Sowmiya Ashok’s The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past opens with a striking statistic: within twenty days between September and October 2019, over one lakh people visited a muddy field in Tamil Nadu’s Sivaganga district. They came to peer into excavation trenches, photograph terracotta sherds, and take selfies with what lay beneath a coconut grove. It was, by any measure, an unusual kind of pilgrimage. But Keeladi is an unusual kind of place, one where archaeology and identity politics have become impossible to separate.
The Dig is, at its surface, a book about archaeology. But Ashok, a senior journalist who has covered Tamil Nadu for years, quickly establishes that the ground at Keeladi is contested territory—a site where the battle over who gets to define India’s past is being fought in real time, one potsherd at a time. The story begins with K Amarnath Ramakrishna, an Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) archaeologist who, in November 2013, set out to survey the Vaigai River basin. His team identified 293 potential habitation sites along the river, narrowed them down to a hundred, and shortlisted three. Keeladi stood out.
As Amarnath himself put it: “Nooru-la onnu than Keeladi”—Keeladi was one in a hundred. Excavations that began in March 2015 unearthed brick walls, ring wells, terracotta drainage systems, nearly six thousand artefacts, and potsherds bearing Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions. The evidence points to a literate, urban settlement on the Vaigai dating to around the second century BCE, possibly earlier.
The finds challenged a long-held assumption that large-scale urban life in India first emerged in the north, in the Gangetic basin, while Keeladi suggested that the south may have developed its own urban culture independently, and roughly contemporaneously. For Tamil scholars and political leaders, this was not just archaeology. It was vindication. As the book documents, Keeladi swiftly ceased to be an archaeological site and became, as Ashok writes, an emotion—a marker of Tamil identity and pride so potent that a Tamil archaeologist once remarked, “Whatever we do, Keeladi will be seen as Tamil Thai—the mothership of the Tamil language.”
In January 2017, at the start of the third season of excavations, Amarnath was abruptly transferred to Guwahati. He wrote back expressing his ‘rude shock,’ arguing that the move had “completely jeopardised his academic ambitions” to complete the excavations. The transfer went viral. In Tamil Nadu’s charged political climate, where suspicion of the BJP-led Centre’s attitude towards Dravidian culture ran deep, it was immediately read as sabotage. Within months, Cabinet ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and Mahesh Sharma flew to Keeladi for a press conference, accompanied by the ASI’s director-general, as protestors in white veshtis raised black flags outside.
What distinguishes The Dig from a straightforward political narrative is Ashok’s refusal to flatten complexity. The transfer, she reveals, was not purely sinister. Amarnath had himself been requesting a move closer to home for personal reasons since 2014, and the reassignment was part of a broader ASI policy affecting 26 officers. But the institutional opacity of the ASI, the inconsistent application of rules, and the broader context of Hindutva-influenced historical revisionism meant that bureaucratic routine was indistinguishable from political design. Ashok does not resolve this ambiguity but sits with it as a more honest and ultimately more instructive choice.
The book’s range is one of its most impressive qualities. Ashok moves from Keeladi to Mohenjo-daro, from the undeciphered Indus script to the ancient port of Muziris in Kerala, from the Sangam poems that functioned like “an olden-day Google Map for archaeologists” to the contested Iron Age site at Adichanallur. Each chapter expands the frame, showing how Keeladi is not an isolated discovery but one node in a web of civilisational questions that India has never fully answered.
The genetic evidence around Aryan migration, the politics of carbon dating, the underfunded ASI, the lawyers filing PILs over excavation timelines—all of it flows through the book with the assurance of a writer who has done the reporting and read the scholarship. That breadth is also, occasionally, the limitation of a book like this. Some chapters feel compressed relative to the richness of the material, and readers looking for greater depth on any single site or debate may wish Ashok had slowed down.
Ashok’s prose is controlled and unshowy, a virtue given the density of material she is managing. She has a gift for the telling detail: a potsherd that a landowner almost threw away, thinking it was plastic; the ASI director-general whispering to his colleague at a press conference to ask which district they were standing in; carbon samples from Tamil Nadu being shipped fifteen thousand kilometres to Miami to have the age of Tamil antiquity determined in an American laboratory. These moments carry the book’s argument more effectively than any policy analysis.
The Dig is, finally, a book about institutional health—about what happens to knowledge when the bodies entrusted to produce it are under-resourced, politically exposed, and structurally incapable of resisting capture. In a country where the past is increasingly legislated rather than excavated, The Dig makes a quiet but persistent case for the dignity of evidence.