SITE OF DECEIT: HOW THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA FORTIFIES HINDUTVA HISTORY

Eram Agha

THE DELHI OFFICE of the Archaeological Survey of India was thrown into a frenzy on 21 July 2023. A district court in Varanasi had ordered the director general of the ASI to put together a team to carry out a “scientific investigation/ survey/ excavation” at the Gyanvapi Masjid site and submit a report in two weeks. Things had to move fast.

“It was overnight—it was that hurried,” an ASI official who was present in the office that day told me, on condition of anonymity. The ASI began immediately, but appeals to the court’s decision led the survey to be paused for a few days. Meanwhile, ASI staff began to discuss who would lead the project when it began again.

KK Basa, an anthropologist, was filling in as director general at the time. Basa consulted various senior ASI officials, including its additional director generals and several directors. One of the names under consideration was Alok Tripathi. But, the ASI official told me, another senior employee was not comfortable with the choice. A second ASI official said that Tripathi was not qualified to lead such projects, as he had “not done excavations.”

Tripathi was appointed an ADG of the ASI in 2021, after serving as a professor of history at Assam University in Silchar for several years. He had previously led underwater archaeology projects for the ASI at locations such as Lakshadweep. According to the first ASI official, Basa, too, was not keen to appoint Tripathi. The acting DG felt that it might be better for a director-level official to lead such a controversial project. Basa wanted to maintain a “buffer zone”—in case anything were to go wrong, the senior functionaries would not have to take the fall themselves.

Eventually, however, Tripathi was given charge of the Gyanvapi project. His appointment was covered widely in mainstream media, especially in Hindi newspapers. The reports were nearly identical—all of them spoke highly of Tripathi’s prowess as an archaeologist, complete with moving anecdotes about his love for the field.

Basa’s caution and the concern within the organisation was well founded. The Gyanvapi Masjid has become a sensitive political issue in recent years. Located next to the famed Kashi Vishwanath temple, the mosque has been the target of Hindu-nationalist groups since the 1930s. They claim that the original temple was razed on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and that the mosque was built in its place. The mosque was among the sites that the Hindu Right had turned its sights on after mobs razed down the Babri Masjid, in 1992. A popular slogan during the agitation was “Ayodhya toh bas jhanki hai, Kashi–Mathura baki hain”— Ayodhya is just a preview, Kashi and Mathura are remaining.

In the early 1990s, Hindu groups filed a petition staking claim to the Gyanvapi site, but the courts did not rule in their favour, and the matter remained dormant for two decades. In early 2019, Hindu youths were caught trying to bury an idol of the Hindu deity Nandi in the mosque compound, seemingly in an effort to establish a Hindu historicity to the site. Later that year—around a month after the Supreme Court delivered a verdict allowing a temple to be built in place of the demolished Babri Masjid—Hindu petitioners filed a fresh petition at a civil court in Varanasi, seeking an archaeological investigation of the Gyanvapi mosque’s origins. This time, the courts did not shut them down. A slew of petitions followed over the next couple of years, and the matter eventually reached the Supreme Court, which agreed to allow the history of the site to be looked into. The Varanasi civil court, whom it charged with handling the petitions, ordered the ASI survey. With a general election less than a year away and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party seeking a third term under Narendra Modi, the political relevance of the survey was not lost on anyone.

The second ASI official noted that leading such a survey was a clear path to finding favour with the government. While speaking of Tripathi, both the officials cited the example of BR Mani, a former ADG who had led a survey at the Babri Masjid site, in 2003. Mani authored a report stating that the ASI had found a tenth-century temple under the structure of the sixteenth-century mosque. The report would later become the foundation for the Supreme Court judgment. Mani retired as an ADG, in 2015. The following year, the Modi government appointed him director general of the National Museum, a move widely seen as a reward for his report.

“These things give a message, if you do something for the government or do the party a favour,” the second ASI official told me. “This must be on Alok’s mind. He wants to secure his post-retirement life.” Both officials told me that, within the ASI, Tripathi was seen as close to the ministry of culture, which oversees the agency, and that he had the government’s backing. “Some say the recruitment terms for the ADG post were designed keeping him in mind,” the second official said.

When I told Tripathi that people I spoke to had compared him to Mani, he laughed. “So, you are saying I am going to get a good posting?” he said. He denied that he was seeking favour from the government, noting that he was six years away from retirement. He argued that his recruitment happened in accordance with ASI rules and denied that the terms had been designed for him. “I would be happy if they did that,” he joked. He refused to comment on the Gyanvapi survey, saying the matter was sub judice. Tripathi was unfazed about his lack of experience with excavations. “Exploration or excavation, whoever goes leads the team,” he said. “Like in a cricket team, there must be a captain … Team will be there, but one person decides who will do what.”

The ASI resumed its survey on 4 August. The mosque committee appealed against the survey, and the investigation had to be halted as the plea went through the high court and the Supreme Court. Both denied the petition. The courts directed that no excavation would take place at the site and that only a “scientific survey” would be carried out, employing technology such as ground-penetrating radar and carbon-dating of the pillars and plinths of the structure. It also asked the ASI not to enter the wazukhana, the area where devotees perform ablutions before namaz, which, the Hindu side claimed, housed a shivling—a cylindrical idol symbolising the Hindu deity Shiv. The Muslim side contended that the structure was a fountain.

Staffers told me that the ASI put together a team of close to fifty people—an outsized number, according to some. “No activity within ASI gets this kind of manpower,” one of them told me. It was initially given four weeks for the survey but ended up taking nearly four months, seeking extensions from the court. The report was submitted to the court in December, and its contents were made public on 25 January 2024. It said that the ASI had found remains of a Hindu temple and idols under the Gyanvapi mosque structure. The report said that a temple “appears to have been destroyed in the 17th century, during the reign of Aurangzeb, and part of it was modified and reused in the existing structure.”

“The Gyanvapi survey was a complete waste of time,” the first ASI official told me. They said that ASI staff openly joked that the survey was a sham, especially since the team was not allowed to enter the wazukhana. “Anyone with sanity could not understand why it took so much time,” they told me. “There was a joke in the office, that what took them so long? Were they counting crows in Varanasi?”

According to the official, the outcome of the survey was a foregone conclusion—not only because it was clear which way the ruling dispensation leaned, but also because the findings were entirely unremarkable, as it was common throughout history for religious structures to be built atop pre-existing ones. “Don’t we know the cultural sequence of India? Everyone knows,” they said. “So, what happens when the temples are overriding the Buddhist stupas? This is what history is.” The official suggested that the survey was delayed so that the report could come out closer to the general election. “I do your work, you do mine, that is how the world runs,” they said. “All on government money and time.”

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA was established by the colonial government in 1861. Over the next few decades, its first director general, Alexander Cunningham, conducted extensive surveys of much of northern and central India, especially Buddhist monuments and sites. Cunningham is said to have spent personal funds on these projects, as the ASI suffered a financial crunch. In the early 1900s, it was codified as a statutory body under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act. Some of its most groundbreaking discoveries were made under the director general John Marshall, a young, Cambridge-educated archaeologist who had experience in excavations. Marshall led the ASI for over two decades, and it was under him that the Indus Valley civilisation was discovered, at sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

The organisation was dealt a blow with Partition, since the most iconic sites of the Indus Valley civilisation are now in Pakistan. Many mosques and shrines were damaged during communal violence, while other monuments, such as Delhi’s Purana Qila, became massive refugee camps. Ancient artefacts were quite literally split down the middle, between the two countries. The ASI’s post-Independence leadership, which decided to seek out more Harappan sites, also became the largest conservationist body responsible for protecting and maintaining Indian heritage—a role it continues to fulfil today.

ASI excavations at Sinauli led to the discovery of over one hundred burial sites, where archaeologists discovered evidence of swords, bows, pottery and, most significantly, a wheeled vehicle, which it called a horse-driven chariot. The findings are the first of their kind in India. Courtesy SK Manjul

“While India possesses a very large government machinery whose responsibilities range from research to the management and preservation of India’s monuments, the juggernaut among departments and directorates of archaeology and museums is the ASI that is attached to the Union Ministry of Culture,” the historian Nayanjot Lahiri writes in her book Monuments Matter. Today, the ASI is responsible for looking over the maintenance of close to four thousand monuments or structures. Roughly a third of the ministry’s funds, Lahiri notes, go to the ASI.

The ASI was always imagined as a neutral body with technical expertise, where archaeologists conducted excavations, analysed their findings, published research papers and added to the academic understanding of ancient India. Its mandate is neutrality—it is expected to stand above religion and politics, and rely only on verifiable, archaeological evidence, in order to provide a true picture of the subcontinent’s history.

