Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane

By DILIP K. CHAKRABARTI. New Delhi: MUNSHIRAM MANOHARLAL, 1997. Pp. xi + 257. Rs 350.

Archaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti has produced a polemical survey of scholarship on ancient India. In addition to rehashing the "racist" assumptions of Western Indology, he charges his "mainstream" or "establishment" Indian colleagues with perpetuating the conventions of colonial scholarship in a way that is emblematic of the subservient relationship of the Third World to the West. Calling for the construction of an Indian perception of the Indian past, he argues, in apparent reference to historians of ancient India such as Romila Thapar, that this goal cannot be realized by combining India's ancient ahistorical texts with social-science theories. What is needed, he submits, are detailed investigations of the land in its relation with the people-such as are to be found in his other works. The point of the present volume is to blunt the thrust of earlier research. What he offers here is the first major exercise with regard to India of an expanding area of archaeological studies, that of the sociopolitics of the past, ushered in by Peter Ucko in sessions of the World Archaeological Congress since 1986.

The introductory chapter which sets the issue includes a critique of current conditions for the study of archaeology and ancient Indian history in Indian colleges and universities: even in one of the more favorable cases, that of Delhi University, "archaeology is still 'side-show of a side-show', the second side-show being 'ancient India'" (p. 9). It also offers a broad survey of the interaction between archaeology, ideology, and nationalism in various parts of the world, ending with a rare positive evaluation of Martin Bernal's Black Athena.

Chapter 2 surveys the interplay of race, language, and culture in the history of racial classifications, which reached their sorry acme in Risley's anthropometric measurements. Although much of this is well known and Chakrabarti's sustained vituperative tone tends to dull the reader's response, the survey is based on extensive reading and documentation and includes some lesserknown episodes, such as Fergusson's "racist" use (in his Archaeology in India with Especial Reference to the Works of Babu Rajendralala Mitra, 1884) of a critique of the works of the respected Indian scholar in opposing the famed Ilbert Bill, which sought to allow senior Indian judges to try criminal cases in which Britons were involved. The...