Why khaki knickers are in a twist over Keeladi dig

Not many Indians would have heard of Keeladi—actually Keezhadi in Tamil— a nondescript village in Tamil Nadu. It’s probably obscure even to most Tamilians. But today the name is the stuff of newspaper headlines and political rhetoric, thanks to the effort of one man: K Amarnath Ramakrishna.

A professional archaeologist, he was leading the Archaeological Survey of India team which was in charge of the excavations in Keeladi, on the banks of the Vaigai river, just about 12 km from Madurai from 2014 to 2016 before he was transferred to Assam.

Ramakrishna chose Keeladi from among several sites along the Vaigai to dig for a possible river-based civilisation in the area because of the many earthen mounds in the region. The decision bore fruit as the excavations in a coconut grove resulted in unearthing of a treasure trove.

The findings include structures such as brick walls and ring wells, artefact such as ceramic pottery, iron objects and inscriptions in the Tamil-Brahmi script.

Ramakrishna went public with his findings in 2017, courting controversy.

Some of the inscriptions point to links with the Indus Valley scripts, and the possibility that the provenance of Tamil Brahmi can be pushed back to 6th century BCE (580 BCE as claimed by two archaeologists), which would be older than the Ashokan Prakrit Brahmi of the 3rd century BCE. This, in effect, would mean upending Indian (especially south Indian) history as it is taught in schools and college, as the antiquity of Tamil would be even greater.

Some inscriptions even suggest faint links to Indus Valley scripts, reviving long-standing debates about the continuity of ancient Indian civilisation and the origins of Dravidian culture.

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All of this is an evolving story and it is by no means clear that this is indeed the case, as it has not been shown conclusively that the pot shard inscriptions are from the same layer as the 6th century BCE artefact. But, perhaps aware of the implications of the Keeladi dig, this was enough to spur the ASI into action.

Ramakrishna got his marching orders to Guwahati at the behest of the BJP government. Or so said notable Tamil protagonists such as V. Arasu, a former professor of Tamil at the Madras University). The ASI, however, argued that it was just a routine transfer.

The controversy resurfaced in May this year when Ramakrishna sent in his 980-odd page report to the ASI which rejected it. The ASI asked its own superintending archaeologist to revise the report, suggested the dating was wrong (580 BCE was too early), and asked for further stratigraphy (layering) studies, as it felt the conclusions were hasty.

Ramakrishna refused. He stood by his report which, he said, had been arrived at scientifically through widely accepted carbon dating and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) —both methods to determine the age of archaeological samples. He insisted that his reconstruction of the site was fully consistent with stratigraphic practice and cultural/material deposits. He said the artefact had been subject to tests in India, as well as the US and Italy, and his report was based on their findings.

The ASI appointed V. Sriraman (also from TN) as Ramakrishna’s replacement. When Sriram questioned his predecessor’s findings, the state government took the matter to court. Ruling in favour of the TN government, the Madras High Court put State Archaeology Department, in charge of the site. So far, the dig has yielded over 20, artefact.

Union minister for culture Gajendra Singh Shekhawat sought to put a lid on the controversy, saying there was no truth to these allegations, and the ASI only wanted further confirmation of the findings in the first report.

#Archaeology#India🇮🇳#HumanOrigins #Keezhadi #Keeladi #TamilNadu

Tamil Nadu’s Ancient Sites like #Keezhadi suggest India's Cradle of Civilization may lie further South than #Harappa & #Mohenjodaro....as earlier believed.
https://t.co/Cqo7HpegjR pic.twitter.com/n5RpPvD0QL

— Rohit Singh Negi🌐 (@rohitsinghnegi3) June 25, 2025

However, the subsequent transfer of Ramakrishna from Delhi to post of director of National Mission for Monuments and Antiquities in Noida did nothing to quell speculation.

The entire controversy, however, is not just about archaeological method or evidence. As The Hindu pointed out, beyond being a clash about the validityof the methods used, it was a clash of narratives between the RSS-inspired views of the BJP and the secular ideology of the Dravidian parties.

This has also exposed the faultlines between the BJP-led Central government and the DMK government in the state. Tamil political parties lined up behind the DMK criticising, what they called, the RSS-inspired efforts to ‘suppress the heritage of the Tamils’. Thangam Thennarasu, the minister of archaeology, said it was an attempt to make the Tamils second class citizens. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin too waded into the controversy, calling it an affront to Tamil pride and culture. He said that the ASI’s order to Ramakrishna to rework his findings was nothing but a blatant attack on Tamil culture and rhetorically asked the BJP if it had any evidence to back the ‘imaginary’ Saraswati civilisation theory it was propounding.

Keeladi, to sum up, has the potential to reshape our understanding of south Indian urban civilisation; it’s a cultural coup for the DMK in its longstanding battle for the hearts and minds of the state’s voters. It remains to be seen how this will play out. But one this is for certain: it is intimately tied to the politics of the present.