Keezhadi Museum

 Around 2015, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) made an exciting new archaeological discovery south-east of Madurai in the Keezhadi village. What looked like urban settlements with houses built of standardized bricks and tiled roofs were found at a depth of about 2.5m. More significantly, they were dated between the 6th and 3rd century BCE! Pottery, beads, iron tools and weapons, teracotta tools and toys have been found. To put this in context, the only other urban settlement in India that is older than this is the Indus Valley (or Harappan) Civilization which dates back to the 3rd millennium BCE. 

Some of the pottery found in the site had inscriptions that seem to be Tamil Brahmi providing tantalizing circumstantial evidence that links this settlement with the Sangam poetry corpus. That is, if you are willing to take a leap of faith. Until now, the Tamil Sangam poetry itself has been dated to a much later period: 1st and 2nd century CE. In my humble opinion, the fact that there is Tamil Brahmi writing suggests the Keezhadi people were potentially Tamil speakers, but does not by itself mean their language was evolved enough to produce the poetry of the richness and sophistication of Sangam Tamil. On the other hand, I have always felt the current dating of Sangam poetry also highly suspect.  Compressing that vast corpus to 200 years seems like a rather tight fit. In any case, I am hoping findings like Keezhadi make historians revisit the dating of Sangam poetry.

There is also some controversy around the age of the pottery with inscriptions (as to which end of the 6th century BCE - 2nd century BCE time frame they belong to). The controversy is that, if they turn out to be older than the 3rd century BCE, then that pre-dates Ashokan Brahmi, the script that was used in Ashokan edicts found throughout India. However Tamil Brahmi has until now been considered an evolution of (Ashokan or Mauryan) Brahmi and not the other way around.

We cannot access the archeological sites themselves, where excavations are still going on. However an excellent museum has been put together that houses many of the artifacts and some model recreations from the Keezhadi site. We visited this museum recently and this post is inspired by that visit. 

As you enter the museum there is a small auditorium where they show a 15 minute video providing the historical context and background which is best seen before seeing the museum itself. 

Let me just give a brief background on stages of growth of a particular human culture or civilization before we see where Keezhadi fits in; human populations go though various stages in their development as a culture starting from hunter gatherers and three peiods of Stone Age, namely Paleolithic (Old), Mesolithic (Middle) and Neolithic (New) Stone Ages. In the Paleolithic period, large stone tools with  sharpened edges are usually found. In latter ages, smaller, more specialized tools and more polished stone tools are used. Some of these human cultures discover iron and/or copper and gold go through the Iron Age developing metallic tools, coins and weapons. 

As they go through these stages, humans move from a nomadic hunter gatherer life style to settled societies, with farming and agrictulture, producing food that can be saved across seasons. They start producing pots for storage. As the society becomes more sophisticated, it produces goods for leisure such as jewels and ornaments using beads and metals and toys and games. Coins from other remote civilizations can be found suggesting trade links to those societies. If they develop writing, they start making inscriptions or other signages on rocks, caves and pots. 

The Keezhadi settlement is clearly an Iron Age settlement which shows all the stages of development listed above:

• Walls made of standard sized bricks, tiles, ringed wells
• Terracotta pipes and brick-made channels for water
• Black and red pottery including Black Polished ware 
• Seals, Roman coins and arretine pottery shards suggest trades to remote civilizations
• Tamil Brahmi script in pot shards
• Many iron tools such as ladles, sickles and knives
• Beads of different kinds and small gold ornaments
• Toys like cube and cuboid dice made of ivory and terracotta

The museum includes references to Sangam Literature (especially Natrinai, Purananuru and Agananuru) that indirectly refer to some of the artifacts. The juxtaposition of Sangam poetry references next to artifacts might suggest a direct link but I found these connections quite tenuous.  For instance, next to an antimony rod that was evidently used for decorating a woman's eyelash, there is a citation of a line from a Natrinai poem that talks about a women's hazel eys with decorated eyelashes. 

On less controversial matters, I found the museum very well organized. Local design elements such as Athankudi tiles and wood work that is reminiscent of Chettinadu have been used tastefully in the multiple buildings that make up the museum. The sheer number and variety of artifacts on display for a settlement that was discovered only 10 years ago is quite remarkable. We went on a week day and the crowds were sparse; I hope the museum gets added to everyone's must-see list for Madurai. 

R. Balaji

On the New Test Cricket - part 1

 It is difficult to believe I haven't written more on cricket - the avid fan that I am, especially of the Test format. This is likely to be the first of a series of posts, so bear with me while I ramble and rant a bit on T-20 and then the pleasures of Test cricket. 

Test cricket remains the purest and most balanced battle of bat vs. ball. I realize I might antagonize T-20 fans, but I have always believed T-20 tilts the balance heavily in favor of bat over ball. When there is no fear of getting all out in a 20 over span, batsmen hit with impunity and scamper home in 20 overs with 5-6 wickets lost. So yes, lots of 4's and 6's to go wild over; but there is rampant run inflation (i.e. the value of a run, a 4 or a 6 has come down).  I wonder what will happen if they tweak T-20 to say 5 wickets down and you are all out, with 5 players who only bat and 5 who only bowl. 

