Developing Indian Pasts? The Archaeological Survey of India, 'Postcolonial' Archaeology, and Technical Assistance in Nepal

This article examines archaeological assistance provided to Nepal by the Archaeological Survey of India as part of India’s aid efforts there in the 1960s. It demonstrates how that work, which endeavored to show long-standing Indian-Nepali connections and strengthen the two countries’ contemporary relationship, sat within a complex set of threads tying it to wider interest in the regional past of post-Partition India. Those threads were filtered through the British Raj, European Orientalism, and local responses to it; they were also connected to post-Partition India’s attempts to assert its regional power and the archaeological theorization and materialization of an ‘Indian’ identity. The Indian bureaucracy that helped to link India and Nepal both powered this Indian archaeological work abroad and, at times, proved its undoing. Observing this messy nexus of paperwork and archaeological practice, the article argues for further investigation of the movement and circulation of archaeological knowledge in this critical period in global history: an investigation that will reveal both a more complex picture of how that knowledge has operated ‘in transit’, while deepening understanding of archaeology’s messy coloniality at a time when ethical questions relating to the discipline have come to the fore.