HIDDEN CUSTODIANS OF INDIAS PAST: INDIGENOUS CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DISCOVERY AND PRESERVATION OF EARLY INDIAN INSCRIPTIONS AND MONUMENTS (1750 - 1947)

The history of Indian archaeology and epigraphy, has been written almost exclusively with colonial actors- the administrators, surveyors, European scholars - at its centre. Such stories have ignored native agency - those who found the sites, provided the knowledge, saved the monuments, deciphered the inscriptions, and directed the excavations. In this paper, we reconstruct a broader period of Indian archaeology and epigraphy from c.1750 to 1947 that accounts for the participation in the construction of archaeological knowledge in colonial India by local temple priests (shevats, pauranas), villages (gramavasis), pandits, munshis, carvers, village guides (mahout), pilgrims, and hereditary communities. Using a series of archival methods, including digging into archives,genealogy, footnoting, the mapping of discovery networks and the reconstruction of discovery networks, we trace their role and place within colonial archaeology in terms of how their activities were reported and recorded in official documents and survey reports. This paper also attempts to treat gaps in archives not as the absence of knowledge but rather as historical traces in order to reconstruct and reconstruct the often-ignored networks and communities involved in the discovery and preservation of monuments and inscriptions in colonial India, with a specific focus on Indias celebrated finds in archaeology and epigraphy.