This, however, has not always been the case. The ASI’s history includes archaeologists who have been accused of partisanship, serving the BJP’s political projects or acting in their own interests. Mani was one. His report on Ayodhya had invited criticism from historians such as Irfan Habib, who noted that the ASI had been less than careful with animal remains at the Ayodhya site, which could have ruled out the existence of a temple.

BB Lal, who headed the ASI between 1968 and 1972, was another. Lal, widely known to be a Mahabharata and Ramayana enthusiast, set up various ASI excavations at sites mentioned in the epics, such as Hastinapur. Though Lal found no evidence to match what was in the epics, he did discover, in 1952, a type of pottery known as Painted Grey Ware. Lal dated the PGW material culture—in archaeology, the term “culture” represents the artefacts and structures specific to a time and a region—to about 1100 to 800 BCE, over three thousand years ago. This led Lal to date the Mahabharata to around the same time. Many archaeologists challenged this conclusion because no evidence in connection to the epic had actually been found. His approach also invited criticism from several historians, including DN Jha, who described his work as “systematic abuse of archaeology.”

Lal was also derided widely for his revisionist stance on Ayodhya. He had initially claimed, in the 1970s, that the site was not of archaeological interest, but then changed his mind in the 1990s, writing about a Hindu temple on the site in the BJP mouthpiece Manthan. The anthropologist Ashish Avikunthak described Lal’s stance on Ayodhya as the “original lie” that spurred the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

In the past decade, an ideological lean in the ASI has been especially helpful for the Modi government, which relies on distorting history to legitimise a Hindutva narrative. During this period, the ASI has become a source of right-wing talking points. “There is a disconnect between academic and official archaeology. Academic is more interested in self-reflexive critical archaeology, while official archaeology is statist,” Gautam Sengupta, a former ASI DG, told me. “As you know, archaeology is a politically charged subject. If you look at the Indian situation, archaeology is volatile. There are issues which are not archaeological, and beyond the scope of the discipline, and those are entering in our discourse.”

The surveys at monuments and the ASI’s work—or lack thereof—at excavation sites across India seem to be following a script written by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. For instance, in Sinauli, located in the Baghpat district of western Uttar Pradesh, ASI excavations led to the discovery of over one hundred burial sites, where archaeologists discovered evidence of swords, bows, pottery and, most significantly, a wheeled vehicle, which it called a horse-driven chariot. This discovery was startling, the first of its kind in India. The ASI dated these artefacts to around 2000 BCE and connected them to the tail end of the Harappan civilisation. Sanjay Kumar Manjul, the lead archaeologist on the project, claimed that the chariot proved that India had the oldest-known warrior class in the world, and linked the findings to references in the Mahabharata and the Rigveda.

Sinauli has since become the focal point of a convoluted ideological battle between those who subscribe to the Sangh’s idea of history and those who do not. In this, the ASI has landed firmly on the side of the former. Its officials have conveniently contorted the Sinauli findings to construct an ancient Hindu past, despite an abundance of scientific evidence that clearly contradicts its claims. The ASI’s spin on complex archaeological evidence made it to Modi’s ears, and the prime minister then broadcast it as fact.

ASI excavations at Sinauli led to the discovery of over one hundred burial sites, where archaeologists discovered evidence of swords,bows, pottery and, most significantly, a wheeled vehicle, which it called a horse-driven chariot. The findings are the first of their kind in India. Courtesy SK Manjul

Modi has his own uses of the organisation as well. Before being appointed the DG of the ASI in 2023, Yadubir Singh Rawat was the head of the state archaeological department in Gujarat. His main claim to fame was his work in Vadnagar, Modi’s birthplace?, where he focussed on uncovering evidence of the town’s centrality to ancient India, particularly highlighting its Buddhist past. Since then, ASI excavations have supposedly uncovered a seven-layered historical site said to date back to the eighth century BCE. Those associated with this project have used these findings to claim civilisational continuity after the Harappan period—although this, too, is based on shaky ground. In 2022, India applied for Vadnagar to be recognised as a heritage site by UNESCO. Inclusion in the list is highly coveted. Besides bringing international prestige, recognised world heritage sites also receive funds and support from the organisation. More importantly, recognition signifies a permanent inclusion in the annals of world history.

Meanwhile, the ASI has demonstrated lacklustre interest in archaeological research that challenges the Sangh’s idea of ancient India. In 2015, ASI excavators in Keezhadi, Tamil Nadu, unearthed the first ever evidence of urban civilisation from the Sangam era, which is widely considered the pinnacle of Tamil art and literature. A non-Vedic civilisation, however, would not sit well with the purported Vedic origins of India. The project soon became mired in controversy. The lead excavator was transferred, and the central government withheld funds for further excavation.

From Gyanvapi to Sinauli and Vadnagar, the ASI’s misuse of archaeology to serve the Sangh’s agenda stands as testament to how sinister the project of ideological history has now become. The organisation’s evolution over the past decade has worried its own employees, many of whom felt that it ought to be more scientific and objective. “What is our mandate? Are we mercenaries?” the first ASI official said, referring to the recent surveys of religious structures. “ASI has been buried under all this muck. Somewhere, our wajood”—existence—“is coming under question. Our authenticity, neutrality is coming under question.”

“I would not say we are atheists but, when we go to mandir, mosque or church, we see the architecture first. Most people among us are like this,” the official continued. “It is not religion—it is culture, tradition and Indianness that we are trying to hold on to. But if it goes on like this, very soon, ASI will be just a name.”

THE ACTOR MANOJ BAJPAYEE, sharply dressed in black suit, black shirt, and black trousers, stands on a set that resembles a theatre stage. He delivers an impassioned monologue, peppered with references to the Mahabharata. “From the stories of Lord Krishna becoming a charioteer to Karna’s tales of war, the chapters would be incomplete without this invention, and our contemporary discovery as well,” he says, as the background music swells.

“When words fall short in the face of evidence, then…” He pauses. “This is our discovery: the first chariot in Indian history.” Bajpayee dramatically opens his arms, and an ancient, two-wheeled vehicle materialises before him. Its entire chassis, made of wood, is decorated with gleaming copper inlays. The chariot has solid wooden wheels, with copper triangles engraved in concentric circles. Bajpayee looks fondly at the special-effects vehicle, as the camera pans across it, zooming in on its design. He then proceeds to climb the make-believe chariot. “This historic chariot symbolises our glorious past—a shining example of our ancestors’ artistic creation,” he says.

The scene is from Secrets of Sinauli: Discovery of the Century, a 2021 documentary produced by Discovery+. Bajpayee is the host of the 55-minute film, which includes exclusive footage from the excavation itself and interviews with senior ASI officials, including current and former ADGs and DGs. Manjul told me that he had worked closely with the producers of the film and was “hundred-percent” involved in the writing of the script. The ASI had hired professionals to film the excavations in 2018. After the findings became public, it released a two-minute film on the site. The Discovery+ team saw this video, Manjul said, and approached him for a longer project. He said that even the graphics of the excavation sites used in the documentary were based on his own sketches.

The tone of the documentary is triumphant and nationalist, casting the findings at Sinauli as a window into the ancestry of modern Indians. In the process, it advanced an interpretation championed by the ASI and the Sangh: that the Sinaulians were the descendants of the Harappans and were warriors connected to the Vedic civilisation, which, in turn, proved the existence of a continuous, unbroken Hindu civilisation that was untouched by an Indo-European migration. These claims are riddled with loopholes and do not stand scientific scrutiny, because nearly every other piece of archaeological and biological evidence suggests otherwise. But, before getting into that, it is important to understand the ASI’s claims, and those of the Sangh, in full.

Excavations at Sinauli first began in 2005, after village residents discovered copperware, gold fragments and human skeletal remains in their fields. The ASI conducted a round of excavations and found burial sites, but returned to Sinauli only in 2018, when it conducted another, more extensive round, under Manjul’s leadership.

These excavations are the most pivotal archaeological findings in India in recent decades. In some burials, the excavators discovered copper antennae swords and helmets, alongside terracotta pots, which they believed were used for ritualistic offerings of food during last rites. Though the wooden coffins had decayed, the copper sheets and inlays decorating the legs and lid had remained. Some of the burials had human remains, such as skeletons. There was also evidence of another type of funereal ritual, possibly a cremation. Another significant discovery was a special burial site, with a decorated coffin, covered with copper sheets and adorned with floral patterns. Its lid had eight motifs that each appeared to resemble a bull, or a human wearing headgear. The most striking discovery, found in a handful of burials, was a wooden cart with copper inlays—featured as a chariot in the documentary.

