Prof. B.B. Lal
| Birth place | Jhansi |
| Date of death | 10 September 2022 |
| Death place | Delhi |
| Date of birth | 2 May 1921 |
B.B Lal (2 May 1921 – 10 September 2022), was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972. In the latter year, he took voluntary retirement to pursue his research programs independently. First, he joined Jiwaji University, Gwalior, as a Professor and later the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, of which he was also the Director.
Professor Lal's excavations cover an extensive range- from paleolithic times to early history. At Kalibangan, Rajasthan, he unearthed a prosperous Harappan civilization city. The excavations at Hastinapura, Indraprastha, etc. have established a kernel of truth in the Mahabharata, even though the epic is full of interpolations. Likewise, his excavations at Ayodhya, Śringaverapura, etc. have indicated that the Ramayana also has a historical basis. In 1961, he conducted excavations in Egypt also, which threw welcome light on Egyptian prehistory.
A leitmotif in the lime and work of Lal was that his discoveries altered popular perception, dismantling theories held so far and installed truths that have stayed unquestioned to date. Be it the discovery of pillars beneath the masjid that stood at the site where now will soon stand the grand temple of Ram at Ayodhya, or the discoveries through his extensive archaeological work at the Harappan site of Kalibangan, Lal’s contribution to Indian archaeology stay unparalleled.[ref]
Although he trained under Mortimer Wheeler, who was a strong proponent of the Aryan invasion theory, Lal, who initially did believe in this hypothesis, his work then led him to prove otherwise. Lal wrote:
It is thus abundantly clear that the origin of the Harappan Civilization goes back to the 6th millennium BCE, if not earlier. It is also likely that further field work may bring to light a still earlier stage. Anyway, the Harappan Civilization cannot be regarded as an ”import“from elsewhere. It is ”indigenous”. And since, as already shown, the Harappans and the Vedic people are the same, the latter ipso facto are indigenous – neither invaders nor immigrants.
Another key contribution of the stalwart was his work ascertaining the historicity of the epics Mahabharata (the 1950s) and Ramayana, of which the former, he has, in an interview, called the first most satisfying moment of his life. He said:
A seeker after truth keeps on getting satisfaction from everything he does. Thus, each new problem that I tackled gave me satisfaction. However, the first major satisfaction came when in the 1950s I was able to establish, through archaeological fieldwork, the historicity of the Mahabharata.
