ASI: An Archaic Archaeological Bureaucracy

Founded in 1861 on the logic of military reconnaissance and colonial surveillance, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was tasked with searching, discovering, categorising, and enumerating India’s vast archaeological heritage encountered by British imperial power. After 1947, the fundamental basis of the organisation remained the same, but it slowly transformed into a gargantuan bureaucratic entity—sluggish and obdurate.

Now, the ASI attempts to protect and preserve the expansive heritage of ancient and medieval India. However, it gets powerful historical and political legitimacy by producing official and governmental knowledge about India’s archaeological past, which is the least funded part of its institution. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India report on the ASI in 2015 noted that the budget of the Excavation and Exploration department of the ASI until 2015 was merely one per cent, which has since seen minuscule improvement in the last few years.

The first quarter of the 21st century has not been easy for the ASI. Its epistemological credibility has seen severe erosion after its controversial excavation of Ayodhya in 2003. Although the making of the Ram Temple was a political battle for the Hindu fundamentalist and they won, the ASI lost its epistemic legitimacy.

The ASI’s methods of excavation have been questioned and debated in India. About 25 years ago, I entered this contested field as an anthropologist of archaeology to study how archaeology as a science is practised in India. This journey led me to the doorstep of one of the largest archaeological bureaucracies in the world—the ASI. I wanted to understand how the ASI produces data, evidence, and facts about India’s past. What techniques, methodologies, and practices does it employ? What are the sociological, political, and ideological processes behind its knowledge production mechanisms? How does the ASI conduct excavations and discover artifacts in a trench? I wanted to trace how artifacts found in ASI excavations become published facts and are used as official court evidence.

I found that the process of archaeology in the ASI is shaped by an intricate mix of scientific logic and bureaucratic practices, infused with nationalistic ideologies in India. It grapples with the country’s colonial past, an inefficient government machinery, plagued by widespread dissatisfaction among employees. I embedded myself in ASI excavation sites in far-flung corners of India and carefully and exhaustively studied the social, cultural, and scientific world of ASI archaeologists.

The micro-focus of an ASI archaeology is the excavation site. At these sites, artifacts from the ancient and hoary past are discovered, excavated, organised, labelled, catalogued, and presented as scientific objects. Here, ASI archaeology is shaped by an obstinate bureaucratic system where science, state, and religion coalesce together to create the past for India, which is poorly fashioned and weakly articulated.

In the ASI, archaeology isn’t really about science, nationalism, or even patriotism. Although ASI members claimed that doing archaeology was for the country, this was merely an excuse for their turgid bureaucratic work. After spending more than two years at excavation sites, ASI offices in Delhi, and different regional centres, I understood that ASI archaeology wasn’t just about scientific practices learned from experts. Instead, ASI archaeology was theoretically and functionally an overwhelmingly ideologically driven postcolonial bureaucratic epistemological intervention. It was panoptical, compromised, oppressive, exploitative, and corrupt. The ASI unquestioningly continues to follow methods and ideas from the colonial era, reinforced by an orthodox and corrupt bureaucratic system in modern India.

ASI archaeologists primarily imagine themselves as government bureaucrats in the state’s service rather than exemplary or passionate scientists producing authentic and accurate facts about ancient India. Their work is more about following bureaucratic rules than conducting scientific research. This means the practice of archaeology is usurped by a managerial impulse to govern, manage, and regulate, influenced by dogmatic Indian bureaucratic logic.

This system leads to corruption of people, minds, and even the data that the ASI produces. The knowledge they produce is merely a by-product of this bureaucratic system, not its primary objective. Driven by the logic of colonial times, the ASI’s organisational system is hierarchical and coercive, making it even more difficult to foster a scientific temperament. Here, an overpowering bureaucracy debilitates archaeological work and the official knowledge it produces.

