Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: Epigraphic Research

Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: Epigraphic Research

Himanshu Prabha Ray, Distant Worlds, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.322
Published online: 15 August 2022

Summary
Interest in the material remains of the past in Europe dates to the early 17th century, though archaeology as a
discipline developed only two hundred years later. It was transposed to the Indian subcontinent once British
colonial rule was established in the region, in the 19th century. Archaeological practice has often been discussed in
secondary writings as presenting a “scientific” approach to the study of the past, though from the 1990s onward its
political implications have been highlighted bringing into focus the search for remnants of the Greeks and Greco-
Roman civilization by British archaeologists such as John Marshall (1876–1958) and Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976),
who worked as director-generals of the Archaeological Survey of India. This reliance on models worked out in
Europe had a significant impact on the study of the beginnings of writing in the subcontinent, the development of
epigraphy, and collections of inscriptions and copper plates. To stress the bias that has crept into an understanding
of the significance of the written word in the Indian past, writings on ceramics need to be brought into the
discussion as these have often been used in the colonial period for establishing chronology or “Roman” influence as
evident in Wheeler’s 1946 excavations at Arikamedu on the Tamil coast. The development of several new trends
over the last seven decades in the subcontinent has challenged colonial constructs and helped provide a balance.

Keywords: copper plates, writing, inscribed pottery, Brahmi, Kharosthi, colonialism, South Asia, India, epigraphy

Subjects: Archaeology

Colonial archaeology in India has generally been studied and written about with reference to the
setting up of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861 by the colonial government (Chakrabarti
1988, 2003; Ray 2007; Singh 2004). Other themes often addressed include interest in preserving
monuments (Ray 2008, 2019) and establishing museums (Mathur 2007). In contrast, the making
of the corpus of inscriptions and monumental writing has been under-researched. In a
comprehensive study of Indian epigraphy defined by Richard Salomon (1998, 199–225) as “the
study of inscriptions and their contents rather than with the forms, varieties, and historical
development of the scripts in which they are written,” the distinction between epigraphy and
paleography, which relates to the development of writing and scripts, is maintained. Salomon
terms his work as a supplement to the earlier study by D. C. Sircar (1907–1985), the chief
epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India in the post-independence period from 1949 to
1962 (Sircar 1965). In a succinct summary of the demerits of inscriptions and the drawbacks in
using them for a reconstruction of history, Sircar highlighted issues of chronology since
inscriptions were often dated in little-known regnal eras of kings and that the genealogies of
ruling dynasties were often fabricated and their panegyrics exaggerated (Sircar 1965, 23–30).

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Colonial archaeology also includes a different set of questions linked to the making of collections
of inscriptions by British officials from the 18th century onward, their categorization based on
political history, and the institutionalization of their study in colonial India. How did this process
of collection and categorization impact on the writing of Indian history in both the colonial and
postcolonial periods? It brings into discussion two issues: one is the stress on linear time that
votaries of Western Enlightenment celebrated, as opposed to cyclical time, which formed the
basis of the Indian tradition, and the second is the marginalization of the traditional process of
recording and ordering of written information, as evident in early Sanskrit sources. A theme
generally neglected by historians of ancient India is how collections made in the colonial period
were transformed in the 19th century with the categorization of the corpora of inscriptions
detached from the original context and documented and listed in journals and books. It is also the
contention here that decontextualized inscriptions came to be studied and deciphered as
autonomous “texts” bereft of their archaeological setting and were then used for working out
first the political history of ancient India in the colonial period and subsequently the
socioeconomic historical framework in the post-independence period. A key question that has
escaped attention is the role of the colonial state and its officials in the creation of this corpus and
the initiation of these as a primary resource for the writing of India’s ancient past. Salomon
(1998) agrees that: “the study of inscriptions was totally absent from the traditional curriculum
of Sanskrit learning, so that the field of Indian epigraphy was born only with the beginning of
European Indology in the late 18th century” (199). He nevertheless overlooks the fact that
modern interest in ancient inscriptions is itself a post-Renaissance phenomenon.

It needs to be stressed that in Europe, the modern interest in ancient inscriptions dates from the
Renaissance period. Cyriacus of Ancona (1391–1452) was the first traveling scholar to collect
inscriptions from Italy and Greece and publish them (Liddel and Low 2013, 2). The practice of
bringing together inscriptions as a compendium started in the 19th century with the publication
of four volumes of Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum between 1828 and 1877. This practice found its
reflection in India with the publication of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum comprising the
Inscriptions of Ashoka prepared by Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893), the first director-general
of the newly established Archaeological Survey of India. While these publications paid attention
to restoring the texts and providing readings and interpretations, they missed out on the
discussion of the ancient significance of these epigraphs.

