Keeladi challenges the idea that South India was a passive inheritor of technology from the north: New book

The discovery, which has captured the imagination of many people in Tamil Nadu and is dated to the Sangam era, is at odds with the long-held view that urbanism began solely in north India. (Also read: Artist Dhiraj Rabha’s work casts long shadows of insurgency at Kochi-Muziris Biennale )

In The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past, Sowmiya Ashok recounts an entertaining story that sifts fact from emotion and the politics around it. “Since the BJP came to power, there has been a certain homogenisation of India’s history. What these excavations are saying is something else,” Ashok says.

In this interview, she discusses the evidence from Keeladi, the Sangam-era claims around it, and how archaeology has become enmeshed with politics.

Keeladi clearly struck a chord very early on. Why do you think it resonated so strongly with people, and how did that initial curiosity slowly turn into something much more cultural and political?

For many people in Tamil Nadu, we had not seen anything similar to the Keeladi finds before. Suddenly, there was this site which the ASI team was comparing to sites we had read about in our history textbooks. That made it exciting and a lot of people in Tamil Nadu showed up in large numbers out of curiosity. There was also wonder over how this fit into the idea of being Tamil or our origin story.

In history textbooks, especially in English, the focus on South India is less when it comes to ancient India. From that perspective, Keeladi stood out and it was claimed to be contemporaneous with the second urbanisation in the Gangetic plains. This allowed people in Tamil Nadu to think that Keeladi could offer a deeper understanding of the ancient past.

But there were flashpoints in the Keeladi story. One was in 2016, when there was talk of moving the Keeladi artefacts to the ASI excavation office in Mysuru. That was seen as taking something that rightfully belonged to the Tamil region and moving it to another state. That was when Keeladi also reached the courts. The second flashpoint was when the lead archaeologist, Amarnath Ramakrishna, whose team discovered Keeladi, was transferred out of Tamil Nadu to Assam.

By then, people were convinced that Keeladi was a symbol of a glorious Tamil civilisation. The transfer was seen as a way to suppress such a Tamil civilisation from being revealed. So very quickly, within the span of two years, Keeladi transformed from a fascination to becoming a strong cultural symbol, and then into something deeply political.

You argue that Keeladi gave the Sangam age a physical anchor it long lacked. Why does that matter?

The Sangam Age is roughly pegged to between 300 BCE and 300 CE and Tamil archaeologists see it as a clue as to how far back this idea of civilisation goes. There was wonderful literature from that period, but tangible evidence had not been found from the ground. When Keeladi was discovered, suddenly there was ‘proof’ that what the poems described was being pulled out of the trenches in physical form.

This had happened before too. Archaeologists had previously used the Sangam poems while out on expedition but the scale of what was found in Keeladi felt different. There were many more brick structures, ring wells, furnaces, artefacts, and everything was studied through the lens of the Sangam poems.

Amarnath Ramakrishna himself called it a Sangam site. That’s when it became much more symbolic. As (archaeologist and historian) Nayanjot Lahiri said in an interview, the feeling was similar to how excavations linked to the Hindu epics—the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas—transformed public imagination in the north. That’s how it felt for the Tamils in the south that there was a site which offered Sangam references.

There are two sides to this, though. Some archaeologists are cautious about comparing it to the Sangam Age and prefer instead to say it is a good example of an Early Historic site in Tamil Nadu which also happens to offer connections with the literary texts.

Why does Keeladi sit uneasily within the BJP’s narrative of ancient India?

In Keeladi, what was not found stood out more strongly, in some ways, over what was found. There was no connection in the form of material evidence, as such, with the Vedic sites of the northern riverine plains. Immediately, there was this consensus that this means Keeladi was unique.

People instead saw similarities with Harappan sites. And for years, there’s been this belief in the south that when the Indus Valley declined, people migrated south. That connection felt important and in a sense, Keeladi legitimised such claims.

What Keeladi did was to challenge the idea that the south was a passive inheritor of technology from the north during antiquity. It also spurred more excavations. Now, Tamil Nadu is claiming it has the oldest Iron Age site in the world. These new findings create discomfort because it suggests a more diverse, less homogenous story of India’s past.

What did your reporting reveal about the ASI as an institution?

To clarify, I am neither an archaeologist or a historian. As a journalist, my job was to document what I saw through ground reporting and I have relied on the expertise of scholars and published material.

From my understanding, the ASI is meant to preserve cultural heritage, but now it has been pulled into questions, for example, of whether there is a temple under a mosque. That’s not what the ASI originally set out to do. There’s also a pattern in the geographical spread of where excavations have taken place. They’re not evenly spread across the country.

From my interactions with various experts, it felt like archaeology was being used to prove a point, rather than to understand the diversity of the subcontinent.

When you look back at Keeladi now, do you see it mainly as political interference, or was it really about a deeper fight over who gets to decide history in India?

I think both. If we lived in an age that appreciated debate and research around bringing out the diversity of India, I don’t think the Keeladi story would have blown up the way it did.

The discovery was made at a very particular political juncture. The BJP had come to power in the Centre, and subsequently the DMK here in Tamil Nadu. They were locked in a federalism debate and there were issues around GST, NEET and even the Hindi imposition that was taking place alongside. The Keeladi issue added fuel to existing tensions.

But there is also a deeper question over who gets to authorise history in India. I heard this repeatedly from people: that those who write history are the ones who sit in Delhi and that didn’t seem fair to many people in the scholarly world in Tamil Nadu.

I could sense that these definitions of what was urbanisation in the ancient world had to be rethought and more nuanced to capture the complexity of how it manifests in different parts of India.