ASI archaeologists see excavations as an administrative task of aggregating and collecting artifacts to manufacture facts. This process is often impaired and unscrupulous. Through painstaking observation of the nature, quality, content, and extent of ASI excavation sites, I found that the ASI preferred excavating large-scale sites over prolonged periods, sometimes close to a decade. This preference was driven by the potential for siphoning of government funds, rather than addressing specific research problems or the objective of producing factual and verifiable knowledge about India’s past.

ASI archaeologists, functioning as bureaucrats, are unconcerned with methodological innovations or the theoretical nuances of archaeological science. They also are indifferent to the knotty historical issues and academic research problems that have plagued India’s past. This is evidenced by the fact that official reports of many large-scale excavations, including significant sites like Dholavira and Rakhigarhi conducted more than 20 years ago, have not yet been published. Even the most important excavation conducted by the ASI this century, in Ayodhya in 2003, remains unpublished.

The ASI is a characteristic location to study how the postcolonial Indian government functions. The ASI doesn’t operate in areas of extreme tension, such as military zones or regions with high resistance, where the state exerts its brute power, as in Kashmir, Northeast India, and the tribal regions of Chhattisgarh. Instead, ASI excavation sites are calm, stable, and sedate. I found that even here, the Indian state uses its prodigious bureaucratic power to dominate and command the lives of its own personnel involved in the relatively laidback archaeological process, thereby incapacitating the objective of archaeology as a science.

This system controls and manages people’s lives, from senior officers to local labourers, much like a factory or military operation and not like an exemplary location of science where knowledge is deeply venerated, honestly created, and sincerely disseminated. The ASI’s archaeological work is more about maintaining a tight bureaucratic authority rather than focusing on scientific goals.

The power dynamics and daily oppression seen in ASI archaeology are like those in colonial times, with the same kind of hierarchy and domination. Bureaucracy was an encompassing powerful tool of the colonial empire; after Independence in the ASI, it has evolved as a site of large-scale corruption and ideological misrepresentation.

In this authoritarian system, the local labourers—mostly Dalit, women and the landless—who work the hardest at the excavation site are seen as uneducated and inferior, while the higher-ups, now Indian, have taken the place of the former colonial rulers. This system of regulation and domination is a product of both colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic ideologies, presented as a scientific mission but inherently repressive.

In Independent India, the ASI’s archaeological work is a manifestation of this widespread colonial ideology, with its harsh mechanisms still in place and even more perfected. This hegemony affects everyone involved, including the knowledge produced and published by the ASI.

Earlier nationalistic, and now Hindutva, narratives only appear when writing reports or articles, distorting the compromised and undermined knowledge produced by the ASI. This is especially evident in the context of the reports written about the excavation of Harappan sites and most clearly seen in the case of the unpublished Ayodhya excavation report submitted to the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court. The report of this excavation was written in a matter of months when the average time of writing a report of an ASI site takes nearly two decades.

Today, the ASI is being subverted by Hindutva. This is evident in how Hindutva lawyers are repeatedly involved the ASI in numerous mosque-temple disputes, such as those at the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi, the Krishna Janmabhoomi-Shahi Idgah in Mathura, the 13th-century Bhojshala in Dhar, and most recently, the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal. Here, an autocratic bureaucratic system that produces flawed knowledge is exploited by a fundamentalist religious ideology to instigate communal disharmony at Muslim heritage sites. This strategy mirrors what we have seen in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute.

In ASI archaeology, the past is severely emasculated. Here, facts, knowledge, and dates are sabotaged—in the dusty and forlorn trenches of large-scale horizontal excavation in the margins of India; in the tattered tents of ASI campsites; and in the forged receipts and fabricated bills. This past-making is further compromised in the dumped pottery fragments; faded and obliterated antiquity labels; in the lost and forgotten artifacts stored in the rugged ramparts of medieval forts in Delhi; in the unwritten site reports, never published. In the ASI, corrupt bureaucracy produces corrupt epistemology.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ashish Avikunthak is a Filmmaker, Anthropologist, and Archaeologist. He is the author of “Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science, And Past In Postcolonial India” (2022) published by the Cambridge University Press

(This appeared as 'Between The Rock And The File' in print)