Speaking Archaeologically™

Down Chawri Bazar roads, into the Bulbulikhana one goes, if they want to find this place. There are scant bulbuls here now, but a regular bustle of people, on by-lanes which grow ever thin as you proceed down them.    A gate next to a tea shop announces, Razia Sultana ki majar , (The Grave of Razia Sultana), but there is none to be found! Good old uncles direct you to even darker alleys, with workshops, sewage, and cramped buildings rising five floors high. A bustle existed there, the sights and smells of fruits, tea, tyres, meat, rickshaws, which are slowly replaced by sewage, machinery, and stagnant water.  This continues till you break away from all that, and arrive at a small mosque, with an ASI stone to give it its name - Sultan Razia’s Tomb. One of the rulers of the newly established Delhi Sultanate, reigning from 1236-40 CE, Razia has been termed the first female monarch of the subcontinent. Constant infighting among her nobles, some of which refused to accept her...

Why, ASI?  That's the question I ask myself each time I visit any poor site unfortunately in the clutches of the so-called "efficient control" of the Archaeological Survey.  However, things get even more muddled up in the rare case of good conservation that ASI has at long last managed despite themselves. To photograph or not to photograph, that is the question one has in every ASI museum and usually the answer is not to photograph because to hell with whoever you are! When it's an ASI museum, even if the artefacts are languishing in neglect and you're the one researcher who can do so much for it only if you're allowed to keep a visual record photographically, they will still turn you down! The things, however, are not so simple at Mattancherry Palace in Kochi. Now, if you ask at the desk, they'll tell you it's okay to photograph as long as it's without flash because it's got frescoes and quite understandably you don't want to c...