6. South Asian Heritage and Archaeological Practices

Archaeological practices have been consistently deployed within South Asia for over two hundred years for establishing truths about civilisational origins and legacies. This paper focuses on histories of civilisational tradition that have been unearthed for India through seemingly disparate archaeological practices during the colonial and post-colonial times, but with historiographic crossings and mutations. My aims are to sow seeds of caution towards all forms of valorisation of civilisational ethos within disciplinary archaeology, and to situate the importance of critiquing such constructs in an academic milieu that shows an increasing concern towards archaeological productions of tangible ‘heritage-industries’. My case studies are the nineteenth-century creations of a Buddhist Banaras, and recent interpretations regarding the cultural legacies of the Indus Civilisation, South Asia’s unique Bronze Age phenomenon.