On September 20, 2024, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. K. Stalin expressed his gratitude to John Marshall, the late Br꧃itish archaeologist who headed the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) when Daya Ram Sahni’s excavation🍃s in Harappa (1921) and Rakhal Das Banerji’s in Mohenjo-daro (1922) led to the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).
Marshall announced the discoveries in a six-page report published in the Illustrated London News on September 20, 1924, drawing global attention. Remembering Marshall a century after the announcement of the discovery of South Asia’s oldest🤡 civilisation, Stalin wrote in a social media post: “I look back with gratitude and say, thank you, John Marshall. By taking the right cognizance of the material culture of the #IVC, he linked it to the #DravidianStock.”
Stalin’s mention of Marshall’s linking of the Harappan or the IVC with Dravidian culture came roughly a month after India’s new class six social science textbook released by the Union government-funded National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) called the Harappan civilisation as Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation. This nomenclature links the Harappan civilisation with settlements 🐟in northern India—considered the eastern extension of the Harappan civilisation—where Hindu nationalists claim the Saraswati river valley existed.
On September 20, Stalin als💛o announced that the state government would organise an international conference to mark the centenary of the discovery of the IVC and install 💖a life-size statue of Marshall. Three and a half months later, on January 5, 2025, while inaugurating that international conference in Chennai and laying the foundation stone for Marshall’s statue, Stalin took his war against Hindutva historiography to the next level. He announced a $1 million prize for anyone indisputably deciphering the Harappan script.
He sounded certain that the decipherment would confirm the Harappan script’s Dravidian connection. “There were bulls in the Indus Valley. Bulls are Dravidian symbols,” he said. He released a book, published by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology (TNSDA), which said that the state’s archaeolo🎶gists compared Indus and Dravidian signs and found that 60 per cent of the graffiti marks have similarities with the Indus script.
The Indus script has remained an enduring mystery, just as the Vedic Saraswati. In his 1924 report, Marshall pointed out that the pictogra💙phic script used to inscribe legends on the stone seals was unknown. Besides, “the figures engraved on them, and the style of the engraving, are different from anything of the kind hitherto met with in Indian art”.
Marshall noted that🐷 the animals engraved on the stone seals are in some instances bulls, in others, unicorns; but neither the Indian (Vedic) humped bull nor the water buffalo occurred among them. He also pointed out that “the strange pictographs which do duty for letters” bore “no resemblance whatsoever to any ancient Indian alphabet known to us”.
While the Harappan script was not linked to any Indian language, the discovery of the civilisation itself displaced the Hindu nationalist pride for the Vedic Sanskritic civilisation. The Sanskrit of the Vedic time had no script, but the Harappans had a script. They knewꦉ how to write.
Four months after Marshall’s report, in a December 1924 essay titled, Dravidian Origins and the Beginning of Indian Civilisation, Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the celebrated linguist, called the Indus🍸 Valley’s burial customs “distinctly un-Aryan”, showing a “deep-rooted difference in racial and cultural origins”. He concluded tha๊t the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa cultures “did not seem to be Aryan”.
Marshall published an elaborate report in 1931 detailing the excavations that took place 𓆏till 1927. In this book, he concluded that the religious belief of the Harappan people—as emerging from archaeological evidence—was distinctly different from the Vedic culture of the Indo-Aryans. Both Marshall and Chatterji suspected Dravidian links, but were not sure.
These developments around the discovery of the Harappan culture came at a time when India’s Hindu nationalists—especially the Hindu Mahasabha and the Annie Besant-led Home Rule League—were🍸 propagatin༒g Vedic Aryan glory and superiority.
Since William Jones’ 1786 proposition that Sanskrit, Pers𓄧ian and European languages had a common ancestor, the broad consensus among linguists was that the Aryans (Indo-Europeans) were speakers of a langu𓆉age that originated in the central Asian steppe region and then migrated to Europe, Iran and India. Following the identification of the Dravidian language group in the 1810s, German Indologist Max Müller declared in 1847 that the common ancestor of Sanskrit and European languages originated in the Caucasian range, while the Dravidian languages are indigenous to India.
