude67. Thus the explanation for the neglect of prehistoric foundations of regional cultures is evidenced by the extreme pre-occupation of historians and archaeologists with finding grand sites that would enhance the image of pre-colonial India, but not necessarily as far back as the prehistoric period

indicated that the actual existence of lithic materials in this area were reported much earlier in the 18th and 19th centuries by those such as Valentine Ball (1880) and others (see Narain, 1990). The further post-independence tool finds in the Santal Parganas and Chotanagpur were as follows69: in 1951 by Surjit Sinha, in 1952 by R.C. Kar and H.C. Chakaldhar. In 1955, Dharani Sen made some more finds again at Barudih. Such finds in which in some cases Neolithic artefacts were found along with Northern Black Polished Ware (which is a ware connected usually with the Mauryan Period) were continued to be made till recently. Between 1959 and 1960, Sita Ram Roy, and others of the K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, in the course of their exploration in South Bihar collected two Neolithic Celts and a polished roller from the vicinity of Lota Pahar and one Neolithic Celt was picked up from Chandil in the Singhbhum district, well south of the present Santhal Parganas. A small mound near the village Barudih in the Sanjay valley near Sini was taken up for exploration and test digging was carried out at Dugni between 1964-65 and 1967. Digging at Barudih revealed polished axes, adzes and other stone artefacts. These have typological similarity with tools of the Bodding Collection (see Bodding 1904). These type finds have continued to be made throughout the 20th and this century. From 1961-69 a survey was carried out in the Bhimbandh area in Munger district, which recorded Neolithic stone implements. The surveyors R.C.P. Singh and others of Patna University also obtained Neolithic tools such as axe hammers, ring stones, and a small Celt from this area. The latest work by Prof. Vidula Jayaswal, at Paisra, a Mesolithic site is very significant (Chakrabarti, 2000). Two seasons of excavation at Chirand in the District of Saran between 1961-64 and 1967-70 under Shri B.S.Verma, of the Directorate of Archaeology, Government of Bihar, brought to light for the first time a full-fledged Neolithic culture in the Ganga valley. Numerous other finds were made from this outstanding excavation. From 1972-1982 Dharani Sen (of University of Calcutta), collected Neolithic Celts, pottery and beads during his reconnaissance survey of Barudih in Chotanagpur. Between 1975 and 1977 Mr. S.R. Roy and others of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Bihar, also collected a number of Neolithic celts and mace heads from Ghorangi near Chandil in the Singhbhum district. In 1977-1978 Mr. R.S. Bisht and others of the Mid-Eastern circle Archaeological Survey of India, Patna, brought to light a Neolithic cultural phase comparable to the Neolithic period of Chirand from the excavations at Chechar—Kutubpur on the northern bank of the river Ganges, in the district of Vaishali.70 In 1983, this author brought to light a Neolithic industry in the plateau regions of the Rajmahal Hills from a surface survey carried out as part of his Ph.D. project. In 1986 D.K.Chakrabarti

6.4 Prehistoric research in Santhal Parganas In the context of the Santhal Parganas, we are today in a better position to trace the history of archaeological research. Arguably the very first of substantial finds such as those at Barudih and Dugni and other sites of Chotanagpur plateau were made by British officers.68 We have already In the background, of course the notion of Aryans as progenitors of dominant Indian ethnic groups and the Dravidian as those of the marginal ones still lurks around (see Pratap 2003). 66 See Pratap 1987 for a better discussion on Indian Antiquarians and their biases. See also Singh (2004). 67 See Pratap 1988 also for a review of colonial attitudes to India’s Prehistoric Past. Another interesting article on early middle and late British attitudes as reflected in literature regarding the Indian Landscape is Rajan Nayar’s The Sublime Raj published in the Economic and Political Weekly. 68 Like Capt. Beaching, Valentine Ball, Le Mesurier, W.H.P Driver, J. 65

Wood Mason, W.H Anderson, J.H. Hutton, E.F.O. Murray and the Missionary P.O. Bodding (see Narayan, 1996). 69 These collections are usually housed at the Patna Museum. See Narayan V. 1990 for plates and descriptions of these. 70 See Narayan, V. 1996. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Bihar. K.P. Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, for a detailed discussion of this significant site.

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in course of his archaeological survey of the Chotanagpur plateau and the Santhal Parganas discovered a fragment of ring—stone and polished ring-stones at sites located in Palamu and Hazaribagh and Giridih districts. His discovery of the Damin industry (upper palaeolithic) from lowland Santhal Parganas is also published. Most recently field surveys carried out by Satish K. Tyagi and Dr. Rajiv Ranjan Sinha, Department of Archaeology of Bhagalpur University, has brought to light an upper palaeolithic site from around the Rajmahal hills. Also excavations carried out at Maharajpur, east of the Rajmahal Hills, by S.N. Jha of the Directorate of Archaeology, has brought to light a Neolithic occupation horizon complete with tools of bone, antler as well as ground and polished stone axes (both pers. comm.). Manoj Kumar Singh and D.K. Chattopadhyaya of the University of Delhi surveying well east of the Rajmahal, in the Kharakpur hills, have also located significant palaeolithic sites71.

