He was most noted for several excavations Indus Valley civilisation sites and for his support of the existence of a destroyed Ram Mandir underneath the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

He was a distinguished archaeologist and art historian who was awarded several gold medals and the Sir Mortimer Wheeler Prize for Excellence in Archaeology.

He won the first Dr Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar National Award of Madhya Pradesh in recognition of his devotion and contribution to archaeological research.

[citation needed] The Indian Society for Prehistoric and Quaternary Studies had published a volume of papers in his honour in 2009.

He argued that there was evidence of an 11th-century temple that lay underneath the masjid,[2] which might have been demolished by Babur (the founder of the Mughal Empire and a Turkic invader hailing from present-day Uzbekistan), since no written record about its demolition exist.

[3] From the crumbling walls of the so-called Babri [Mosque] and the old and new debris there emerged, like the proverbial phoenix, hundreds of objects which testify ... to the existence of the eleventh- to twelfth-century Rama temple ...- Dr. S.P.