Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, before 1930 Photographer unknown · public domain
Rakhaldas Banerji
12 APRIL 1885 — 23 MAY 1930
He cut down through a Buddhist stupa in the Sindh desert and struck a city forty-four centuries old. The announcement went out under another man's name.
The lead
The man who dug too deep
In the winter of 1922 a thirty-seven-year-old Bengali archaeologist stood on a low mound in the Larkana district of Sindh, in what is now Pakistan, and decided to keep digging. The mound was crowned by a ruined Buddhist stupa, and by every expectation of the Archaeological Survey of India that stupa was the story: a Kushan-era monument, second century of the common era, worth clearing and recording and nothing more. Rakhaldas Banerji cleared it. Then he went under it — and found flint blades, copper, and small carved seals of steatite that had no business being in a Buddhist monastery at all.
He had seen seals like them before, in the reports from Harappa, 590 kilometres north. In 1923 he wrote to his Director-General, Sir John Marshall, and made the claim that reorganised the human past: the mound at Mohenjo-daro was not late, it was enormously early — older than the Buddha, older than the Vedas, older than anything then known in India. He was right. When the world was told, eighteen months later, it was told by Marshall. Banerji was by then being transferred east, out of Sindh; within four years he was out of the Survey altogether; within eight he was dead at forty-five. The report he wrote on his own excavation sat unpublished for fifty-four years, and when it finally reached print in 1984 its title said everything: Mohenjodaro: A Forgotten Report.
The lifeline
Forty-five years
1885
Born at Berhampore, Murshidabad, in the ruins of Bengal's old Nawabi capital.
1911
Takes his MA in history at Calcutta; joins the Archaeological Survey as assistant superintendent.
1922
Digs beneath the stupa at Mohenjo-daro and reaches a chalcolithic city.
1923
Writes to Marshall proposing the site's remote antiquity — the first person to do so.
1926
Leaves the Survey at forty-one, under an accusation he denied. His report is shelved.
1930
Dies at Kalighat, Calcutta, aged forty-five, two years into a chair at Banaras.
By the numbers
The arithmetic of a short life
37
His age in the trench at Mohenjo-daro in 1922 — a superintending archaeologist eleven years into the Survey.
4,400 yrs
Between the city he uncovered and the season he uncovered it. Mohenjo-daro was built around 2500 BCE.
54
Years his own excavation report waited after his death. Written by 1926, printed at Varanasi in 1984, at 166 pages.
10
Bengali historical novels he wrote beside the monographs — he was a working novelist as well as an epigraphist.
The work
What he made, found and wrote
1914 · 1917
Bangalar Itihas, two volumes — a history of Bengal written in Bengali, for Bengalis, at a time when the subject was written in English for London.
1915
The Palas of Bengal, with Prachin Mudra on ancient coinage. He was a numismatist and epigraphist before he was a digger.
1919
The Origin of the Bengali Script — still a foundation of Indian palaeography. The same year he is first deputed to Mohenjo-daro.
1922–23
The excavation. He and his team clear the stupa and its quadrangle almost entirely, and open three areas of the buried city below: fired brick, laid streets, drains, flint, copper, seals.
1923
The letter to Marshall arguing the site's great antiquity, and linking its seals to those Daya Ram Sahni had found at Harappa. Two sites, one lost civilisation.
1924
The Temple of Shiva at Bhumara and The Palaeography of the Hathigumpha and Nanaghat Inscriptions — published in the same year the Indus discovery was announced without him.
1926
The Mohenjo-daro report, submitted complete with photographs and plates to the Director-General. It is not published. The typescript is returned to him on 16 January 1930.
1928
Bas-reliefs of Badami and A Junior History of India; he takes the Manindra Chandra Nandy chair of Ancient Indian History and Culture at Banaras Hindu University.
1930–33
History of Orissa (two volumes), The Haihayas of Tripuri and The Age of the Imperial Guptas — all published after his death.
1984
Mohenjodaro: A Forgotten Report. Fifty-four years late, his account of his own dig is finally set in type.
Recognition
Then and now
In his lifetime
The world learned of the Indus Civilisation from John Marshall's announcement in the Illustrated London News of 20 September 1924. Banerji is not the name the headlines carried.
Marshall took over the Mohenjo-daro excavations; Banerji was transferred to the Eastern Circle in 1924, away from Sindh.
His finished report was held by the Survey for four years and never printed. He complained that he was not permitted to publish on his own site, and put an account in a Bengali periodical instead.
In October 1925 a Tara image was carried from the Chausath Yogini temple at Bheraghat to the circuit house where he was staying. He denied wrongdoing and the charges were dismissed — but he took voluntary retirement on 16 August 1926, aged 41.
He died four months after the Survey returned his typescript.
Since
Marshall himself conceded it in print in 1931, in the preface to his own great Mohenjo-daro volumes — the grudging sentence quoted below.
Mohenjo-daro has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980, and the Indus Civilisation is now recognised as one of the three great Bronze Age urban cultures, beside Egypt and Mesopotamia.
His report reached print in 1984, under an editor's title that is itself an accusation.
His palaeographic work on the Bengali script is still cited a century on.
Berhampore, his birthplace, keeps a Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay Museum at Panchanantala.
A place
Berhampore, on the Bhagirathi
He was born beside the river in Murshidabad district — the country of Bengal's vanished capital, where the Nawabs' palaces were already going back to the earth and an English cantonment sat on top of them. A boy raised among the wreckage of one lost city grew up to find another.
1757
Plassey fought some 50 km upriver; Murshidabad's power passed to the East India Company.
1853
Krishnath College founded at Berhampore, where he sat his first examinations before Presidency College, Calcutta.
1857
The 19th Native Infantry at Berhampore refused the new cartridges in February — the rebellion's first refusal, on his home ground.
A quote
The credit, such as it was
Three other scholars whose names I cannot pass over in silence, are the late Mr. R. D. Banerji, to whom belongs the credit of having discovered, if not Mohenjo-daro itself, at any rate its high antiquity.
Sir John Marshall · Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, 1931 Written one year after Banerji's death