The 2018 excavations at Sinauli were led by SK Manjul, an additional director general at the ASI. Manjul has attempted to connect the findings to the Mahabharata and the Rigveda. Courtesy SK Manjul

Manjul and other archaeologists, many of whom were associated with the ASI, gave their interpretations of these findings at length in the documentary. They claimed that Sinauli was connected to a late phase of the Harappan civilisation. The Harappan civilisation, or the Indus Valley civilisation, had emerged around 3000 BCE in north-western parts of the Indian subcontinent and had begun to decline around 1900 BCE, before collapsing by about 1500 BCE. The next known era, referred to by historians as the Vedic age, spanned roughly from 1500 BCE to 600 BCE, a period in which the Vedas are believed to have been composed. According to the ASI officials, as the Harappan civilisation declined, its people moved eastward, towards the basin of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers. There, they either settled or mixed with the existing population, becoming the Sinaulians.

The documentary was intent on casting Sinaulians as the Vedic people, and the Vedic people as indigenous to India. DV Sharma, a former ASI DG who led the round of excavations in 2005, quotes a burial ritual described in the Rigveda, which includes laying down the dead and offering curd, ghee and sacred plant extracts. The Rigveda also mentions cremation rituals, which there was evidence of at Sinauli, Sharma says. Niraj Rai, a geneticist who studies ancient DNA, says that the DNA extracted from the Sinaulians showed “local” identity—that is, it had no contribution from Central Asian or Eurasian DNA. “These people were the ancestors of most of the Indian population today,” he says. He does not mention that no such finding has been made public.

The presence of swords and the chariot, Manjul claims, suggests that the Sinaulians were a “warrior class” similar to the warriors described in the Mahabharata. (At many points, as the experts speak, an animation plays on screen, depicting dhoti-clad men and women wielding bows and arrows, reminiscent of drawings in Amar Chitra Katha comics, which were based on stories from Indian mythology.) In another interview to Smita Prakash, the editor of ANI, Manjul said that the design of the cart and the length of the yoke suggested it was a horse-drawn chariot. He referred to various wars mentioned in Hindu scripture and epics, which employed a rath, or chariot. Manjul said the term was the root of the name “Dasrath”— signifying the owner of das, or ten, chariots—the king and father of Ram in the Ramayana.

Only one among the experts quoted in the documentary is a little less sure of these interpretations. VN Prabhakar, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, says that more research would have to be done before such conclusions could be made about a whole civilisation.

Assertions of an ancient, martial Hindu identity depend greatly on epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which the Hindu Right likes to claim are historical accounts and not stories compiled over centuries. The Sinauli findings also impel another question that has a significant bearing on the Sangh’s idea of India: who were the Vedic people?

Scholars have theorised that the Vedic people were a population that emerged after the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation. An earlier theory, prevalent since the late nineteenth century—and propagated by archaeologists such as Marshall, who discovered the Indus Valley civilisation, and his mentee, Mortimer Wheeler, a British archaeologist who headed the ASI at the time of Independence—was called the “Aryan Invasion Theory.” The Aryans, an ancient martial race from Central Asia, were believed to have invaded the Indus Valley settlements towards the end of the civilisation, displacing the Harappans. They were said to have brought horses, chariots and military technology with them, as well as Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit, which then became the language of the Vedas.

The idea of an Aryan migration was formed because there was no archaeological evidence to connect the Harappans to the Vedas—not least because the Harappan language was yet to be deciphered and because the culture described in the Vedas did not really match the Indus Valley Civilisation. There was also linguistic evidence in the favour of a migration: the Vedas were written in Sanskrit, and there are undeniable commonalities between Indo-European languages spoken across Europe and Asia, including ancient languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, suggesting a mixing of ancestral populations.

The RSS was never pleased with the idea of such an influx. Since those who composed the Vedas are considered the progenitors of modern Hinduism, the Sangh has always insisted that they were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, in order to position Hindus as the true inheritors of the land. MS Golwalkar, who headed the RSS between 1940 and 1973, wrote, “Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous children of this soil always from time immemorial.” This approach has also allowed the Sangh to claim Muslim rule as an aberration in India, casting the Mughals as invaders.

“People link the word ‘Hindu’ to the term ‘Aryan,’ and the [idea is that] Aryans came from outside as invaders, pushing the local population into the forests—this sort of invasion is often imagined. This false perception should be broken,” Manmohan Vaidya, a joint general secretary of the RSS, says in a video uploaded to the organisation’s YouTube channel. The video, titled The Myth of the Aryan Invasion, is a part of the “RSS Knowledge series.” Vaidya walks along the banks of a river, in conversation with Krishna Gopal, another joint general secretary and Sangh ideologue. “It is true that when the British came to India, they tried to create many conflicts,” Gopal responds. “And this is why they gave a theory, a hypothesis, that the Arya people came from outside. Because the Arya caste is a superior caste, this was known. And how could the people of a slave nation be superior? That is why they created this hypothesis that Aryas were outsiders and made the local people into slaves, pushed them back.”

A screenshot from “Graves of the Great Indian warriors: Recent Archaeological Survey at Sanauli,” a presentation by SK Manjul, the lead excavator. Manjul suggests that the Sinaulians were a “warrior class” similar to the warriors described in the Mahabharata—even though scholars caution against using literary texts such as epics as archaeological sources. Courtesy SK Manjul

The ASI’s interpretations of the Sinauli findings feed directly into the Sangh’s preferred view of civilisational history. “All the initial investigations were done by the West,” Manjul told me. “They had to keep Indians down, and Western theory above. That’s why they made the theory in this way. If they had said that India had everything … How would they have ruled?” He added, “That’s why they put down our culture.”

Manjul appeared proud in his mission to prove an indigenous unbroken civilisation. “The Sinauli DNA is not yet published, but it has shown that we are the sons of the soil,” he said. “Every Indian must be proud that we had chariot technology because chariot was big thing at that time. Technological advancement in the form of chariot is a big thing. Just like missiles today, every war in those days was won by the use of chariots.”

He insisted to me that his interpretation was based only on evidence. I asked him whether the government was pleased with his findings. “Of course,” he said. “Government is very happy that this happened.” The prime minister publicly lauded the findings, Manjul told me. “The biggest change is that what we thought is fiction … those things are being proved,” he said. “It has opened a new approach, which will have a long-term impact. The history of India will be written afresh.”

The views the ASI presented in the documentary, and in the media coverage of Sinauli, had serious detractors in the archaeologist community, and some within the ASI as well, all of whom were far more cautious in their approach. Some believed that the findings were, in fact, additional evidence in favour of a migration into the Indian subcontinent. There was also a mound of conflicting scientific DNA evidence in favour of a migration from the Pontic–Caspian Steppes in Central Asia that had emerged around the same time as the Sinauli discoveries, coming from other sites excavated by the ASI itself.

THE MAIN POINTS that counter the ASI’s distortions of the Sinauli findings are centred on the nature of the vehicle discovered—on whether it was indeed a horse-driven chariot or a cart—and what it could say about the Aryan migration theory. The issue, which involves both archaeological and DNA evidence, is much more complex than the ASI would have anyone believe.

“The dispute exists because of the fact that the three buried vehicles have solid wheels, not spoked wheels that normally separate chariots pulled by horses from carts pulled by oxen or other animals,” the journalist Tony Joseph writes in his book Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From. “But those who call these ‘chariots’, or even ‘war chariots’, argue that the height of the wheel and the lengths of the pole and the yoke suggest that these vehicles were pulled by horses, not oxen.”  

One scholar challenging the chariot interpretation is Asko Parpola, an Indologist and Indus-script historian based in Helsinki. Parpola argues that Vedic civilisation would have been a mix of Arya culture and the pre-existing Harappan culture. In a 2020 paper on the Sinauli findings, he wrote, “Several indications suggest that the Sanauli ‘chariots’ are actually carts yoked to bulls, as in the copper sculpture of a bull-cart from the Late Harappan site of Daimabad in Maharashtra.” Parpola wrote that the artifacts found in Sinauli, such as the antennae-hilted swords, were also connected to the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex, a civilisation in Central Asia that existed between 2300 and 1500 BCE. The BMAC had bull carts in its iconography.

The claim that the Sinauli chariots might be the oldest in the world is also contested. Chariots are believed to have originated in the Sintashta culture, a Middle Bronze Age civilisation that existed in present-day Russia between 2200 and 1900 BCE, making it a few centuries older than the late Harappan phase. The Sintastha are also considered to be the speaker of Indo-European languages, and the original “Aryans,” by some scholars, because their burial rituals matched the rituals described in the Rigveda—which were also found in Sinauli. Parpola suggests that the Sinaulians “may represent early immigrants who had come to South Asia via the BMAC from the early phase of the Sintashta culture, when the spoke-wheeled and horse drawn chariot had not yet been invented.”

