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Archaeology and the Public Purpose
 Archaeology and the
Public Purpose
Writings on and by M.N. Deshpande

nayanjot lahiri

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.

Published in India by
Oxford University Press
22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110002, India

© Oxford University Press 2021

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-013048-0

ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-013048-2

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-099386-3

ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-099386-3

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the following:
Images 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, and 4.4 in Part I and Chapters 4, 5, 11, 12, and 17
in Part II of the book. The publisher would be pleased to hear from the copyright
owners so that proper acknowledgement can be made in future editions.

Typeset in ScalaPro 10/13

by Tranistics Data Technologies, New Delhi 110 044
Printed in India by Rakmo Press, New Delhi 110 020
 To
The Deshpande Family
For preserving the family archive
 Images and Tables

Images

I.1 M.N. Deshpande xii

1.1 Deshpande’s father on his release from jail; the boy

on his left in a monkey cap is M.N. Deshpande 9
1.2 Deshpande with B.K. Thapar at home 26
1.3 Deshpande and Mortimer Wheeler at Ellora—Jain caves
in the background 29

2.1 Bungalow No. 7 in Aurangabad today  33

2.2 Director General Deshpande at the Gol Gumbad with
ASI staff 42
2.3 Deshpande with his family and Dr Christian 43
2.4 Bahal excavation camp—group photo of excavation
staff, 1957–8 47
2.5 Deshpande giving a lecture at the Marathi Sahitya Parishad 49

3.1 Officers and staff along with Deshpande’s wife

and sister-in-law at a newly discovered cave below Cave
15 at Ajanta 58
3.2 Visit of Madam Soong Ching Ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen)
to Ellora 59
x Images and Tables

3.3 Nehru coming down the steps at Ajanta 69

3.4 Nehru, Edwina, Deshpande, and Y.B. Chavan at Ajanta 70
3.5 Deshpande explaining Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa
to Nehru and Edwina 71
3.6 Ravana shaking Mount Kailasa at Ellora 72
3.7 Nehru, Edwina, Deshpande, and Chavan in
Cave 29 at Ellora 73
3.8 Siva and Parvati, Cave 29, Ellora 74
3.9 Nehru with Deshpande at ASI’s centenary celebration
exhibition74

4.1 Sheikh Abdullah’s letter to Nurul Hasan 80

4.2 Deshpande with ASI staff in Madhya Pradesh 81
4.3 Deshpande at Talpura 81
4.4 Daimabad excavations directed by Deshpande, in
Ahmednagar. Group photograph of the excavation
staff, 1959 82

5.1 Chandi Prasad Bhatt, 2017 101

5.2 A young Chandi Prasad Bhatt with Gaura Devi and
Hayat Singh 108
5.3 Deshpande and Madhumalati in the Himalayas with
ASI staff 109
5.4 Simha dvara, Badrinath temple 110

6.1 Deshpande in his retirement 118

Tables

13.1 Statement showing important falls of plaster from

the soffit of the dome since July 1936 256
13.2 Magnitude of the crown thrust 260
13.3 Stress due to the meridian thrust 261
 Introducing the Book

This book did not begin as an exploration of the life and work of
Madhusudan Narhar Deshpande (1920–2008). It began as a conse-
quence of research where, initially, I had no idea that he had centrally
figured. A few years ago, I discovered that the Badrinath Temple in
Uttarakhand had been saved from becoming a Birla Mandir in the
1970s. The man who saved Badrinath is more commonly remem-
bered as someone who saved forests and trees, the iconic environ-
mentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. While looking at how this unfolded,
I learnt from Bhatt-ji that his own work at Badrinath had been made
possible because of an archaeologist who was then the director gen-
eral of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI or the Survey), M.N.
Deshpande. I had met Deshpande many decades ago and knew of
him as a scholar of the western rock-cut caves of India. His interven-
tion at Badrinath was something about which I had no clue.
This jugalbandi (duet) that Bhatt hinted at, between him and
Deshpande, remained tucked away in a corner of my mind until,
sometime later, I happened to ask my friend and colleague Ashwini
Deshpande, professor of economics at Ashoka University, if she knew
of Deshpande. I was surprised and delighted to learn that her own
grandfather and the Deshpande I was in search of were brothers. She
soon put me in touch with her uncle Ashok Deshpande, the son of
M.N. Deshpande. One thing led to another and eventually I got access
to a treasure trove of papers and photographs that the Deshpande
family has lovingly preserved. It contained photographs that I
have not found in the ASI collections and there were unpublished
articles too which throw light on Deshpande’s life and research. That
Archaeology and the Public Purpose. Nayanjot Lahiri, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190130480.002.0007.
Image I.1 M.N. Deshpande
 Introducing the Book xiii