In his 1810 essay on epitaphs, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) linked the rise of the art of
writing with the need for remembrance in ancient cultures, while Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
argued for the truthfulness of inscriptions and suggested their use as a key to understanding the
subconscious (Orrells 2014, 329–336). This comparison raises a fundamental question about
what was written and why. From George Grote (1794–1871), the author of the twelve-volume
History of Greece, to Sheldon Pollock (2007), epigraphy has often been viewed as power. What was
considered worth writing by ancient cultures in the Indian subcontinent? How did the making of
collections of inscriptions in the colonial period impact the development of the discipline of
epigraphy or the study of inscriptions?

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Some of the relevant issues relate to the making of collections of inscriptions in the colonial
period, which created a disjunction between the written word and its context. A general approach
that continues to the present is that epigraphists study inscriptions and their decipherment,
while archaeologists analyze the material record of new finds, and the delinking of the inscription
from its context creates a rupture between the two. It is important to shift focus to the
archaeological contexts of writing, including inscribed pottery, relic caskets, and stone and
copper-plate inscriptions, to reformulate the colonial emphasis on the use of ceramics as
indicators of discrete “cultures” and ethnic groups. A discussion of the ramifications of the
development of epigraphy in colonial India with reference to the traditional system of recording
and its bearing on the writing of India’s early history.

The Making of Collections: Decipherment and Origins of Writing

In the 18th century, as the East India Company established its trading centers on the Indian
coasts, Sanskrit, Pali, and Persian literature evoked interest in the subcontinent’s past. In 1785,
Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), a Sanskrit scholar who was also proficient in Bengali and Persian
deciphered a 6th-century inscription in the Brahmi script known as the Gopika cave inscription
(Wilkins 1788). The cave was discovered by John Harrington, who then sent an eye copy of the
inscription to Wilkins to decipher, a common practice in the colonial period. As an employee of
the East India Company, Wilkins pioneered typefaces that could print in local languages, such as
Bengali and Persian. In 1784, along with the philologist and judge William Jones (1746–1794), he
founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal to focus on an understanding of India’s past.

James Prinsep (1799–1840) was another prominent English scholar and orientalist who arrived in
Calcutta in 1819 as the assay master of the mint. Prinsep founded the Journal of the Asiatic Society
of Bengal and initiated its members as “traveling antiquarians” into a collection spree. In this
way, he acquired large numbers of coins and inscriptions, which he deciphered and published in
the Journal of the Asiatic Society. In 1834, James Prinsep announced the results of the research by
adventurer Charles Masson (1800–1853) and collections of bilingual coins in the Kabul valley and
explorations conducted in the Punjab by Jean-Baptiste Ventura (1794–1858) and Claude Auguste
Court (1793–1880), who were both mercenaries in Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s (1780–1839) military.
These further led Prinsep to decipher early Brahmi script in 1838 used in the Asokan inscriptions
and at the Buddhist monastic site of Sanchi (Kejriwal 1988, 162–220; Salomon 1998, 203–214).

Sten Konow (1867–1948) was a Norwegian scholar of Indian philology and comparative Indo-
European linguistics. He was closely associated with George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India.
In 1906 he came to India as the government epigraphist for India and stayed in the country until
1908. During his stay in India Konow was the editor of the Epigraphia Indica and published the
edition of the Kharoshti inscriptions in 1929 as volume 2 of Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. In
1910, a personal chair of Indian philology was created for him at the University of Oslo.

The archaeological map of India was drawn based on surveys conducted largely in north India by
Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893), the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India.
Cunningham and his colleagues established other branches of archaeology such as numismatics

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and epigraphy. In fact, the studies of Cunningham’s own early period were almost exclusively on
coins, and numismatics continued to dominate his writings, his significant contribution being to
focus on the provenance of coin finds. To this was added his survey and publication of
inscriptions and the inception of the series titled Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum with the
publication of Cunningham’s Inscriptions of Asoka in 1877.

Many of those involved in archaeological research, especially in the early years, played a dual
role, being both military personnel and colonial administrators who were also engaged in making
large collections of manuscripts and other antiquities. A good example of this is the career of
Colin Mackenzie (1753–1821). In 1783, Colin Mackenzie secured a commission in East India
Company’s Madras Army and carried out two surveys: one of Guntur and the other of the roads
from Nellore to Ongole. In 1792, he was appointed as Engineer and Surveyor to the Subsidiary
Force in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad “for the purpose of acquiring some information of
the geography of these countries.” Thus, one aspect of Mackenzie’s work was the official
topographical survey and compilation of detailed maps, and he was supplied with a staff for this.
At the same time, Mackenzie was involved in the collection of historical, literary, and cultural
material, including thousands of stone and copper-plate inscriptions, for which he built his own
team of specially trained helpers and brahmana assistants (Howes 2010).