In 1992, the discoveries of five funerary complexes in Sintastha had yielded “the remains of chariots, which radiocarbon dates show were the oldest chariots known anywhere,” David W Anthony, an archaeologist, noted in his 2007 book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. “The funeral sacrifices at Sintastha settlements showed startling parallels with the sacrificial funeral rituals of the Rig Veda,” he added. Anthony wrote that the cultures in the northern Steppes “showed a common kinship with the Aryans of Rig Veda and Avesta” and that these peoples invented the chariot between 2100 and 1800 BCE.

Joseph notes in his book that, while vehicle burials of Sinauli are the first of their kind in India, the practice of vehicle burials is seen as far back as 3000 BCE, in Central Asia. The Yamnaya, a pastoral civilisation dated to around then, were known for burying bull-carts and wagons. “It is not surprising that Yamnaya started the practice of burying their wagons along with their dead,” he writes. “Wagons drawn by oxen or horses are what changed their fortunes dramatically and, therefore, it would be difficult to think of anything else that would have been more integral to their culture.” The Yamnaya were the antecedents of the Sintashta, who also had the practice of vehicle burial.

A scene from BR Chopra’s Mahabharata, a popular fictionalised television show from the 1980s, which was based on the epic.

“Considering this long background of vehicle burials in the Steppes, it is also not surprising that when we see the earliest evidence for chariots with spoked wheels anywhere in the world—in a successor culture of Yamnaya known as Sintashta … we also discover the earliest chariot burials,” Joseph writes. “Clearly, the people of Sintashta continued the practice of burying their vehicles with their dead even after they upgraded to chariots from wagons. Apart from buried chariots, the graves in Sintashta also contained remains of horse sacrifices, and impressive collections of weaponry.”

Put simply, there is existing evidence that the practices discovered at Sinauli were similar to those of preceding or contemporary civilisations in the Central Asian Steppe—the very region from which a migration into the Indian subcontinent is believed to have taken place. There is no evidence of these practices and cultures in the Harappan period, and they only become visible in later sites such as Sinauli. Joseph argues that the discoveries at Sinauli, in fact, could “provide additional evidence of a population movement into south Asia soon after 2100 BCE”—the exact opposite of what the ASI claimed.

Joseph also pointed to another key issue: the absence of horses in Sinauli, which makes the hypothesis of a horse-drawn chariot harder to believe. “The problem of the horse is this: the horse is rarely to be found in the Harappan civilisation, neither as skeletal remains nor as images on seals and artefacts, while it is very prominent and ubiquitous in the Rig Veda,” he writes in Early Indians. P Ajithprasad, a retired professor of archaeology from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda who is an expert on Harappa, also noted how horses were incongruent with the findings at Sinauli. “There is some hint on horses being found in Late Harappa, but it is substantiated that horses played an important role much later,” he told me. Equid remains had only been found at one or two post-Harappan sites, increasing only in the PGW phase. This suggests horses came to India later through migration. The discrepancy also reinforces that the Harrapans were not the Vedic people.

It is possible that ancient DNA evidence could solve the mystery of the origins of the vehicle and its presence in Sinauli. Joseph explains why.

So the really important question with regard to the recent discoveries in Sinauli may not be whether these were chariots or carts, but rather why the people of Sinauli began burying their vehicles with their dead around 1900 BCE. Also, apart from the striking vehicle burial, there are many other finds in Sinauli that are the first of their kind in India, including copper-decorated coffins and shields, helmet, whip and torch. Since it is not often that you see radically new cultural practices adopted in an existing, well-established and traditional society, the questions naturally arise: was there an influx of new migrants with new burial practices? Or did an existing population just adopt a new practice from elsewhere? Or was the sudden beginning of a new practice happenstance? Or as the dominant Harappan Civilization was declining, was there a mingling of different cultures and practices from a wide region? What could provide an answer to these questions is ancient DNA analysis of skeletons recovered from Sinauli.

Joseph notes in Early Indians that Rai, the geneticist from the Discovery+ documentary, had made “unsupported” statements about the DNA analysis of the skeletons at Sinauli, claiming it did not show any traces of Central Asian or Eurasian Steppe DNA—a claim that Manjul repeated to me. “No such report based on Sinauli DNA had been published when the documentary was released. And no such report has been published since then,” Joseph notes.

Confoundingly, some of the contradictions to the claims of indigeneity can come from Rai’s work itself. Rai and Vasant Shinde—an archaeologist at Deccan College, Pune, who led the excavations at Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in present-day Haryana—co-authored a paper, published in 2019 in Cell. It examined the DNA of a female skeleton from Rakhigarhi. The paper found that the sample had no DNA from the Eurasian steppe ancestry.

“The fact that there was no Steppe DNA in Rakhigarhi strongly supports the Arya migration theory, because Rakhigarhi is a Harappan site and the skeleton from which the DNA was collected dates to around 2600 BCE, while the Arya migration happened between circa 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE. It is, therefore, not a surprise at all that there is no Steppe ancestry in Rakhigarhi: that is exactly what the Arya migration theory would predict,” Joseph told me in an email interview. “The fact that there is significant Steppe ancestry in almost all Indian population groups today, and that there was none in Rakhigarhi, is clear evidence that the Arya migration happened much later.”

Shinde and Rai were also among almost a hundred co-authors of another paper in the journal Science, released around the same time as the Cell paper. The paper took a wider view. It outlined a DNA-based model for migrations across the ancient world, based on genetic data from 523 samples across eight thousand years. It proposed that there was a migration into the Indian subcontinent less than five thousand years ago, from the Eurasian Steppes, around the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation. These patterns mirrored the Indo-European languages spoken across much of Central Asia, Europe and South Asia. The paper suggested that the incoming steppe pastoralists mixed with some sections of the Indus Valley civilisation, giving rise to the ancestors of most north Indians today. Some Harappans, meanwhile, were pushed southward by the migration, and mixed with the hunter-gatherers indigenous to this region, giving rise to the ancestors of the southern Indian populations of today.

The Caravan had reported on these findings earlier, noting what the two papers put together made clear: “This suggests that the steppe pastoralists migrated to the subcontinent in substantial numbers after the decline of the Harappan civilisation. Moreover, both papers clearly spell out the likelihood that the steppe pastoralists were the carrier of the Indo-European languages—including early Sanskrit—to the subcontinent. This also suggests what is already rather clear from other sources of historical studies: the early Vedic corpus is not Harappan.”

BB Lal, seen here with Narendra Modi. Lal headed the ASI between 1968 and 1972, was widely known to be a Mahabharata and Ramayana enthusiast. He set up various ASI excavations at sites mentioned in the epics, such as Hastinapur. Though Lal found no evidence to match what was in the epics, he did discover, in 1952, a type of pottery known as Painted Grey Ware. His approach invited criticism from historians and scholars, who termed it a “systematic abuse of archaeology.”  NARENDRA MODI / X

Shinde and Rai backtracked from their papers immediately after it became public. Shinde said that the studies showed that the Rakhigarhi DNA was “local,” and that “the Vedic era that followed was a fully indigenous period with some external contact.” The two conducted a press conference, releasing a statement that said that the research “demolishes” the hypothesis about a mass migration during the Harappan time from outside South Asia, “or even before.” The note concluded that this “important breakthrough research completely sets aside the Aryan Migration/Invasion Theory.” Finally, it said that the research “also establishes the fact that the Vedic culture was developed by the indigenous people of South Asia. Our premise that the Harappans were the Vedic people thus has received strong corroborative scientific evidence based on ancient DNA studies.”

The Caravan had reported on the misinformation this created at the time—mainstream media failed to question the authors, reproducing their statements verbatim. Meanwhile, the RSS ideologue Tarun Vijay lauded the authors on Twitter, calling their press conference a “brilliant move.”

As Joseph sees it, the Rakhigarhi DNA results settled the question of whether the Arya were present during the Harappan civilisation. They clearly were not, he told me. “As far as Sinauli is concerned, whether there was Steppe ancestry there or not is yet to be found out. If there was Steppe ancestry in Sinauli, it would be significant additional evidence that the Arya migration happened and that it happened soon after the Harappan Civilization began declining,” he said. “If there was no Steppe ancestry in Sinauli, it would suggest that the vehicles and other new equipment seen in the Sinauli burials were likely borrowals from BMAC or early arriving Arya immigrant groups, as Parpola suggests. In neither case will it disprove Arya migration.”

The ASI officials I spoke to, including Manjul, were unconcerned about the heaps of scientific evidence that contradicted their interpretations. Rawat, the DG, gave me a long-winded response. He used a Sanskrit phrase to defend the differences of opinion: “munde munde matribhinaa”—There are as many opinions as there are people. “You cannot take one aspect. You cannot say this is the only thing because DNA is proving we came from outside,” he added. “Vasant Shinde is not saying it. He says we are indigenous people—very little bit mixing, but not much.”

