Day 42 : Book Excerpt : The Strides of Vishnu

One evening in early August 1943, Brigadier General Mortimer Wheeler was resting in his tent after a long day of poring over maps, drawing up plans for the invasion of Sicily. Wheeler was a tall, rugged-looking man who sported a bushy moustache in the fashion of English officers of his time. Through the open flap of his tent, he spotted the corps commander, General Sir Brian Horrock, hurrying across the encampment, waving a telegram in his hand. Barely concealing his excitement, Horrock handed the telegram to Wheeler and exclaimed: "I say, have you seen this—they want you as [reading] ‘Director General of archaeology in India!’—Why, you must be rather a king-pin at this sort of thing! You know, I thought you were a regular soldier!"

Thus in the hot Algerian evening, with his eyes cast across the Mediterranean on the historic battle ahead, Mortimer Wheeler begins his heroic autobiographical narrative about archaeology in India. The moment in the desert reads as both trivial and momentous: the redirected career of one British officer ushers in a new era for Indian archaeology. Of course, the general noted, he could not leave his post before the invasion. He finally boarded his ship— the City of Exeter— to join a convoy of allied ships headed east in February 1944.

Mortimer Wheeler had been invited to become the director general of archaeology by the India Office of the British government in its last years of rule in South Asia, and by the viceroy of India (Lord Wavell), who governed on behalf of the Crown in Delhi. Summoning  a general from the battlefields of Europe was an extraordinary measure, an admission both of the desperate condition of Indian archaeology and an acknowledgment of its vital importance. By the 1940s, India had distinguished itself as one of the great archaeological locations in the world, along with Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. A succession of eminent archaeologists preceded Wheeler at the directorship of Indian archaeology, even before its official found founding in 1871, when Alexander Cunningham became its first official director. The renowned scientists who followed Cunningham at the post included James Burgess, John Marshall, N. G. Majumdar, and K. N. Dikshit. These men— and many others— had supervised some of the most remarkable discoveries in archaeological science and brought India its prestige as a storehouse of great historical treasures.

Cunningham’s colleague James Prinsep not only discovered the famous rock edict of King Ashoka at Dhauli, Orissa, he was the man who between 1834 and 1837 deciphered the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts in which the Indian king had his pronouncements written down. This achievement was critical in establishing a firm toehold for dating in India’s history, which had been notoriously lacking in datable evidence. Decades later, it was John Marshall who excavated the Indus River cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and pushed back the age of Indian civilizations to the early centuries of the third millennium BCE— contemporary with the Nile and Mesopotamian civilizations and far earlier than Greece. It was Marshall, too, who excavated Taxila— the great Indian Hellenistic center in northwest India and the first place on Mortimer Wheeler’s itinerary as he set out to survey his vast new realm.

The new director took the Frontier Mail train from Bombay to Delhi and from there to Rawalpindi— the British military base in what was then called the North-west Frontier, the northern region of Punjab and Kashmir. Taxila, or Takshasila, was a further 20 miles from the city, in a valley bounded by the massive Himalaya range. Wheeler described a valley covered with yellow mustard seed and flooded with sunlight as he arrived. As he surveyed the beautiful scene and the long-neglected archaeological dig at the four sites of Taxila, Wheeler knew that it was time to fix Indian archaeology and that Taxila was the perfect place to launch his campaign. After all, it was here that the young Macedonian king, Alexander, had begun his own conquest of the lands of the Indus River and its six tributaries in 327 BCE— the anchor date for Indian historiography. But it was Taxila, too, that made Wheeler conscious of what exactly ailed Indian archaeology and what had to be done.

Despite impressive early discoveries, Indian archaeology suffered from a number of serious flaws. Too much work was invested in uncovering spectacular objects, "treasures of the past," which then found their way into  museums. Monuments— especially religious objects such as Buddhist stupas, Hindu temples, statues, and artwork—were highly prized, drawing both attention and money for exploration and preservation. Though valuable and inspiring, such archaeological work contributed far too little to the scientific reconstruction of past cultures in their contemporary and sequential settings. Worse, Marshall, who had focused on a small number of prestigious digs, failed to apply the principle of stratification to his work, opting instead for what Wheeler contemptuously called the bench-level method. The cure for this, Wheeler insisted, was stratigraphy.


~~The Strides of Vishnu - Hindu Culture in Historical Perspective -by- Ariel Glucklich