B. B. Lal


Braj Basi Lal was an Indian writer and archaeologist. He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972 and has served as Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. Lal also served on various UNESCO committees.
His later publications have been noted and criticised for their historical revisionism, taking a controversial stance in the Ayodhya dispute, claiming to have found the remains of a columned Hindu temple beneath the subsequently destroyed Babri Masjid mosque.
He received the Padma Bhushan Award by the President of India in 2000, and was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2021.

Early life and education

Lal was born in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India, on 2 May 1921. Lal obtained his master's degree in Sanskrit from Allahabad University, India.

Career

After his studies, Lal developed interest in archaeology and in 1943, became a trainee in excavation under a veteran British archaeologist, Mortimer Wheeler, starting with Taxila, and later at sites such as Harappa. Lal went on to work as an archaeologist for more than fifty years. In 1968, he was appointed the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India where he would remain until 1972. Thereafter, Lal served as Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla. The B. B. Lal Chair at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur has been established by his son Vrajesh Lal to encourage research in science and technology related to archaeological work.
He served as Head of Department in School of Studies in Archeology, Jiwaji University, Gwalior from 1970 to 1975.

Archaeological work

Between 1950 and 1952, Lal worked on the archaeology of sites accounted for in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, including Hastinapura, the capital city of the Kurus. He made discoveries of many Painted Grey Ware (PGW) sites in the Indo‑Gangetic Divide and upper Yamuna‑Ganga doab.
In Nubia, the Archaeological Survey of India, Lal and his team discovered Middle and Late Stone Age tools in the terraces of the river Nile near Afyeh. The team excavated a few sites at Afyeh and cemetery of C-group people, where 109 graves would be located. Lal worked on the Mesolithic site of Birbhanpur, Chalcolithic site of Gilund and Harappan site of Kalibangan.
In 1975–76, Lal worked on the "Archaeology of Ramayana Sites" project funded by the ASI, which excavated five sites mentioned in the Hindu epic Ramayana – Ayodhya, Bharadwaj ashram, Nandigram, Chitrakoot and Shringaverapur.
Prof. B. B. Lal has published over 20 books and over 150 research papers and articles in national and international scientific journals. The British archaeologists Stuart Piggott and D.H. Gordon, writing in the 1950s, describe Copper Hoards of the Gangetic Basin and the Hastinapura Excavation Report, two of Lal's works published in the Journal of the Archaeological Survey of India, as "models of research and excavation reporting."
In his later publications, Lal has taken a pro-Hindutva stance and engaged in historical revisionism, taking a controversial stance in the Ayodhya dispute, and arguing in favor of the fringe Indigenous Aryans point of view. His later works have been characterized by D. N. Jha as "a systematic abuse of archaeology," while Julian Droogan writes that Lal "has used the term blut und boden, a patriotic connection between one's blood and the soil of one's homeland, in connection with supposed religious continuity in the archaeological record of the subcontinent." Ram Sharan Sharma characterized Lal's later work as driven by communalism and irrationalism, disembedded from "objective and scientific criteria."

Ayodhya dispute

Lal took a controversial stance in the Ayodhya dispute. Between 1975 and 1980 excavations took place at Ayodhya, with Lal writing in 1977, in the official ASI journal, that finds were "devoid of any special interest." In a seven-page preliminary report submitted to the Archaeological Survey of India in 1989, Lal "only mentioned" that his team found "pillar bases," immediately south of the Babri mosque structure in Ayodhya. In 1990, after his retirement, he wrote in a RSS magazine that he had found the remains of a columned temple under the mosque, and "embarked on a spree of lectures all over the country propagating th evidence from Ayodhya." In Lal's 2008 book, Rāma, His Historicity, Mandir and Setu: Evidence of Literature, Archaeology and Other Sciences, he writes :
Lal's conclusions have been contested by multiple scholars, questioning both the stratigraphic information and the kind of structure envisioned by Lal. According to Hole,
Hole concludes that "the structural elements he had previously thought insignificant suddenly became temple foundations only in order to manufacture support for the nationalists' cause." This accusation has been countered by KK Mohammed, who was a student archaeologist accompanying BB Lal. KK Mohammed claims that BB Lal didn't highlight his findings related to the issue because temple was not a big issue back then and he didn't want to provoke people. He claims, that after a decade, leftist historians, suo moto gave a statement that BB Lal hadn't found any evidence of temple. This, as per KK Mohammed, forced BB Lal to highlight his earlier findings from excavations. KK Mohammed claims that the criticism of Lal's work in Ayodhya was an attempt by leftist historians in connivance with extremist Muslim groups with a view to mislead Muslims.

Indigenous Aryanism

In his 2002 book, The Saraswati Flows On, Lal rejected the widely accepted Indo-Aryan migration theory, arguing that the Rig Vedic description of the Sarasvati River as "overflowing" contradicts the mainstream view that the Indo-Aryan migration started at ca. 1500 BCE, after the Sarasvati River had dried up. In his book ‘The Rigvedic People: ‘Invaders’? ‘Immigrants’? or Indigenous?’, Lal argues that the Rigvedic People and the authors of the Harappan civilisation were the same, a view outside mainstream scholarship.

Awards and honors

Personal life

Lal lived in Delhi and had three sons. Lal died at his home in Hauz Khas on 10 September 2022, at the age of 101.

List of publications

  • Braj Basi Lal.. Paleoliths from Beas and Banganga Valleys. Ancient India. No.12. pp. 58–92.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. Birbhanpur: Microlith site in Damodar Valley., West Bengal. Ancient India. No..14. pp 4–40.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. From the Megalith to the Harappan: Tracing Back the Graffiti on Pottery, Ancient India. No. 16. Pp 4–24
  • Braj Basi Lal. Indian Archaeological Expedition to Qasr Ibrim 1961–62.
  • .
  • Braj Basi Lal.. The Direction of Writing in the Harappan Script. Antiquity. Vol..XL. No.175. pp 52–56.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. A Deluge? Which Deluge? Yet Another Facet of Copper Hoard Culture. American Anthropologist. Vol. 70. Pp 857–73.
  • Special survey reports on selected towns: Dumka, 1981.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. The Giant Tank of Śṛiṅgaverapura. Illustrated London News. January. P59
  • Frontiers of the Indus Civilization, 1984.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. Should One Give up All Ethics for Promoting One's Theory? East and West. Vol. 53.. Nos. 1–4. pp285–88.
  • Braj Basi Lal. Historicity of the Mahabharata: Evidence of Art, Literature and Archaeology. Aryan Books International., 978-81-7305-459-4
  • Braj Basi Lal. Excavations at Kalibangan : The Harappans. Archaeological Survey of India.
  • Braj Basi Lal. Kauśāmbī Revisited. Aryan Books International
  • Braj Basi Lal. Testing Ancient Traditions on the Touchstone of Archaeology. Aryan Books International
  • Braj Basi Lal. Agony of an Archaeologist. Aryan Books International.
  • BR Mani; Rajesh Lal; Neera Misra; Vinay Kumar Felicitating a Legendary Archaeology Prof B. B. Lal. Vols. III. BR Publishing Corporation.
  • Braj Basi Lal.. From the Mesolithic to the Mahājanapadas: The Rise of Civilisation in the Ganga Valley. Aryan Books International.

Printed sources

*