Rawat felt that the focus on DNA testing of Harappan samples was only because “we want to prove they are outsider.” He seemed dismissive of the studies, saying that small percentages of Eurasian DNA were not enough. “Harappan is a composition of local people also. And we are searching four-percent Iranian, two-percent this and that,” he said. “To me, DNA is … to make you feel inferior that you came from somewhere else. Why should we? We are here from thousand years, there are streams of people coming from here and there.”

He told me that he had no doubt that the Harappans were the Vedic people. “I feel all our mythology or ancient literature that resulted from that period, [although] we are not in a position to associate to which period it belonged,” he said.

I asked Manjul why the documentary he worked on did not include any dissenting experts, such as the world-renowned historian Romila Thapar, who argues the search for a Hindu identity in ancient India is anachronistic, and also points to the issues arising from using literature as historical sources. His response sounded familiar. “This is unbelievable for them,” he said. “Actually, they are biased … When new thing comes then they think their established theory is ending. So, people try to counter.” Some dissenters, he said, “still supported Western theory … so to support that theory they give contradictory opinion.”

ARCHAELOGISTS FROM across the world gathered in the national capital in July 2024. India was hosting a session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee for the first time. The committee, formed under a 1972 treaty, is among the foremost bodies in the world responsible for recognising and protecting natural and cultural heritage sites across the globe. The sessions were spread over ten days, with over two thousand delegates in attendance.

Narendra Modi opened the session. In his address to the gathering, he emphasised the greatness of the ancient civilisations of the Indian subcontinent. “India is so ancient that every point of time in the present moment is a reflection of its glorious past,” Modi said. He spoke highly of the technological innovations of ancient Indians and called for “new perspectives to witness the past.”

The British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, photographed in London, in 1962. Wheeler headed the ASI at the time of Independence. Like his mentor John Marshall, who discovered the Indus Valley civilisation, Wheeler was a proponent of the Aryan Invasion theory, which suggested a violent influx of a martial population into the Indian subcontinent towards the end of the Harappan civilisation.

“The world experts present here must learn about the evidences found in Sinauli,” Modi said. “The Sinauli findings are from the Copper Age but instead of the Indus Valley Civilisation, they match the Vedic civilisation. In 2018, a four-thousand-year-old chariot was found here. It was horse-driven,” he said. “So, these new discoveries show that, to know India, there is a need for a new prejudice-free approach.”

Among the events on the sidelines of the convention, the ASI had organised a panel discussion, titled “Archaeology and Epic in the Light of New Researches,” on the discoveries at Sinauli. But, by the end of the discussion, no one felt more out of place than the archaeologists themselves. Manjul played me a recording of the event during one of our meetings, telling me that he had made a presentation at the event to propose the archaeology of the Mahabharata.

He began the presentation by admitting that in his profession, the process of comparing evidence to literary texts was generally frowned upon. “Normally, archaeologists try to escape going into epics or Vedic literature or even early literature to correlate with archaeological finding,” he said. “It is really dicey sometime, and it is really debatable.” But he felt such comparisons were necessary. “Nowadays, it is a topic of heart-to-heart, related to Indian society and culture,” he said. “And it is deep rooted.” He gave a forty-minute presentation of possible connections between the epic and the Sinauli findings, and ended the presentation with a photo of a chariot with a rider and horse. “We try to do experimental archaeology,” he said.

After spending the majority of his presentation on the epic, Manjul clarified, “I am not saying that Sinauli is related to Mahabharata,” but that it is “reflecting similar kind of facts and cultural aspects mentioned in Mahabharata.”

“The panel had people who are well acquainted with literature,” Ajithprasad, the retired professor, who was also a panellist, told me. “But there were also people who are historians and take archaeological facts much more seriously than literature.” One archaeologist remarked that “Manjul is trying to look for BR Chopra’s Mahabharata”—referring to a hugely popular fictionalised television show from 1988 , based on the epic.

The historian Upinder Singh wrote about the issues that literary material present in her book A History of Ancient and Medieval India. “All literary works are connected to the historical contexts in which they are produced and in which they circulate. However, an ancient text does not necessarily offer a simple or direct reflection of the society of its time. It constitutes a complex representation of that society and a refracted image of the past,” she writes. “In other cases, a text may represent an ideal, not an actual situation and it cannot be read as a description of what was actually happening at the time. Ancient texts often contain myths, and although myths can tell us indirectly about history, the two should not be confused with each other.”

Ajithprasad noted that, even if we were to draw from the Ramayana and Mahabharat to understand the cultural context of a particular age, there was not enough evidence to connect the texts to the findings. “Archaeology is interpretation based on data where the material remains are dug up in excavations. In addition to excavated materials, data comes from writing, inscriptions, et cetera. Archaeologists take all evidence coming from different sources and look at the patterns for reading meanings out of them,” he said. “So, if you look in that light, where does Sinauli stand?”

In other words, Sinauli had not yielded much evidence beyond some weaponry, a chariot and burial sites—there was no text and no inscriptions. There was no evidence of any details described at length in the epic, such as the cities, the kingdoms, the societal practices and the architecture. There was no evidence that the chariot found had ever been used in a war, or that there even was a war at all. “I was of the opinion that dragging archaeology to validate events in epics whose veracity we don’t know is actually a disservice to archaeology,” he told me. “The field is not about giving proofs to belief.”

Even people associated with the ASI were not entirely in support of Manjul’s attempts to correlate the Mahabharat to Sinauli. “I think we should not do this without understanding Mahabharat and when it actually took place. We should not associate Sinuali material with Mahabharata,” Mani, the head of the national museum and the former ADG who had conducted the Ayodhya survey, told me. “Do you know the date of Mahabharat? Then how can you associate it?”

I asked Rawat, the ASI DG, whether the Sinauli findings indicated the culture of the Mahabharata. “Very difficult,” he told me. “But Mahabharata I would not say.” He felt that the decline of the Harappan civilisation had pushed people into the Gangetic plain, creating a conflict over resources with the existing populations there. “Maybe in the memory of people, it was the fight for the land,” he said. “It was maybe recorded as Mahabharata.” Rawat was present during the UNESCO event. After hearing the differing points of view, he had concluded the panel discussion by saying, “We will do another seminar for a couple of days, and discuss this further.”

When I asked Manjul about the connections he had made between the findings and Hindu scripture, he said, “Literature can be exaggerated but it is not fantasy.” He continued, “All our gods and goddesses are warriors. Where did this imagination of a warrior come from, then?” he told me. “Even before the Mahabharata, in the Ramayana, Ram and Lakshman are warriors, and even their gurus.” I asked if the warriors of Sinauli could be a different warrior class from the ones mentioned in the texts. “No, it is not different. This is development,” he told me. “Slowly, slowly, society is developing. First Rigveda, then Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and then it went on.”

BLACK AND BLUE tarpaulin sheets covered the three thousand square metres of excavated area called Ambaghat in Vadnagar, in Mehsana district, Gujarat. The excavation site was located on a raised mound, overlooking the Sharmistha Lake. Next to the site, construction was ongoing for a large experiential museum meant to showcase the ancient history of Vadnagar. The museum and the excavation site are part of an ongoing effort by the union government and the ASI to highlight the history of Vadnagar as India’s oldest living city. The museum will house excavated items running into the thousands, obtained from various sites around Vadnagar. Visitors will also be able to walk through the digging site next door, to witness the ancient city for themselves.

I visited Vadnagar in September 2024, just days after Modi’s seventy-fourth birthday. The air was heavy with rain and a rumour: “More houses will go for the museum project.” Residents of Ambaghat told me that close to sixty homes had been acquired for the museum, and they had heard that there would be more. The disappointment with the project loomed large over the locals, who were mostly farmers from the Other Backward Classes and relied on their fields for income. Rabari Babarbhai Vastabhai, a resident and advocate who had approached the court regarding the acquisition, told me that the residents were dissatisfied because they had been displaced from their ancestral homes. Some had not yet been rehabilitated, although some had received compensation. I asked another resident, Manu, if he was pleased that important discoveries had been made in his town. “That work in the compound is fine, but where should we go?” he said. He described the project as “Kisiko dukhi karke sukhi hona”—making someone sad for your own happiness.

Government projects such as the museum have become common around Vadnagar since Modi became prime minister. Some projects highlight Modi’s connection to the town—the railway station where the prime minister claims to have sold tea, the restoration of his primary school and so on.

