Guest Post by Mohan Rao

Just read Sowmiya Ashok’s The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past (2025) and I have some thoughts to share.

This is a book I have deeply enjoyed reading. It is written in a very enjoyable, easily readable style, bereft of jargon and comprises the journalist author’s research over a period of time to the excavations at Keeladi in Tamil Nadu and the immediate alarm bells it set off in distant Delhi, where the BJP had just taken power. The pathway to a Hindu Rashtra must begin with a rewriting of Indian history and archeology.

Beginning with Keeladi, the author covers other sites in Tamil Nadu and their exciting discoveries, and the politics that ensue between Tamil identity and Hindutva.

The author mentions many of the shenanigans undertaken by Hindutva in this direction, but without passing judgment.  I do not believe that this is necessarily good journalism or academics, for the pathway to fascistic perjury is lined with such silences.

Sowmiya Ashok is not just intelligent, she also has a profound appreciation of irony. Above all, she doesn’t carry the Naipaulian guilt and anger for avenging the wrongs done by history to a supposedly tolerant Hindu civilization. Naipaul was of course colonial, entrapped in James Mills’s ideas of Indian history. But so was Jinnah’s Indian Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. With no irony al all, both mirrored Mills’s idea of Indian history. So we must be cautious about current calls for decolonization of history. This decolonization has, in fact, been done for more than a hundred years by nationalist historians and since Independence by scores of post-colonial historians, subaltern historians, feminist historians, Dalit historians and queer historians. And indeed, historians writing histories of languages and regions. The call for decolonizing history now is thus a Hindutva call for Brahminical history.

But today we live in revisionist times. Our Prime Minister could claim, at the inauguration of a private hospital in Mumbai in 2014, that the image of Lord Ganesha, elephant head on a human form, proved that ancient India had advanced cosmetic surgery. He also claimed that Karna from the Mahabharata, said by him to have been born outside the womb of his mother Kunti, impregnated by the sun God Agni even while a virgin, proved that advanced genetic sciences existed in ancient India. Not one of the doctors present there protested. Complicit silence.

Officially, therefore, India sees the troubling replacement of history with myth. This becomes particularly troubling with the recent extolling of Indian Knowledge Systems, which in essence is Vedic/Brahminical knowledge systems, excluding all other indigenous knowledge systems, including those of the producers of food, the non-Brahminical castes, the Dalits, the Muslims and Christians, all imagined as part of India in our Constitution.

During the height of the Covid 19 epidemic, our Health Minister, a doctor himself, recommended something called Coronil, manufactured by Godman Baba Ramdev, close to the establishment, as a cure for Covid. (This worm has recently turned, but that is another story we must know about.) This is a drug of unknown origin, untested. We do not know how many took recourse to it and how many died. The IMA did not protest. The ICMR kept quiet as did the health unit at Niti Ayog. Death by silence.

This is public health and professional failure at very high levels. The journalist Vidya Krishnan was the sole journalist that called this out and she was met with rape threats. The journalism profession also failed us with their acquiescence with the powers that be. Journalistic betrayal of democracy is now old hat.

It is not surprising that given the age structure of the population, India had the highest Covid mortality in the world, aided by our silence. The demographer who estimated this, Prof. K.S.James, incidentally my friend from JNU, was hounded out as the Director of the International Institute of Population Sciences for doing what a demographer should do. All other demographers were silent.

One famous incident of scientific perfidy does not find mention in this otherwise well-researched book. This is the discovery of an image of a horse in a seal from Harappa by one Dr. Subash Kak in the United States. What had burnt the heart of Hindutva was the fact that Harappa, which they claimed was a Vedic civilization, did not reveal the presence of a horse, essential to proof as a Vedic civilization, despite many years of careful search. And here had this Kashmiri Brahmin, a professor in computer science at a university in the West, done the miraculous! Discover the horse in Harappa! Crackers were set off and bells were rung in Hindutva temples.

One thing that can be said about Hindutva academics without much discussion is that they are profoundly and almost amusingly ill-read. But they also appear to be supremely incompetent. Michael Witzel, a renowned Indologist and an expert on Harappa revealed that the horse image created by Dr. Subhash Kak was that of a bull with the image of a horse super-imposed. While doing so, he had not calculated that the position of the testicles of the bull and horse are not similarly placed. This was thus revealed to be a major hoax of history. Were they ashamed into silence? They never are.

Instead, they reached out to readings of the Rig Veda, the existence of a Saraswathi civilization, along the banks of a non-existent river Saraswathi. A Saraswathi civilization is being celebrated, even as it has entered school textbooks.

Sowmiya Ashok has been researching Hindutva’s efforts to take over Harappa for so long, I refuse to believe she did not know about the Subhash Kak nastiness. Even I do, and this is not even my area of work. This is strategic silence perhaps to get interviews with Lal and Shinde?

How does one view this?

The author has interviewed a huge number of movers and shakers in the archeological world. It is a missed opportunity that she has not grilled Dr.B.B. Lal – who “discovered” a non-existent temple below the Babri Masjid, thus contributing to its wanton destruction. A magnificent rejoinder was furnished to the Supreme Court by Prof.Shereen Ratnakar, one of India’s best archeologists, but in vain. The author could have quoted Ratnakar. But, silence.  Lal was one of the most prominent and earliest archeologists to be blatantly wedded to Hindutva. He only gave interviews to pro-Hindutva outfits.  Here she gets an opportunity. But silence.

She similarly missed an opportunity to grill Dr. Shinde who stretched academic credibility to find signs of the Vedic civilisations in Harappa. But silence.

Prof. Irfan Habib has spoken in public about the efforts to create Harappa as an Aryan entity and the problems therein. He firmly rejects that hypothesis arguing why it was proto-Dravidian ( I do not know what that means!). But the author is silent about this.

Much as I enjoyed the book and all the fascinating findings, I see it also as a missed opportunity for not calling out the frauds who people the archeological world that she had the opportunity of meeting and interviewing. Some more strategic silence?

So, I am not saying anything at all about all the brilliant findings from archeological excavations in Tamil Nadu, the issues of identity, the homonymy between Sangam texts and burial findings, and much more that make the book eminently readable. But that the author does not tell us what her text tells us in conclusion: that Harappa was not a Vedic civilization, that there were indeed profound similarities between the Harappan and Keeladi and other related sites and so on.

One too many strategic silences –  that is what disappointed me.

Mohan Rao retired as Professor from JNU and is now an independent scholar based in Bangalore.