Nayanjot Lahiri
Nayanjot Lahiri is a Professor of History at Ashoka University. She was previously a professor in the Department of History at the University of Delhi. Educated at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and at the Department of History, University of Delhi, she taught at Hindu College from 1982 till 1993, and thereafter at the Department of History. She has served as Dean of Colleges at the University of Delhi from 2007 till 2010 and as Dean of International Relations from 2006 till 2007. Nayanjot Lahiri has been Member, Delhi Urban Art Commission (2007-2010), and currently serves on the Council of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and on the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Society (New Delhi). She was also member of a committee set up by the Government of India in 2010 to analyse the impact of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (Amendment and Validation) Ordinance, 2010 and to draft an alternative bill for Parliament. The bill became law in March 2010.
Professor Lahiri's research interests include Ancient India, Indian archaeology, and heritage studies. She is the author of Pre-Ahom Assam(1991), The Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes (upto c. 200 BC) (1992), Finding Forgotten Cities- How the Indus Civilization was Discovered (2005), Marshalling the Past: Ancient India and its Modern Histories (2012) and Ashoka in Ancient India (2015). She is the co-author of Copper and its Alloys in Ancient India (1996), editor of The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2000), co-editor of Ancient India: New Research (2009), Buddhism in Asia - Revival and Reinvention (2016) and an issue of World Archaeology entitled The Archaeology of Hinduism (2004). Her writings have also appeared in peer-reviewed journals like Antiquity, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, World Archaeology and Economic and Political Weekly. At present, she is working on a history of Indian archaeology since Independence.
Professor Lahiri won the Infosys Prize 2013, in the humanities, for her work on archaeology. Her book Ashoka in Ancient India was awarded the 2016 John F. Richards Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book in South Asian History.
A selected list of her published books include:
Ashoka in Ancient India. (2015.)
Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was discovered.(2012.)
With Singh, Upinder, eds. (2010). Ancient India: new research.
Marshalling the Past. (2002)
Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (2000)
Monuments Matter: India's Archaeological Heritage Since Independence (2017)
The archeology of the Indian trade route (1992)
Vismrit Nagaro Ki Khoj (2009)
Pre-Ahom Assam: Studies In Inscription Of Assam Between The Fifth And The Thirteenth Century Ad
Time Pieces: A Whistle-stop Tour of Ancient India (2018)
A selected list of her published articles include:
The Pre-Ahom Roots of Medieval Assam. 1984. Social Scientist 12: 60-69.
The Assam-Burma Route to China. 1986. Man and Environment X: 123-34 (with D.K. Chakrabarti).
A Preliminary Report on the Stone Age of the Union Territory of Delhi and Haryana. 1987. Man and Environment XI: 109-16 (with D.K. Chakrabarti).
A Preliminary Report on the Archaeology of the Ranchi District with a Note on the Asura Sites. 1988. Man and Environment XII:29-53 (with D.K. Chakrabarti).
Landholding and Peasantry in the Brahmaputra Valley c. 5th – 13th centuries AD. 1990. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient XXXIII: 157-68.
Harappa as a centre of trade and trade routes: a case study of the resource-use, resource-access and lines of communication in the Indus Civilization. 1990. The Indian Economic and Social History Review XXVII:405-44.
Some ethnographic aspects of the ancient copper-bronze tradition in India. 1993. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3 (2) : 219-32.
Black-and-Red Ware settlements in West Bengal. 1993. South Asian Studies 9: 123-35 (with D.K. Chakrabarti, G. Sengupta, and R.K. Chattopadhyaya).
The Iron Age in India: the Beginning and Consequences, 1994. Purattatva 24: 12-32 (with D.K. Chakrabarti).
Investigating the inception and early use of Iron – Changing perceptions. 1995. Current Development Reporter II (1): 10-16.
Indian metal and metal-related related artefacts as cultural signifiers: an ethnographic perspective. 1995. World Archaeology 29 (1) : 116-132.
The Alloying Traditions of Protohistoric and Historic India: Some general trends and their ethnographic dimensions. 1995. Puratattva 25: 64-73.
Preliminary Field report on the Archaeology of Faridabad – the Ballabgarh Tehsil (with U. Singh and T. Uberoi). 1996. Man and Environment XXI (1) : 32-57.
Archaeological Landscapes and Textual Images: A Study of the Sacred Geography of late medieval Ballabgarh. 1996. World Archaeology 28 (2): 244-64.
John Marshall’s appointment as Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India: a survey of the papers pertaining to his selection. 1997. South Asian Studies 13 : 127-40.
A little known Buddhist relic stupa in the Santhal Parganas. 1997. Puratattva 27: 96-99.
South Asian Demographic Archaeology and Harappan population estimates: a brief reassessment. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 35 (1). 1998: 1-22.
The end of the Harappan Civilization and the Aryan Question: First Formulation. Reconstructing History Essays in Honour of Prof. V.C. Srivastava (ed. V.D. Misra). 1998. Varanasi: 195-204.
