Iravatham Mahadevan

"The sequence ensures that the text on the neolithic tool found in Tamil Nadu is not only in the Indus script but also in the Harappan language. I may add this is the archeological discovery of the century in Tamil Nadu."

"Iravatham Mahadevan, specializing in the Indus script and early Tamil, is an example of a scholar who became co-opted to serve as an academic sepoy for Western manipulations.... In 1970, while he was a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow, Mahadevan came out with a hypothesis that the Harappan script is ‘a language which resembles South Dravidian (including Telugu) in general and Old Tamil in particular’. This was music to the ears of those fanning the flames of Dravidian separatism. It supplied social and political theories of India’s divided identities by claiming ‘amazingly close parallelisms between the hierarchical structure of proto-Indian and the old Tamil polities’. He theorized that the Mahabharata was a story of class-war between a priestly oligarchy and common people in Harappan civilization – a gift to Indian Marxists looking for class-conflict wherever possible."