ASI archaeologist who authored Keeladi report transferred amid row
The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has transferred Keeladi site excavator K Amarnath Ramakrishna almost a month after he refused to rework his report on the site of the ancient Tamil civilisation, officials aware of the matter said.
According to the order issued on June 17, Ramakrishna has been transferred from his role as director of antiquity at the National Mission on Monument and Antiquity (NMMA) in New Delhi to director of the NMMA's Greater Noida office. This is the third time that Ramakrishna has been transferred within the ASI in the last nine months.
The latest transfer comes a month after ASI asked Ramakrishna, who led the first two phases of excavations at Keeladi, to rework his 982-page report submitted to the agency in January 2023.
The excavations at Keeladi, beginning in 2015, first narrowed the gap between the imaginations of the Tamil and the Indus Valley Civilisations (3,300 BCE to 13,00 BCE), the earliest known in the Indian subcontinent. This reconstruction of this ancient society evoked both linguistic and cultural pride, pushing Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin to claim that the Tamil civilisation was rich, modern and developed, and juxtapose Tamil pride against the Hindi heartland.
This has come at a time when right-wing ideologues have increasingly argued that it was the indigenous people of South Asia who developed the Indus Valley and Harappan civilisation and were 'the Vedic people'.
On May 21, the ASI asked Ramakrishna to resubmit the report on his findings after making necessary corrections in an effort to make it 'more authentic'. Five changes were suggested by the agency after two unnamed experts vetted the report. Two days later, Ramakrishna wrote to ASI, defending his findings and refusing to rework the report.
DMK Rajya Sabha MP P Wilson condemned the transfer, saying the BJP-led Centre were attempting to 'dilute the findings' of Ramakrishna's findings. 'As the pressure to officially release the report was building, the BJP is attempting to bring in a 'yes-man' in his (Ramakrishna) place who will withdraw the report and dilute the findings to suit their xenophobic narrative,' he said in a post on X.
Ramakrishna was previously transferred in 2017 after two phases of excavation at the site. His successor later said that the third excavation at the site yielded 'no significant findings'.
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