The likes of Maharashtra’s Jyotirao Phule, Bhimrao Ambedkar and Tamil Nadu’s Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy Periyar had also been hammering at the Vedic Aryanism of the Hindu nationalists—charging it with being Brahminic and caste-oppressive—when Harappa’s pre-Vedic excellence emboldened the Dravidian ওclaims against Vedic Aryan glory.
Harappa was an urban civilisation, while the Ved๊ic was rural. The Vedic culture had a predominance of religion and male deities; Harappa had very few relics of a religious nature and, those suspected to be a deity, were mainly female figures. The Vedic-Aryan culture was intrinsically linked to horses, but the Harappan findings had no trace of any horses.
This led to the discovery of Harappan sites in western India’s Lothal (Gujarat), Dholavira (Gujarat), Kalibagnan (Rajasthan) and north India’s Alamgirpur (Uttar Pradesh) during the 1950s and the 1960s. Some of the archaeologists leading such projects had Hindu nationalist leanings. For example, Bal Krishen Thapar and Braj Basi Lal were leading figures of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-backed Indian Archaeological Soc👍iety, founded in 1967🐠.
Citing the presenꦇce of Harappan sites significantly away from the Indus Valley region, archaeologist Lal proposed in 1964 that the Indus Valley Civilisation should be renamed as the Indus-Saraswati or Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation. This was under the assumption that the Indian side of the civilisation developed on the banks of the Saraswati.
The Saraswati’s existence has been controversial. All the mighty rivers mentioned in the Vedas exist till date, except the Saraswati. The Saraswati was actually described as the mightiest of them all—flowing from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. But neither has later literature mentioned it, nor has its past existence (paleochannels) been conclusively traced. This is why a section of historians considered the Saraswati in the Vedas to have been used metaphorically. But Lal was convinced that the dry paleochannels of north India’s Ghaggar and Pakistan’s Hakra—a 19th century speculation—represented the Vedic Saraswati.
Later, Lal and several other archaeologists involved with the excavations of such sites—Thapar, S R Rao and R S Bisht—tried to establish other connections between the Harappan and Vedic cultures. All of them have been closely associated with the Hindu nationalist camp. Lal a﷽nd Thapar identified some structures in these sites as fire altars—connecting the practice with Vedic yajnas.
In a 1992 book, published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), titled, History of Civilizations of Central Asia, V. 1: The Dawn of Civilization, Earliest Times to 700 B.C., A. H. Dani and B. K. Thapar wrote that Harappa 🌟is “usually identified with Hariyupiya of the Rigveda”. The use of the word ‘usually’ is curious, as such linking was, indeed, rare.
The greatest thrust, however, has been laid in proving the past existence of the Saraswati. The speculation that the dry channels of Ghaggar and Hakra represent the Saraswati always remained contested, as the Saraswati menti𝓀oned in the Vedas was a perennial, Himalaya-born, snow-fed, mighty river, whereas Ghaggar and Hakra are rain-fed rivers having no glacial links.
In 1985, the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY), the history wing of the RSS, launched a Saraswati Nadi Shodh Abhiyan (research campaign) under the leadership of archaeologist V. S. Wakankar. In 1997, ABISY’s Saraswati🐭 Nadi Shodh Prakalp was founded in Chennai, the heartland of Dravidian politics. In 1999, after the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) gove🍃rnment came to power, the Saraswati Nadi Shodh Sansthan was founded in Haryana, a heartland of Vedic culture.
The same year, the Geological Society of India, which was then allegedly under the influence of Hindu nationalists, published a book titled, Vedic Sarasvati-Evolutionary History of a Lost River of Northwestern India. The essays it contained linked the Harappan civilisation with the Vedic culture through the Saraswati. ꧒An essay by Wakankar—who also served in different RSS organisations in leadership roles—said that “the upper Saraswati region forms the nucleus of human evolution”.
