Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy, and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between the micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI and the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political, and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how the postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book-length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world. It scrupulously shows how the theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms, and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.