In 1882, the Epigraphical Survey was created for editing and publishing inscriptions, and the
English civil servant John Faithfull Fleet (1847–1917) was appointed as its head. Because of his
competence in the Kannada language, Fleet was able to collect a number of inscriptions both in
Kannada and Sanskrit. In December 1887, a full-fledged Department of Archaeology was created
in Mysore, and in 1890, Benjamin Lewis Rice (1837–1927) was appointed its full-time director of
archaeological research. Rice had earlier served in important positions such as secretary to the
government of Mysore, Department of Education, and had been involved with archaeological
research since 1884. During his tenure, he edited and published twenty volumes of Epigraphia
Carnatica containing 8,869 inscriptions, in addition to general works such as Mysore and Coorg
from Inscriptions and Find of Roman Coins near Bangalore. Scholars like R. Narsimhachar, R.
Shamasastry, and M. H. Krishna followed him and continued the prolific epigraphic output. Five
thousand inscriptions were copied and published during the tenure of R. Narsimhachar, and
another two thousand with Krishna as director. An overview of developments in Indian epigraphy
until 2015 is provided in an edited book by Shrinivas V. Padigar (2016).

It was not until 1892, however, that a regular series titled Epigraphia Indica for publishing
translations of inscriptions got off the ground and provided a forum for the reporting and
discussion of inscriptions collected by the Archaeological Survey of India (Burgess, Hultzsch, and
Fuehrer 1892). In 1903 a separate journal Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica had been set up for Arabic
and Persian inscriptions. In 1903, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) instituted two
archaeological scholarships—one for Arabic or Persian and the other in Sanskrit—and this set
epigraphy firmly within the domain of the ASI. Three years later, in 1906, a new post of
government epigraphist was created for the entire country, although such a post had existed
under Alexander Cunningham when in 1883, J.F. Fleet of the Bombay Civil Service was appointed
to a three-year term as epigraphist to the Government of India.

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It is important to recognize that traditional scholars such as Bhagwanlal Indraji (1839–1888)

struggled and contributed actively to understanding the country’s past. Often supported by the
Princely States, in this case the Nawab of Junagadh, they traveled extensively and, with their deep
cultural insights, were able to provide different perspectives from that of colonial officials and
administrators. Born and brought up in the ancient city of Junagadh in Gujarat, Bhagwanlal was
the youngest of the three sons. His father was a known Ayurvedic practitioner and astrologer, and
Bhagwanlal trained in Sanskrit as part of the family tradition but lacked a formal education or
adequate knowledge of English. Junagadh, located at the base of Girnar Hills, was known for its
historical remains, such as the three inscriptions on the same rock: of Asoka dated to the 3rd
century BCE, the 2nd-century-CE record of Rudradaman, and the 4th-century epigraph of
Skandagupta; Buddhist caves; 11th-century step wells; Jain temples; and the medieval fort. It was
these remains that attracted young Bhagwanlal’s attention. The Asokan inscription had already
been copied under instructions from Ranchodaji Amarji (1768–1841), the dewan of the Princely
State, and was a topic of discussion among local scholars. Ranchodaji himself wrote a history of
Sorath in Kathiawar in Persian, and this work found a receptive audience. Thus “the Girnar
inscribed rock became a school of learning” (Dharamsey 2012, 36).

In 1862, Bhagwanlal joined Bhau Daji Lad, a medical doctor with an interest in antiquarian
research, as an epigrapher. Bhau Daji who was twice the sheriff of Bombay, as it was then known,
financed Bhagwanlal’s early fieldwork, which enabled him to embark on his first long tour in
1865–1866. During this period, he visited Dhauli and Jaugada, the sites of Asokan edicts, and the
Udayagiri caves in Orissa, where he copied the famous Hathigumpha inscriptions. He was also
one of the few scholars at this time who had an understanding of the history of Jainism in India. It
is significant that it was the writings of medieval authors such as Hemacandra that first drew
Bhagwanlal Indraji’s attention to the Mauryas. This is evident from Bhagwanlal’s note in his own
handwriting stating that he got copied in Vikram Samvat 1914 (1858 CE) Hemcandra’s
Pariśiṣṭaparvan of Triṣaṣṭiśalākāpuruṣcaritra (the eleventh and last book) to study Mauryan
history (Dharamsey 2012). Bhagwanlal’s reliance on Hemachandra’s writing marks the crucial
difference between Indian and European archaeologists working in the 19th century. While the
former took recourse to writings in Sanskrit, for colonial officials, it was tracing the evidence of
Alexander the Great in Greek writings and his expedition to India that provided the crucial focus.