question that arises, then, is that if this is obtaining in the Santhal Parganas, Jharkhand, over the span of time that archaeological and Indological studies have existed, then what does this in sum tell us about subbaltern archaeology in India? The message this gives us is quite simple. It tells us that prehistory was not pursued since it would only shed light on the past of the lower Castes and Tribes considered inferior to the dominent ethinicities. Thus in its place in the fashion of the day much ethnographic writing also emanated from this district72. Numerous commentaries exist as to the reasons for the origin of ethnographic literature per se and ethnographic fiction that was created during the colonial period (Said 1978, Nayar, 2007). In our view the immediate reason for this seems to be that this body of literature owes its origin to the fascination with the savage for the administrative reason that more needed to be known about the district for its better administration. The earliest of the ethnographers, for our purposes, such as Buchanan Hamilton, Valentine Ball and W.S. Sherwill were really polymaths who speak about the Paharia as an aside to their mission of inscribing as much as they could of such things as the quality of the people, their language and customs, land and forests, the climate, native industries, flora and fauna and minerals of commercial importance. Indeed they were also insightful enough to note the antiquities occurring in the routes of their journeys. In the case of Santhal Parganas the very first significant finds are attributed to P.O. Bodding the Norwegian missionary stationed at Mohul Pahari Santhal Mission. Bodding was an antiquarian and he avidly collected neolithic ground and polished basaltic axes when he first chanced upon them in and around the Rajmahal Hills, and later instructed his retinue, the Santhal, to look far and wide for these and to bring it to him when discovered. It is also to be noted that in the manner of the times, Bodding (see bibliography), after he had collected over two thousand of these very obviously Neolithic ground and polished axes made separate gifts of these to the Museum at Patna but also to those at Oxford (the Pitt-Rivers Museum) as well as to the Ethnographic Museum, (Oslo). In his own paper, written around 1904, P.O. Bodding subscribes closely to the antiquarian ideas of his day that these implements were not at all the product of the processes that the Santhal ascribed to its origin73. Furthermore he opines that these axes have an affinity with ground and polished tools of the southern Indian tradition, an idea endorsed by Allchin (....). He does submit that they were products of prehistoric human activity. Bodding, in an ethnographic aside also mentions that the Santhal had a variety of ethnomedicinal uses of these tools. Bodding mentions that neolithic axes were dipped into water and

6.5 Review of archaeology and anthropology in the Santhal Parganas 1771-2008 In this section we offer a review of archaeological as research in the Santhal Parganas as from an ethnographic perspective. In the Santhal Parganas archaeologically, the real impetus of research comes with Alexander Cunningham’s appointment to the post of Chief Surveyor of the Archaeological Survey of India (Roy, 1996). But as we have already stated the story of archaeology in the Santhal Parganas, in Alexander Cunningham’s period, is really one of discoveries and excavations of relics related to the great and the grand tradition of Indian archaeology—finds made were those such as Bodh Gaya, Nalanda, Pataliputra, Nonagadh, Rajgir, Indappa to name just a few. Discoveries of temples, stupas, inscriptions, sculpture, rock-cut caves, and other excavations and surveys connected with themes such as the original extent of ancient Pataliputra, were made. The location of places mentioned by the Buddhist travellers to India such as Hieun Tsang was another of Alexander Cunningham’s passion. Scores of antiquarians such as Waddell and others devoted their entire working careers to finding the original extent of ancient Pataliputra. In this period we have very little evidence of surveys connected with prehistoric archaeology or excavations that would have thrown light on the tribal traditions of Bihar. Naturally then, in this period the discovery of palaeolithic and other cultures from the Santhal Parganas are few and far between. We have already pointed out the broad pattern of postindependence prehistoric research in the Santhal Parganas. It would seem from this that prehistoric research was slightly haphazard and certainly interpretatively scanty as well as to research on and for the remains connected with the great tradition of Indian civilization, even taken by itself, prehistoric research seems to have been undertaken in fits and starts and no great attention has been given to these finds even after independence. The

We have included in the bibliography citations of the main works in this category such as those of F.B. Bradley-Birt, W.S. Sherwill, R.B. Bainbridge and Buchanan Hamilton and much later in the twentieth century the work of William Archer and Mildred Archer. 73 It is said that the Santhals who discovered, collected and supplied these implements to Bodding had an indigenous term for the implements pronounced as—Chetter Dhiriee—or the lightening stone. The Santhal thought that these tools usually occurred at places where lightening struck during the monsoons. 72

See Bhattacharya, D.K. and Singh, M.K on their Stone Age finds at Adhwaria published in the Purattatva.

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that the Santhals believed that drinking this water would cure many diseases.

groups who should be studied ethonographically; and proper research on this had to await the coming of archaeology in its very modern sense. Here we may add that so far as regional archaeology is concerned, as well as, a public view of the Indian past, even today extremely medieval notions of how such artefacts originated and what we stand to lose if such research is pursued—hamper the advance of prehistoric archaeology in the tribal areas. Thus interpretative research in the tribal dominated districts of Santhal Parganas continues to be weak (however see Pratap 1987, 2000 and 2004).