In response, historian Irfan Habib charged the 1999 book—including Wakankar’s essay—with peddling speculation. In a 2001 paper titled, Imagining River Sarasvati—A Defence Of Commonsense, Habib pointed out that Wakankar’s assumption—of the ‘upper Saraswati’ or Haryana to be the nucleus of human civilisation—was based on the finding of a fossil-ape (Ramapithecus) in the Siwaliks, whereas Rama൲pithecus “is not in the line of hominids but of the orangutan!”
The Saraswati mentioned in the Vedas was a perennial, Himalaya-born, snow-fed, mighty river, whereas Ghaggar and Hakra are rain-fed rivers having no glacial links.
Habib, along with Leftist historians and archaeologists like Romila Thapar and Shereen Ratnagar, have questioned the identification/interpretations of Harappan fire hearths from Lothal and Kalibagnan as Vedic fire altars. “Two such doubtful ‘sacrificial’ altars in the whole Indus civilization are certainly too few either for propounding the existence of an ox-slaughter cult or for claiming Vedic affinities on its basis,” Habib wrote in his 2002 book, The Indus Civilisation.
The Hindu nationalist initiatives on the Saraswati had a temporary setback after the Vajpayee government lost power in 2004, but they revived soon after Narendra Modi’s NDA government took charge in 2014. Since then, multiple government-funded organisations, including the ASI and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), have been deeply engaged in Sar▨aswati researc🃏h.
Over the past few years, excavations at several Harappan sites in India—especially Rakhigarhi in Haryana and Sinauli in Uttar Pradesh—have resulted in archaeologists declaring that the findings conclusively proved that the Aryans were indigenous to India and that Harappan culture was a Vedic one. The claims have largely remained dispute🌄d. For example, in Uttar Pradesh’s Sinauli, what the ASI archaeologists claimed to be a chariot—linking the Harappan site wiꦏth the Vedic Aryans—has been dubbed by others as merely a wheeled cart.
While some scientists associated with government-funded institutions have claimed that꧟ they have found evidence of a glacial-fed river along the Ghaggar-Hakra paleochannels—proving Saraswati’s existence—other studies said the glacial deposits were more than 9,000 years old and the river was dry☂ even much before the Harappan civilisation was born.
Meanwhile, a Dravidian challenge to the Vedic claim on Harappa rose💖 from the south. One of the strongest arguments in favour of a Dravidian link was that speakers of a Dravidian language, Brahui, have been living in the vicinity of the Indus sites for many centuries. However, the huge geographical gap between the Dravidian heartland in southern India an✱d the Harappan sites raised questions about any possible link. Besides, no such ancient urban settlements of Harappan antiquity had been excavated in the Dravidian states.
After the Keezhadi (Keeladi) excavations in Tamil Nadu during 2015-16, its lead excavator, archaeologist K. Amarnath Ramakrishna of the ASI, told the media that the findings hint at a civilisation parallel to the𒀰 Harappan. The K🅰eezhadi excavation turned into a political tussle, with the Modi government transferring Ramakrishna, and the Tamil Nadu government approaching the court to allow the state archaeology department to take over the excavations—a battle it finally won.
In September 2021, within months of coming to power, Stalin told the state assembly, “It is the task of the government to scientifically prove that the history of the Indian subcontinent should begin from the Tamil landscape.” Since then, his government has backed the state archaeological department in tracing Harappan links to ancient cultures unearthed in Tamil Nadu. The late🧸st TNSDA book, which Stalin released in January 2025, was a product of that in🎃itiative.
However, within a fortnight of Stalin’s $1 million prize a🔯nnouncement, the ASI team excavating the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi claimed to have unearthed more proof of the Saraswati. ASI archaeologist Sanjay Manjul—also the main figure behind the Sinauli chariot claim—told the media that a reservoir that they unearthed that month was linked to the drying of Drishadvati, a tributary of the Vedic Saraswati.
(It appeared as 'The Harappan Hurdle' in Print)
