Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler - My archaeological mission to India and Pakistan

Wheeler, Mortimer

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GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ARCHEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA

CENTRAL

ARCHAEOLOGICAL

LIBRARY

ACCESSION NO.

CALL No.. JU3054/ W^e.

MY

ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION TO INDIA AND PAKISTAN

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Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 197ft

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher's prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Filmset and printed in Great Britain by BAS Printers Limited, Wallop, Hampshire.

Preface

Chapter One Introductory 9

Chapter Two

Taxila and the North-west Frontier, 1944 13

Chapter Three

The Taxila School of Archaeology, 1944

Chapter Four Arikamedu 43

Chapter Five

Merchant navigation in the Roman world S3

Chapter Six Indian megaliths 59

Chapter Seven The Indus Civilization 67

Chapter Eight Pakistan, 1947-1950 81

Appendix

Select bibliography

List of illustrations

Index

In August i<>43 the Author was invited by the India Office and the Viceroy oi India (Lord Wavcll) to undertake the total reorganization of the Archaeological Survey of India, a task which was then regarded as a matter of some unusual urgency. Whatever political and technological pressures may have been at issue - and they turned out to be of some considerable weight and complexity - were rendered none the simpler by wartime involvements; and in fact ic was not until the Spring of 1944 that the writer was at last free to exchange the vagaries of a brigade-command in the Eighth Army for the fascinating amalgam of responsibilities which constituted and continue to constitute the routine of the Indian Archaeological Survey, ranging from the salvation of the Taj Mahal to that of the sensitive vestiges of the Indus Valley Civilization. Years later it has been considered that the somewhat elaborate processes and priorities which comprised what is here memorized as My Archaeological Mission fo India and Pakistan may perhaps be thought worthy of a succinct and essentially personal review.

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l Map of Indo-Pakistan subcontinent.

Chapter One

This small book is a substantially personal account of die efforts made by many individuals since 1900 to organize and modernize the preservation and exploration of the ancient sites and monuments of the former Indian Empire prior to its dissolution and reconstruction after 1947. More briefly it may be described as a summary account of the latter phases of the old Archaeological Survey of India increasingly supplemented by the expanding enterprise of Indian and other universities under the spreading range of trained interest which has appeared internationally during more recent years.

Irrelevantly though it may seem, the account begins with a brigadier in a small military encampment on a hilltop above Algiers and the date is the beginning of August 1943. In the sunset the end of the days planning operations of the forthcoming British and American invasion of Italy had drawn to itsjust close, when the Corps Commander, General Sir Brian Horrocks, dashed across towards my doorway with a signal in his hand and the remark, I say, have you seen this - they want you as - [reading] Director General of Archaeology in India 1 - Why, you must be rather a king-pin at this sort of thing! You know, I thought you were a regular soldier! If the general ever paid an extravagant compliment, he did so then, although there was, I thought, a hint of pain and disillusionment in his voice. For my part the proposition was a complete bombshell. Without any sort of pre-warning, the India Office was asking for my release to take up a key post in a teeming country I had never been to in my life! However, I gathered my wits and said that I would consider the offer after the next battle but not before.