It seems that the work of the Archaeological Survey in the further period from 1900-1947 continued espousing a policy very much similar to the previous period. Survey and excavations continued to be focussed on Bihar plains and macro—sites such as Bodh Gaya, Pataliputra, and Rajgir. As mentioned before, however, significantly though, the period 1771-1900 shows a profusion of ethnographic material on Santhal as well as Paharia. As cited above, most of the prehistoric archaeology work in modern Santhal Parganas seems to have been undertaken in the era after independence. We have already mentioned, in a previous section the works of R.C.P. Singh, Sita Ram Roy, F.R. Allchin and D.K Chakrabarti, although work carried out by those such as Dharani Sen at Dugni and Barudih74 is still very significant for understanding the sequence of cultures in the Santhal Parganas. It would therefore be pertinent to conclude that the hiatuses and imbalances in the way prehistoric research work has progressed since Alexander Cunningham tells us that prehistory of the Santhal Parganas was ignored mainly because it was assumed to be directly connected with the history of marginal ethnic

6.6 Conclusion In this chapter, we attempted to examine the main currents of prehistoric research in rural Santhal Parganas. In doing so, we have applied some of the concepts of the kind of selfexamination espoused by an ethnography of archaeology approach. We did find that there are significant gaps in the prehistoric research, in which wittingly or unwittingly the pasts relating to the tribal folks of the district gathered dust until well after independence. The next chapter turns to considering the issue of tribal heritage in the Santhal Pargana and its preservation.

For recent review of this site the work of R. K. Chattopadhyaya, University of Kolkata is relevant (Pers. Comm.)

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argued that archaeologists must not study landscapes only from a utilitarian point of view—that is their potential for resource in the common reckoning of archaeologists. Rather landscapes are culteral artefacts and are to be studied as constituting an important aesthetic component within human systems, past or present. Not much research, till date, in India, has been generated from this point of view77.

Chapter 7 Tribal Heritage: The Prospect of its Preservation 7.1. Introduction Having discussed something of the archaeology of the Santhal Paraganas in this chapter, I pose the question— what is tribal heritage? And secondly, what is the view we are to take of it regarding its conservation? Much has been accomplished, before and after independence, by way of research and data gathering, on indigenous groups75. Lately, the Government of India has also voted in favour of the UN General Assembly Resolution of 13th September, 2007 regarding the rights of indigenous peoples and has since then also introduced a new legislation in the Indian parliament that seeks to give the tribal peoples unhindered access to their hills and forests in which their access was curtailed in the wake of the Forest Acts of the nineteenth and this centuries. However, it is anybody’s guess how much of their landscapes, ecosystems and heritage, broadly speaking, have actually been conserved at par with our Red Forts and the Taj Mahals. Separately there is now even a UNESCO resolution that advocates conservation of culturally significant landscapes irrespective of their cultural affinities. The situation today in India vis-à-vis the tribal heritage (including hills, rivers and landscapes) of ethnic or tribal peoples, generally speaking, and particularly in Jharkhand, do not present a picture wherein a clear demarcation would exist as to its ownership in the present, nor indeed, is there any significant governmental or nongovernmental effort towards its preservation. This chapter intends to introduce these aspects of tribal heritage as constituting a significant factor for heritage conservation.

In a countrywide perspective, as per a distribution map issued by the Anthropological Survey of India (see their Tribal Atlas of India), rather much of the countryside in states like Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Orissa (in Middle India); and Karnataka, Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala (in southern India); and Gujarat and Rajasthan (in Western India); and Assam, Manipur, Arunachal, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland (in the northeast of India), and Andaman and Nicobar Islands (off the southern coast of India) are current habitats of tribal people. In these areas, at once, hundreds of square miles of territory are occupied by tribal people, be they huntergatherers, pastoralists, or shifting agriculturists, plough agriculturists or crafts people or tradesmen. In the Deccan and western India many tribal peoples occupy themselves as pastoral folks. In the case of the North—East it would appeal that the tribal heritage has descended from several centuries past of recorded history and is to be found flourishing in the areas of their present or past residence. Can we possibly ignore this national resource any longer? Yet it must be said that tribal domains of India have been the site for the continuing depredations of their natural wealth such as of forests, hills, rivers and the landscape broadly speaking. Jharkhand itself was subjected to a rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century and with the development of Iron, Aluminum, Manganese, Copper, Mica, Coal and other mines, with the development of Hydro-Electric power such as through dams over Damodar, Ajay, Subamerakha and Mayurakshi rivers; and through a rather direct set of exploitative legislations with respect to the forest dating to the late nineteenth century the area was all but wrested from indigenous control. It is relevant here in the modern times, to speak of the Sardar Sarovar Project that has devastated the lives and ecology of numerous indigenous peoples that used to inhabit the cachement area of the river Narmada.

