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Unlike in the North, archaeological excavations in the South have largely focused on megalithic sites and burials, with little attention to evidence of habitation, says archaeologist K Amarnath Ramakrishna, whose 2014-16 excavations in Keeladi have served to disrupt the long-held belief that India’s urban civilisation flowed from the North to the South.
Over two years after he submitted his report on the Keeladi excavations, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had asked Ramakrishna to revise his report, but he refused, saying he stands by his report. On June 17, Ramakrishna, who has already faced a string of transfers over the last decade, was transferred to Greater Noida as Director of the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities (NMMA).
“Except for Arikamedu in 1945 or Kaveri Poompattinum or Poompuhar in 1965, which focused on habitats, most other big explorations in the South, including the excavations carried out by Alexander Rea at Adichanallur at the start of the 20th Century, have all revealed evidence of burial sites. But we needed to ask an important question: who created these burials? Burial sites are evidence only of the final rituals carried out by people — they don’t tell the story of how they lived. It’s this that we tried to find in Keeladi,” Ramakrishna told The Indian Express at his NMMA office.
After a year spent exploring 293 sites on both banks of the Vaigai river, the team led by Ramakrishna, then the ASI Superintending Archaeologist, zeroed in on Keeladi, a village near Madurai, where they carried out two seasons of excavations between 2014 and 2016. Here, on a mound “protected by a coconut grove” for 40 years, the team found evidence of “pure habitation” – a large number of burnt brick structures. “It was for the first time in Tamil Nadu, after Arikamedu, that we had found such structures. All of this pointed to the existence of a sophisticated urban society in Keeladi,” he says.
In his report, which he submitted in 2023, Ramakrishna proposed that the earliest evidence of life in Keeladi could be dated to between the 8th and 5th Century BCE. If true, Keeladi would have been a contemporary of some of the urban sites in the Gangetic plains – a proposition strong enough to shake up history, and politics.
“It was for the first time that such a big excavation had happened in the South. It showed that the second urbanisation – or the emergence of urban centres around 6th Century BCE, after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation – happened in the South too. Early and late Sangam literature (the earliest body of Tamil texts, roughly dated to 3rd century BCE) talks about human activities. These didn’t exist in a state of vacuum,” says Ramakrishna.
In 2017, soon after the second season of excavations, Ramakrishna was transferred to Assam and the third phase at Keeladi was taken over by ASI archeologist P Sriraman, who ruled out anything of significance at Keeladi. This led to a political uproar that the Centre was working to downplay Keeladi’s – and thereby Tamil Nadu’s – antiquity. With the High Court taking over the matter, Ramakrishna was directed to complete his report and the Tamil Nadu archeology department was permitted to carry out further excavations.
At the end of two seasons of excavations, 2017-18 and 2018-19, the state team reported the findings of antiquities such as pieces of gold ornaments, iron implements and terracotta ring wells, and published a report pegging Keeladi as an urban settlement going as far back as 6th century BCE or even earlier.
In 2023, two years after Ramakrishna finally submitted his report, after a prodding from the court, the ASI asked him to revise it.
“I refused. I stand by my report and my findings. Keeladi offers evidence that all cultures developed independently. But so far, we have only excavated 2 per cent of the mound. There’s much more that lies buried in Keeladi,” he says, while saying more explorations and excavations needed to be carried out in the South.
The ASI has six Excavation Branches – Delhi, Nagpur, Baroda, Patna, Bhubaneswar and Mysuru – which are mandated to carry out archaeological exploration and excavation works.
“The ASI’s work has been North-focused. In the South, narratives have never been corroborated with archaeological evidence. Harappa and Mohenjodaro went to Pakistan after Partition, which is why we are doing so much in the North. If we lose something, we search for it. It’s time we did that in the South. History is research. We need to see it in a scientific manner.”