By the early 20th century, several Princely States had well-established departments of
archaeology and many of these actively participated in epigraphical work though their approach
varied. Brahmagiri hill in Karnataka was home to at least three minor rock edicts of Asoka, with
Siddapura, Brahmagiri, and Jatinga-Ramesvara located in an area within a radius of about 2
miles. The minor rock edicts are also said to form the earliest group of Asokan inscriptions,
followed by the major rock edicts. In the annual report of his department at Mysore, M.H. Krishna
(1892–1947), the director of archaeology, published a contour map of Brahmagiri hill that he had
explored, indicating not just the Asokan inscription and the megaliths but also, more
significantly, the relationship of this hill with the Asokan epigraph at Siddapur, memorial stones
located around it, temples, a perennial spring, tank with good water halfway down the hill, and a
cave with a natural trough containing drinking water (Nagarajan and Sundara 1985).

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Krishna’s approach to locating inscriptions within larger cultural landscapes has found
resonance with present-day archaeologists. Morrison and Lycett have reexamined stone
inscriptions from south India and have convincingly shown that locational analysis of the
inscriptions provides insights that otherwise get marginalized. Especially important for the
discussion are inscriptions associated with agricultural activities such as those on embankments
and canals. A coded database of 1610 Vijayanagara period inscriptions from the northern part of
the kingdom shows that five languages and six scripts are represented. Thus, a monolingual
analysis of the inscriptions tends to give skewed results. For example, the distribution pattern
shows the predominance of inscriptions in Telugu, rather than those in Tamil or Kannada, the
present-day official language of the region, and provides a corrective to the Tamil-centric
historical understanding of the Vijayanagara kingdom (Morrison and Lycett 1997, 223). In
addition to contextualizing stone inscriptions within cultural landscapes and coded databases,
issues regarding the authenticity of the records have also been raised.

Forgeries: Ancient and Modern

While modern forgeries have received attention in the annals of epigraphic studies references to
forged inscriptions occur in the ancient period and are mentioned in the inscriptions themselves.
This is especially valid for copperplate records, which were often land deeds. It is not surprising
that the Sanskrit lawbooks prescribe the death penalty for forging royal documents (Salomon
1998, 165–168).

In the history of epigraphy, Alois Anton Führer (1853–1930) has received notoriety for fraud and
for spreading falsehood. Führer came to Bombay in the 1870s and built a close relationship with
Georg Bühler (1837–1898), who had acquired a reputation as a collector of manuscripts for the
government, before he moved to Vienna to take up a teaching position. In 1885, Führer began his
career as a government archaeologist. He continued his relationship with Bühler and regularly
sent him inscriptions that he had recovered for editing and publishing. After his excavations at
the Kankali Tila mound at Mathura from 1888 to 1890, Führer regularly sent inscriptions for
Bühler to write twenty articles in the Vienna Oriental Journal, Academy, and Epigraphia Indica. The
relationship between the two has been described as follows:

One body of opinion regards Führer and Bühler as compliant with best scholarly practice.
The middling view construes them as business partners, with Führer handling
acquisitions in India, and Bühler in charge of European marketing. At the other extreme,
they are seen as partners in crime,

with Führer often accused of forging inscriptions (Huxley 2010, 496).

One of the primary concerns of colonial collectors was to establish a chronology for India’s past,
and this emphasis on dynastic history has continued well into the present. It is intriguing that
Western scholars who have written subsequently on the origins of the Brahmi script have

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continued to ignore the archaeological evidence from the subcontinent. At this point, rather than
presenting various interpretations of the date or origins of Brahmi, it may be more constructive
to analyze the archaeological data on writing on materials other than on stone, such as on pots.

The Origins of Writing: Rethinking the Role of Ceramics

In addition to the decipherment of inscriptions, a theme that found frequent discussion was the
origins of writing in India. Major contributors to the early study of ancient Indian writing were
Indologists and Sanskritists whose primary interest was in Indian law digests, especially those
relating to inheritance and partition. One prominent contributor to the debate on the beginnings
of writing in India was Georg Bühler (1837–1898), an influential Austrian scholar of Sanskrit and
Prakrit. Bühler came to India in the mid-19th century and joined Elphinstone College, Bombay as
a lecturer in 1865 and was also the keeper of oriental manuscripts in the Bombay Presidency. He
returned to Europe and took up the chair of Sanskrit studies in Vienna in 1881. Buehler first
published Indian Palaeography in German in 1896, which was subsequently translated into
English and published in Calcutta.