he had left behind a cache of papers, notebooks, and files is unusual

as it is rare for director generals of the Survey to do so. John Marshall,
the longest serving director general in British India, did not leave
any papers; nor did Amalananda Ghosh, the longest serving direc-
tor general in independent India. Using Deshpande’s papers, and
material sourced from some offices of the Survey, I thought I would
be able to capture the flavours of the era during which Deshpande
worked as also draw attention to his writings. Additionally, though
Deshpande was a man who, unlike some of his generation, did not
project himself, there are many elements about his life and writings
that are worth remembering. Doing a book on him thus seemed a
fitting tribute to a low-key scholar. And this year being his birth cen-
tenary made it an appropriate time to write about him.
Spanning more than eighty years, this book provides a glimpse
into the life and work of Deshpande through several essays that I have
written about him. Apart from him, family members and colleagues,
politicians and environmentalists figure here as well, and this is
because on many occasions it is the interleaving of Deshpande’s life
with those other lives that helps in understanding the nature of his
work and the directions it unexpectedly took. Simultaneously, I have
brought together selected articles written by him as also extracts from
his writings and notes, especially those found in the Deshpande fam-
ily collection. My essays describe various phases in the career of this
important post-Independence ASI man who went on to become its
director general: what it was like to grow up in a family devoted to
fighting for India’s freedom; how he and independent India’s young
archaeologists were a unique cohort; and his encounters and experi-
ences as an archaeologist, including with an iconic prime minister
and an equally celebrated environmentalist. Deshpande’s own writ-
ings are in English and Marathi, and range from publications on
explorations and excavations in the rock-cut caves of western India to
the Himalayas; archival notes relating to conservation of monuments
such as the Gol Gumbad and the Qutb Minar; unpublished writings
on terracotta art and folk religion; and Marathi writings on archaeolo-
gists and gurus, which appear here for the first time in English (the
writings reproduced here are referred to by the names of the essays
in my chapters). His Marathi writings, in fact, in terms of style are
qualitatively different and more charming than his more academi-
cally oriented English writings.
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xiv Introducing the Book

It was only possible to put this book together because of the kindness
of many individuals and institutions. In Aurangabad, Dilip Khamari,
who heads the Aurangabad Circle office of the ASI, went out of his way to
facilitate my work. His entire team too, from the staff at his office—those
under whose charge Ellora and Ajanta fall—were extremely helpful. In
Delhi, V.N. Prabhakar at the Head Office of the ASI got me access to files
and photographs in the file room at Purana Qila, and Meena Devi was a
great help in digging out material relating to Deshpande’s years as direc-
tor general. Similarly, Shakti Sinha, then director of the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, ensured that I could immediately look at the
Nehru archives there. Deepa Bhatnagar and Deepshikha Salooja at my
own university’s archives, the Ashoka Archives of Contemporary India,
systematized the Deshpande papers and got them scanned and photo-
copied for me. Ashoka University also made my work at the Aurangabad
Circle of the ASI possible, thanks to a faculty grant. Sumit Guha, Madhav
Deshpande, and many other scholars who have a deep knowledge of the
history of Maharashtra and who form part of the Maharashtra Studies
List, shared many references and writings with me. Soniya Khare trans-
lated the Marathi articles that form part of this volume. Rivka Israel
improved the quality of my writing. I am deeply grateful to all of them.
The following images are from the ASI Aurangabad Circle: 2.4,
2.5, 3.1, 3.2, and 4.4. Image 4.1 is from an ASI file (ASI Headquarters,
New Delhi). Images 2.1 and 5.4 are from the author. All other photo-
graphs are from the Deshpande family albums.
Above all, this book is a product of the Deshpande family archives.
That is why it is dedicated to them. The family kept all his papers and
has not only shared these with me but also their thoughts and memories
with great generosity. I specially owe a big thanks to Shobha, Ashok,
Mita, Mrinalini, Sushama, Dilip, Sudhanva, and Ashwini. I do hope that
what this book reveals—made possible because the family of the protag-
onist around whom it revolves preserved his writings—will encourage
others to save papers and correspondence, files and manuscripts. These
provide precious windows into the past. Many official papers, copies of
which get saved in personal archives, are often untraceable in govern-
ment archives. Those ASI papers that I have used from the Deshpande
family archives, for instance, are not available in the file room of the
Survey. If they had not been so carefully kept by the Deshpandes, much
about M.N. Deshpande’s life and times would have remained forgotten.
 1
Among Independent India’s Young
Archaeologists

