Journey of a Civilization: Indus to Vaigai

Journey of a Civilization: Indus to Vaigai seeks to establish common grounds and connecting threads that link the riddles of Indology, namely the authorship and language of the Indus Valley Civilization and the origins of Dravidian language speaking people in general and Old Tamil traditions in particular. Balakrishnan considers these issues to be not only interconnected but two sides of the same coin. This book aims to place new evidence about the Dravidian affiliation with the language of the Indus people and positions the ancient Sangam Tamil corpus as a proto-document that is relevant for understanding Tamil pre-history which had probable connections to the Indus Civilization. The spatial and temporal distances between the Indus Valley Civilization and ancient Tamilakam cannot be are stricting factor to tracing remnants of the Dravidian in the northwestern geographies and its legacy markers in the Sangam texts. Using technological tools such as Geographic Information System (GIS), the author has analyzed what he calls the journey of a Civilization and argues that place-names are reliable markers to track ancient migrations. The book celebrates the plural foundations of Indian culture and prefers a narrative of the Rain Forest instead of the popular melting pot metaphor. As P. J. Cherian observes, Balakrishnan has provided a road map for future research with far-reaching consequences.