The 50 overs ODI is a reasonable middle ground where the threat of getting all out remains. So I believe predictions of the demise of the ODI format are premature, but I could very well be proven wrong on this one, given the huge success of IPL (I recently learnt it is one of the top 10 leagues in the world across all sports -  measured in terms of the money in it). It remains to be seen whether 3 formats can survive, given the demands it puts on players and the cricketing nations to squeeze in local T-20 leagues, along with international competition.

So anyways, as a Test cricket fan, I never miss out on Indian test cricket and also watch the Ashes with great interest . There is something magical about the sheer visual image - players sporting pure whites on the lush green fields of England. The ball swings like crazy and 250 is a par score for a Test inning. Tennis fans can perhaps relate to this visual delight when they tune into the first week of Wimbledon every year; players in pure whites on pristine verdant turf.

When HD coverage started happening, for the first time, you could see the ball's movement in the air even before it pitched - yes there is movement before it hits the pitch and then movement after it pitches. And in slow motion, if the bowler has perfect seam position you can see which side of the ball is shiny. Which in turn determines the swing direction - towards the rough side in traditional swing and the other way when the ball gets older and starts 'reversing'. We could have an entire post on the art and physics of swing bowling.

If you grew up watching test cricket in the 80s and 90s, India always had great batsmen (Gavaskar, Vishwanath, Vengsarkar and Azharuddin), but we were never a fast bowling powerhouse, with Kapil Dev standing out as the only great seam bowler (and he only bowled medium pace) from that era. Overall we were a middling team. We would lose most test series against the dominant teams of that time, viz. West Indies, Australia and England. 

In the 2000s, the batting stayed strong, if not stronger with a formidable batting unit that consisted of Sehwag, Tendulkar, Dravid and VVS Laxman; not to mention Ganguly and a strong batting wicketkeeper in MS Dhoni. We continued to be strong in spin bowling with great spinning duos such as Kumble/Harbhajan Singh and more recently Ashwin/Jadeja. All of this resulted in some really solid performances at home where we could pulverize the opposition in spin-friendly pitches, but our record abroad was still mediocre, especially against Australia, England and Sout Africa. Zaheer Khan was a great swing bowler for a while, but fast bowling remained an area of weakness. 

Into the 2010s, we finally started producing genuine fast bowlers who could move the ball both ways.  This brings us to who we have now - Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Shami and to a lesser extent Mohammed Siraj. These guys bowl regularly in the high 130s kph, and Bumrah can bowl in the low 140s kph with great accuracy. Bumrah is currently ranked the no. 1 bowler in ICC Test Rankings, a first for an Indian pacer. More on Bumrah later.

The batting dominance continued after the aforementioned unit retired. Kohli came in and has become arguably the greatest multi-format player of all time. As a Test batsman, his form has declined a bit in recent years, but still ranks easily among the top 10 around the world. Pujara took over "Wall" duties from Dravid and others like KL Rahul and Rahane have chimed in. May be there aren't as many now that will end up in the all-time-great list (Kohli being the only one). But at any given point in time, we have enough in-form batsmen to field two world-class batting sides. Youngsters like Shubman Gill and Yashaswi Jaiswal show great promise.

Thanks to a stronger and more balanced bowling unit (as in both pace and spin), India has beome a cricketing powerhouse in the last 15 years or so. Nowadays we almost always win series at home against anyone and have started winning abroad as well, with back to back series wins in Australia being the highlight. South Africa is the only place where we are yet to win a series. India is often ranked no. 1 or 2 in the World Test rankings. In the new World Test Championship format (which is a 2 year cycle), India is the only team that reached the finals in both instances of so far. True, we lost both the finals to NZ and Australia respectively, but reaching both finals is a testament to the team's consistency over this period.

I wrote all of the above without looking at any numbers, I then looked it up and thankfully the numbers as produced by Google Gemini confirmed my impressions*; India has steadily gotten better as a Test cricket team over the last 4 decades. The following table is reproduced verbatim from Gemini's answer to my question "India's Win loss draw record in Test cricket matches in the last 50 years by decade". 

Decade	Played	Won	Lost	Drawn	Win%	Note
2020s (2020-2023)	54	30	13	11	55.56	Current period
2010s (2010-2019)	82	41	24	17	50.00	Kohli Era
2000s (2000-2009)	81	34	28	19	42.53	Tendulkar, Sehwag & Dravid era
1990s (1990-1999)	80	27	34	19	33.75	Azharuddin & Tendulkar era
1980s (1980-1989)	81	20	31	30	24.69	Gavaskar & Kapil Dev era

So overall, it is an exciting time to be a cricket fan in India. And then Test cricket itself is evolving. We have a new breed of young cricketers (aforementioned Jaiswal, Shubman Gill and the swashbuckling Rishabh Pant) who defy conventional wisdom and bat with supreme confidence and aggression. There is this thing called Bazball that England has been playing in the last few years which has brought a new fearless (or reckless?) and aggressive approach to Test batting. Their record over this period is not bad at all (14-6). But is it because of Bazball? Would they perhaps have an even better record if they did not play Bazball? 

More on Bazball and other recent trends in Test cricket in the next post.

Balaji 

* I checked ChatGPT as well and it returned different numbers which puts both the ChatGPT and Gemini numbers in question; however both sets of numbers confirm the same trend - that India's win percentage in Tests has been improving every decade since the 90s, till midway through the 2020s.