The British pursuit of knowledge on India followed the East India Company’s rise in status from a trading company to the revenue collector of Bengal in 1765. The translations into English of the indigenous Persian and Sanskrit texts, which were a direct response to the Company’s new administrative needs, facilitated the recovery of ‘Ancient’ India. This recovery in turn allowed the British to seek justification of their governance, by presenting themselves as moral up-lifters of a decadent society that was once a great civilisation. Archaeology, or what was by the 1830s perceived as undertaking archaeological investigations, was fully roped into the politics of manufacturing a history for India. For, by then the self-assured rational administrators of the progressively Utilitarian Britain had begun to accord Indian ruins and antiquities with higher value as sources than the indigenous texts. “In a country such as India, the chisels of her sculptors are ... immeasurably more to be trusted than the pens of her authors” (Fergusson 1876, reprinted 1910: p. x) is what they ordained. Thus privileged, archaeological investigations became the scientific mode of conducting enquiries on the history of India. After the Mutiny of 1857, such investigations and their photographic documentations inevitably assisted the British in the geographical surveillance of their vast and lucrative colony, and for empirically grounding their many, albeit similar, representations of the histories, which they created for ‘Early India’.

From the mid-nineteenth century we can establish many variants of archaeological work within British India, although two were historicised as two separate forms by the involved scholars themselves. In retrospect, the distinctions they tried to impose upon their work appear blurred because the aims of their scholarship were very similar.

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