7.2. Tribal landscapes The world over, the issue of conserving cultural landscapes is gaining momentum. In the academic realm the appearance of Christopher Tilley’s Phenomenology of the landscape and Matthew Johnson’s The Idea of Landscape has ushered in an era of landscape studies in archaeology. Although this line of thought already existed within geography before Tilley’s and Johnson’s work, it has gathered strength, and literature discourses on understanding archaeological sites within their (landscape) context has begun to appear. Briefly, the argument in this line of thought is that people live within landscapes and perceive them in ways typical to their own culture. Thus culture is always, and has been, predetermining the way landscapes are perceived and used76. Tilley and Johnson seperately have

In India it is commonplace that the protected monuments are those usually associated with the predominant ethnic groups of the country which for the best part forms the Indian heritage that is much so talked about this world over. Usually a large part of the national budget, for such purposes, is also allocated to such monuments. Tribal heritage, in contrast, consists of megalithic type burials (in the Chotanagpur Plateau), places of worship, in natural rock formations (caves, waterfalls, hill ranges, forests and so on), and sometimes, as in the northeast, of menhirs and megaliths such as those attributed to the pre-Ahom kings

See Singh, K.S. (Ed) The People of India Series of the Anthropological Survey of India. There is also a great deal of photographic, physical anthropological, as well as social anthropological data on India gathered since the 18th century, that is stored in the Anthropological Survey of India and the larger of the museums of India such as the National Museum, Delhi, the Indian Museum, Kolkata, the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai, and the Chennai State Museum. 76 See Johnson’s redoubtable work The Ideas of Landscape on this in the British context. Tilleys Phenomenology of the landscape is also 75

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useful on this account. However, see Bibliography for Bishnupriya Basak’s very interesting study in the Ayodhya hills of Midnapore district where she has attempted to understand how landscapes of the past existed in her area of study.

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Plate 7.1 Approach to Rajmahal Hills by road during monsoons.

Plate 7.2 Foothills of the Rajmahal in floods

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Plate 7.3 Approach from Sahibganj to Rajmahal hills

Plate 7.4 View from northern crest of the Rajmahal Hills

Plate 7.5 Northern view showing the lowlands and the river Ganges. 39

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Plate 7.6 View inside the hills with clearances for shifting cultivation

P late 7.7 Plough agriculture in the northern lowlands

Plate 7.8 Sunrise on the Ganga 40

Tribal Heritage: The Prospect of its Preservation

Plate 7.10 Paharia children

Plate 7.9 Paharia children

Plate 7.11 Village scene in the morning

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Plate 7.12 Agricultural plot clearance in progress

Plate 7.13 A hill stream For the rest, cairn burials, stone circles, stand out as another category of heritage in tribal country sides. In southernIndia Megalithic-type burials are to be found uniformly throughout the Deccan Peninsula (see Murthy, U.S.R).

District). There is here also a great concentration of tribal folks (particularly in eastern and Western Ghats) and in the coastal areas, all the way up to the Andaman Islands, that practice everything from pastoralism to hunting fishing and. agriculture. Perhaps it should be added here that tribal habitats on the whole are mountainous, heavily forested— in central, southern, eastern—and in the northeast, and in Rajasthan and Gujarat which are arid zones.

7.3. Conservation of tribal heritage: peopling the hills Occasionally, inscriptions on rocks, as well as rock paintings also occur to a significant degree in such areas (see chapter 9. In Jharkhand particularly the best known group of rock-paintings are from Karanpura Valley in Hazaribagh

Lately the Supreme Court of India has evinced great interest in protecting monuments of national importance (Like the 42

Tribal Heritage: The Prospect of its Preservation

Taj) that are atrophying due to industrial or environmental causes. However, there is no clear evidence as yet that the honourable Court has extended benign eyes to the folk and tribal monuments and landscapes.

times in India the calls to arms for such purposes have come from people such as Mahahweta Devi (Jungle ke Davedar) Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide), and Vasudha Dhagamwar (2006) rather than from formal academics.

It is thus clear that conserving tribal heritage would mean conserving it in situ. It would also mean that at once both the ecological niches as well as elements of immobile heritage may (including megaliths) have to be conserved. Not much may be said about the tribal landscapes (wooded and forested) that are already deforested under the impact of permanent settlement78. in places that were thick jungle and that housed a great range of fauna (mentioned before in the case of the Santhal Parganas), and amidst which tribal settlements existed, there is today often not a single tree for as far as the eye may see. Even so the prospect of conserving that ecosystem, which remains, and investigating possibilities of regenerating it as well as preventing further such damage is important and central to the idea of conserving tribal heritage. In recent

7.4 Conclusion In this brief chapter we have tried to show that under the new conventions of UNESCO regarding conservation of cultural landscapes and lately the UN resolution of 13th September, 2007 that is a declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples, there is much by way of resolutions for preserving landscapes that are of significance, in tribal and even non-tribal areas. Such steps would be a means of according to tribal areas their own sovereignty that is in any case underlined by more and more proposals of the government (such as the Tribal Lands Bill) far beyond granting further separate state status to several of our predominantly tribal areas.

Land legislation enacted by the British which gave fillip to plough agriculture (see Baden Powell’s Land Systems of British India) over other means of subsistence.

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to be surveyed the more effective is the survey likely to be in locating artefacts, assemblages, and the sites of significance. This I would imagine would be the benefits of using modern technological aids. The real problem however is after assemblages are discovered—issues like what to sample, sample-size, the sampling techniques to adopt, continue to dog the field archaeologists. Although, in theory, much may and has been written about sampling methods by archaeologists and statisticians, however, in field situations it is my experience that a compromise of one kind of another has to be made—for very simply the local community may object to stones being removed or to too many of them being removed. The commonest techniques then, after an assemblage is discovered, is the broad spatial mapping of these prior to collection, and then using a reliable-sampling technique, such as a random or stratified random sample, is taken so as to best understand the composition of an assemblage, in terms of spatial patterning, raw material use, and typology.

