Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

A study of the cities and states of South Asia between c.800BC and AD 250.

George Michell provides a pioneering and richly illustrated introduction to the architecture, sculpture and painting of Southern India under the Vijayanagara empire and the states that succeeded it. This period, encompassing some four hundred years, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, was endowed with an abundance of religious and royal monuments which remain as testimonies to the history and ideology behind their evolution. The author evaluates the legacy of this artistic heritage, describing and illustrating buildings, sculptures and paintings that have never been published before. In a previously neglected area of art history, the author presents an original and much-needed reassessment.