Madurai: The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court on Thursday passed an interim order directing the Archaeology Survey of India (ASI), New Delhi not to shift to Bengaluru the 5,300 artefacts unearthed at Keezhadi during the excavation recently,.
The ASI which has completed its yearlong excavation recently decided to close the excavation site and shift the antiquities to its head office at Bengaluru (the Keezhadi heritage place comes under Bengaluru circle) because the land here belongs to a private person.
Countering this, Kanimozhi Mathi, a history graduate from Chennai, filed an emergency petition before a division bench comprising Justices S Nagamuthu and G Muralidharan seeking that the respondents not close the site.
Instead, he requested the court to direct them to set up a site museum to preserve the artefacts and monuments in the same place as local people have also expressed their willingness to give their land to set up the Museum.
The excavation conducted by the ASI team led by K Amarnath Ramakrishna, the superintending archaeologist at Keezhadi, has thrown light on ancient Tamil civilisation that thrived on the banks of the River Vaigai nearly 2,500 years ago.
Mr Ramakrishna, who has been conducting the survey since 2013 to identify Sangam Age towns along the course of river Vaigai, found that antiquities discovered at Keezhadi have disproved the myths that Tamils were merely ethnic groups. Instead, it demonstrated to the world that Keezhadi is the first river bed civilisation in Tamil Nadu, which probably predates even the Indus Valley civilisation, said the petitioner.
He also added that Keezhadi empirically and categorically proved that Sangam literature was not mere poetic imagination. And it also provided enough clues to understand Tamil Brahmi script in the Tamil historical context, said Mathi.
Arguing for setting up a site museum, the petitioner pointed out that the website of ASI clearly establishes that “it is the policy of the Government of India to keep the small and movable antiquities, recovered from the ancient sites in close association to remain to where they belong, so that they may be studied amid their natural surroundings and not lose focus on them after being transported,’.
A museum branch was created in 1946 by ASI and at present there are 44 site museums under its control, said Mathi. Shifting of these antiquities would lead to their losing their relevance. Stating that setting up the site museum would be useful for future research, he told the court that the government land is also available near the site.
After hearing the argument, the bench passed an interim stay on shifting of the artefacts to Bengaluru and directed the respondents to file their reply on October 18.