Chapter 8 The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach 8.1 The Strategy for surface archaeology It would be appropriate here to observe that for the most parts Indian Archaeology till this millennium is survey based. From the works of archaeological survey in thesis submitted to Universities, to the work of research institutes like the Deccan College and university departments of archaeology and that of the Archaeological Survey, it is the finding of previously undiscovered sites that brings accolade. In this chapter, with recourse tour own surveys in the Rajmahal Hills, we would like to make suggestions regarding archaeological work particularly in tribal areas such as in Central India, North-Eastern India, Eastern India, and the Eastern and Western Ghats regions of Southern India, as these are all, without exception hilly and forested, with minimum soil profile development. Towards the end of archaeology in these areas, we would like to draw attention to our own work in the Rajmahal Hills in 1981-1982, 1983-84, 1992 and 1996 and 2006 (see bibliography).

In our own field-work, in the years cited above, we were faced with at least three fine assemblages and numerous single artefact occurrences in the Rajmahal highlands. The sites were named as BGB, PCH and CDH (see below) and the locational factors were noted in order to ascertain the functional roles to each of these sites (see below). Since, all three, of these, were located near water sources, a priori, we may say that these were camps of some sort. The first BGB was also assigned base-camp status precisely because there was the presence of a large amount of debitage and locationally it favoured the possibility of year-around residence Over 10% sample for each of these three sites was taken grid-wise and put into envelopes and removed for analysis.

While the usefulness of survey based ethnoarchaeology has been emphasized elsewhere (Ebert, 1979, Eder 1984, Kramer and David 2001, and Lewarch and O’brien 1981) there are numerous examples of survey-based studies that are not possible to mention here are today available to us in our country. Almost all begin with planning the survey on the basis of 1 inch to 1 mile maps to locate precisely where the survey is to be carried out. This in itself poses no problems, since this series of maps are still available to us from when they were first drawn in the 1930s. However newer techniques such as GIS and GPS based survey techniques, The LAAR (see Marathe), as well as Remotely Sensed Images (RSI) from the INSAT (Hyderabad) are also now available. The GPR (The Ground Penetrating Radar) has already been used a few years ago in the context of subsurface structures at the site of Ayodhya. In addition, The Space Shuttle Program of the NASA on request also provides real-time images of selected parts of India that were freely available as far back as 1984 in Cambridge and I feel sure that Indian archaeologists, without doubt, would also as on date have access to these.

On the analysis of frequency of types of artefacts the overarching presence of finished tools (see table below) from all three sites suggests that each of these three sites were manufacturing camps: Chips and flakes or fragments, as expected to occur, were chiefly of Chert, Chalcedony and Agate. The Rajmahal Hills yield various types of flints and this was the chief raw material utilized. Next to Chert, Chalcedony was the preferred material for the manufacture of simple blades, backed blades, triangles and other types of geometric tools. Core tools such as axes, adzes and scrapers (simple and end scrapers were invariably made on Chert) and it was this category of tools that were found in single artefact locations. In the first instance, I labelled this industry Neolithic (purely from the study of surfaces material and their typology) due to the presence of axes and adzes (see plates 8.1 to 8.5), 8.14, as well as geometric tools (see plates 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.11, 8.15, 8.16, 8.17).79 These were fine adzes and heavy-duty scrapers as well as partly ground and polished tools such as celts and a chisel (see plates 8.12, 8.13).

8.2 Surface archaeology in Rajmahal Hills The relevance of studying surface assemblages and their sampling has been written about already (Cherry, Gamble and Shennan 1978, Mueller, 1975). How effective these are over and above other more modern techniques, named above, remains to be seen. Our own surface archaeology project in the Rajmahal Hills was carried out by fieldwalking and with the aid of 1 inch to 1 mile maps alone. However it appeals to reason that the more precise the technique is for giving the coordinates of sites and other associated features, details of the area

In the regional context the industry of the highlands may therefore be termed Neolithic because a) there is no reason 79

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It is pretty common in the Indian neolithic context to find microliths (see Thapar (1974, 1981), Akhtar (1983).

Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

to think that microlithic cultures cannot exist with polished tool tradition as at Chirand (Verma, 2008). Secondly, even if the polished celt tradition of lowland Santhal Parganas is relegated to the neolithic there are no dates from the uplands that may be earlier than these. Thus we would like to say that survey and typology in the Indian context both need a thorough revamping in the study of prehistory because in view of emerging debate, newer techniques help us retrieve vast additional data that will provide a wider view of the context of finds—geography, geology, geomorphology and so on. These will enlighten us as to the terrain conditions of prehistoric habitats in their context. So far as typology is concerned no new works redefining the Indian typological system have really emerged (see Bhattacharya and M. K. Singh) just as we continue to use the old system as if typo-technological terms like Axe, Adze and Scraper make sense. The emergence of microwear analysis is a very positive development, as theoretically these should inform us about actual functions of tools of a category. This will allow us to redefine types in the light of actual functions80.

