The Battle for Ancient India - An Essay in the Sociopolitics of Indian Archeology

by Dilip K. Chakrabarti

A number of issues regarding the study of ancient India have recently emerged in the public domain. The most important of them are the saraswati project, Aryan invasion theory, the textbook controversy in India and California and the language of the Indus civilization. The intensity of debate on each of these issues is reminiscent of religious clashes. Much of this debate is also not limited to professional historians and archeologists. The mass of data and opinions, which are currently available on the internet and have frequently been published in the media, can no longer be ignored by anybody interested in ancient India. Some professional analysis of this development has long been called for.

This book is in response to this need. It first states the author's position on each of these issues, but more importantly, critically examines their rationale. By studying the socio-political implications of some of the current assumptions of the Indian archeology and by noting their associations with different scholars and scholarly groups, it demonstrates that even the apparently remote conclusions about India's prehistoric, protohistoric and early historic past have sub-texts of various kinds and that these sub-texts have different socio-political implications and agendas.