There’s no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
– Arundhati Roy
For decades, the instilled memory of Indian history has been strategically scripted through a Brahminical lens. This Aryan-centric history has claimed that civilisation is something that the south ‘inherited’ or that it ‘trickled down’ from the Gangetic plains. But Keezhadi is an archaeological testimony against these Brahminical narratives. Hence, the ruling class with a strong passion towards ancient civilisations get afraid of the very same, when it is Dravidian.
Located about 12 km south-east of Madurai, on the southern bank of the Vaigai River in Tamil Nadu’s Sivaganga district, Keezhadi was waiting, just about 100 feet under, with bricks and beads, to dismantle this historical distortion brick by brick. In 2013–14, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the leadership of Superintending archaeologist K. Amarnath Ramakrishnan, conducted a large-scale survey across the Vaigai riverbed, identifying 293 sites, Keezhadi in particular, standing out due to unusually rich surface finds. By March 2015, following trial trenches revealed layers of habitation, burnt bricks, and black and red ware pottery. Keezhadi was officially declared an excavation site. The first two seasons (2015–2016) unearthed over 5,500 artefact, including Tamizh-Brahmi inscribed potsherds, terracotta figurines, ring wells, beads, spindle whorls, and industrial tools- clear signs of a literate, urban, and craft-based society. As for the antiquity of the settlements, radiocarbon dating and stratigraphic analysis confirmed that the settlement dates back to as early as 580 BCE, or perhaps earlier, pushing the timeline of urban settlements years back from what was till now ascribed to this region, directly linking it to the Sangam Era, perhaps earlier.
Another striking feature of Keezhadi is is the absence of any trace of temples, religion, sculptures, or ritual altars among the 5500+ finds. Keezhadi can be inferred to be a secular settlement organised around knowledge, literacy, and civic life instead of caste or god. This aspect of Keezhadi perhaps is the most important in today’s political climate, where history is routinely distorted to propagate Hindutva. Keezhadi stands as a rebuttal to this idea and exposes how the subcontinent’s plural past has been flattened into a unilateral narrative that revolves around Sanskrit, temples, and Brahminism.
But just as the dig was gaining momentum, Amarnath Ramakrishnan was abruptly transferred without official reasons after he denied to change the reports. This is unusual as the lead archaeologist typically oversees until final reporting is completed. Soon after it was said that the ASI’s next phase of excavation has resulted in no significant findings and the excavation was halted, sparking anger from Tamil Nadu’s political leadership and civil society for suppressing Tamizh past. However, what made the world turn towards Keezhadi yet again? What brought the spotlight back? The answer lies in a discovery that does not just add a chapter to history but rewrites it.
Until recently, the Iron Age was believed to span from 1200 BCE to 550 BCE, with the mainstream narrative locating its origin in West Asia and south-eastern Europe with the origin of iron age in India being in the Gangetic plains. But on 23rd January, the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology published a pioneering report titled ‘Antiquity of Iron’, which presented radiocarbon evidence that the Iron Age in Tamil Nadu began as early as 3345 BCE nearly 2,000 years earlier than previously thought, and long before any such evidence in the ‘cradles’ of Indian civilisation. The findings were based on artefacts unearthed from Keezhadi, Sivagalai, and Adichanallur, and authenticated through carbon-dating at Beta Analytic, USA, Showing that the south was not a passive recipient but an early architect. Another very significant discovery of Keezhadi is the recent facial reconstruction of two Sangam Age individuals, whose skulls were discovered at Kondagai, a burial site near Keezhadi. These reconstructions, based on forensic science and DNA analysis, revealed predominantly South Indian features, with West Eurasian and Austro-Asiatic traces, painting a far more complex picture of ancient Tamizh ancestry and migration pattern. It shows how the region was open to people and ideas, and connected with many cultures.
Despite all these remarkable discoveries from Tamil Nadu, the silence from the centre has been deafening. The BJP which aggressively celebrates the so-called Vedic past through fabricated history textbooks, has actively tried to sabotage these discoveries. There is no large-scale funding to Tamil Nadu archaeological department, no museum initiatives, and most importantly no inclusion of this important history in national curriculum. By not including Keezhadi in school textbooks, they are trying to suppress this part of history, and deliberately keeping the future generation unaware of South India’s significant contributions to early civilization. It is part of a broader attempt to centralize and Bramhinise Indian historical narratives as part of RSS’s agenda of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. This neglect is nothing but deliberate erasure, because the Dravidian identity rooted in rationalism, secularism, and linguistic pride, stands in direct contradiction to the Hindutva project. It is thereby seen as a threat, not to real history but to those who benefit from hiding it.
