The politics of archaeology in ‘The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past’ by Sowmiya Ashok

It is a curious fact that the general diversity of Indian traditions and social structures has not been reflected in history writing. The dominant narratives have focused much more on upper India, neglecting the peninsula. All the major milestones of India’s early history — Indus Valley Civilisation, Aryans and Vedic Age, and the great Mauryan empire — had their headquarters in upper India. During the same period, what was happening in the Deccan and the Tamil region? It is this historical silence about a significant region of India that is at the centre of this remarkable book.

All professional historians know how difficult it is to construct human life for times before the arrival of the written word. In its absence, the traces of the past are found in the archaeological excavations, which, quite literally, unearth facets of how our ancestors lived. The discovery of the great Indus civilisation is based entirely on archaeological findings. Prior to the 1920s, when it was discovered, the temporal boundaries of Indian history ended with the Aryans. With the discovery of an ancient civilisation on the banks of river Indus in north-west India, the beginnings of Indian history were pushed back by nearly 2,000 years. In this context, the archaeological excavations carried out in Keeladi, a small town in Madurai (Tamil Nadu), have been of crucial significance.

The excavations began in 2015 and have since continued intermittently. Some of the findings from Keeladi have suggested the emergence of cities and the use of metals such as copper and iron a few hundred years before the Christian era, prior to in the North. Interestingly, many of the findings at Keeladi are well-matched in descriptions found in Sangam poetry, written around the same period.

Sangam literature is a huge compilation of bardic poetry from the ancient Tamil region, remarkable in being non-religious, profane and also non-Brahmanical, as against the sacred poetry in Sanskrit. It was marked by rich descriptions of nature, landscapes, hills, jungles and plains. A corroboration of the written text by archaeological findings has confirmed the validity of the evidence at Keeladi.

However, archaeology, as it has grown as a discipline, has not been a socially innocent and morally neutral pursuit of India’s past. It is wound up with the roots of our collective identities of being Indian, North Indian or being Hindu. In other words, knowledge derived from archaeological excavations can easily provide nourishment to spatial, cultural and religious identities and promote politics based on those identities.

In this sense, the knowledge-seeking project of Indian archaeology has got entangled with the politics of identities. This creates the possibility that knowledge can be twisted and manipulated to suit and support specific political projects.

Some of the earliest archaeological sites of Indus Valley Civilisation are in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, now in Pakistan. A discovery of an archaeological site of matching antiquity in India can be an effective rebuttal to Pakistani claims. A discovery of such a site in South India can also trigger a North-South fault line, by portraying South as ‘older’ and, therefore, ‘superior’ to the North. Counter-claims can flow from the North. The excavations at Keeladi have been caught in this rivalry.

Archaeology can also be used to settle the old debate whether Aryans migrated from the steppes of Central Asia, or whether they were the original inhabitants of the region and migrated from here to Iran and Europe. The possibilities are endless. Our distant past has become a battleground for claims and counter-claims for settling political disputes. It is therefore no surprise that history, an account of human life in the past, has become a great arbiter in the present dispute. Whoever controls the past will control the future.

The pride in one’s past is always a double-edged sword. It provides a very positive input for our collective identities and shared solidarities. However, it can also lead to jingoism and separatism. It can destroy all that is virtuous and worth cherishing in our collective social life.

Sowmiya Ashok’s book has provided an excellent account of how archaeology works but also how it can be placed at the service of larger political projects. She has used the specific story of Keeladi to tell the larger story of the politics of knowledge about the past.

The real merit of the book, however, is that it makes a philosophical plea for liberating knowledge from the shackles of prejudices and vested interests. Only independent knowledge, rooted in evidence and procedures of enquiry, can understand human life correctly. And only correct and valid knowledge can play a constructive part in the advancement of human life.

— The reviewer is a visiting faculty at BML Munjal University, Manesar