Some years before 1947, a bunch of newly minted archaeologists made

a tryst with the trowel and spade. This was a cohort of young people who
would imbibe the basics of the discipline in the field and not within
the portals of a university, digging trenches and documenting discov-
eries in places alive with history. Some came to be schooled among
the ruins of the fabled city of Taxila near Rawalpindi in 1944, others at
the ancient port town of Arikamedu in Pondicherry in 1945, and still
others in 1947 in the shadows of Karnataka’s megaliths and the dead
that were entombed there. The circumstances that brought them there
were unusual and will be outlined a little later, but this was an all-male
bunch. In terms of their backgrounds, the young men, mainly in their
twenties, can be described as a rainbow group, and came from differ-
ent parts of India—from cities such as Allahabad, Calcutta, and Lahore
and other places in Kerala and Kashmir, Maharashtra and Bengal.
After their training, most of them either made archaeology their career
or pursued research grounded in that discipline. By 15 August 1947,
several had become teachers in universities or returned to pursue their
doctoral research there. There were as many who found employment
with the ASI. A few of them would move on to form the core of a newly
created Archaeological Department in Pakistan.
These were independent India’s young archaeologists, and Madhu­
sudan Narhar Deshpande was one of them.

Archaeology and the Public Purpose. Nayanjot Lahiri, Oxford University Press
(2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190130480.003.0001.
4 Archaeology and the Public Purpose

A question that readers may have right at the outset is this: What
was so special about the pursuit of archaeology as a career by this
cohort? After all, recovering material relics was a calling that Indians,
at least a few, had wandered into even in the nineteenth century as they
began researching and writing about the remote past. That is when
the pleasures of field archaeology first began to be systematically pur-
sued. Subcontinental scholars followed in the footsteps of officials of
the British East India Company and sundry European savants as they
undertook the discovery of the material past of ancient India. There
were explorers of sites, excavators of mounds, and decipherers of
epigraphs among them. From the early part of the twentieth century,
Indian officers were manning departments of archaeology in British
India and in the princely states. A few would rise to occupy the high
position of director general of the ASI. So, coming back to the question,
why does the training of this particular bunch of individuals, in retro-
spect, mark a watershed moment?
The answer really lies in their numbers and in the circumstances
which brought them to the discipline. There were considerably more
of them than the men who had chosen the same career path earlier.
Previously, individuals who became archaeologists had done so in a
piecemeal way. Consequently, one would have encountered only a few
such professionals at that time. However, within a couple of years,
some 125 students were trained in the field. Also, as they more or less
simultaneously became archaeologists in the last years of British rule
in India, they came to be bound by a uniform training and perspective
on Indian archaeology, and this was unprecedented. Deshpande was
among this group of professionals who came into their own in the
twilight years of the British Raj, and his background and early years
in archaeology will be explored here in relation to his contemporaries.
The interleaving of an individual life with other similar lives helps in
understanding the ties that bound the careers of these men as also
the differences among them as they explored and excavated, conserved
and showcased the heritage of a new nation state.
But first, a foray into Deshpande’s early life and education.

***

Madhusudan Narhar Deshpande started life as a small-town boy. He

was born on 11 November 1920 to a doctor’s family at Rahimatpur
 Among Independent India’s Young Archaeologists 5

in Satara district of the Bombay Presidency (now in Maharashtra).

