Three mounds, a forgotten term, and the politics of Indian archaeology

On 22 June 2026, The Indian Express published Week 159 of its UPSC daily subject quiz on History and Culture, a routine pedagogical fixture for the country's civil-services aspirants. The questions, as always, double as a snapshot of what the establishment considers worth knowing about South Asia's deep past: three archaeological mounds, an obscure ancient Indian term, the institutional history of Shaivism, and a working knowledge of regional heritage sites. Read as a syllabus rather than a quiz, the questions tell a more interesting story than they intend — about which pasts get codified, which get skipped, and what that filtering does to public memory.

The Indian Express's quiz functions, in effect, as a parallel curriculum. Aspirants preparing for the Union Public Service Commission examinations are a constituency of several hundred thousand, and the paper's daily subject capsules shape how the country's administrative class is trained to read antiquity. The framers of those capsules are not neutral. They are, in their choices of which mound to name and which sect to foreground, doing exactly the work that heritage politics in any post-colonial state has to do: deciding which ancestors count, and on what terms.

The three mounds, and the one that isn't

The quiz poses a multi-part question on three named archaeological mounds. Two of them, the standard Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, are unambiguous: excavated from the 1920s onwards under the Archaeological Survey of India and its British-era predecessors, they form the empirical bedrock of any school-level account of South Asian antiquity. The third, the so-called "Painted Grey Ware" mound at Hastinapur in Uttar Pradesh, is the sort of site that lives mostly in textbooks and in the site-notices of the ASI's own regional circles. It is, like most Painted Grey Ware occurrences, a question of interpretation: the ceramics associated with the late Vedic horizon are found in scattered low mounds across the upper Ganges plain, and whether any single one of them is "the" Hastinapur mound is partly a matter of literary tradition about the Mahabharata's capital and partly a matter of stratigraphy.

That the quiz treats these three as a coherent set is itself a small act of canon-formation. It places the Indus Valley and the late Vedic horizon on the same footing, which is the standard move in Indian school curricula but one that smooths over the genuine chronological and cultural gap between them. The Indus cities were largely depopulated by around 1300 BCE; the Painted Grey Ware horizon runs from roughly 1200 to 600 BCE. The framing presents them as equally "ancient Indian" — which, in the political grammar of South Asian heritage, is the entire point.

The forgotten term and the sectarian tilt

The quiz's question on Shaivism is the more revealing beat. It asks about the institutional history of the sect — the maths (monastic orders) established by the philosopher Adi Shankaracharya in the early ninth century CE, and the four monastic seats (Joshimath, Puri, Sringeri, and Dwarka) traditionally associated with his mission. For a staff-writer reader outside the Indian civil-services ecosystem, the design choice is striking: a quiz for a national exam is built around the lineage history of one denomination of Hinduism, treated as the unmarked default of "Indian culture."

The framing reflects the same political reality visible in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government's heritage spending since 2014: a marked tilt toward the institutional history of Advaita Vedanta and the Shankaracharya maths as a kind of civilisational shorthand for Indian-ness. Competing traditions within Hinduism — the Smarta, the Tantric, the Bhakti and Vaishnava lineages that in many regions were numerically and culturally dominant — appear in such syllabi mainly as context for the Shaiva narrative. Minority religious traditions get less column space still. The quiz is, in this sense, a low-stakes weekly barometer of the same selection pressure that operates on the ASI's site-protection budget and on the NCERT history textbooks.

What an UPSC quiz teaches the country

The structural pattern here is familiar to anyone who has watched post-colonial states negotiate their heritage. The instruments are pedagogical: textbooks, exam syllabi, the visible inventory of "national" sites, the calendar of commemorations. The effect is to make one curated past feel inevitable and to render the alternatives obscure. In the Indian case, the operation is unusually open because the bureaucracy that runs the UPSC also staffs the ASI and the state-level archaeology departments, and the same political coalition has held the heritage brief for over a decade.

A counter-reading is possible. The quiz's framing is, after all, only a small slice of the syllabus, and the UPSC's General Studies paper on Indian Heritage and Culture also covers Buddhist and Jain architecture, the syncretic traditions of the Bhakti period, and the Indo-Islamic and Mughal layers. The inclusion of Adi Shankaracharya's maths is the inclusion of a documented historical institution, not the invention of one. The argument that this tilts a civilisational canon is a fair one, but it is not the same as claiming that the canon has been falsified.

The honest verdict is somewhere in between. The Indian Express's quiz is accurate, and it covers ground that any serious candidate needs. But in its selection of which mounds and which sects merit a weekly appearance, it reproduces, almost without friction, the heritage priorities of the current political settlement. That is what weekly syllabi do. The question worth asking is whether the institutions that publish them will, in a decade's time, look back and recognise the work they have done.

This piece sits on the culture desk rather than the politics desk because the subject is the framing of antiquity, not a current partisan fight. The line between the two is finer than the syllabus suggests.

Sources

• Indian Express — UPSC daily subject quiz | History and Culture (Week 159) (via Telegram, 22 June 2026)
• Archaeological Survey of India — official site (ASI, government)
• Wikipedia — Mohenjo-daro (encyclopaedic reference)
• Wikipedia — Painted Grey Ware (encyclopaedic reference)
• Wikipedia — Adi Shankaracharya (encyclopaedic reference)

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-daro
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_Grey_Ware
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Shankara