type agriculture and which was, most likely, shifting type of agriculture81. Such thinking regarding the origin of agriculture typified not only the Indian scenario but characterised thought regarding the origin of agriculture throughout the tropical-colonised world. Indian scholars, however, were less likely to pontificate along these lines (see Sharma, G.R, 1980) for reasons peculiar to our circumstances. The simple reason for this was that shifting cultivation in contemporary (even historical) contexts was largely practiced by tribal folks. Herein lay the problem. To say that modern Indian agricultural practices were somehow connected with and owed their origin to tribal (non-Aryan) systems was anathema to most with the exception of those such as the historian D.D. Kosambi (1956, 1965) and the sociologist G.S.Ghurye (1943, 1963, 1980). Thus it is that while the finds connected with earliest agriculture in the subcontinent include many varieties of low-rain-fall crops very few archaeologists ventured to suggest that these might have been connected with Jhum. Sharma (1966) and lately Roy (1981) both stand tall in conducting surveys and excavations to investigate agricultural origins in the northeast of India. However in a country like India, with its varied climatic regimes it is not possible that in all cases shifting agriculture type of economy precedes settled farming. Certainly British colonial records of the 18th century give several instances of this type of agriculture existing at the time of colonization. A priori therefore there is no ground to believe that this technology would not have existed much before its mention in 18th century. From an archaeological point of view, the early workers who pondered over the origin of this type of agriculture, invariably related it to the neolithic as was the fashion of that day (see F.R. Allchin, 1968). The advocates of this discourse included orientalists also but also geographers like L. Dudley-Stamp, and B.W. Hodder as well as colonial administrators, and ethnologists of various hues took this view and decried its practice to boot. However no concerted effort was made at that time to verify this hypothesis. It was left only to later Indian workers to both flesh-out the hypothesis and to try to verify it as well.

8.3 Slash and burn agriculture: the status of research In this part of the chapter we aim to summarise the state of research on agricultural origins in the Indian subcontinent without engaging in any sort of palaeobotany (see Kajale 1984, Mehra 1963, Vishu-Mittre, 1968). Traditionally, South Asian archaeologists have regarded shifting cultivation (hereafter sc) as the appropriate model for considering agricultural origins in the subcontinent. However this simple assumption is fraught with deductive fallacies (See Pratap 1987). Therefore, from T.C. Sharma’s (1966) simplistic inferral of sc in the archaeological materials from Daojalihading (in Assam) to Sankar Roy’s (1981) more sophisticated attempt to impute such an agricultural model on the materials from Rengigiri in meghalaya, to this author’s attempt to track the changes in an sc system over two centuries in the Rajmahal Hills and to then to extrapolate from that onto the archaeological record of the Rajmahal we have a sequentially refined set of techniques that are being applied. Here we discuss the path forward while presenting in brief the work already done.

since such agriculture is today usually a marginalized type of activity being largely overrun by settled farm economy the country-over thus very few archaeologists even in postindependence India, except those in the eastern as well as in the north-east of India, have ventured to think this as having any relevance and have tried to draw from it such inferences as would further our knowledge of the antecedents of such agriculture (Korisettar pers comm82., Sharma, 1966, Roy 1981, Pratap, 1984, 1987, 2000, 2004). Indeed to put it in other words, it is only these archaeologists who have tried to understand the stone industries of these regions in the light of the existing traditional farming methods. It is on

It would be a commonplace that the agricultural systems of India of today owe their origin somewhere in its past. Colonial and postcolonial archaeologists of India have alike considered that the neolithic revolution in foodproducing strategies did not suddenly give rise to settled farming, but that there was a system that preceded settled From 2002-2004 the present author has carried out a microwear analysis of Neolithic implements from Chirand, a site in Northern Bihar. The tools, although typologically very different from those at Rajmahal, were fashioned, in an environment that was heavily forested. Chirand artifacts were long-known (the site was excavated in the 70s) to be associated with hunting-gathering as well as agriculture, but it was only through this authors efforts that it was possible to identify whether tools made on bone, antler as well as stone were actually used and in what manner. (See Varma, B.S. 2008 Chirand—the excavation report, Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, Govt. of Bihar, and Pratap, n.d.)

80

Recently the site Lahuradewa in Uttar Pradesh has been much in archaeological consideration as it has yielded specimens of rice from strata dated to 6,000 B.C. 82 The archaeologist R. Korisettar carried out a regional multidisciplinary survey in selected districts of Karnataka State and inferred from these, as well as palaeobotanical studies of specimens from selected trialtrenches, that shifting cultivation, in some form was the preferred economy of these areas. 81

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The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach

record, that such an exercise while providing insights into how certain tool-repertoires came into existence in those areas, also happens to throw light on the dynamics of such agriculture. Such research that yields double-insights is the need of the hour and the archaeologists of eastern and north eastern India, broadly speaking; own the patent to this dual-value archaeology. Ever since the publications of T.C. Sharma’s book in 1966 of his researches in the north-eastern part of India, particularly in Dao Jali Hading in Assam, Indian archaeologists have been aware of the continuity of the past agricultural traditions into the present. The finding of shouldered-headed celts or axes and adzes has continued to be made in parts of north-eastern and eastern India continuously from the beginning of the twentieth century, through to this day. Repositories like the State Museum of Assam (Guwahati), Patna Museum (Patna) and the Indian Museum (Kolkata) are replete with specimens of such tool-types and in great numbers. The Eastern Indian Neolithic tradition is, if one may speak generally, remarkably uniform in terms of tool types and the technology employed in their production. When P.O. Bodding (1904) a Norwegian Missionary working at a hospital in the Santhal Parganas (in the 1900s) wrote about the shouldered headed celts and other implements found in the foothills of the Rajmahal he provided a good parallel that eastern India has to offer to the polished, and shouldered-axes so far found largely in the north-east and in southern India.

