Ashish Avikunthak

Ashish Avikunthak
Presented with The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the HTC Forum
Part of the MIT Fall 2025 Architecture Lecture Series. 

Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India

In this talk, Ashish Avikunthak outlines the central arguments of his book Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2021), an ethnographic investigation into the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and its role in shaping archaeological narratives in postcolonial India. Rather than presenting a linear or celebratory history of Indian archaeology, Avikunthak offers a critical account of how a modest colonial institution transformed into a formidable bureaucratic apparatus. He demonstrates how contemporary ASI’s practices are driven by nationalist imperatives, claims to scientific authority, and spatial politics, revealing archaeology’s instrumental role in constructing a Hindu-centric vision of the past. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, the book exposes the stratification of archaeological labor and the spatial segregation between archaeologists and workers, echoing colonial hierarchies. Through the ASI’s work at Harappan sites in western India, Avikunthak reveals how archaeology is mobilized to legitimize a flawed narrative of Vedic-Aryan origins, reinforcing ideological agendas under the guise of scientific inquiry. Avikunthak connects these practices to broader political movements, notably the ASI-led excavations at Ayodhya following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, illustrating archaeology’s entanglement with religious nationalism. The book critiques the objectivity of ASI archaeology, showing how its epistemology is subverted by postcolonial corruption and Hindutva ideology. 

Biography

Ashish Avikunthak is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, archaeologist and cultural anthropologist. His films have been the subject of more than a dozen retrospectives, eighteen solo shows and they have been shown worldwide in major film festivals, group shows and museums. He has been named Future Greats 2014 by Art Review. In 2025, he received the Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground, the New York–based festival of experimental documentary and avant-garde film, in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to the field of experimental media." He is the author of “Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science and Past in Postcolonial India,” published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, that ethnographically interrogates the role of Archaeological Survey of India in the making of the past in contemporary India. His scholarly works have been published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, Journal of Material Culture, Contributions to Indian Sociology and The Indian Economic and Social History Review among other publications. He has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and earlier taught at Yale University. He is now a Professor of Film media at the Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island.

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streaming on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaTJmFhdv9M

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. 
HTC Forum events are made possible with the generous support of Thomas Beischer through the Lipstadt-Stieber Fund.