Statue of John Marshall, who discovered IVC, unveiled in Chennai

Chennai: To commemorate the centenary year of the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of the three early civilisations of South Asia, a life-size statue of English archaeologist John Marshall, who announced the findings to the world, was unveiled at the iconic Egmore Museum here.

Chief Minister M K Stalin threw open the statue of John Marshall, whose discovery reported in Illustrated London, a weekly newspaper on September 20, 1924, reshaped the history of the Indian subcontinent, just two months after he laid the foundation stone for the same.

The life-size statue of John Marshall is part of the efforts by the Tamil Nadu government to celebrate the discovery of the IVC a century ago. The DMK dispensation has been attaching top priority to archaeology by allotting record funds to the department ever since Stalin declared in the Assembly in 2021 that India’s history should be rewritten from the Tamil landscape.

“Sir John Marshall, who discovered and announced the Indus Valley Civilisation to the world, opened a new chapter in Indian archaeology. His discovery dismantled the false notion that Sanskrit is the foundation of everything and led to the Dravidian hypothesis, reshaping our understanding of the ancient Indian subcontinent forever,” Stalin said after the ceremony.

He also emphasises that Tamil Nadu will continue to strengthen and advance the path Marshall paved for “uncovering the true history of our land.”

The statue has been installed at a cost of Rs 50 lakh and is also a continuation of the centenary celebrations of IVC by the Tamil Nadu government, which organised an international seminar in January. Stalin had in January also announced a prize of $1 million to those who decipher the Indus script.

A morphological study by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology that found 60 percent of the signs and 90 percent of the graffiti marks unearthed from excavation sites in Tamil Nadu have parallels with those found in the IVC.

Stalin has maintained that the discovery by John Marshall was a turning point in India’s history which completely changed people’s understanding of the past as the English archaeologist argued that the language spoken by the inhabitants of IVC could be Dravidian.

“There were bulls in the Indus Valley. Bulls are Dravidian symbols. Bulls are spread from Indus Valley to Alanganallur (a village near Madurai famous for Jallikattu). Ancient Tamil literature has rich references to bull-taming sport and one of the IVC seals has impressions of a man trying to tame a bull,” Stalin had said, positing a link between the two civilizations.

Many archaeologists and experts have also suggested a Dravidian link to the IVC with ASI chief K N Dikshit writing in 1939 that he believed that a “thorough investigation” in Tirunelveli district and the neighbouring regions will one day lead to the discovery of some site which “would be contemporary with or even little later than the Indus civilisation.”