Thread by @shrikanth_krish

I know Iravatham is not that popular among Hindu right wing given his view that IVC language was most likely Dravidian

But I enjoyed reading his 1999 interview on IVC and Harappa a lot. Here's the link. A very long interview but well worth it

harappa.com/script/mahadev…

https://twitter.com/veejaysai/status/1066892602614534145

While Iravatham's conclusions have been politicized, with him getting felicitations from DMK govt if I am not wrong, in the interview he came across as a genuine scholar who is not very political

Some nuggets from the interview

"The modern speakers of Dravidian languages are the result of millennia long intermixture of races. There are no Aryans in India, nor are there any Dravidians Those who talk about Dravidians in the political sense, I do not agree with them at all"

"There are no Dravidian people or Aryan people - just like both Pakistanis and Indians are racially very similar. We are both the product of a very long period of intermarriage, there have been migrations. You cannot now racially segregate any element of the Indian population."

"Thus there is no sense in saying that the people in Tamil Nadu are the inheritors of the Indus Valley culture. You could very well say that people living in Harappa or Mohenjo-daro today are even more likely to be the inheritors of that civilization"

Very well said in my view.

But then he says something intriguing -

"In fact, I plow a somewhat lonely furrow in this. I often say that if the key to the Indus script linguistically is Dravidian, then culturally the key to the Indus script is Vedic"

(Contd.)

"What I mean is that the cultural traits of the Indus Valley civilization are likely to have been absorbed by the successor Indo-Aryan civilization in Punjab and Sindh, and that the civilization in the far south would have changed out of recognition"

"In any case, the present South Indian civilization is already the product of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian cultures, and the language itself is completely mixed up with both elements. Tamil alone retains most of the earlier Dravidian linguistic structure"

"Malayalam, Telugu,Kannada have become Indo-Aryanized much more, and culturally, the Hindu religion is a complete combination of all these elements"

"Therefore while it is legitimate to look for survivals, those survivals are as likely to be found in the RgVeda as in Purananuru, a Tamil work, as likely to be found in Punjab and Sindh as in India and Sri Lanka"

Then he has some remarks on the Aryan question

"the incoming Aryans were relatively a small minority and they were able to dominate only culturally and ultimately, in the assimilated Indo-Aryan or north Indian people, the indigenous racial element must have slowly surfaced"

"That is why we have no such thing as early Aryan pottery, because the pottery continued to be made by the local people. As someone has said jokingly, archaeology knows of no Aryans, only linguistics knows of Aryans. This is true"

"The answer to this is that the incoming Aryans were small in number. In this respect there was no cultural discontinuity. The real discontinuity was in language, principally, and in religion and ritual in the earliest levels"

"but in later levels, modern Hinduism as we know it is a composite of both pre-Aryan ...religions and the incoming Aryan religion. Perhaps when the Indus script is deciphered, I would not be surprised to find that the greater part of modern Hinduism has a Harappan lineage"