For all of Lord Curzon’s unpopularity as the viceroy of India – not to mention his racist mindset and the infamous announcement of the part...
For all of Lord Curzon’s unpopularity as the viceroy of India – not to mention his racist mindset and the infamous announcement of the partition of the undivided Bengal – his appointment of John Marshall, barely twenty-six years of age, as the head of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1902, was an act of prudence. Marshall encouraged archaeological studies and spearheaded excavations which were to change the chronology of ancient India.
Prior to the great unearthing of the mounds in the valleys of the Indus, it was thought that India’s civilisation dated back only to the time of Alexander’s invasion.
The history before that was in the realm of the unknown. In 1921, the epoch-making discovery of the site of Harappa and the following year at Mohenjo-daro brought to light the existence of a singularly uniform civilisation (3300 to 1500 BCE), located in what is now Pakistan and north-west India up to the Arabian Sea. It was
“...closely akin but in some respects even superior to that of contemporary Mesopotamia and Egypt.”
The discovery became a source for
“...popular perceptions of India’s ancient past...”
and inspired a nationalistic sentiment of a
“...glorious golden age.”
Later, in post-Independence India, the Indus civilisation became a revered reference for the nationalistic Hindutva cultural claims of...
