"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 âa language which resembles South Dravidian (including Telugu) in general and Old Tamil in particularâ. This was music to the ears of those fanning the flames of Dravidian separatism. It supplied social and political theories of Indiaâs divided identities by claiming âamazingly close parallelisms between the hierarchical structure of proto-Indian and the old Tamil politiesâ. He theorized that the Mahabharata was a story of class-war between a priestly oligarchy and common people in Harappan civilization â a gift to Indian Marxists looking for class-conflict wherever possible."
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Malhotra, R., NÄ«lakantan, A. (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Iravatham_Mahadevan
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Iravatham Mahadevan
Iravatham Mahadevan (2 October 1930 â 26 November 2018) was an Indian epigraphist and civil servant, known for his decipherment of Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and for his expertise on the epigraphy of the Indus Valley civilisation.
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