Journey of A Civilization: Indus to Vaigai

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

R. Balakrishnan is a postgraduate in Tamil Literature. He is the first student of Tamil literature to clear the Civil Services exam. He joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1984. His initial postings in the Tribal areas of Odisha triggered his interest in Indology, Anthropology and Place-name Studies. It was Iravatham Mahadevan who led Balakrishnan into the area of Indus Studies. Balakrishnan has published several research papers on Place-name Studies, Odisha's history, and it's plural culture.
Using Geographical Information System tools he formulated the 'Korkai-Vanji-Tondi Complex', a place name complex in the Indus geography which formally announced in 2010. His paper on High-West:Low-East Dichotomy of Indus Cities and it's linguistic paradigm gained wide attention. His Tamil book on the Dravidian foundations of Indus Civilization received accolades from Iravatham Mahadevan as the best book written in Tamil on the subject.
Balakrishnan is an author, poet and has published several books in Tamil. After thirty-four years of service with the Government of Odisha and the Government of India, he retired from the Civil Services in 2018. He is currently the Honorary Consultant of the Indus Research Centre of the Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai.

Time is an inscrutable wonder which can consign entire phases of the human past to oblivion. Lack of material evidence, absence of written sources, disappearance of oral histories and memories may conspire to push stretches of the human past to 'dark' ages, or create 'gaps' or 'breaks'. Legends and myths, that comply with or resist power structures, evolve out of combinations of myriad life streams and innumerable tales of generations. Such narratives may further stifle and diffuse evidence, relegating unfathomable depth to oblivion. The illuminations of research would remain disjointed, and even fail to reckon the simple fact that life as it persisted in the seven continents of this planet has been a continuum.
Journey of a Civilization: Indus to Vaigai, sketching the journey of the Indus Valley Civilization to the Tamilakam culture, is a path-breaking attempt to bridge one of the most pronounced historiographical 'gaps' in the annals of South Asia. Espousing different strands of sources and adducing fresh evidence, the author, R. Balakrishnan, juxtaposes Indus Valley Civilization and Tamiļakam culture to reveal their organic relationship. Given the readings and misreading on the subject, the author has employed an integrated methodology to substantiate the connections to demonstrate the hypothesis that the Indus Civilization could have been Dravidian.
Several sources ranging from local legends to literary, archaeological and epigraphical evidence have been surveyed. It is particularly interesting and fascinating that the author has positioned the ancient Sangam Tamil corpus as a proto-document that could be relevant and useful for understanding Tamil prehistory which had its probable connections to Indus Civilization.
The book traces several elements in the Indus Valley Civilization, classical Tamil literature and the antecedent geographies. Using technological tools such as Geographic Information System (GIS), he has analyzed what he calls the 'Journey of a Civilization' and argued that place-names could be dependable markers to track ancient migrations. This not only establishes connections to the past but also charts the direction in which the authors of the Indus Valley Civilization could have journeyed.
His earlier book in Tamil-Dravidian foundations of the Indus Valley Civilization has already received wide attention. Iravatham Mahadevan who penned the foreword to the volume hailed it as the best book written so far on the subject in Tamil. The present volume builds on Mahadevan's research findings, and materializes his wish to have the study published in English. It is indeed unfortunate that Mahadevan is not with us today. He would have been delighted to shower his blessings in abundance.
Balakrishnan is a well-known researcher in onomastics. Extending this category of research, he has scientifically established the fact that Dravidian place-names have found their way to remain alive in the Indus region. In addition to this, he has traced how these names have traveled to present times in the Tamiļakam geographies.