Overview

The book presents the challenges faced by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in the first two and a half decades after Indian independence. It looks at the shifts in Government policies, how ASI found its feet in a global environment, and the new realities of economic development such as big dam constructions that invariably resulted in the submergence of archaeological sites. Based on unpublished archival data, this book highlights the contributions of the longest-serving Director-General Amalananda Ghosh and members of his staff. It thus provides a corrective to the histories of archaeology that describe the policies of the post-1947 ASI as a continuation of colonial archaeologists such as Mortimer Wheeler, who was appointed Director-General at the cusp of Indian independence in 1944 by the British. The book will be indispensable to researchers and scholars of history, heritage studies and archaeology, and South Asian studies. It will also be of appeal to those interested in the history of archaeology and the development of the discipline in India.

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9781041002581

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Himanshu Prabha Ray is Tagore National Fellow at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. After teaching at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, she was appointed the first Chairperson of the newly established National Monuments Authority, Ministry of Culture in 2012. From 2014 to 2019 she was awarded the prestigious five-year Anneliese Maier fellowship of Humboldt Foundation, Germany and held an Honorary Professorship at the Distant Worlds Graduate School of the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. Ajay Yadav is pursuing his DPhil in Arecheology at the University of Oxford, UK. He holds an MPhil degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is on study leave from the Indian Administrative Service, Government of India, which he joined in 2006. From 2019 to 2022 he held official positions in the Ministry of Culture and the ASI.

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