Coming to Grips with the Indian Past: John Marshall’s early years as Lord Curzon’s Director-General of Archaeology in India – Part I. 1998. South Asian Studies 14 : 1-23.
In the Shadow of New Delhi: Understanding the landscape through Village eyes (with U. Singh). The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape (ed. Peter J. Ucko and Robert Layton). 1999. Routledge, London and New York:
Bodh-Gaya: an ancient Buddhist shrine and its modern history (1891-1904). Case Studies in Archaeology and Religion (ed. Timothy Insoll).1999. Archaeopress, Oxford: 33-44.
Archaeology and identity in colonial India. 2000. Antiquity 74 (285): 687-692.
Coming to Grips with India’s Past and her ‘Living Present’: John Marshall’s Early Years (1902-1906). 2000. South Asian Studies 16: 89-107.
Destruction or conservation? Some aspects of monument policy in British India (1899-1905). 2001. Destruction and Conservation of Cultural Property (ed. Robert Layton, Peter G. Stone and Julian Thomas). Routledge, London: 264-75. -
Historical Archaeology of India: An outline of the Work of the Archaeological Survey of India (with Vaishali Sethi and Baldev Purushartha). 2002. Indian Archaeology in Retrospect - Archaeology and Historiography, Volume IV (ed. S. Settar and R. Korisettar). Manohar, New Delhi: 71-115.
Commissioned Comment on Robert Hayden’s article, Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans, 2002. Current Anthropology 43(2): 223-24.
Commemorating and Remembering 1857: the revolt in Delhi and its afterlife.2003. World Archaeology 35 (1):35- 60.
The Discovery of the Indus Civilization: Early Intuitions and Unknown Reports, 1826-1920. 2003. Negotiating India’s Past Essays in Memory of Partha Sarthi Gupta (ed. B. Pati, B.P. Sahu and T.K. Venkatasubramanian). New Delhi, Tulika: 3-28.
From Ruin to Restoration :The Modern History of Sanchi. 2004. Belief in the Past. The Proceedings of the 2002 Manchester Conference on Archaeology and Religion (ed. T. Insoll). Archaeopress, Oxford: 99-114.
Harappan Settlers of the Yamuna-Ganga Doab (with D.P. Sharma). 2004. Indus Civilization Sites in India: New Discoveries (ed. D.K. Chakrabarti). Marg series, Mumbai: 52-56.
John Hubert Marshall. 2004. The Dictionary of British Classicists 1500-1960 (ed. R. Bodd). Thoemmes Press, Bristol.
Archaeological Theory: A Perspective from Outside the Western Academy. Puratattva 36. 2006: 1-11.
Monumental Follies. India 60 (ed. Ira Pande). IIC Quarterly 33 (3 & 4), Winter 2006-Spring 2007: 128-39.
Foro Virtual: Arqueologia Y Descolonizacion. Arqueologia Suramericana/ Arqueologia Sul-Americana 13.1, enero/Janeiro 2007: 3-19.
Geographical Overview: Asia, South: Ganges Valley.2008. Encyclopedia of Archaeology (ed. Deborah M. Pearsall), Elsevier Inc. San Diego.
Archaeology and Some Aspects of the Social History of Early India. 2009. (ed.). A Social History of Early India (ed. B.D. Chattopadhyaya), Indian Council of Philosophical Research, New Delhi.
The archaeological landscape. Journal of Landscape Architecture 7(1), 2009: 36-41.
D D Kosambi. The Historian as Writer. Economic and Political Weekly. 44(43), 2009: 41-48.
'Partitioning the Past - India's Archaeological Heritage after Independence' 2012. G Scarre and R. Coningham (ed.). Appropriating the Past - Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 295-311.
‘Archaeology and the Ancient City’. 2014. The City & South Asia, Cambridge (USA): Harvard South Asia Institute, pp. 7-9.
‘Buddhist Revival and the Restoration of Sanchi’ in Nayanjot Lahiri and Upinder Singh (co-edited). 2016. Buddhism in Asia: Revival and Reinvention. Delhi: Manohar, pp. 53-79.
‘Are Archaeological Discoveries like Scientific Discoveries? The Curious Case of the Indus Civilization. 2017.World Archaeology Volume 49 (2): 174-86.
The Historian as Writer: The Polished Prose of D.D. Kosambi. 2017. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed.) A Concise History of Indian Literature in English (New Expanded Edition). Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
‘Commemorative Intention as Seen Through Images of Delhi’ in Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (ed.) The Uprising of 1857. 2017. New Delhi and Ahmedabad: Alkazi Collection of Photography in Association with Mapin Publishing.
‘Introducing the Collector’ in Anna Dallapicolla’s (ed.) Thanjavur’s Gilded Gods: South Indian Paintings from the Kuldip Singh Collection. 2018. Mumbai: The Marg Foundation.
Picture Courtesy: Isha Pareek, Undergraduate Batch of 2021