In 1972 as young Ravians, with my oldest nursery-days friend Asad Rehman, we set off on foot of all things to reach London and return the same way. Crazy you might say, and rightly so. But hitch-hiking was the rage then. In Peshawar, we stopped at the house of Dr Ahmed Hasan Dani, Pakistan’s greatest and academically renowned archaeologist.

Dr Dani’s son Anis was and remains an old Ravian friend. He also has a PhD in archaeology and lives in Washington, following his World Bank job. His sister and family live in Lahore. My father had instilled in our mind the fact that Pakistanis just do not appreciate their greatest scholars. The fame of Dr Dani was everywhere we went.

In Cambridge University’s department of archaeology, his picture hangs proudly. Scholars study his works. My dear wife was his neighbour while doing her Master’s in Botany from Peshawar University, staying with her uncle Dr Saleem Kaul, the renowned botanist. For safety, I inform that she stood first. It is dangerous asking her the botanical name of a plant.

Let me start by impressing our readers that Dr Dani was present when Sir Mortimer Wheeler was excavating Mohenjo Daro, and his contribution was outstanding. In the same way, he had a leading role in the excavation of Harappa. He also excavated the famous pre-Indus Civilization site of Rehman Dheri near Dera Ismail Khan. The list is endless and known the world over. But not in Pakistan.

Along the way in order to study ancient manuscripts, Dr Dani fluently spoke Bengali, French, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Seraiki, Sindhi, Tamil, Turkish and Urdu. He was among the first in the world to read a number of ancient scripts that one sees on rocks and monuments. He authored 30 books on the subject that are taught all over the world. Yet in Pakistan, so little is known about him.

Dr Ahmad Hasan Dani was, without doubt, one of the sub-continent’s most remarkable archaeologists. A Sanskritologist, he was the first Muslim to graduate from the Benares Hindu University. After independence, he taught at Dhaka University and had a major role in setting up its department of archaeology. There, he wrote a classic work on East Indian archaeology.

But then Dr Dani is famous for his work on the Gandhara Buddhist period and on Central Asian Studies. In 1949, he wrote the first article linking the Vedic ‘Hariyupiyah’ with today’s Harappa; in 1981 he edited ‘Indus Civilization: New Perspectives’.

The professor conveyed an enthusiasm for learning that was infectious. His special concentration was on teaching children to think and reason.

“Teaching children is critical,” he used to say. This was true wherever he went. When Mohenjo-Daro was excavated, he revealed fascinating details about the site, proclaiming it ‘the first planned city in the world’ and demonstrating that its Indus Valley Civilisation was one of humanity’s great foundational cultures, alongside Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.

In a way as we research ancient Lahore, one discovers that he had long ago urged the authorities to immediately save the ancient walled city lest traders destroy it. His fear proved true. Even when we stayed with him on our hitchhike, he mentioned old Lahore and how it was being destroyed by traders.

He was the very first to describe the ancient people of Pakistan as a sophisticated people who understood irrigation, traded with Arabia and ruled from Afghanistan to Rajasthan. He also showed how they practised yoga and created statuettes of bangled dancing girls and stern-faced priest-kings that delight viewers to this day.

Rejecting academic super-specialisation, Dani synthesised disciplines to reconstruct the distant past. His last publication was ‘A History of Pakistan’ (2007), which culminates in the republic’s creation in 1947, encapsulates 50 years of research. But then just who was this great man we have forgotten about, save a few academics?

Ahmed Hasan Dani was born in Basna, a village near Raipur, in central India. His parents were Kashmiri by origin and he was the first in his family to be educated. He studied Sanskrit at the Banaras Hindu University, graduating as its first Muslim student in 1944. He started work at the Department of Archaeology of British India at the Taj Mahal, Agra, before leaving for East Pakistan in 1947. From 1950 to 1962, Dani was East Bengal’s superintendent of archaeology, a history professor at Dhaka University and the curator at Dhaka Museum. He compiled definitive works on Bengali Muslim architecture between completing his PhD thesis on the prehistory of eastern India at the London University in 1955 and working as a research fellow at the School of African and Oriental Studies (1958-59).

Dani left for the Peshawar University where he created the department of archaeology and became its first professor. In 1971, he established the social sciences faculty at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, serving as its dean until his retirement in 1980. In 1993 he established the Islamabad Museum.

From the 1960s, Dani shone light on Graeco-Indian remains in northern Pakistan. At the ancient city of Taxila, descendants of Alexander the Great’s troops had mixed with locals, adopted Buddhism and crafted statues and temples that bore unmistakable traces of an Aegean provenance. In 1997, Dani became founding director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations.

He also supervised exploration of a shrine at Murree, which, some believed, housed the remains of Mary, mother of Jesus. At Rehman Dheri and Baluchistan, he helped unearth traces of a proto-urban civilisation that may predate Mesopotamia by millennia.

From 1978 onwards, he and German colleagues discovered rock art from the Karakoram mountains dating back 40,000 years. In 2007, he alighted on a human footprint, possibly a million years old, imprinted in sandstone near the Margalla Hills, north of Islamabad.

Often Dani swam against the tide. He suggested that Sufi meditation was derived from earlier Buddhist customs and disputed the theory that today’s southern Indians descend from the Indus Valley refugees driven out by marauding Aryans. Over time, it is now proven through DNA research that they are Dravidians.

Dr Dani led some amazing UNESCO expeditions along the Old Silk Road to China in 1990 and the Soviet Union in 1991. He popularised history through newspaper articles and ran cultural trips for Pakistanis as well as European, American and Japanese tourists, and lectured internationally.

Imploring Pakistanis to celebrate their pre-Islamic ancestors, Dr Dani criticised nationalists and religious zealots who destroyed traces of preceding cultures. Sadly, those extremists still insist that our history begins with the Ghazni invasion. Dani insisted that his countrymen radically reappraise their outlook on history.

The greatest influence on Pakistan, he argued, was neither the Hindu south nor the Arab west but central Asia, in its Buddhist, Persian and later Sufi traditions. As chair of the Pakistan-Central Asia Friendship Association, he wanted to revive a genuine relationship – cultural, historical, commercial as well as religious – and advocated reopening routes to the north that were shut down after the 1920s.

Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2025