It is painful to write an obituary for Shereen, a close friend and colleague. Let me try, instead, to recall the distinctive way in which she used archaeology to capture the past.
The passing of Shereen F. Ratnagar, who died on May 25 at 81, marks the end of an important chapter in Indian archaeology and historical scholarship. For those of us who knew her as a colleague, friend, and fellow traveller in the world of ideas about the past, the loss is intensely personal. Yet her intellectual presence is likely to endure for generations through the questions she posed, the assumptions she challenged, and the new ways in which she taught her students to think about the ancient past.
Shereen F. Ratnagar was among the most distinguished interpreters of the Harappan or Indus Civilisation. Educated at Deccan College, Pune, and later trained in Mesopotamian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, she brought to Indian archaeology a rare combination of empirical rigour and theoretical imagination. She served for many years as Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she inspired students and colleagues alike through her uncompromising commitment to critical inquiry.
What made Shereen exceptional was that she never treated archaeology as mere recovery of objects, recording of their stratified context, and fixing of chronology alone. For her, archaeology was fundamentally about the lived realities of human communities—about people, modes of subsistence, production of artefacts, exchange, and power relations.
She was always, in her own right, as much anthropologist and political economist as field archaeologist, and was mentored by Romila Thapar.
What distinguished Shereen from many archaeologists of her generation was her refusal to remain confined within the descriptive boundaries of the discipline. Stratigraphy, pottery typologies, artefact catalogues, and excavation reports were for her only the beginning of inquiry. Her real concern was the reconstruction of human life. She constantly sought to understand how ancient communities functioned, how production was organised, how trade networks operated, how power was structured, and how ordinary people experienced the worlds they inhabited.
A defender of academic integrity
Shereen was a fearless defender of academic integrity. She consistently opposed the ideological misuse of archaeology and insisted that interpretations of the past must be guided by evidence rather than political agendas. Whether engaging with debates surrounding the Harappan Civilisation or intervening in public controversies such as the Babri Masjid issue, she displayed intellectual honesty and an unwavering commitment to scholarly ethics.
Those who knew her personally remember not only the scholar but also the person behind the scholarship. She possessed a remarkable capacity to move effortlessly between archaeology, anthropology, history, literature, and contemporary social concerns. Conversations with her rarely remained confined to ancient artefacts; they invariably expanded into discussions on society, culture, politics, and humanity itself. She approached the past with empathy and imagination, always seeking to recover the human experience hidden beneath archaeological remains.
In an age increasingly inclined towards specialisation, Shereen remained a genuinely interdisciplinary thinker. She taught us that archaeology is not merely about things left behind; it is about reconstructing the worlds that produced those things. Her scholarship restored agency to the people of the past and reminded us that ancient societies were inhabited by real men and women with aspirations, conflicts, beliefs, and struggles.
A critical voice
For her students, colleagues, and friends, Shereen Ratnagar was more than an eminent archaeologist. She was an intellectual conscience, a critical voice, and a scholar of uncommon originality. Her work reshaped our understanding of the Harappan Civilisation, but perhaps her greatest legacy lies in the example she set: that scholarship must be rigorous, humane, fearless, and forever willing to ask difficult questions.
As we bid farewell to her, we remember not only a world-renowned archaeologist but also a thinker who taught her students to see the past as a living human landscape. Her voice may now be silent, but the questions she raised and the insights she offered will continue.
Her pioneering work on Harappan trade and interaction with West Asia—Encounters: The Westerly Trade of the Harappa Civilisation, later revised as Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age—is a classic in Harappan studies. She demonstrated the extent to which Harappan communities were integrated into wider Bronze Age networks stretching from the Indus basin to Mesopotamia. Trade, for her, was not merely the movement of goods but a window into contemporary communities, their organisation, political authority, and economic structures.
Equally influential were her studies of the political organisation of Harappan society. At a time when the civilisation was often represented through static images of urban planning and material sophistication, Ratnagar asked deeper questions about state formation, authority, inequality, and social control. Her work encouraged scholars to see the Harappan world not simply as a collection of archaeological sites but as a dynamic social formation made up of many unevenly developed communities structured by the Harappan network for the circulation of trade goods.
Her writings on the decline of the Harappan Civilisation were marked by the same intellectual independence. She resisted simplistic explanations based solely on environmental catastrophe or invasion theories. Instead, she explored the internal contradictions, economic transformations, and wider regional developments that may have contributed to the end of one of the world’s earliest urban traditions. Through works such as The End of the Great Harappan Tradition and Understanding Harappa, she showed how archaeological evidence could be interpreted within broader historical and anthropological frameworks.
A work of particular brilliance demonstrating her application of an anthropological framework is Makers and Shapers: Early Indian Technology in the Home, Village and Urban Workshop. It studies early technology as self-help production in the household, as a joint enterprise of the village community, and as a workshop industry of trade centres. The works of Shereen Ratnagar have a lasting impact on Indian archaeology, while her insightful method—positioning itself between theory and field empiricism—will remain indispensable for years to come.
Rajan Gurukkal is a historian and social scientist, former Vice Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Visiting Professor of IISc and Vice Chairman, Kerala State Higher Education Council.
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