modern times that quite reflect how ethnicity may well be founded even in terms of what we eat: Kodon Marua Ann Nahin, Jolaha Dhuniya Jan Nahin According to historical records this aphorism dates to 18th century and gives us the clue that those who ate millets (Kodon) and barley (Marua) were not really held in great esteem by those who ate rice. Further those who ate millets and barley were not simply the ethnic cultivators of the slash and burn kind but also plains dwelling backward and semi-aboriginal castes and tribes. Against the backdrop of the domestication of plants and animals such historical findings allow us to deepen our understanding not only of the chronology of domestication of crops and their dispersal, but also their likely impact on social superstructure of India. From another point of view Ucko and Dimbleby’s domestication of plants and animals provided or dictated almost a paradigm for research that has sustained for nearly a quarter of a century. By and large, excavation ensembles in post-independence South Asia have a palaeobotanist and a palaeontologist in their fray and in this period a fine-grain picture of the floral and faunal component of over a hundred or so sites has emerged. The work of Vishnu-Mittre, V.N. Misra, K. Paddayya, Mukund Kajale, Peter Rowley-Conwy, G.L. Badam, B.P. Sinha, B.S. Verma, L.A. Narain and scores of

On a divergent note, much has been studied and learnt also about the domestication of plants and animals since F.R. Allchin (1960, 1961, 1962, and 1969) and Bridget Allchin (1966, 1993), Vishnu-Mittre (1968, 1974) and other workers who wrote about the origins of agriculture in South Asia. At a geographically greater level Ucko and Dimbleby (...) wrote their landmark volume The Domestication of Plants and Animals. If I take the example of the work of those such as Rakesh Tiwari, Madhav Gadgil, Mukund Kajale, K.S. Saraswat, Dorian Fuller then it may easily be said that the practice of shifting cultivation must be prior to permanent agriculture in South Asia. Also the Vavilovian theory that there should be centres and non-centres in agricultural dispersion particularly in seed-crops, then not quite demonstrated, in Ucko and Dimbleby, stands vindicated in the South Asian context. This business of centres of dispersal is of course just a theory that helps us explain how similar crop species are found in differing environments. But it does not allow us to establish per se which crop species was first adopted and which next and so on for every climatic regime. So far as slash and burn economy are concerned, today there is positive confirmation that the cultigens in the slash and burn repertoire must have arrived from the drier climes say of north-western India and were from there dispersed to non-hilly country like the vast Gangetic plains. Today, more anthropologically oriented archaeologists, are wont to suggest that human groups as far back as we may imagine must have been organised in terms of their ethnicity. In the course of my research I stumbled upon an aphorism from

Plate 8.1 Hand axe on chert

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Plate 8.2 Hand axe on chert

Plate 8.3 Broken-hand axe on chert

Plate 8.4 Hand axe on chert

Plate 8.5 Hand axe on chert

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The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach

Plate 8.6 Fluted cores on chert and chalcedony

Plate 8.7 Flake tools on chert

Plate 8.8 Flake blades on chert

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Plate 8.9 Mound at Pachrukhi (RJM 2)

Plate 8.10 Tools in deposit at Pachrukhi mound (RJM 2)

other workers in South Asia has helped us to understand better the early floral and faunal regimes in the context of human settlement and subsistence economies.

as imbued with divineness, a life of its own, and for that reason it must be sacred, protected and never ever overexploited. This discovery gives a perspective to almost every thing now written regarding ecology of India in the present times. In usual archaeological parlance, we would say that it elevates the debate regarding man-land relationships from the usual plain of different types of exploitation strategies to one closer to habitus now usually a theme espoused by postprocessual archaeologists.

Also research by non-archaeologists, in south Asia, such as those by Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha and P.S. Ramakrishnan has helped us understand how ecology has been perceived by South Asians emically. This is to say that, it is their discovery, that in most cases South Asians usually in smaller groups sees nature or their eco-system 50

The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach

Plate 8.11 Points on chert and chalcedony

Plate 8.13 Mini, polished chisel with finger grooves—dorsal view. Note the edgedamage due to use.

Plate 8.12 Mini, polished chisel on chert with finger grooves—ventral view

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Plate 8.14 Macro scraper on chert

Plate 8.15 Fluted core on chert

Plate 8.16—Points on chert and chalcedony

Plate 8.17 Triangles on chert and chalcedony

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The Archaeology of Shifting Cultivation: A Surface Archaeology Approach

8.4 The stone-tool technology of shifting cultivation We may offer a few suggestions as to the stone-tool technology connected with shifting cultivation that is found widely in India83.

the data. For example Chirand in Bihar, and in places in the North West of India (Mehrgarh) and Rajasthan, where fire clearance has been suggested (by Gurdip Singh), are all grasslands or desert areas in which a shifting cultivation economy is not at all imaginable.

