BOOK: JOURNEY OF A CIVILISATION
In Journey of a Civilization, retired bureaucrat R. Balakrishnan poses the ‘Indus riddle’: a profusion of archaeological remains from the Harappan civilisation, but without known literature that evokes it. And the ‘Tamil riddle’: a rich body of classical literature that mentions cities, kings, clans and a distant past, but with scant archaeological associations. The two-birds-with-one-stone solution favoured in this book is the ‘Dravidian Hypothesis’: which claims an “organic link be-tween the Indus Valley civilisation and the Dravidian linguistic family in terms of culture, ideology and language”.
This is not a new idea. Variants have been proposed since the archaeological discovery of Harappa and Mohenjodaro, and several attempts to decipher the Harappan script have relied on the assumption that it represents a proto-Dravidian language. Journey of a Civilization goes all in, moving beyond linguistic categories to try and marshal evidence for a deep civilisational connection between the Harappans and the early Tamils. This requires two faraway ends to be joined—depending on who is doing the dating, the last of the Harappans and the earliest known
Sangam text are separated in time by anywhere between a thousand to two thousand years and in distance by a couple of thousand kilometres.
Balakrishnan mines Sangam verses for echoes of distant geographies. A ‘merciless chill wind’ from the north and a ‘fire-mouthed’ hot wind from the west are interpreted as being more consistent with a location in western India than any place in Tamil Nadu. Similarly, other references—to the Himalayas, to an animal possibly a yak, to a camel—evoke other places.
The main thrust of Balakrishnan’s work has to do with names of places. Migrating people tend to name new settlements after the ones they left. Equally, place names can persist through different waves of settlers. He uses databases of place names to compare ‘namescapes’ between southern India and the Harappan geography. He finds numerous correspondences— with names of places and rulers from Sangam literature, with present-day names from Tamil Nadu. To give one example, places named Kallur (along with several others with an ‘-ur’ suffix) are found in Pakistan, in Maharashtra’s ‘transit zone’, and in all the southern Indian states.
Other correspondences explored between the two cultures include bull-taming and cock-fighting, both depicted on Harappan seals, the use of the colour red, the high status of potters, and so on. Recent excavations in Tamil Nadu of first millennium BCE urban sites are mentioned as possibly yielding more connections in future.
Such work is understandably based on a degree of imaginative interpretation—that sometimes feels like it is slipping into wishful thinking. The book’s stated aim is to only present associations that support its Dravidian hypothesis. So it’s not clear, for instance, how Harappan namescapes might match other areas of the subcontinent. Or, while that tree on a Harappan seal might just be the vanni tree held sacred in the South, it is worth mentioning that the writing on such seals almost always reads right to left, unlike the earliest known Tamil writing.
In any case, Journey of a Civilization—lavishly produced and packed with photographs, maps and tables—is confident enough in its Dravidian hypothesis to leave “the responsibility of filling the gaps [of time and distance] to the efficiency of the archaeologists and the historians”.
In recent years, it has been ancient DNA and population genetics that have yielded the most illuminating, new evidence about early Indians. Initial results indicate that the Harappans are a base population for almost everyone on the subcontinent today. Perhaps they moved south with Dravidian languages and culture, or into them, or perhaps a bit of both. The next decade is likely to throw up fine-grained accounts of migrations and intermixing in the Indian iron-age. A compendium like Journey of a Civilization will certainly be useful when it is time to reconcile the findings of genetics, linguistics and archaeology into coherent history. ■