Eminent archaeologist Shereen Ratnagar passes away

The 82-year-old was synonymous with Harappan history, She specialized in Indus Valley Civilization, with a focus on its trade networks, social organization.

Mumbai: One of India's most distinguished archaeologists Shereen Ratnagar passed away in Mumbai after a brief illness, family sources said on Tuesday.

Ratnagar, 82, who died on Monday night, was synonymous with Harappan history. She specialized in the Indus Valley Civilization, with a focus on its trade networks, social organization, and decline through empirical analysis of artifacts and sites.

Educated at Deccan College in Pune and at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where she studied Mesopotamian Archaeology, Ratnagar later became Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Historical Studies in Delhi. After retiring in 2000, she pursued independent research in Mumbai.

Her book Encounters: The Westerly Trade of the Harappa Civilization (1981), documents Harappan artifacts like chert weights found in Iraq confirming westerly exchanges. She also authored Understanding Harappa: Civilization of the Indus (2001), providing a detailed, evidence-driven overview of Harappan economy, urbanism, and intercultural contacts.

Ratnagar also challenged unsubstantiated interpretations, such as re-evaluating Mohenjo-daro's "dancing girl" bronze as non-dance related and attributing some flawed attributions to Edwardian biases, while emphasizing state-controlled production in beads and tools based on distributional evidence from sites like the Rohri Hills.

Ratnagar was born in 1944 in Mumbai and pursued her undergraduate studies with a BA in History before transitioning to specialized archaeological training.

After her postgraduate training, Ratnagar undertook fieldwork in Iraq as part of a fellowship with the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, where she served as registrar documenting antiquities.

She then returned to India and joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi as a junior fellow at the Centre for Historical Studies, supervised by Romila Thapar. During this period, she completed her PhD on interactions between the Indus region and Mesopotamia.

Ratnagar served as an expert witness for the Sunni Waqf Board in the Ayodhya title suit litigation during the 2000s, providing testimony that challenged the Archaeological Survey of India's (ASI) 2003 excavation findings at the disputed site.

The ASI report, resulting from court-ordered digs following the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, concluded that a large structure, interpreted as a Hindu temple, existed beneath the mosque, based on features like pillar bases, terracotta figurines, and stratigraphic layers dated to the 12th century or earlier.

Ratnagar argued that the evidence was inconclusive, emphasizing disturbed stratigraphy due to prior construction and demolition activities, which undermined claims of continuous temple occupation.

In her court submissions, Ratnagar contended that the pillar bases identified by ASI were not uniquely indicative of a grand Ram temple, as similar features appeared in non-temple Islamic structures, and lacked precise dating ties to Hindu architectural traditions specific to Ayodhya's Ram Janmabhoomi narrative.

Critics accused Ratnagar of allowing Marxist ideological influences, which they said were prevalent in JNU's historiography tradition where she taught, to shape her archaeological interpretations, often prioritizing class-based economic narratives over evidence of cultural or religious continuity.

Trained in Indian and Western Asiatic archaeology, Ratnagar was the author of many books and academic papers on the Indus civilization: its overseas trade, political organization, cities, and its decline, as well as studies on pastoralism and urbanism.

Her interest in the conceptualization of the early state, of non-stratified tribal societies, and of the limits and potentials of non-market economies, coloured much of her work. She also made interventions concerning the political abuse of archaeology.