In 1898, Buehler published On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet (Karl J. Truebner) in which
he pushed back the origin of writing in India to the 8th century BCE and traced its beginnings to
the Phoenicians. Richard Salomon sums up Buehler’s legacy in terms of identifying the
beginnings of writing in India in the following words:

In general, some form or other of Bühler’s essential thesis that Brāhmī was developed out
of a Semitic prototype in pre-Mauryan India has been accepted by most scholars in the
west, but rejected by the majority of South Asian experts, who generally argue for a
separate and indigenous origin for the Indic scripts, often by way of derivation, direct or
indirect, from the Indus script

(Salomon 1995, 271–279).

It should be mentioned that the Indus civilization was discovered in the 1920s and was not known
at the time that Bühler wrote his history of paleography.

The beginnings of writing in India in the two scripts, Brahmi and Kharosthi, have often been
dated to the 3rd century BCE and attributed to the Mauryan king Asoka. This does not consider
inscriptions on pottery and other material objects frequently found at archaeological sites (Ray
2006, 113–143). Archaeological finds from Sri Lanka have challenged the assumption of a
Mauryan beginning for the Brahmi script. The 1990 excavations by Siran Deraniyagala (director-
general of the Archaeological Survey of Sri Lanka) at the ancient sacred site of Anuradhapura to
the southeast of the modern city named after it provided the first indications of a pre-Mauryan
date for the presence of Brahmi in Sri Lanka, thereby questioning the hitherto held views on the
introduction of the script to the island in the Mauryan period. The five shards came from an
approximately 33-meter-deep test pit, Anuradhapura Mahapali (AMP). A total of twenty-nine
radiocarbon determinations were available, and the radiocarbon laboratories of the British

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Museum and Beta Analytic carried out the measurements. It is clear from these detailed analyses
that the earliest evidence of Brahmi script can be dated to the early part of the 4th century BCE
(Coningham et al. 1996, 73–97).

An analysis of the inscribed fragments from Anuradhapura indicates that the legends were
inscribed on lids and on ceramic vessels and that many of these vessels may have been dedicated
to religious establishments. During excavations of the northern and southern ayakas or stone
pillars of the main stupa at Jetavana in Anuradhapura, seventeen vessels were found containing
conch shells, ivories, over two thousand beads, hundreds of fragments of semiprecious stones,
and so on (Coningham et al. 1996, 90). Thus, the close association of inscribed fragments with
travels by Buddhist monastics is evident, and this is further corroborated by data from
Tissamaharama, where the legends include the names of upasika/s, or laywomen, as well as
bhikhusangha, or the Buddhist Sangha, theirs or nuns, and theras or monks (Falk 2014, 45–94). A
significant aspect of the Tissamaharama excavations has been the find of more than one hundred
sherds with legible inscriptions in Brahmi from Tissa 3 in strata placed in a chronological
sequence through radiocarbon dates from 4th century BCE to 2nd century CE. How are these
inscribed sherds to be interpreted? “Most of the sherds at all sites of Akurugoda are uninscribed.
However, the majority of the inscribed sherds have links to Buddhist establishments at the
site” (Falk 2014, 86).

Archaeological excavations conducted since 1960 at the Early Historic burial–cum settlement site
of Kodumanal in South India on the northern bank of the river Noyyal, a tributary of the river
Kaveri have provided further evidence for the pre-Mauryan beginnings of writing on pottery. The
site straddles the ancient route from the Palghat gap eastward to Karur and Uraiyur along the
Kaveri River, which flows into the Bay of Bengal through a fertile and rich delta. Seven seasons of
excavations have brought to light a 40-hectare burial complex at the site, and seventeen of the
graves were excavated. One of the significant outcomes of the excavations is to show that burials,
marked by large stones that are often dated to the Iron Age, continued as a means of disposal of
the dead in the Early Historic period as well dated to the early centuries of the common era.

Nearly 551 Tamiḻ-Brahmi inscribed potsherds, 598 graffiti bearing potsherds, Northern Black
Polished ware, three fragments of Rouletted ware, punch-marked coins, and five radiometric
dates obtained for the samples collected from well-stratified layers date the site from 6th century
to 2nd century BCE. Most of the legends on pottery refer to personal names, although an
important inclusion is that of nikama or nigama, translated as “market town” (Rajan 2015b, 65–
79). In 2013, Rajan and Yatheeskumar published the results of renewed excavations at Porunthal
and Kodumanal in Tamilnadu, where numerous Tamil-Brahmi and Prakrit-Brahmi inscriptions
and fragments were found. Their stratigraphic analysis combined with radiocarbon dates of
paddy grains and charcoal samples indicated that contexts date to as far back as the 6th and,
perhaps, 7th centuries BCE (Rajan 2015a; Rajan and Yatheeskumar 2013).