Others focus on establishing Vadnagar’s place in ancient Indian history. In the last two decades, excavations unearthed a sequence of seven successive cultures in the town, stretching over more than two thousand years, from the second century BCE to the nineteenth century, including during the Kshatrapa and Solanki dynasties in the first and second millennium CE. The town is surrounded by a rampart dated to about 200 BCE, and its present form is on a mound, about twenty-five metres high, that was found to have been the result of continuous habitation, making Vadnagar one of the oldest living cities of India.

“The town’s strategic location near Sharmistha Lake, along with its sophisticated water harvesting systems, enabled it to thrive despite climatic challenges that led to the decline of other settlements,” an editorial in Heritage: Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, which is published by the University of Kerala, states. The journal’s December 2024 edition, running into fourteen hundred pages, focusses on Vadnagar. It includes 46 articles on the findings in the town, all co-authored by Abhijit Ambekar, a superintendent archaeologist with the ASI’s Vadodara circle, who had been heading the excavations since 2016. “Among the most remarkable discoveries is Vadnagar’s role as a major center for shell manufacturing, with artifacts showing a revival of shell craft after the Harappan period … Additionally, religious and cultural structures, such as a Buddhist monastery, highlight Vadnagar’s importance as a spiritual and cultural hub, contributing to its lasting legacy in Indian history,” the editorial said.

The excavations at Vadnagar “reveal a twenty-five-hundred-year continuous history of human habitation and its cultural diversity,” Ambekar told me. This, he said, made Vadnagar comparable to other two-millennia-old cities such as Varanasi, Ujjain, Indrapastha and Madurai. Ambekar added that the fortification rampart around Vadnagar “indicates defence structure for twenty-two hundred years,” as compared to other historical or mediaeval cities—such as those of the Mughals—which were about five or six centuries old. In 2023, Ambekar also co-authored a paper as part of a joint study with IIT Kharagpur, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the ASI, which argued that residents of ancient Vadnagar survived by adapting agricultural practices and water-management systems to climatic changes over the centuries of its existence.

The Vadnagar findings have been the subject of widespread media coverage glorifying its history—Discovery+ made a documentary on the town as well, with speakers saying that the continuous habitation showed the town’s “resilience” over centuries, and that Vadnagar had a “special energy.” Experts in the documentary also connected Vadnagar to “Anartpura,” an ancient town mentioned in Hindu scripture, and spoke about its history as a Buddhist, Jain and Hindu centre. An India Today  headline, referring to the town’s climatic history, said that it provided a “2500-year-old solution to fight climate change.”

But, most of all, news reports claimed that the Vadnagar findings appeared to disprove the “Dark Ages” of Indian civilisation, showing continuity since the Harappan period. The period between the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation, around 1900 BCE, and the emergence of Iron Age settlements, around the sixth century BCE, was referred to as the Dark Ages by some archaeologists. The source of this claim was a press statement by Ambekar’s co-author on the 2023 paper, Anindya Sarkar, a professor at IIT Kharagpur. Sarkar told the media before the release of the paper:

Our evidence makes Vadnagar the oldest living city within a single fortification unearthed so far in India … Some of our recent unpublished radiocarbon dates suggest that the settlement could be as old as 1400 BCE contemporary to very late phase of post-urban Harappan period. If true, then it suggests a cultural continuity in India for the last 5500 years and the so-called Dark Age may be a myth.

The continuity of an Indian civilisation, besides aligning with the Sangh’s preferred narrative, would also make Vadnagar a wholly unique representation of Indian heritage. But, like with Sinauli, the picture that emerged after my conversations with other archaeologists and ASI officials was less than certain.

Yadubirsingh Rawat (right), then the director of the department of archaeology in the Gujarat government, speaking to Buddhist monks about an excavated Buddhist Monastery at Vadnagar, Gujarat—the birthplace of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—in 2010. Rawat had begun excavations at Vadnagar on Modi’s suggestion. AJIT SOLANKI / AP PHOTO

Excavations first began at Vadnagar in the 1950s. “After partition of India, there was a need to identify more sites related to Harappan civilisation,” Ambekar told me. “Being a bordering state to Pakistan, extensive surveys were undertaken that resulted in discovery of a large number of sites in Gujarat besides early historical sites.” This led to discoveries at sites such as Dholavira, among the largest Harappan-era sites in India, and Lothal. Vadnagar did not have Harappan culture, but it yielded material culture dated to about the tenth century CE. Some excavations continued in subsequent decades, but nothing groundbreaking was discovered until the mid 2000s, when Modi was in power in Gujarat.

In 2006, YS Rawat was heading the state archaeological division. At the time, the Gujarat government was focussing on sites such as Dholavira, which was up for a UNESCO World Heritage recognition. One day, Rawat told me, he received a call from the state’s culture ministry. The message was from the chief minister. “CM wants to know, what can you do with Vadnagar?” Rawat replied, “Just wait for a week and I will make a presentation and then decide.” He told me that Modi was aware that Vadnagar, or “Anantapur,” had been mentioned in the travelogues of the Chinese scholar Xuanzang, who stayed at the city in the seventh century. Besides, the local folklore said that the villages of Vadnagar had been destroyed and established seven times.

Acting on Modi’s suggestion, Rawat began excavations. He uncovered a Buddhist monastery that could match a monastery described in Xuanzang’s writings. He also found evidence of a continuous sequence from the fourth century CE until the present. Excavations have been non-stop since then. Rawat continued working until 2013, and the ASI took over the following year. In 2016, Ambekar, who was heading the Vadodara circle, was given charge of Vadnagar. In all, Ambekar and Rawat investigated close to thirty sites in the area.

The town soon became a hub of archaeological investigations, with scholars attempting to link it to their existing work. During my visit, I met Vinay Kumar, a professor at the Banaras Hindu University, who had previously worked with the ASI. Kumar was conducting a study comparing Buddhism in Vadnagar and in Sarnath. “There has been change in the region … it is coming to light of the people through publications and this excavation,” Kumar told me. “And, you see, it is the native place of our honourable PM, so lots of emphasis for development has been given to this place.”

With Modi rising to power at the centre, the government’s focus on Vadnagar intensified. Ambekar told me that the ASI had conducted six continuous seasons of excavations at Vadnagar from 2016 until the present. He writes in Heritage that the culture ministry then decided to construct an experiential museum on the Ambaghat site, “wherein visitors would be provided with an experience of archaeological remains through touch-and-feel medium. It was also proposed that an elevator would be designed for allowing visitors into the deep excavated trenches of around 20m.” The government then asked the ASI to expand excavations to an area of four thousand square metres. The government of Gujarat was tasked with giving infrastructural help—and so were billionaires. Sudha Murthy, an author and former chairperson of Infosys, has reportedly supported the Vadnagar project.

In 2022, India submitted Vadnagar for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage site, describing it as a “multi-layered historic town with its history stretching back to nearly 8th Century BCE.”

Archaeologists I spoke to, including Rawat, told me that the claim that Vadnagar’s history can stretch back to before 800 BCE—or 1400 BCE, as Sarkar told the media in 2023—is not yet verified by archaeological evidence. Dating back to these eras was done on the basis of a sample found through core drilling, a method of extraction that uses a horizontal drill. “There is a recent claim that the antiquity of the site goes back to the eighth century BCE,” an archaeologist from a reputed central university, who has worked with the ASI, told me. “However, it is not from a proper stratigraphical context and from a core drilling. We need confirmation for this early chronology from a regular excavation.”

Both Ambekar and Mukesh Thakur, a local worker associated with the ASI who is part of its Vadnagar team, confirmed that this was the case. “Excavation was done manually till twenty metres, but then we encountered the problem of water level,” Ambekar told me. There was water-logging at that depth. “Core drilling was at Darbargadh and Ambaghat locality,” he said. “Manual excavations were confined to locations within town and outside.” Another archaeologist, asking not to be named, told me, “Core drilling is not used for excavations. Geologists employ that technique. We are excavators. We use different techniques.”

Rawat too found issue with the dating of the site to 1400 BCE. He told me that because of the water logging, the contamination of the sample could be an issue. Besides, the sample date “comes from deposit which has not any culture material”—that is, there was no evidence yet that the site was inhabited at the time. “If you go down you can get more ancient date. Date can come from any sample,” he said. “All date cannot be related to human activity. In archaeology you have to be very careful to establish antiquity of any site. You should have both the date and archaeological material.”

The claim that Vadnagar could disprove the “Dark Ages” is mentioned in the 46 Heritage articles Ambekar co-authored—but it refers to a different dark age. In our conversations and in the papers, Ambekar referred to the period in the first millennium, following the end of the Gupta dynasty, when urban centres in India began to degenerate and there was a downfall of early empires. Vadnagar’s prosperity during this period was in contrast to the rest of the subcontinent, he said. I confirmed that he was not referring to the Dark Ages as they were understood to be, between the Harappan phase and the Iron Age. “More study required,” he said. When I reminded him of Sarkar’s comments about connections to 1400 BCE and how Vadnagar proved a continuity of fifty-five hundred years, he only said, “We do require cultural material from that phase.”