This family was a high-caste one, bearing the title of Deshpande.
The Deshpandes were part of a substantial community of Deshastha
Brahmans, residents of the desha or territory that was the Deccan
Plateau of western India. While Deshpande was an old title of
medieval times for a class of record-keepers in western India, by
the early twentieth century there were all kinds of profession-
als among them, from writers and teachers to social workers and
politicians.1 Like their ancestors, they were usually better educated
than many of their peers.
Madhusudan’s father, Narhar Pandurang Deshpande, was the
first doctor in the family. His father had served as a policeman. He
was from Ninam Padali in Satara district, where the family had been
granted land as inam (or gift) during the time of the Bhonsle Raja in
Satara. After serving as a policeman for around fourteen years, he
left the service vowing that no one from the Deshpande family would
ever join the police force because of the harassment they caused to
people.2 Both his sons, Narhar and Govind Rao, were born in Padali.
A few years later, they moved to Satara, around 20 kilometres away,
where the boys were admitted to the Satara Government High School.
Sustenance came mainly from selling what was grown on the ances-
tral lands and one does not know if the father was able to supplement
this in any way.
Narhar’s elder brother Govind Rao ran away from home with the
dream of becoming a doctor, but he was finally able to qualify as a
compounder. After working with a doctor in Nasik, he sat for the
compounder’s test and got a government job. His dream of becom-
ing a doctor was then transferred to his brother. To begin with, the
keenness expressed itself in a ham-handed way with Govind Rao
using force to get Narhar to study hard. One morning, the teenager,
along with a friend, ran away. They were eventually found but the
scare ensured that the elder brother gave up beating or scolding the
younger one. Narhar would eventually graduate from the medical
college in Poona (or Pune as it is now called) that was allied with

1 For scribal culture in Maharashtra and in other parts of India, as also

the hierarchy of clerks and scribes c. 1300–1800 onwards, see Guha (2010).
2 This and many other details about M.N. Deshpande’s early life are based

on an email from his granddaughter, Mita Deshpande, dated 14 June 2019.

6 Archaeology and the Public Purpose

the Sassoon General Hospital. This was the B.J. Hospital, so named
because it had been founded by Byramjee Jeejeebhoy in 1878. After
his years there, Narhar became a government doctor and worked in
various parts of Karnataka and Maharashtra, including the Yerawada
Central Jail in Poona.
Where does the small town of Rahimatpur figure in these trav-
els and travails? Narhar, evidently, did not have any ancestral con-
nections with it. However, he had a government job, one that was
transferable, and one of those postings brought him and his fam-
ily to Rahimatpur. We don’t know what it was about the place that
made a deep impression on him but it seems that in response to the
nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s call to boycott the British,
Narhar gave up his government job and decided to settle down there.
The doctor also changed his lifestyle and apart from becoming an
active Congressman, gave up wearing foreign cloth. ‘He bought a
piece of land that was going very cheap, because it was rumoured
that the land brought bad luck—no one who lived there would have
a child. Narhar scoffed at this, and went ahead with the acquisition.
An old structure stood there apparently, dilapidated and in ruins,
which he demolished and built the first version of the Deshpande
house.’3 Simultaneously, he began his private practice from a small
clinic near the main square of Rahimatpur. The town today has a
population of about 25,000, but in the 1920s some 6,000-odd people
lived there.
Then, as now, the Deshpandes were a large and closely knit brood.
Narhar and his wife Radha Bai had four sons (of whom Madhusudan
was the youngest) and four daughters. The eldest son was given away
to be adopted by a widowed aunt.
Narhar had started a family tradition by becoming a doctor. Three
of his sons became doctors and, in fact, the clinic that he founded
would be run by the family for eighty years or more. After Narhar,
it was looked after by Purushottam, one of his sons, and later by Dilip,
who was Purushottam’s son. The exception in this family of doctors
was M.N. Deshpande, who instead chose a path that resulted in a
career rooted in the past. He became an archaeologist.

3 This is what was conveyed in a long email by Sudhanva Deshpande on

22 May 2019. His uncle, Dilip Deshpande, recounted these details to him.
 Among Independent India’s Young Archaeologists 7

