Shereen Ratnagar

Shereen F. Ratnagar is an Indian archaeologist whose work has focused on the Indus Valley Civilization. She is the author of several texts.

Quotes

• “We have found that the nature of material residues and the units of analysis in archaeology do not match or fit the phenomenon we wish to investigate, viz. Aryan migrations. The problem is exacerbated by the strong possibility that simultaneous with migrations out of Eurasia there were expansions out of established centres by metallurgists/prospectors. Last, when we investigate pastoral land use in the Eurasian steppe, we can make informed inferences about the nature of Aryan emigration thence, which is a kind of movement very unlikely to have had artefactual correlates.”
  • quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.

• Ethics and honesty, [are] rare amongst scholars working on the Indian past.
  • quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.

About

• That this ‘social science approach’ can lead to disaster is suggested by a Ph. D thesis submitted by Shireen Ratnagar under Thapar. While examining the issue of Indus-Mesopotamia trade, this thesis reduced the Indus civilization to the position held by India in the British empire as a supplier of raw materials. Kumkum Roy was another of her Ph. D students and her book on the emergence of monarchy in Vedic India arranges certain portions of the Vedic texts in an arbitrary developmental order and postulates on that basis the ‘emergence’ of monarchy. Exercises of this kind may or may not be ‘social science’, but certainly this is not honest history.
  • Chakrabarti, D. K. (2021). Nationalism in the study of ancient Indian history. National Security, 4(1), 29-50.