“1400 date is being given … Dholavira is getting abandoned, and Vadnagar is being set,” one ASI staffer who was associated with the dig told me. They said the ASI had continued digging because that was the union government’s expectation. “ASI does not want to do deeper,” they said. “Political hai. Kitni khudai karenge ab?”—It’s political. How much more will we dig?

A rendered model of an experiential museum meant to showcase the ancient history of Vadnagar. The museum and the excavation site are part of an ongoing effort by the union government and the ASI to highlight the history of Vadnagar—the birthplace of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—as India’s oldest living city. DIRECTORATE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND MUSEUMS, GUJARAT

I contacted Sarkar to ask about the comments he made to the media. He appeared unconcerned with the lack of cinching evidence. He told me that he had obtained samples of bricks dated to 1400 BCE in central Vadnagar, “inside the premises of Prime Minister Modi’s school.” The dates, he admitted, were uncertain. “This is tentative. I am saying tentative because it is not published. For publishing you need more robust data. It’s a scientific study,” he told me. “We are tentatively saying the date is 800 BCE and it probably goes to 1400 BCE. There is nothing below it. This is why we say continuity.”

I reached out to the culture ministry for an interview and also sent a detailed questionnaire, to seek responses on both the Sinauli and the Vadnagar projects, as well as on the ASI’s alignment with views that suited the Sangh Parivar. At the time of publishing, I had not received a response.

IN 2015, the ASI began excavations at Keezhadi, a small town about twelve kilometres away from Madurai, in Tamil Nadu. Amarnath Ramakrishna, the head of the ASI’s Bengaluru branch, had wanted to start a dig at a site near the Vaigai River, which is mentioned in ancient Tamil literature. Ramakrishna and his team examined over two hundred sites before settling on Keezhadi, which he expected would be relatively undisturbed, since the site was now a coconut grove.

The excavation was hugely successful. Over two years, Keezhadi yielded close to six thousand artefacts from 102 trenches, larger than most excavations of its kind. The findings had the potential to transform the known history of Tamil origins—these were the first-ever indications of an urban civilisation from the Sangam era, which is seen as the pinnacle of Tamil art and literature. Further studies revealed more startling data. Earlier thought to span 300 BCE to 200 CE, the dates of the artefacts suggested that the Sangam era could go as far back as 800 BCE, Ramakrishna told me. The findings also inspired interest and celebration in Tamil society, which welcomed deeper studies into its cultural origins. Keezhadi soon began being compared to the Indus Valley civilisation, with many referring to it as a site of the “Vaigai Valley civilisation.”

But Keezhadi enthusiasts, including Ramakrishna, were in for a rude shock. The central government suddenly withheld approvals and funding for the third phase of excavations. In early 2017, Ramakrishna was transferred to Assam under a new policy that required excavators to be shifted to a new posting after two years—a move that was widely seen as an attempt to destabilise the Keezhadi excavations. The central government’s action had also prompted severe backlash from opposition parties in Tamil Nadu, who alleged that the government’s delay was “political design” and that the BJP government wanted to prevent details of a Tamil civilisation from emerging because a non-Vedic Tamil civilisation would be a challenge to the Sangh’s view of Hinduism.

“There is a theory that [in ancient times] Tamil Nadu had only racial groups, and that urban civilisation was found only along Indus–Gangetic valley. Keezhadi’s excavation has the potential to nullify that theory,” Ramakrishna said in a 2017 interview to The Caravan. “If there were archaeological evidences to prove that urban civilisation was found along Vaigai river, why can’t people accept it? Don’t we need to know India’s history?” The government eventually greenlit the third phase of excavations in mid 2017, which was carried out under a different ASI officer. The ASI announced that there were “no significant findings” and pulled away from the project.

The Tamil Nadu government subsequently took over the site. The state government has since carried out six rounds of excavations. The findings have been groundbreaking—in one round of investigations, the state archaeology department found evidence that the Vaigai civilisation was familiar with the Tamil Brahmi script in 580 BCE, much earlier than previously believed. It also found graffiti marks that could suggest links with the Indus Valley civilisation. Though more evidence was required, the Keezhadi discoveries gave “substance to a theory voiced by scholars and politicians in the state that Tamils may have descended from the Indus Valley civilisation, as it declined and its people moved South,” the Hindustan Times reported.

ASI officials I spoke to denied that the organisation did not want to focus on Keezhadi. “Keezhadi is a very important site,” Rakesh Tewari, who was the DG at the time of Ramakrishna’s transfer, told me. “The issue was the submission of the annual report of the excavation. When the report was submitted, permission was granted to the concerned branch to continue. Subsequently, the excavation of this site was taken up by the Tamil Nadu department and they did a good job.” News reports, however, suggested that the ASI had denied Ramakrishna permission to submit a final report.

“Usually, a report on a site is submitted only at the end of excavation or when substantial work has been done,” Ramakrishna had told The Caravan in 2017. Earlier that year, he said, he had submitted both a preliminary report and a follow-up report, before his transfer. “But no such report was warranted for the other sites,” he pointed out. “In fact, 56 such reports for various excavation sites are pending all over the country. For instance, the report on Adhichanallur”—another site in Tamil Nadu—“where excavation took place in 2005, is still pending.” He noted that even the Madurai bench of the high court had expressed displeasure at the ASI’s slow pace in Adhichanallur.

Ramakrishna is currently heading the temple survey project at the ASI’s Chennai branch. “I can work anywhere,” Ramakrishna told me. “But archaeologist has to do archaeology work, woh karne nahin de rahe”—they are not letting me do that. “I am not digging.” Referring to the policy he had been transferred under, he said, “Research does not have a time frame.” He added, “Archaeologists need freedom. I am not a bureaucrat who has to be transferred.”

A dice made of ivory uncovered during the eighth phase of excavations, at Keezhadi, in the Sivaganga district of Tamil Nadu. In 2015, an excavation by the ASI had uncovered the first-ever evidence of a Sangam-era civilisation, at Keezhadi. The project soon became mired in controversy. The lead excavator was transferred, and the union government withheld funds for further excavation. The Tamil Nadu government subsequently took over the site. Politicians and historians in Tamil Nadu have accused the union government of sidelining Keezhadi because evidence of a non-Vedic civilisation does not suit the Sangh’s idea of India. ANI

Ramakrishna felt that the ASI had an outsized focus on northern Indian civilisations. “We are simply concentrating on Harappa and Indus. Why are we not seeing plural cultures? They are the people of this land,” he said. A focus on civilisations near north Indian rivers had yielded ample evidence, because rivers were naturally a focal point for human activity, but “similar kind of research has not been carried out in Tamil Nadu.” This is why he had chosen Vaigai sites for his digs, he told me. According to him, mentions of the Vaigai in Sangam literature were not comparable to the mention of rivers in Hindu scripture or epics. “Actually, Sangam literature is not a religious literature,” he said. “It tells us how the people lived, how trade happened, how the political structure was, how society was. It is a social text.”

R Mahalakshmi, a professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was not in complete agreement with Ramakrishna’s view of a north India bias in the ASI. “This is a generalization that is not warranted at least for several decades after independence—some very important discoveries and archaeological excavations have taken place in Tamil Nadu,” she wrote to me. “Having said that, the colonial legacy of the Aryan-Dravidian divide has continued to hold the imagination of not just the political establishment or common people, but also has currency among sections of archaeologists and historians.”

Mahalakshmi agreed that the findings at Keezhadi appeared to establish the existence of an urban, Sangam-era civilisation matching the poetic texts. She was hesitant, however, to make any interpretations. “The final reports of excavations have not been released, and so one cannot ascertain things with any surety,” she said. “Till members of the community of archaeologists and historians don’t actually get to study the reports, it will be difficult for us to comment one way or the other.”

Several people I spoke to brought up the delay in publishing excavation reports from digs in the last few decades. Tewari told me that, usually, ASI excavators submit a brief or preliminary report during the dig. The annual report of the ASI includes more detailed information on ongoing digs, such as section drawings and illustrations, and excavators often write extensive articles. But once the dig has been completed, excavators publish final reports that include analyses by various experts from different fields, including geologists and geneticists. “Publication of reports is very important for a technical organisation like ASI … That has taken a backseat,” Pravin Srivastava, a former DG, told me, calling publishing “ASI’s major role.” Srivastava said it was important for excavators to show their peers the work they had done.

