Dr. R. Balakrishnan IAS (R)
Image: Partha Narasimhan
My book Journey of a Civilization starts with the words of Juan Goytisolo. The novelist and poet clarify that these notions are born from a belief that Man, like the vegetable, is a product of the land of some timeless coordinates whose characteristics determine his traits and nature. We want to believe that our ‘deep-rooted’ traditions germinated, grew and flourished in singular geography and within specific boundaries since the dawn of time. Myths and legends are founded on these professed ‘millennia-proven’ ethnolinguistic and cultural polygons of identities, entrenched forever in some corner of this planet. But the reality is that Man is footloose and perennially peripatetic. As Juan Goytisolo says, “Man is not a tree, he has no roots; he has feet, he walks.” Poet Eliza Griswold says, “Everyone here is an immigrant. Everyone came from somewhere else.” But, ironically, our assumption about ourselves is dramatically different.
The story of migration, in a way, is the story of humankind. People who chose to stay back in the safety of their caverns remain fixed in the potholes; those who stepped out shaped civilizations. The genetic and paleontological record indicates that modern human migration is at least 60,000 years old. The stories of ancient journeys are reminders of humans’ resourcefulness, technique and incredible agility to adapt to new landscapes and circumstances. The Journey Indus to Vaigai, which I theorize in my book, is a conscious call. As Kelley Hays-Gilpin states, metaphors are not merely verbal expressions; metaphors have a visual character and are amenable to archaeological analysis. Besides, particular terms and contexts of metaphors help us trace migration across time and space.
Individuals travel, groups travel, and even a civilization can also travel. When a population with diverse ethnic identities but with a composite linguistic and cultural common ground ‘leaves port’ and embarks on a long-drawn arduous journey of troubles and turbulences and finally and firmly anchors itself in another conducive geography and holds on to its fundamental ideologies, largely intact — such a journey has to be called a journey of civilization. Along with the people, gods and goddesses, beliefs, faith systems, and names of geographical features and places migrate too.
To my knowledge, no other linguistic community in India keeps talking about its language, civilizational pride, and ancient roots the way Tamil society does. We can understand the phenomenon through Carl Becker, who talks about the kind of history ‘common people carry around in their heads.’
The collective past we carry and the oral traditions embed into a metaphor. Mahabharata knew Dravidians, Ashokan inscriptions refer to Tamil kings, and Kharavela’s Hathigumpha inscription talks about the ‘Tramira alliance’ of Tamil kings. Barring this, there is no evidence of in-person confrontation between the north Indian kings and Tamil kings on southern soil. There is a reference to ‘new Moriyar’, ‘Nandar’ and ‘Kosar’ in some past events, and Konkan seems to be the geographical context for some of the events recalled in Sangam Tamil texts. Some details in Old Tamil texts provide graphic descriptions of flora, fauna, and landscapes unique to north and northwestern geographies, which is opposite to the northern literature’s lack of clarity about southern geography, its flora and fauna. The key to these issues concerning our collective past remains embedded in the metaphor of migration.
The grandeur of the Tamil Civilization is evident in Old Tamil texts. Its long-distance maritime trade, attested in literature and proven by archaeology, and the celebration of urban living coupled with its relative disconnect from what is known as a Vedic core makes it unique. The Old Tamil texts contain a corpus of carried-forward memories preserved through oral bardic traditions for several generations. Besides, there are certain geographies and specific landscapes and locations alluded to in Old Tamil texts but which are situated well beyond, towards the northwest of the known Tamil political boundaries of the Sangam Age. These subtle geographical characteristics point to a long history of migration that could have preceded the Sangam Age. There are many prevailing theories about the origins of the Tamils. The ideas of Lemuria and Mediterranean origins are the most popular.
The collective memories of massive natural disasters and migration of ancient Tamil people, repeated shifting of Pandiya capitals, and the relocating of Royal Tamil Academies promoted by Pandiya kings created a shared narrative in Tamil society. ‘Calamities’ and consequent ‘migrations’ formed the keywords to narrate a past. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization and the presence of a Dravidian language in the northwestern geographies added a fillip. However, the popular perception about the origins of Tamils was built around the ‘lost lands’ or Kumarikkōṭu (Mount Kumari), which was conveniently enlarged to be a ‘continent’ (Kumari Kandam) and got linked to the theories of ‘Lemuria Continent’ (Philip Sclater and Ernst Haeckel) and continental drift. The supposed event of the ‘continental drift’ referred to as the ‘Taylor- Wegener hypothesis’ is not relevant in the light of new findings. The notion of being the ‘most ancient clan’ received further impetus with the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization.
