ABSTRACT
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is grounded in a colonial epistemology that can be characterized as somewhere between what Bernard Cohn calls the “historical modality” and the “survey modality” (Cohn 1996: 5). Cohn defines these categories as the “investigative modalities” of knowledge production mechanisms invented by imperial ideology, subsequently perfected in colonies to produce “facts” that could be classified to govern their subjects. For Cohn, the historical modality is a means of knowledge production instrumental in “the ideological construction of Indian civilizations,” whereas the survey modality is involved in “mapping and bounding to describe and classify the territory’s zoology, geology, botany, ethnography, economic products, history, and sociology” (Cohn 1996: 7). On the one hand, ASI (established in 1861) was an instrument of survey that scientifically discovered, excavated, and classified India’s past, and, on the other, it was an agency that provided empirical evidence for the construction of an ideological history of India’s past through the analysis of architectural remains, epigraphical inscriptions, and archaeological excavations. In its postcolonial incarnation, ASI continues to embody this colonial, ideological, and epistemological framework in the scientific-bureaucratic construction of Indian civilization.