Inscriptions on pottery have an extensive distribution in the Indian subcontinent in the early
centuries of the common era and inscribed pottery fragments have been found at a large number
of Buddhist monastic sites (Ray 1987, 1–14). Particularly noteworthy in the monastic context are
the inscribed bowls and vessels carrying dedicative inscriptions, such as the twenty-four

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potsherds with Kharoṣṭhī writing found in the vicinity of Peshawar with legends reading
danamukhe or donation and sanghe catudise or of the Sangha of the four quarters (Chhabra 1949–
1950, 125–129), or the fifty Kharoṣṭhī and five Brahmi inscribed sherds from Tor-dherai in
Baluchistan. In contrast, shards inscribed with Brahmi writing were found in the stupa area at
Mohenjo-daro in the Gandhara region. It is interesting that unlike the Gandhari-Prakrit
manuscripts, Kharoṣṭhī legends on pottery have a wide distribution into the Punjab, eastern and
southeastern India.

Buddhist monastic communities are often associated with the adoption of writing for their texts
in the 2nd and 1st century BCE, especially based on the evidence from Gandhara (Drewes 2007,
101–143; Schopen 2009, 189–219). Many of the manuscripts were subsequently either “ritually
buried” in water pots inside the cells of monasteries or kept in special repositories referred to as
koṣṭhikā (Strauch 2014, 797–830). Clearly, inscriptions on pots and other materials need to be
taken into account, and more important, the context is crucial in understanding the role of
writing in early India. The evidence for the presence of Buddhist monastics at Tissamaharama in
the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE is unmistakable, even though there is no monastic structure
associated with finds of inscribed pottery. There is less clarity on the context of inscribed pottery
found in Iron Age megalithic sites in the Tamil region, and this is a theme that requires further
research.

Reading Against the Grain

New research has queried the colonial construction of inscriptions as historical documents since
most of the stone and copper-plate charters were records of property transactions and had a
limited function in society. The fact that they also contained eulogies of the ruling kings often
written in Sanskrit meant that as in the colonial period, these inscriptions have continued to be
used in the construction of the medieval state and society in the writing of socioeconomic history
(Chakravarti 2009, 17–42; Singh 2008, 49–50).

Daud Ali (2000) has argued that

the royal eulogies (praśasti) of copper plate inscriptions can be read as imperial histories
with which medieval agents made and remade their world in a field of highly politicized
and often contestatory representations, as texts partly articulative of their contexts and
partly articulated by them (166–167).

The inclusion of genealogies of the ruling house in the copper-plate eulogies provided the space
to the scribes to construct their vision of the world in which they were placed. This vision does not
place the inscriptions into binary opposition to the Sanskrit Puranas, Sastras, and Upanishads.
Instead, an analysis through the notion of intertextuality shows that in the copper plates, several
different discursive practices overlapped to present a vision of the past often overlapping with
that presented in the Puranas (Ali 2000, 174). Thus, the inscriptions are to be seen as a means by

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which kings of different regions articulated their political relationship with other rulers, rather
than as authentic records of contemporary events, which were more reliable than Sanskrit texts
(Ali 2000, 186).

The use of inscriptions as an unproblematic source of dynastic history and social facts has been
countered by Cynthia Talbot. In her study of the inscriptions of the Kakatiya period (1175–1325) of
ancient Andhra, Talbot (2001) accepts that inscriptions were purposive acts for public display and
refers to them as “materially embedded records of practice.” It is the examination of this
intentionality of the inscriptions that makes Talbot’s work stand apart from other studies. She
locates the temple inscriptions with reference to the locale and makes a distinction between
inscriptions on coastal temples and those in the newly settled inland regions of Andhra.

While Talbot has emphasized the need to locate stone inscriptions on temple walls in their
context, other scholars have stressed another colonial legacy and the need to distinguish between
different materials on which the inscriptions were written. For example, based on a study of
copper-plate grants from south India, Emmanuel Francis (2018, 387–418) has interrogated the
inclusion of copper plates in the category termed “inscription,” which is generally defined as a
publicly displayed document. In a well-researched paper, Francis convincingly establishes that
the form and content of copper plates from south India dated to the first and early part of the 2nd
millennium CE replicate palm-leaf account books.