Ajithprasad echoed this view. He noted that even the reports for Mohenjo-Daro, which was excavated in 1922, had come out by the end of the decade. “Current excavations are small scale and there is technology and all. One can speed it up,” he said. “The shortcoming of delayed publication is that you deprive scholars of some important reference points. These reports are mines of data for others to compare and study. The excavators do publish periodical reports, but it is no substitute for the final report. Final reports have the proper documentation of contexts of artefacts, which are not found in periodic publication.” I came up against this fact during my reporting, with several historians and archaeologists who did not want to comment without studying the final reports.

According to Srivastava, some of the ASI’s older research practices had also taken a backseat. “The excavations are not getting the kind of importance they used to get,” he said. “ASI had a very good system of village-to-village survey long time back, maybe upto the ’60s.” ASI officers used to visit villages in their area and speak to residents to understand local history and folklore, and to identify new sites for excavation. This was no longer the case. (In a piece for The Caravan, the historian Ananya Chakravarti noted how the Sangh, however, had always undertaken such practices and continued to do so today. Its affiliate, the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana, “focusses on collecting local and folk histories in order to remake historical scholarship itself,” she wrote, by connecting these to Vedic and Puranic myths.)

“Lot of time is now being taken up by routine administration: transfers, postings, lot of government schemes [like] G20,” Srivastava told me. ASI officials were engaged for months on the G20 summit, getting sites ready for visitors. “That is not a core activity,” he said. But it had to be done “since it was a national event and country had to be projected in a certain way.”

The Sabhayata Foundation, under the Dalmia group, has signed an agreement with the ministry of culture to support Humayun’s Tomb, as part of the Adopt a Heritage scheme. Public criticism of the scheme intensified when it was reported that the Sabhyata Foundation, under the Dalmia had suggested a fine-dining restaurant, Sufi nights and a light-and-sound show at what is essentially a burial site.  PRESS INFORMATION BUREAU

When I asked Rawat about this, he put the delay in report publication back on the archaeologists. “It is not about department; it is individual-based. Archaeologists can go on excavating, I think they should stop and write their report,” he said. “We are looking into it. We have said we will give this much time, of two or three seasons, and then write report.”

In 2023, Ramakrishna submitted a report to the ASI on the first two phases of the Keezhadi findings, nearing one thousand pages. In February 2024, a Madurai resident filed a public-interest litigation in the high court, saying that “people, political leaders, historians, academicians, researchers, archaeological and Tamil enthusiasts are demanding the reason for the delay in publication.” The petitioner asked the court to direct the ASI to release the report. The union government told the court it would do so in nine months. The report is yet to be released.

IN RECENT YEARS, the ASI was most in the news for its involvement in controversial monument surveys, the latest being at the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh. In November 2024, Sambhal was witness to a spate of communal tensions around the mosque, in which police firing allegedly killed five Muslim residents of the town. Another article in this issue of The Caravan reports on the Sambhal violence in detail. The genesis of the violence was a petition filed by pro-Hindutva lawyers and monks. They had approached the local civil court, demanding access to the mosque, claiming it had been built on the site of a destroyed temple. The judge ordered a survey the same day. Within two hours of the order, an ASI team, from the organisation’s Meerut branch, arrived at the site. The team accompanied district officials on a survey of the site that evening. The ASI has since expanded its operations throughout Sambhal, the piece notes, and “there was apprehension among Muslims about which other structures might be portrayed as former temples.”

The events in Sambhal, similar to the events at Gyanvapi before it and at Ayodhya before that, appear to follow a script. Petitioners affiliated to Hindutva organisations approach the court seeking access to mosques, claiming Hindu historicity at the sites. The ASI’s name is often invoked in these litigations, and the courts invariably order a survey, which then reveals some evidence that can supplement the Hindu side’s claims, even if it is academically uncertain. “In looking at the process of doing ‘archaeology under court orders’ in the case of Ayodhya, I had wondered if that would become a precedent for judicial interventions at other sites in order to support the claims of litigating parties,” Lahiri wrote to me. “That is what began to systematically happen.”

With the Kamal Maula mosque in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, petitioners claimed that the structure was built over the Bhojshala, a school run by the mediaeval ruler Bhoja, and that it was the site of a temple to the Hindu deity Sarasvati. This claim, The Caravan earlier reported, had its origins in bad scholarship by a disgraced former archaeologist of the ASI, from the late nineteenth century. For nearly a hundred and fifty years, the ASI has regularly taken “politically expedient” stances on the Kamal Maula mosque complex, The Caravan wrote, allowing the Hindu Right to claim access to it, even winning worshipping rights in the mid 1990s. And now, Hindutva groups wanted full control of the site.

People associated with the ASI felt the organisation had no choice but to carry out such surveys. “Regarding Gyanvapi and Bhojshala, what the ASI is doing currently is on the lines of what I had done in Ayodhya back then,” Tewari told me. He had carried out an earlier survey of the Babri Masjid on the directions of the high court, in 1990. “It is a legal matter and is being carried out on the court’s direction. It would have been better if these disputes could be resolved amicably by both sides, instead of based on archaeological evidence.”

Srivastava told me, “It is very difficult for ASI, as there are bound to be some such temple elements below the mosque, and now if you dig it up and say there was mandir here … What are you going to do? What will ASI do?”

“As archaeologists, our duty is to excavate and find evidence and that’s what was done in Ayodhya,” Mani, who had carried out the Ayodhya survey in 2003, said. “There is no point going further in details in Gyanvapi mosque. Tomorrow you will say why not Safardurjung Tomb, and why not Qutub Minar be excavated?”

The focus on certain monuments of India’s past has also left thousands of others languishing in the present. The historian Narayani Gupta told me that the ASI’s grip over conservation had loosened over the decades since Independence. Dozens of Sultanate-era structures that had once been inventoried in Delhi, she told me, were no longer standing, because they had not been adequately protected or preserved. Over the 1980s and the 1990s, as the city developed and housing colonies began to be built, more and more structures vanished, some being razed by Delhi government authorities.

The Jami Masjid at Sambhal, in Uttar Pradesh, was witness to a spate of communal tensions in November 2024. The genesis of the violence was a petition filed by pro-Hindutva lawyers and monks, who had claimed the mosque was built on a destroyed temple. The events in Sambhal, similar to the events at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi before it and at the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya before that, appear to follow a script. Petitioners affiliated to Hindutva organisations approach the court seeking access to mosques, claiming Hindu historicity at the sites. The ASI’s name is often invoked in these litigations, and the courts invariably order a survey, which then reveals some evidence that can supplement the Hindu side’s claims, even if it is academically unsound. Shahid Tantray for The Caravan

The ASI never objected to this destruction of India’s past, Gupta pointed out. “Where is the pride in ownership, the eagerness to show great works of art and excellent maintenance?” She brought up excavations at Delhi’s Purana Qila as an indication of the shortcomings of the ASI’s approach. Since Independence, the ASI has conducted several digs at the site, to find evidence of the Mahabharata, because it is believed by some to be the site of a palace for the Pandavas. “Our historic landscapes are seen as places to be exhibited, and to earn entrance charges,” she wrote. “The Purana Qila is excavated every few decades, but the Pandavas’ palace of lac refuses to show itself. Can’t we be mature enough to accept that every building described in our epics may not have survived?”

Academics and historians have raised issue with the ministry of culture’s Adopt a Heritage scheme, in which the government forms agreements with private companies to become involved in the maintenance of heritage monuments. The centre had hoped to sign agreements for 1,000 monuments. An op-ed in The Hindu noted that this scheme sidelined the core responsibilities of the ASI.

The Sabhyata Foundation, under the Dalmia Group, which signed on to manage the Humayun’s Tomb, reportedly suggested a fine-dining restaurant, Sufi nights and a light-and-sound show at what is essentially a burial site. This caused a public furore from archaeologists, conservationists and historians, who raised concerns about the impact on the structure and the site. Sangeeta Bais, a conservationist who was involved with the Adopt a Heritage work at the Red Fort, told me that this plan reflected a gap. “These buildings are of heritage significance and this kind of incentive from corporate is not suitable. Garden tomb complexes cannot have inappropriate activities,” she said. “The thing with Adopt a Heritage is, some of these monuments are world-heritage sites they are known to people, and for me, adoption comes when a monument is significant but not popular. Corporate funding should be for lesser known monuments.”

“Once a site is vulgarised, its majesty and design reduced, it is lost to us. That expensive eateries should be created in these serene surroundings is, to me, distasteful,” Gupta wrote to me. The first ASI official was more dismissive. “They want to pick only mausoleums to do fine-dining?” they said.

Eram Agha is a staff writer at The Caravan.

https://caravanmagazine.in/history/asi-archaeological-survey-india-hindutva-history Please consider subscribing to and supporting Caravan.

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