Firstly, there is great uniformity in the raw materials used for the making of the tool-types mentioned above, usually, largely blackish basalts freely available in these north-east, east and southern Indian zones. The second common characteristic in these three zones is the use of grinding for the preparation of the axes. The axes of these three regions bear clear evidence of grinding to produce uniform polished edges. The third common feature across the three regions is the very fine and remarkable polish that these shouldered tools carry (see plates 8.12 and 8.13 for example). The axes of these three regions bear a very good polish that makes the tool surface very smooth and amenable to a large variety of uses. If there are points of analogy between the traditions of eastern and northeastern, eastern and southern India, then there are also dissimilarities. What are these? Firstly, there is greater use of shouldering in the north-eastern tradition; whereas, in the eastern and southern tradition, shouldering is used only infrequently. There is occasionally also a difference in the raw material used given the local geomorphology. These latter dissimilarities would be evident if we compared, even roughly, the styles represented in the R.C. Kar Collection and P.O. Bodding collection (both at Patna Museum) with those from the north-east (see T. C. Sharma and Sankar Roy and various collections at the State Museum, Guwahati)84. A recent trend in research on these types of industries is to try to correlate metal tools currently in use in traditional economies of these regions with the Neolithic toolkits occurring in the same areas (Roy, 1981).

Secondly shifting cultivation involves crops such as maize, millets and beans, whose water requirement is not very high. However, these crops certainly cannot be taken in grasslands or arid zones using the shifting cultivation method85. These are the reasons why the shifting cultivation hypothesis may be applied only in selected areas. In India, from time to time, the claim for shifting cultivation is made in areas like the North-East, Bihar, Orissa and the southern states where the natural factors and slope requirement is satisfied and there are the ethnographic instances of it being practiced. Here archaeological materials occur in forested zones. These together comprise tropical or subtropical areas hence there is here the presence of high annual rainfall, which is important for shifting cultivation. Given below is a profile of the sites of Rajmahal Hills that turned-up in our survey. 8.5.1 RJM1 Baragutibera This site is located about 11 km from the village of Baragutibera (the base camp for this survey). Artefacts are spread over 50 m×70 m area and some of these are disturbed by ploughing. The density of artefacts here is 7.6 per meter square. The lithics here total 613, comprising 357 implements and 256 simple artefacts86. Implements include simple and worked blades, three types of points axes, adzes and flake-tools. Simple artefacts include cores (fluted and flake-cores) nodules and debitage. The plates below show some of the types collected from this site: 8.5.2 RJM2 Pachrukhi This site is located 500 meters from the village Pachrukhi and 50 meters from Beddo Nadi a local perennial stream. This site is about 5 kilometres from RJM1. Here the site size is about 100×50 meters and occurs in a fieldlike plateau on top of the range, although some of this wide dispersal of artefacts may have been on account of post-depositional processes like ploughing and human and animal disturbance to the site. The lithics at RJM2 comprise a total of 222 artefacts divisible into implements (91) and simple artefacts (131). Implements include simple and worked blades, simple and worked points, scrapers, borers, axes, adzes and flakes of various kinds. Simple artefacts include fluted cores and debitage. There is the presence of a small mound here, which holds promise for archaeological materials if excavated (see plate above).

8.5 Introduction to the Rajmahal material and sites The archaeology of shifting cultivation has for long been a very vexing issue (Allchin, 1960, 1969, Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza, 1973, Hames, 1983, Harlan, 1971, Hariss, 1972, Iversen, 1941, Kajale, 1984, Steensberg, 1986. Smith and Young, 1972, Mehra, 1963, Montelius, 1953, Prasad, 1989, Pryor, 1983, 1986, Rees, 1981, Sharma et al 1980, Shiva, 1989, Vishnu-Mittre, 1968, 1974, Waddell 1972, Watters, 1960). The world over we have evidence for beginnings of agriculture and in many places this is termed as incipient agriculture, an agriculture preceding settled plough cultivation. Where the geographical factors are suitable, very often, this incipient agriculture is termed as shifting cultivation or slash and burn cultivation or fire clearance. However, the requirement for the practice of shifting cultivation is very terrain specific; slope and rainfall must also be all right for shifting cultivation to be practiced. This is the reason why this system of cultivation thrives in the north-eastern states of India till today. However, in many cases, where this hypothesis has been advanced there is a lack of fit between the hypothesis and

8.5.3 RJM3 Chaldehi This site is located 5 km downstream from RJM2. This is a predominantly microlithic site but locationally similar to Recently (see Tiwari R.K.) the shifting cultivation hypothesis has been preferred for the early agricultural site in Uttar Pradesh, Lahurdewa. This is even though the site occurs in the Ganga Valley. However, some slopes occur in and around the site due to cutting of the section by the tributaries of the ganga. 86 See artefact frequency table at the end of this chapter. 85

See White and Modjeska (1978) on the role of stone-implements in elementary agriculture. 84 A good review of the southern Neolithic axes is given in Allchin (1966). 83

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Indigenous Archaeology In India: Prospects for an Archaeology of the Subaltern

Number of people normally required

Hours per day

Number of days required

Total time in hours

Cutting the forest (Darrinirpahara)

27