Ashish Avikunthak - Hindutva Archaeology and the Future of the Indian Past

Over the past four decades, Hindutva archaeology has emerged as a hegemonic epistemic and political project that seeks to reconfigure the deep past of the Indian subcontinent within a singular, continuous, and essentially Hindu civilizational narrative. Far from merely offering new interpretations of archaeological evidence, this project has increasingly sought to reshape the institutions, methodologies, public authority, and interpretive frameworks of archaeology itself, aligning archaeological knowledge with a majoritarian vision of national culture. Building on arguments developed in my ethnographic study, Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science, and the Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2021), this talk examines the consequences of these transformations for both the discipline of archaeology and the historical imagination it sustains. I ask what is at stake when archaeological inquiry becomes increasingly entangled with projects of cultural nationalism, and whether Indian archaeology can preserve its methodological autonomy, critical integrity, and institutional independence within an increasingly majoritarian political environment. Drawing on examples from contemporary archaeological practice, heritage politics, and visual representations of antiquity, I argue that the future of Indian democracy is inseparable from the future of Indian archaeology. The challenge, it suggests, is not simply to defend archaeology against political instrumentalization, but to preserve forms of empirical reasoning capable of sustaining complexity, plurality, discontinuity, and dissent. Archaeology thus emerges not merely as a discipline concerned with recovering what once existed, but as a field in which competing visions of India's future are actively negotiated and contested. About the Speaker: Ashish Avikunthak is a filmmaker, cultural anthropologist, and archaeologist whose work is widely recognized for its philosophical depth, formal rigor, and sustained engagement with ritual, temporality, and Indian epistemologies. Since the mid-1990s, his films have been screened and exhibited at leading international institutions and festivals, including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Berlinale, and the film festivals of London, Locarno, and Rotterdam. His oeuvre has recently been the subject of the edited volume The Epistemic Archaeology of Ashish Avikunthak: Cinema and Religiosity of Everyday Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), which examines the intellectual and cinematic significance of his work. He is also the author of Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and the Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Currently, he serves as Professor of Film/Media at The Harrington School of Communication and Media, University of Rhode Island.