In examining Madhusudan’s career choice, if one thinks about

what went into making this decision, one thing is certain. Not a sin-
gle member of his family was professionally interested in the world
of the material past. So, one may well wonder if there was something
in the town that inspired him. It could not have been the books he
read in a library there because it would be some years before one was
set up in Rahimatpur. The first one—Hind Vachanalay—was estab-
lished, in fact, by Asha Khadilkar, his brother Purushottam’s wife, on
15 August 1947. But the town, as with many places in India, had some
noteworthy monuments. There was a medieval mosque, one whose
fountain was powered by an elephant water-lift, and a mausoleum
built in remembrance of Ranadullah Khan, a front line commander
of the Adil Shahi dynasty of Bijapur.4 Incidentally, Deshpande’s
nephew, Dilip, who is closely acquainted with Rahimatpur, remem-
bers the local lore. Ranadullah Khan had stationed his forces there
when his mother fell severely ill and was in great agony. ‘Ranadullah
prayed to God: “Allah, raham kar!” His mother died there, so he gave
the town the name Rahamatpur, which became Rahimatpur. His sis-
ter also died there, and they are both buried together a short distance
away from Rahimatpur. Their tomb is known locally as Mai–Lekichi
Mazaar (the Mother–Daughter Mausoleum).’ M.N. Deshpande him-
self would later remember the various temples of Rahimatpur—
dedicated to Vitthal, Ram, Mahadeo, and Kartikeya—and the flow of
devotion there.5
Evidently, although Deshpande was born and nurtured in a small
town, it was a historic one, dotted with memorials as also the memo-
ries about those buried there. However, the real reason for his deci-
sion to chart a different course, as we shall see, and one that led him
to make a career out of the monumental past had nothing to do with
the sights and sounds of his place of birth but with an entirely differ-
ent milieu. Still, many years later, it may well have struck Deshpande,
as it strikes those of us who look back at his life, that his earliest
remembrance of monuments was around those that he encountered
in his birthplace.

4 Campbell (1885): 548–9.

5 This is mentioned by Deshpande in his Marathi notes on pp. 32–3 of a
handwritten notebook.
8 Archaeology and the Public Purpose

When Madhusudan was young, he too wanted to be a doctor,

hoping to emulate his elder brothers. His father, however, was not
keen about this and told him that he was meant for something else.
What that was he didn’t say, but he did take him around old places
and to historic events. He took only this youngest son, at the age
of fifteen or sixteen, to visit different sites and monuments ranging
from the famous caves of Ajanta and Ellora near Aurangabad to the
Gol Gumbad of Bijapur. These were places where, later, Deshpande
would do some of his most important work. Simultaneously,
his father exposed him to the world of the Indian national move-
ment, getting him to tag along for various Congress meetings. This
included the first ever meeting of the Indian National Congress to
be organized in an interior village, Faizpur, and not, as had been the
practice, in a big city. This, the fifty-first session of the Congress, was
held in December 1936, and the monument excursion of the father–
son duo would have been organized around it. Faizpur is around
500 kilometres from Rahimatpur but Narhar, being a very commit-
ted local Congress leader, was there. Surely, the young Madhusudan
would have felt enormously excited about seeing Mahatma Gandhi at
Faizpur, as also Jawaharlal Nehru who was then the president of the
Congress. Nehru too would combine the Faizpur session with a visit
to Ajanta. It was at Ajanta, a couple of decades later, that Deshpande
and Nehru would meet.
Like many of his generation, M.N. Deshpande was deeply influ-
enced by the freedom movement. Decades later, while preparing
notes for a speech, he began by describing his upbringing where he
mentioned the formative role of medieval saints and modern free-
dom fighters in the same breath. ‘Jnanishwar, Tukaram, Ramdas,
Tilak, Agarkar and later Gandhian liberalism had sanctified the
intellectual atmosphere’ of his home, he wrote.6 Both he and his
wife Madhumalati, whom he married in 1946, recalled participating
in ‘prabhat pheris’ as children. These were early morning proces-
sions marked by the singing of patriotic songs, a strategy that was
used by the Congress party in many parts of India to unite people
around the cause of freedom from British rule. These children also

6This is from a handwritten notebook in which there are forty pages of

writing, in the Deshpande papers.
 Among Independent India’s Young Archaeologists 9

helped their fathers organize meetings by passing letters between

various Congress workers’ homes. Both fathers went to jail (see
Image 1.1) and Madhumalati’s father spent six years under rigorous
imprisonment.
Dr Deshpande was a staunch Congressman, his political icon
being Tilak, a persona that he had grown up with. The Rahimatpur
home where many a Deshpande lived had a photograph of Tilak.
When Tilak was sent to jail for six years, the doctor gave up sleep-
ing on a mattress and slept on a rough blanket. Apparently, when
Tilak was released from prison after serving six years on charges
of sedition, he travelled around the Bombay Presidency and also
came to Rahimatpur. Madhusudan Deshpande, in fact, was born a
few months after Tilak died in August 1920. Considering his admi-
ration for the great man, if his father had followed the fashion of
naming his progeny after icons Madhusudan Narhar Deshpande
may well have been Bal (or Keshav, the real name of Tilak) Narhar
Deshpande.
Coming back to Deshpande’s childhood, in a few years, the young
boy moved away from Rahimatpur, where he had first been enrolled

