Artefacts of History

Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Researcher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES) at the University of Cambridge and Tagore Research Scholar at the National Museum in New Delhi. She has curated photographic collections at Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge) for over a decade, and was Temporary University Lecturer of South Asian History at FAMES for four years. She researches on the cultural histories of archaeology and photography in South Asia, and continues to study aspects of state formation, polities and urbanisation in Early India, which had led her to study archaeology and the Indus Civilisation after graduating in history.She has written extensively on issues related to the historiography and methodology of the archaeological scholarship of Ancient India, of which an example is her edited volume The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2010). The four essays below illustrate some of the reasons that have led to the present study: ‘The Visual in Archaeology: Photographic Representations of Archaeological Practice in the Indian Subcontinent’, Antiquity (2002); Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation’, Modern Asian Studies (2005); ‘Material Truths and Religious Identities: The Archaeological and Photographic Making of Banaras’, in M. S. Dodson (Ed.), Banaras: Urban History, Architecture, Identity (2012) and ‘Beyond Representation: Photographs in Archaeological Knowledge’, in O. M. Abadia and C. Huth (Eds), ‘Speaking Material: Sources for the History of Archaeology’, Complutum (2013).Currently, she is doing research on the practices of museums, archaeology and heritage-making within post-colonial South Asia.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsHistories, Historiography, Archaeology: An IntroductionAntiquarianism and South Asia: Questioning Histories of OriginsNineveh in Bombay: The Curation of Foreign Antiquities and Histories of IndiaThe Connected Histories of Philology and ArchaeologyFashioning the Unknown: Gordon Childe’s Imprints upon the Indus CivilisationCivilisation, Heritage and the Archaeological ScholarshipA Vision for Archaeology: Partition, Nationalism and the ′Indian′ PastsBibliographyIndex

‘Any academic discipline, in order to move even a little away from its enduring static position, needs to have a critical look at the premises on which the discipline tends to lean perpetually. This book dares to produce that critical look at the way archaeological knowledge is created and passed on in Indian archaeology and should jolt its institutional leaders out of their seats of scientific complacency.’