The notions of collective memory, history, and oral history overlap considerably. As Maurice Halbwachs observes, despite its dynamic character, collective memory is not entirely fluid knowledge nor detached from historical memory. Yael Zerubavel, in his book Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition observes that the power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance that puts the scope and limitations of public memory in perspective. Based on case studies, Zerubavel concludes that a society can have more than one vision of the past and that, as much as history can besiege memory, memory can also besiege history.
As a metaphor for time, migration is simultaneously ‘dealing with the past and ‘dealing with the future, says Brian Lambkin. Our ancestors had greater mobility than what we assume about them today. We tend to superimpose the limitations of our weak limbs onto the mobility of our ancestors who traversed distant geographies on foot, with neither guide nor compass, driven simply by their innate instinct and their longing for surroundings suitable for survival. There could be reasons other than fundamental survival issues that prompt collective migrations. Tamil traditions paint a pen picture of the flood-ravaged Pandiya king moving to a new location (identified with the modern city of Madurai); staying with many Tamil poets, and subsequently establishing the new capital and also the new Tamil Sangam. We can infer that though the migration was distressed, the king cared enough to go with poets and their poetry to the new location. This picture is indicative of not only the nature of the calamity but also the ability of the people to absorb and mitigate dislocations.
As migrants move out, with them travels a world of their own words, oral stories handed down to them by their forefathers that metamorphose along the thread of their exchange and circulation. And with them, their gods and goddesses travel. In that sense, God is also a migrant. The imagery of God being a migrant is evident in The Bible. In Exodus 13:20:22, ‘God’ is portrayed as ‘God of the journey’ who travels with people ‘as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.’ How else could standard nomenclatures exist for some Indo-Iranian and Vedic gods? In what other way could Kannagi, who walked west to Chera country after burning down Madurai, the Pandiya capital as stated in Cilappatikāram, ‘land’ in Sri Lanka and visit the eastern and northern parts of the island as claimed by local traditions?
Juan Goytisolo clarifies: “men and women can root themselves in whatever land they deem appropriate, but they can also abandon it in search of a better life, for freedom, to make money or out of necessity.” This agility and dexterity have brought human civilization this far.
Without trustworthy historical sources in studying a particular culture, one has to rely on archaeology and place-name studies to infer the otherwise undocumented past. Toponymy has now become widely accepted for understanding a specific place’s historical and cultural aspects for studying migration patterns.
In my study about migration, I observed a pattern and recorded it as KVT Complex. My probe for place names associated with the genesis of Sun Worship in India and my search for the river name Chandrabhaga pointed me to the vicinity of the Indus region. It ultimately led me to frame the KVT Complex. In 2010 I presented the evidence of the ‘Korkai-Vanji-Tondi Complex’ (KVT Complex) as a place-name marker for the Dravidian Hypothesis.
Korkai, Vanji, and Tondi were among the most important towns of ancient Tamil land mentioned several times in Sangam Texts. The KVT Complex of the northwestern geographies contains perfect toponymic parallels to Korkai, Vanji, and Tondi of the Sangam period, some of which are used even now in modern Tamilnadu. It includes many other geographical names of significance and anthroponyms attested in ancient Sangam Tamil texts. Suppose the presence of Meluhha in the Sumerian texts can be identified as the most important single piece of actual linguistic evidence relating to the Indus Civilization, as claimed by Asko Parpola. If the Parsi names, European place names and African place names can travel across the continents and stand witness to their migration histories, in a similar manner, the survival of most of the ancient Tamil ‘namescape’ in the hills and the plains of the northwest have to be acknowledged as the ‘birth-markers’ of both the Indus Civilization and the Sangam traditions.
What makes the ‘KVT Complex’ more interesting is the lack of knowledge of these place names and personal names in Sanskrit texts. While the KVT Complex is the ‘nerve centre’ of the ancient Tamil prehistory and history, these names were not classical Greek, Latin or Sanskrit, which are Indo-European/ Indo-Aryan languages. I do not doubt that the evidence of the KVT Complex in the northwest provides new coordinates for Tamil prehistory. But in my study, place names are not positioned as stand-alone evidence in isolation but with other collaterals and with the help of other multidisciplinary tools. The Dravidian paradigm of the ‘High-West: Low-East’ dichotomy of the Indus town planning is one among them.
(Dr. R. Balakrishnan, an Independent researcher in the field of Indology, has been consistently working for the last 30 years on the issues connected to the Dravidian origin, the prehistory of Tamils and the Indus Valley Civilization. He follows a multi-disciplinary approach to reconstructing the past, focusing on place name clusters and published his study in a book, Journey of a Civilization: Indus to Vaigai (2019). Balakrishnan is also a creative writer in Tamil. He is a retired member of the Indian Administrative Service and is currently the chief advisor to the Chief Minister’s Office in the Odisha government. Earlier, he twice held the position of Deputy Election Commissioner, Election Commission of India.)
