Ashish Avikunthak

“The Anatomy of displacement: a study in the displacement of the tribals from their traditional landscape in the Narmada Valley due to Sardar Sarovar project” in Peter Ucko & Robert Layton (eds.), The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape, London: Routeledge.

This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs – Kristeva's genotext and phenotext; Freud's melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy – I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.

Focusing on the epistemological homology between the construction of archaeological knowledge, archaeological evidence and the nature of archaeological representation, I examine the visual archive produced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in India between 1944–48, to analyze the ideological ramification of the archaeological project. The discursive nature of Wheeler's representations was deeply embedded in the disciplinarian ideologies of the colonial project, the scientific project and the military project. This article analyzes Wheeler's methodical attempt at conflating the three projects by disciplining archaeology as a scientific practice in a colonial space. I argue that this was articulated by appropriating the ideas of 'epistemic marker' and 'ethnic marker' as visual tropes to transform the visual representations produced in a colonial context into a scientific discourse, aimed at transforming the discipline.

The depiction of the river Saraswati as an empirical centre of the Harappan civilisation has been marked by intense debate in recent years. Taking the short-lived Saraswati Heritage Project (2002–04) initiated by the Archaeological Survey of India as a case study, this article examines the epistemological emergence of the river and interrogates its historical and ideological relationship to the Harappans and the Aryans. It argues that the epistemic trajectory of Saraswati from a literary entity to an empirical category followed four phases. First, it emerged as a mythical river of colonial Indology; then, as a civilisa-tional river of colonial archaeology; subsequently, as a hydrological body of postcolonial geology and, finally, as an empirical fact of postcolonial archaeology and history. Contrary to historians who attribute the resurrection of the Saraswati solely to the growing influence of Hindutva ideologies, this article argues that the Saraswati is also an epistemic product of the disciplinarian discourse of colonial Indology and postcolonial science. It contends that its ideological and political valence has to be located in the larger discursive universe of colonial and postcolonial scientific practices and not solely attributed to Hindutva.

Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy, and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between the micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI and the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political, and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how the postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book-length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world. It scrupulously shows how the theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms, and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition. Ashish Avikunthak teaches at the University of Rhode Island and is a cultural anthropologist and filmmaker. He was named Future Greats 2014 by ArtReview. Subject of more than a dozen retrospectives and sixteen solo shows, his films have been shown in film festivals, galleries, and museums worldwide.