Keeladi: Resist Sangh Parivar Efforts to Falsify Indian History

The top officials at the Archeological Survey of India under the Central Government are making efforts to prevent the ongoing archaeological investigations at the sites of an ancient civilization at Keeladi in Sivaganga district in Tamil nadu. An academic report prepared by the investigating team led by Dr Amarnath Ramakrishna has been sought to be revised, and when he refused, he was transferred to Assam.

The Keeladi discoveries about an ancient urban civilization on the banks of Vaiga river in Tamil Nadu has made the ideologues of the Sangh Parivar in jittery as they realise that these findings with scientific evidence would destroy the falsified version of Indian history they had propped up, ever since the time of the Vajpayee government at the Centre, twisting the hands of officials at central academic institutions for the purpose. They made efforts to rewrite Indian history giving prominence to the Vedic and Brahmanic traditions and culture as the centerpiece of Indian history and culture. They even claimed that the Aryans who were behind the Vedic civilisation originated in India and were never outsiders who came from the northwest, at the time of the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation. These efforts had a political motive to give a historical foundation to their slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan.” They attacked secular historians like Romila Thapar who rejected these claims, made efforts to capture the Indian History Congress which resisted such attempts and forced academic bodies like the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) to toe their falsified version of Indian history in its academic programmes.

Such a battle in the field of history has been going on for many years, and one of the saddest chapters in this false history of India came in the destruction of Babri Masjid on the claim that it was founded exactly on the spot were Lord Ram was born at an age only known to legends and never to historians. Despite the fact that there was no historical or archaeological evidence of the existence of a temple at the site, the mosque was pulled down by the rabid Sangh Parivar crowd defying rule of law. Stll, the Supreme Court chose to accept their claim to the land not based on evidence, but simply on the strength of faith!

Now the investigations at Keeladi are posing a serious threat to their version of history, where every culture in any part of India is subservient to the Hindu Vedic culture that sprang up in the Indo-Gangetic plains. In Keeladi the researchers have found evidence of a very advanced urban civilisation that dates back to the period of Indus Valley civilization. The ancient Tamil Brahmi writings, types of pottery, urban structures like wells and drainage systems and other artefacts discovered there seem to strongly suggest a South Indian civilisation with substantial connections to the Indus Valley civilisation, much ahead of the age of Vedic culture.

The proven antiquity of the Keeladi civilization and its links to the pre-Aryan Indus Valley urban centres would seriously question the Hindutva claims of the preeminence of Aryans in Indian history. The deeper antiquity of the South Indian Dravidian culture is now being established with scientific proof. For the Sangh Parivar, it would mean the foundations of their Hindutva ideology being shaken beyond repair. Hence their extreme efforts to stop the publication of official reports on these investigations and harassment of scholars involved in these studies. It is a fact that such efforts would not stop truth from coming out eventually, but it exposes the shaky foundations of the Sangh Parivar ideology and their false version of history. Hence it is important for the secular forces to defend the scientific studies in Keeladi and protection of the sites for future generations so that they will know the real history of India and not the made-up versions being propagated by the Sangh Parivar.

Yasmin Farooqui
National General Secretary
Social Democratic Party of India