Image 1.1 Deshpande’s father on his release from jail; the boy on his left in a
monkey cap is M.N. Deshpande
10 Archaeology and the Public Purpose

in a primary school. He went with his brother Srinivas to study in

Poona at the Raja Dhanraj Giriji High School there. The brothers lived
with their elder brother Purushottam, who was running a pharmacy
from a room that his father had bought for him in the Pataskar Wada
area of the city. The locality was a fairly humble place; the family lived
in a chawl there, one which would for many decades be the Poona
home of the Deshpandes. Deshpande and Madhumalati would begin
their married life in the 1940s in this very place, living there with
an aunt, an uncle, and their family. As Mrinalini (Madhusudan and
Madhumalati’s daughter) remembers, those were happy but tough
times, partly because Deshpande’s aunt was perpetually around: ‘My
mother then wore a typical nine yards sari and one fine day my father
decided to get her to wear a normal six yards. Hesitatingly, she draped
it and when her Aunt-in-law saw her all hell broke loose.’7
Poona had been home, in a manner of speaking, to some of the big
names in the history of nationalism and reform in India. Mahadev
Govind Ranade (1824–1901), Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915),
and Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) all had roots there and while
they were no longer around when the Deshpande boys were study-
ing in Poona, surely the boys must have been exposed to the politi-
cal activities around the city.8 They had heard about such figures
from their father who, as we saw, was someone with connections
to that larger world, and the world of the Indian National Congress
and the idea of Swaraj. Some years later, in 1944, when Mahatma
Gandhi was released from the Aga Khan Palace and came to stay at
the Thackerseys’ home, Deshpande was among those who accompa-
nied him on his walks and watched him conduct prayers there (see
‘Unearthing the Past’ in this book).
While one can only generally surmise about the impact of politi-
cal men in Poona on the young Deshpande, what is certain is how
he benefited from the city’s educational excellence. Poona was dotted
with institutions of all kinds that had been set up in the nineteenth
century, some whose foundations went back to earlier times when the
city was the capital of the Peshwas. The pathshalas or schools that were

7
This is based on an email from Deshpande’s daughter, Mrinalini
Sardesai, dated 17 June 2019.
8 For Poona, see Gokhale (1988).
 Among Independent India’s Young Archaeologists 11

patronized by the Peshwas were those where ‘Hindu higher learn-

ing’ in literature or sciences was taught exclusively in Sanskrit and
to students who were Brahmans.9 Later, institutions that catered to
students from different backgrounds were set up. There were schools
that the Dalit social reformer Jyotiba Phule founded in the middle
of the nineteenth century for untouchables and for girls. There was
also the Brahman-sponsored New English School for boys—estab-
lished by Vishnushastri Chiplunkar in 1880 along with friends such
as Tilak, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi, and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar—
where, by 1885, there were over a thousand students.10
In 1884, the founders of the New English School launched the
Deccan Education Society. This Society would seed scores of insti-
tutions but at this time it was founded with the idea of setting up
an arts college. This was Fergusson College, founded in 1885, and
named after the then governor of the Bombay Presidency, though
its sustenance came mainly from the cultural and political elite of
Maharashtra. Donations from the princely families of the Deccan
flowed to it, and later, as the early college buildings came to be built,
it was financed by Indian money. They were designed by a Poona
architect Vasudeo Bapuji Kanitkar and the funds were raised by pub-
lic subscriptions, with much of the travelling for the collection funds
done by Gopal Krishna Gokhale himself. This success story of aspi-
rational Indian self-reliance in education and disinterested generous
commitment for it cannot fail to impress even today. In British India,
this must have been an even greater source of pride for Poona’s citi-
zens and students. It was here that Deshpande enrolled in 1938.
The college was famous for its scholarship in languages, and in
mathematics and science. It was here that Raghunath Purushottam
Paranjpye began his brilliant career as a mathematics student. He
later went on to study at the University of Cambridge where he
was Senior Wrangler in 1899, the first Indian to have excelled in
this way, the title being given to the highest scoring student in
that subject there. It was in this Poona college that Dharmanand
Kosambi, on invitation, began the teaching of Pali in 1912, which
went on to become a popular subject there. By the time Deshpande

9 Deshpande (2015): 7–9.

10 Limaye (1935).
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