K. Amarnath Ramakrishna, director, National Mission on Monument and Antiquity, addressing a conference in Madurai on September 20, 2025.
| Photo Credit: G. Moorthy
In the backdrop of the political flashpoint between the Centre and the Tamil Nadu government over the Keeladi findings, K. Amarnath Ramakrishna, the director of the National Mission on Monuments and Antiquities, said that we are “living at a vicious time when fiction is being treated as history to distort the origin and the facts of civilisations.”
Mr. Ramakrishna, who authored the 982-page report on Keeladi, contended that history could only be based on facts and not on literature. “As argued by many, gods can never create civilisations, it is only the people who are capable of creating and developing civilisations,” he said.
In a bid to divert the importance of the Keeladi findings and “deceive the masses”, he said many people, including educationalists, had started linking those with the Mahabharata by associating Keeladi with Manalur. The notable part surrounding the discussion, he said, was that the report on Keeladi was yet to be fully released.
Mr. Ramakrishna, who was speaking at a conference organised by the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers’ Artists’ Association to observe 100 years of the discovery of Indus Valley Civilisation, said that those who attempt to fictionalise history use literature in defence, but excavations grounded on facts could never be fictionalised or modified. For those who claim that Sangam literature, which spoke highly about the livelihood of the common masses, has reference to gods and religions, Mr. Ramakrishna said the original texts never spoke about god or religion.
On how excavations in Tamil Nadu, unlike the one in Keeladi, were not widely known, he said many findings, including the Adichanallur report, were either incompletely written or “buried” to erase history. “While the Adichanallur report does not carry the test results of the bones that were collected during the excavation, the study in Kancheepuram district, usually linked to its religious places, was yet to be completely released by the University of Madras,” he added.
Though inscriptions played an important role in the study of history, they could only be compared with the current time and land documents, he said. “Many of those just carry trivial details of transfer of properties and other materials,” he said. Because of this, he added, only urns and other remnants secured during excavations could be accounted for archaeological studies.
Mr. Ramakrishna said no inscriptions before the Ashoka period were found in the northern parts of India. “Even those found from the Ashoka period had wordings in a developed form,” he said.
“As a person who dug the earth in Keeladi and completely oversaw the excavation process there, I can be certain that the place had rich material evidence, just enough to reveal the rich history of Tamils,” Mr. Ramakrishna said.
Stating that the efforts made to distort history using literature and fictional stories could not stand long, he added, “Stories always travel fast, but the truth, seeming to be trailing behind, will endure and stand tall.”
Former IAS officer and writer R. Balakrishnan, who felicitated Mr. Ramakrishna, said: “As history tells that civilisations develop along the rivers, the Vaigai, termed earlier as ‘Vaiyai’, was also known as Kaadhal Nadhi (love river).” But, over the years, with the intrusion of religious context to the river, it has been given a different colour, he said.
Published – September 20, 2025 09:30 pm IST