Perhaps the earliest copper plate grant is a late 3rd-century example, the Pātagaṇḍigūḍem
copper-plate grant from West Godavari district in Andhra recording the grant of land to the
monastery at Pithunda (Falk 1999–2000, 275–283). Since then, these engravings of royal orders
regarding land grants were produced in the thousands and collected during the colonial period.
The copper-plate land grants are to be distinguished from other writings on copper and bronze
found in Buddhist contexts, which were often buried and not meant to be read. Both Sircar (1965,
74ff.) and Salomon (1998, 129ff.) refer to pre–3rd century writing on metal of dedicatory or
votive records. In contrast, copper plates recording royal orders were legal documents granting
permanent rights given to recipients and often authenticated by royal seals. These copper plates
were not only often buried for safekeeping but also found in treasuries attached to temples or
mathas. Unlike stone inscriptions, copper plates were portable and not meant for public display
but were instead intended for individual use. An examination of the inscriptions shows that the
recording of land grants was a complex process that involved first writing on palm leaf, then on
copper plate, and finally on stone to make it accessible to the public (Francis 2018, 413).

Palm leaf and birch bark were used for writing, although the former seems to have been more
popular since even the Bhurjapatra or birch bark of the Bower manuscript found to the north of
Kashmir is cut according to the size of palm leaves. As early as 1st century CE, we find that even
the copper plates used for charters were fashioned like palm leaf, that is, oblong and narrow. The
earliest copper plate of this sort is the Taxila Copper Plate of Patika (Konow 1931–1932, 251ff.),
which certainly is not later than the 1st century CE (Guy 1962, 8). Guy has also endorsed the
antiquity of the palm-leaf manuscript and suggests that there is little reason to doubt that it
extends back in time almost as far as the art of writing itself in India, although actual specimens

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have not survived. He argued that the engraved copper plates retrieved from the ancient city of
Taxila, dating from the 1st century CE are of a narrow landscape format, presumably already
emulating the palm-leaf folio.

In 1994, ancient scrolls from Gandhara on birch bark were discovered written in Kharoshti script
and Gandhari-Prakrit language dated from the 1st century BCE to the 3rd century CE. They were
found in a Buddhist stupa in the Hadda area near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. It would seem
that the manuscripts had been ritually buried after fresh copies had been made (Salomon 2018).
Many more manuscripts came to light between 1997 and 2000. Written on palm leaf, birch bark,
leather, and copper, these date to the 8th century CE (Matsuda 2010).

Interesting evidence for the use of palm leaf is provided from the 6th century CE. The Kurud
Charter of Maharaja Narendra, the founder of the Sarabhapura dynasty of south Kosala issued
from his camp of victory at Tilakesvara in the twenty-fourth regnal year of his reign, records the
renewal of the grant of the village Keshavaka (Dikshit 1957, 263–266). The record states that the
previous king had earlier granted the village in a palm-leaf charter to someone by the name of
Bhasruta Svami of Dharani gotra. But as a fire had destroyed the palm leaf, Maharaja Narendra
regranted it in a copper-plate charter in favor of Sankha Svami, Bhastruta Svami’s son. Someone
named Sridatta engraved the record. These instances indicate that charters were first copied on
palm leaves and later engraved on metal by an engraver. This also raises issues about traditional
methods of recording and communicating.

Traditional Writing and Its Uses

In the Arthasastra, an important function accorded to writing is that of maintaining accounts of
income, expenditure, revenue, wages, and the like (chapter 2.7). In the topic—Association with
Elders (chapter 1.5), the Arthasastra refers to arithmetic and writing as important skills to be
learned and refers to the royal scribe who was responsible for drafting royal correspondence
(chapter 2.10). These early references to the significance attached to writing and recording can be
multiplied and added to, but an issue that remains somewhat under-researched relates to the
replication of terms from inscriptions in literary texts, such as the 12th-century Rajatarangini
(Witzel 1990, 1–57).

Inscriptions and the Writing of History

From the 5th century BCE onward, ancient Greek authors introduced data from inscriptions in
their work “to assert an impression of scholarly control over the evidence” (Liddel and Low 2013,
1). Herodotus was one of the early authors to use inscriptions in a study of the past. This is an
issue that we have discussed in the brief overview presented here. In the final section, two
examples become necessary to drive home the point that several under-researched issues
remain, such as the extent to which inscriptions defined public spaces and were themselves
performative speech acts. Another aspect relates to the frequency with which inscriptions were
produced and the intentions behind their production. There is thus a need to move the colonial

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paradigm and read the inscriptions in context rather than as autonomous historical texts. Can the
religious history of a region be studied solely on the basis of (portable) copper-plate charters
preserved out of context and without provenance, in museums? This is a theme raised by Hawkes
(2015, 53–96) in the context of the early medieval period of Indian history.

