Archaeology seems like a perpetual dispute of sorts, the earth, conniving with the elements, trying to gnaw down creations carved into, and out of, itself… waiting for mortality to wither or meander away like a river and then slowly reclaiming its goods and chattels… perhaps no other animal spends this much time mulling over the past to the point of incessantly digging it out and deploying significant mental faculties over it, decoding ciphers or doling out a range of postulates… sometimes polishing them for academic glory, mostly wielding them for politico-religious discourses…
We were in Sambhar for the raptors, and with the time around noon not conducive for such pursuits, went to an excavation site at Naliasar nearby… the region was the first medieval capital of the Chauhans of Shakambari around seventh century AD… the guardian deity Shakambari a divinity disposed towards vegetarianism… her temple overlooking the expanse of the lake from a hillock twenty-odd miles away…
Most of the artefacts from the excavations, attributed to Kushan and Gupta periods and dated between third century BC and tenth century AD, including coins, pottery and sculptures, are now stored in museums… what remains in-situ are vestiges of what seem to be residential units, scattered squares dotting the landscape at regular intervals, and that’s about that… mortar and calcites, vertices punched into curves infinite…
These arid surrounds, where the landscape seems to have little wherewithal to slow down the sands, be it quartz or of time, choose to let the winds have their say, knowing well that nothing is as linear as it seems, and what blows away will someday blow in again, so civilizations are buried and unearthed time and again, teasing with clues hither and thither, lighting a spark that ardent chroniclers try to fan vigorously into a flame of enlightenment, most of the time having to contend with positivist constructs floating in the middle of nowhere…
To that effect such excavations seem reactionary, stumbling upon a discovery and then scrambling to unravel it, attempting to recreate social constructs from terracotta with no avenue to verify the authenticity save the concurrence of peers of the present and its precincts… no matter how empirical the approach, the results in essence remain speculative… do we expect more from archaeology?… perhaps not, for processual integrity is the bedrock of modern civilization, from philosophers positing in towers ivory to coders manipulating emotions on canvases binary…
We didn’t spend too much time on the ground, about half an hour or so ambling up and down the mounds and trenches, distracted by a sunbird or a babbler here and there… on the way out three collared owlets stared curiously before moving deeper into their cavity on being stared back… trees, perhaps, would be better chroniclers, straddling twixt the animate and the inanimate…
Musing on an excavation site at Naliasar, Sambhar, Rajasthan…
