The Economist December 4th 2021 87
Books & artsThepoliticsofhistoryThe rice bowl’s tale
R
arely can a spoonful of rice have
caused such a stir. When M.K. Stalin,
chief minister of Tamil Nadu, addressed
the south Indian state’s legislature on Sep
tember 9th, he celebrated a musty sample
of the country’s humble staple. Carbon
dating by an American laboratory, he said,
had just proved that the rice, found in a
small clay offering bowl—itself tucked
inside a burial urn outside the village of
Sivakalai, near the southernmost tip of
India—was some 3,200 years old. This
made it the earliest evidence yet found of
civilisation in Tamil Nadu. The top duty of
his government, the chief minister trium
phantly declared, was to establish that the
history of India “begins from the land
scape of the Tamils”.
The received wisdom about India’s
early history has been that civilisation gen
erally flowed the other way, from north to
south. So why is a provincial politician so
keen to turn this narrative upside down?
The answer lies in modern identity politics
as much as archaeology.
Mr Stalin’s party, which returned to
power in Tamil Nadu in May after a decadein the wilderness, has secular roots and is
sworn to defend south India, and particu
larly its Dravidian languages, from per
ceived cultural dominance by the far more
populous north. This threat has grown
since 2014, when the Hindunationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) won control of
the national government. With its strong
hold in the conservative north, the bjp
tends to see not strength, but weakness in
diversity. It also tends to view the past as a
simple story of the rise of a Sanskrit civili
sation—Sanskrit being the language of
Hindu texts, and ancestor of most Indo
European languages spoken across north
India—which peaked in a panIndian gold
en age, followed by sad decline during a
millennium of Muslim and Christian rule. Sustaining a Tamil counternarrative
requires evidence—which is why archaeol
ogy matters. Aside from the rich and so
phisticated ancient Tamil poetry known as
Sangam literature, until now proof of the
south’s claim to equal antiquity has been
thin on the ground. Tamil Nadu’s two an
nual monsoons and long seasons of
extreme heat are destructive to brick or
wooden remains. Ethnic nationalists also
accuse authorities in faroff Delhi, India’s
capital, of devoting far more resources to
archaeology in the north than in the south.
But the balance of discoveries has been
changing; Mr Stalin’s rice pot was not the
first startling recent find in Tamil Nadu.
Over the past decade estimates of when ur
ban settlement began in the state have
been pushed steadily back, from around
300 bcto the 1155bccarbon date of the Siva
kalai rice offering. The biggest break
through came in 2014 near a village called
Keeladi, outside the city of Madurai. It is
said that a local lorry driver overheard
archaeologists chatting at a roadside tea
stall. He took them to a palm grove where
he confessed to stealing coconuts. It was
littered with sherds of ancient pottery.
Now in its seventh excavation season,
the 110acre site (pictured) has not turned
up big monuments or rich treasures. The
grid of deep trenches, cut into six acres so
far, has instead produced abundant evi
dence of continued urban settlement from
as long ago as the early sixth century bc, as
well as of industries such as weaving and
pottery and extensive trade. The older straCHENNAI
Archaeological finds in Tamil Nadu complicate the story of civilisation in India→Alsointhissection
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