Gujarat in western India is one of the regions known for coastal temples, which were dedicated to
a variety of deities, ranging from the non-Sanskritic fertility goddess lajja-gauri, whose shrine,
dated to 1st century BCE, was excavated from the site of Padri in the Talaja tahsil of Bhavnagar
district of Gujarat hardly 2 kilometers from the Gulf of Khambat to temples of Surya or Sun and
other gods along the Saurashtra coast from the 6th century onward. These temples are often
attributed to the generosity and patronage of the Maitraka dynasty (493–776 CE) with their
political center at Valabhi at the head of the Gulf of Khambat. Consider, for example, the
following statement: “The Maitrakas of Valabhi (the first local dynasty of Saurashtra) through
land grants to brahmanas, Buddhist viharas and occasionally to temples sought to legitimize
their authority and extend into the countryside for resource mobilization” (Sinha 2001, 151–163).

No doubt, more than 120 copper-plate grants of the Maitrakas written in Sanskrit provide a rich
corpus that has been frequently used to write the history of the Maitrakas, especially within the
socioeconomic framework with an emphasis on the emergence of the state. What is seldom taken
into account is the fact that these temples were located away from the political center of the
contemporary ruling dynasty of the Maitrakas at Valabhi and challenge the often-held view of
being labeled “Maitraka temples.” All the Maitraka inscriptions are records of land grants to
religious donees made during Maitraka rule in western India. A majority of the 120 endowments
of the Maitrakas were made in favor of brahmanas whose Vedic affiliations are specified as also to
Buddhist monks and nuns rather than temples. Most of the donations to brahmanas were of land,
rather than villages, and were concentrated around the political center of the Maitrakas in the
region of Valabhi. These were specifically meant for the performance of Vedic sacrifices. Only five
grants record donations to temples, and none of these corresponds to the coastal temples. A
notable absence in the Maitraka period are stone inscriptions on temple walls that could provide
insights into the nature of the interaction between the community and the shrine (Mishra and
Ray 2017; Ray 2023). But this has not deterred historians from writing about religious change in
the region based on portable copper-plate grants.

In the final analysis, the colonial roots of epigraphic studies in India are evident. It is also
apparent that the legacy of 19th-century collections survives and flourishes, aided by historians
who rely on the contemporaneity of the inscriptions with historical events that they describe as
“neutral observers.” There is “rarely any interrogation of sources (except in terms of authenticity
and chronology). Meaning was read in a straightforward way, as reflecting
reality” (Venkatachalapathy 2006, 5). “Their studies could well have been carried out simply
using the summaries of inscriptions available from reports of the Archaeological
Department” (Subrahmanyam 2001, 461).

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Further Reading
Ali, Daud. 2000. “Eulogy as World History: Rethinking Copper-Plate Inscriptions in Cola India.” In Querying the
Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, edited by Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters and Daud Ali, 166–
167. New York: Oxford University Press.

Buehler, George. (1896) 2004. Indian Palaeography. Reprint. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.

Buehler, George. 1898. On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet. Strassburg, France: Karl J. Truebner.

Chakrabarti, Dilip K. 1996 Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. London: Coronet Books Inc.

Dharamsey, Virchand. 2012. Bhagwanlal Indraji (1839–88) the First Indian Archaeologist: Multidisciplinary Approaches to
the Study of the Past. Vadodara, India: Darshak Itihas Nidhi.

Goody, Jack. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Leoshko, Janice. 2003. Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in South Asia. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing
Ltd.

Morrison, Kathleen D., and Mark T. Lycett. 1997. “Inscriptions as Artifacts: Precolonial South India and the Analysis of
Texts.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4 (3–4): 215–237.

Rajan, K. 2015a. Early Writing System: A Journey from Graffiti to Brahmi. Madurai, India: Pandya Nadu Centre for
Archaeological Research.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha. 2006. “Inscribed Pots, Emerging Identities: The Social Milieu of Trade.” In Between the Empires:
Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE, edited by Patrick Olivelle, 113–143. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ray, Himanshu Prabha. 2007. Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: The Legacy of Sir Mortimer Wheeler. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.

Salomon, Richard. 1995. “On the Origin of the Early Indian Scripts: A Review Article.” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 115 (2): 271–279.

Salomon, Richard. 1998. Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit and Other Indo-Aryan
Languages. New York: Oxford University Press.

Salomon, Richard G. 2018. Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhara. Somerville: Wisdom Publications.

References
Ali, Daud. 2000. “Eulogy as World History: Rethinking Copper-Plate Inscriptions in Cola India.” In Querying the
Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, edited by Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, and Daud Ali, 166–
167. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Colonial Archaeology in South Asia: Epigraphic Research

Burgess, James, Eugen Julius Theodor Hultzsch, and Alois Anton Führer, eds. 1892. Epigraphia Indica: A Collection of
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