Excavating Civilisation: A.S. Altekar and India’s Ancient Historical Imagination

In the decades after Independence, India’s past was often narrated through a narrow lens. As a result, many of the country’s finest historians, once influential, slipped into obscurity. This series revisits their lives and works to show how these keepers of Clio shaped the way Indians understood themselves.

Part 1 :

The venerable scholar of Ancient India decoded our past with spade, coin and manuscript before ideology buried much of it.

Anant Sadashiv Altekar had the air of a man who was happiest with dust under his fingernails. Whether bent over an excavation trench in Bihar’s summer heat or weighing Gupta gold coins, he exuded the patient determination of a scholar committed to the evidence before him. In the mid-20th century, before India’s historical discourse calcified into hardened ideological camps, Altekar’s blend of archaeology, numismatics and textual scholarship produced histories that were both rigorously empirical and attentive to India’s civilisational depth.

Born in 1898 in Mhakave, a village in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, Altekar came of age when Indian nationalism was just finding its voice and the tools of modern historiography were only beginning to be applied to the subcontinent’s past. Educated at Pune’s Deccan College and later occupying prestigious chairs at the Banaras Hindu University and the Patna University, he straddled the transition from colonial scholarship to independent India’s historical self-fashioning.

His scholarship clung to a deceptively simple ideal that the past should be allowed to speak for itself. And that past spoke to him in the most tangible ways. In 1936, while excavating at Kotah in Rajasthan, Altekar uncovered a pair of stone pillars inscribed in the Vikrama era year 295 (AD 238), among the oldest such inscriptions known. Two decades later, at Kumhrar in Patna, he confirmed earlier theories that the site was once a Mauryan complex supported by massive stone columns - an architectural feat matching anything in the Hellenistic world. But it was at Vaishali in 1958 that Altekar made perhaps his most evocative find of a soapstone casket said to contain the relics of the Buddha, now on display in the Patna Museum.

If the earth yielded treasures to Altekar, so did the soil of rural fields. In 1946, villagers near Bayana in Rajasthan stumbled upon a buried hoard of over 1,800 gold coins from the Gupta period.

Altekar, by then the foremost authority on ancient Indian coinage, catalogued the find in loving detail. The Bayana Hoard remains one of the richest single sources for understanding Gupta iconography, political reach and economic sophistication. It was no accident that in 1947 he became the first chairman of the Numismatic Society of India. Coins for him were not inert relics but voices from the past that spoke of kingship, religion and trade in Ancient India.

His textual output was as impressive as his fieldwork. Altekar’s ‘Education in Ancient India’ (1934) was an ambitious survey of the subcontinent’s educational systems from Vedic times to the eve of the Delhi Sultanate. Drawing on Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions and accounts of foreign travellers, Altekar reconstructed a world in which centres like Nalanda and Takshashila flourished, yet he also controversially argued that literacy and institutional learning declined in the later medieval period. Critics such as German Indologist Hartmut Scharfe would later dismiss this, but even his detractors grudgingly acknowledged Altekar’s marshalling of an unprecedented range of sources.

More enduring still was Altekar’s ‘The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization’ (1938), the first sweeping attempt to track the status of women in ancient times.

Decades before ‘gender history’ became a formal field, it was Altekar who traced shifts in property rights, marriage customs and education. His complex conclusions were neither a romanticisation of the past nor a simple tale of decline. While he noted constraints tightening in certain periods, he also pointed to examples of female agency in religion, politics and literature. Given today’s increasingly caricaturish debates, Altekar’s erudite treatment offers a reminder that history rarely conforms to activist slogans.

A late classic was ‘State and Government in Ancient India’ (1949) - a meticulous study of political ideas and institutions as gleaned from the Arthashastra, the Dharmashastras and epigraphic records. The book treated ancient Indian polities not as exotic curiosities but as advanced systems with fiscal regimes and foreign policy. Altekar resisted the reductive models that Marxist historians wherein class conflict alone drove political change.

Instead, he treated political culture as a product of both material and ideational forces with religion, law, warfare and diplomacy each playing a part.

Perhaps Altekar’s most prescient work, given today’s culture wars over the Gyanvapi mosque–temple complex, was his ‘History of Benares: From the Earliest Times Down to 1937.’ It serves a fine introduction to Altekar’s oeuvre. This slim but dense chronicle, originally serialised in the Journal of the Benares Hindu University, traced Varanasi’s evolution from prehistoric settlement to a modern urban centre.

Unlike the sanitised narratives favoured by India’s mid-20th century Nehruvian historians, Altekar did not flinch from recording episodes of destruction alongside periods of renewal.

“Benares saw its turbulent phase during 1194 and 1707, with the advent of Muslim rule, prosperity of the city declined rapidly.” The period 1200–1550 was a dark one for Benares as temples were demolished on several occasions, especially by Sikandar Lodi when he conquered the city in 1494.

Altekar acknowledged the few moments of conciliation too. “With Akbar, the imperial policy changed… to a policy of toleration and Benares began to prosper again.” The magnificent Viswanatha temple were rebuilt by Todar Mal at the request of scholar Bhatta Narayana. Later, Shah Jahan’s eldest son, Dara Shikoh, anxious to find a meeting point for Hinduism and Islam, had summoned 150 sanyasis from Benares and translated principal Upanishads into Persian.

The city’s history experienced its darkest phase yet under Aurangzeb, whose reign initially did not disclose his policy of bitter hatred towards Hindus. However, secure after the death of his father, Aurangzeb, on April 9, 1669 issued the demolition of Hindu temples and schools zealously carried out by the governor. Visvanatha and Veni Madhava were pulled down. The Nehruvian era’s embrace of Marxian historiography left little room for Altekar’s brand of scholarship.

For anyone seeking to truthfully reconstruct India’s ancient past without the ideological filters of the late 20th century, Altekar’s work remains invaluable. His excavation reports are models of descriptive clarity while his numismatic studies offer forensic analysis that still underpins modern catalogues. His thematic surveys drawn from inscriptions, legal texts and foreign accounts are goldmines for comparative research.

To read Altekar today is to recover a style of scholarship that has largely vanished: interdisciplinary without being jargon-laden, nationalist without being chauvinist, empirical without lapsing into obscurantism. He saw the past as a treasury to be understood, not as a quarry for ideological stone-throwing.

The sheer scope of what he attempted is remarkable. Few historians today would dare to write a cradle-to-present survey of women’s history, or of education across two millennia, for fear of disciplinary sniping. Altekar did so because he believed Indian history could not be chopped into neat compartments.

Anant Sadashiv Altekar died in 1960, before the full force of Marxist historiography swept through Indian universities. He did not live to see his work pushed to the margins of syllabi.

As India once again debates its historical memory, Altekar’s works are exemplars that history need not be a zero-sum contest of ideologies. His career was spent piecing together fragments from many sources, allowing the multiplicity of India’s past to stand on its own terms. In doing so, he preserved a record that survives the tides of fashion in historical writing.