‘Before the Ganga, there was the Vaigai’

On the southern edge of Madurai, where the river Vaigai cuts through dry plains and banana groves, Keezhadi lies quiet beneath a copper sky. Nothing in its tiled houses or narrow lanes hints at a revolution. Yet in this village, archaeology has become a matter of politics and the soil itself a manifesto.

In Keezhadi (also ‘Keeladi’), there is a newfound reverence for the earth. Children draw spades and ancient pots on classroom walls. Shopfronts sell miniature artefacts. Locals speak of the earth as if it were an ancestor.

The pride runs deep and so does the unease — because this rediscovered past is also a new battleground in Tamil Nadu’s coming election.

A buried city

Keezhadi’s story began with an act of curiosity. In the 1970s, a local schoolteacher, V. Balasubramaniam, noticed that students were bringing him shards of pottery they had found while digging a well. He preserved them, believing they came from “a civilisation that must have lived here when Madurai was still forming its first stories”.

When the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) surveyed the Vaigai Valley four decades later, that memory guided them back to this mound on Madurai’s fringe.

Under the leadership of archaeologist K. Amarnath Ramakrishna, the first trenches were cut in 2014. Within months, Keezhadi’s soil yielded evidence of a planned settlement — brick houses, ring wells, workshops, furnaces, beads, tools and pots inscribed with Tamil-Brahmi script. Carbon dating later traced the layers to around 580 BC, revealing an urban and literate culture that flourished long before the Mauryas or the Vedic age reached South India.

The discovery challenged the North-centric timeline of Indian civilisation. It suggested that the people of the Vaigai Valley — the ancestors of present-day Tamils — built cities, wrote in their own script, traded widely and developed civic life independent of Sanskritic influence.

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Tamil Nadu’s identity has long been anchored in linguistic pride and its rationalist politics. Keezhadi entered that continuum as proof, a scientific assertion of the Dravidian imagination.

Madurai MP Su. Venkatesan told National Herald that Keezhadi’s excavation “proved beyond question that Tamil society had achieved urban sophistication equal to any ancient civilisation”.

When the ASI abruptly transferred Ramakrishna in 2017 and slowed further digs, the move was read as a political attempt to blunt that pride. “Stopping the work after such discoveries made no sense,” Venkatesan said. “It looked like they feared what the soil was revealing.”

The Tamil Nadu government swiftly stepped in. The department of archaeology took charge, resumed excavations and commissioned carbon dating to be conducted abroad. When the results came back, confirming Keezhadi’s antiquity, the state saw the findings as a badge of honour.

Chief minister M.K. Stalin spoke of the discovery as scientific validation of a cultural truth — that Tamil civilisation was rational, literate and modern in spirit long before northern India’s Vedic order.

“Keezhadi shows our ancestors were thinkers and builders who believed in reason,” he said at a cultural conclave in Madurai. “It is not mythology, it is identity.”

That framing has now travelled from lecture halls to political platforms, where Keezhadi stands as a living rebuke to Hindutva nationalism, which many in Tamil Nadu see as an imported ideological force bent on subsuming diverse histories into a single Sanskritic narrative.

The ASI’s reluctance to publish findings in full, the transfer of key personnel and the bureaucratic delays in releasing reports deepened suspicion.

Tamil Nadu’s minister for finance and human resources management, senior DMK leader Thangam Thennarasu, told National Herald that “science is not the real problem, politics is”.

“First, they said there was nothing here. Then they moved the officer, stopped funds and delayed the report. When evidence challenged their story of a single Vedic civilisation, they called it inconclusive.”

The Centre’s hesitation, he said, stemmed from fear of what Keezhadi symbolised.

Ramakrishna, the archaeologist who led the initial dig, continues to defend his findings with quiet conviction. “You can correct grammar, not history,” he’d once said. “If I change the concept, I become a criminal.”

Keezhadi’s people have embraced their newfound fame with a mix of wonder and ownership. “We were once a nameless stop on the Madurai bus route. Now the world comes to us,” says panchayat president E. Venkata Subramanian, sitting in an office lined with photographs of artefacts. “Our children look at this land differently. They see dignity in the soil.”

A short walk away, the new Keezhadi Museum rises from a five-acre campus that displays more than 30,000 artefacts.

Inside, schoolchildren gather around showcases of pots and beads as guides explain how each layer of soil reveals a different age of Tamil life.

“These letters are ours,” one student whispers to another, pointing at an inscribed potsherd.

In nearby Agaram and Manalur, where more trenches have opened, local leaders performed bhoomi pujas as if inaugurating a temple. “If temples can get crores,” said R. Kannan, a farmer who gave part of his field for the dig, “why not this ancient town that shows who we were?”

The Vaigai civilisation

By 2019, Keezhadi’s findings were reinforced by similar discoveries in the Vaigai valley — at Sivakalai, Konthagai and Agaram — together forming what scholars now call the Vaigai Civilisation Cluster. The continuity across these sites strengthened the argument that a distinct Tamil urban culture had flourished here independently.

For the Dravidian movement, Keezhadi offered empirical vindication of what leaders like Periyar and Annadurai had long preached — that Tamil society was rational and egalitarian long before Brahminism and caste hierarchy took root.

The DMK government quickly folded Keezhadi into its cultural policy. Textbooks now carry chapters on the excavation, school tours are subsidised and public hoardings in Madurai declare: ‘Before the Ganga, there was the Vaigai’.

This recentring of Tamil history through archaeology is reshaping the ideological battlefield in the state ahead of assembly elections next year.

The quiet fields of Keezhadi have turned into the epicentre of a cultural and political confrontation. As campaign motif, Keezhadi is today as potent as language or social justice. For the DMK, it’s both a shield and a sword — a shield against cultural homogenisation and a sword that carves out a distinct Dravidian imagination.

Political analyst V. Arulraj told National Herald that Keezhadi has turned archaeology into ideology. “The BJP campaigns on faith, the DMK on evidence. When a spade unearths a 2,600-yearold Tamil city, it is both science and a political weapon.”

The state BJP’s response to this proud assertion has been cautious so far. Party leaders here know how deep the narrative runs. In public meetings, their leaders praise Keezhadi as “India’s shared heritage”, eliding the challenge it represents to Vedic supremacist fantasies. Privately, they admit that the site complicates the Hindutva script in Tamil Nadu.

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By late afternoon, the sun turns Keezhadi’s red earth to gold. Workers cover the open trenches with tarpaulin as school buses line up outside the museum.

As dusk descends, lamps are lit along the museum path. Their light falls on the faces of children holding small flags that read ‘Tamil Civilisation Lives’.

Beyond the fences, the Vaigai glimmers in the half-light, carrying silt that may still hide more stories.