"To future generations he will always be the man who, archaeologically speaking, left India three thousand years older that he had found her"

wrote Alfred Foucher about John Marshall in his foreword to Revealing India's Past (Cummings 1939, p. 355). He continued:

"... just as the early period of the Archaeological Survey of India is identified with Alexander Cunningham's career, so is the later period entirely impersonated by Sir John Marshall."

This should not be read only as the tribute of a fond friend and collaborator. What John Marshall accomplished in his long archaeological career as Director-General of Archaeology in India (1902- 1928) has scarcely been equalled in the present century and, while one may hesitate to see the Archaeological Survey as being "impersonated" by him, the spirit of Foucher's sentiment is correct. Written fifty years later, Dilip Chakrabarti's tour de force of Indian archaeology (1988, p. 170) echoed the same sentiment: "The large exposed and conserved sites we see, the gardens around the monuments we appreciate, the museums we enter and the objects we admire, the objects on which much of our own perception of our past is based — these are all intimately linked with the period which we here have called 'the John Marshall period' in the history of Indian archaeology." 

The purpose of this essay, however, is not to recount the landmarks of Marshall's Indian career. Instead, I will try to grope my way through Marshall's early years (1902-1906) so as to recover a few signposts that will help us to better understand how this young Cambridge archaeologist, whose name has come to be linked with the archaeological image of ancient India, first came to grips with the Indian past. These years broadly coincided with the Viceroyalty of Lord Curzon (1899-1905) who played a decisive role in grooming Marshall. Equally important, the scale and nature of monuments, the diversity of political control exercised over different parts of the subcontinental landmass where they stood, as also the range of interactions with various people in the region impinged on and influenced him in various ways. There is a wealth of archival information available on these issues and, through the maze of detail, a great deal of the subcontinental archaeological universe in which Marshall occupied an important space also gets refracted. Finally, these years provide the base line for the genealogies of several of Marshall's definitive works. With the benefit of retrospective appraisal, one recognizes the need to explore the circumstances and situations in which these first glimmerings appear, even though John Marshall himself at this stage showed no obvious preoccupation with them.