Source: The Hindu
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, INDIA, February 12, 2002: The 29th all-India conference of Dravidian Linguistics which drew to a close here today has urged India’s government to scrap any move to include in the country’s standard school curriculum the theory that the Indus Valley civilization was of the Aryans and not of the Dravidians. In a resolution adopted unanimously at the valedictory function of the conference, it was pointed out that such moves went in letter and spirit against the accepted and well-established objective views of impartial historians and archaeologists. History, like any other scientific discipline, should be studied on the basis of considerations that were basically academic and objective and certainly not communal and political, which would jeopardize any serious and meaningful academic pursuit in the country. Furthermore, the theory recently put forward on the Indus Valley civilization was highly unscientific and whimsical, the resolution said. The conference wanted the Centre to give Dravidian South its rightful and legitimate share in the history books and to withdraw the new syllabus prepared and published recently by the NCERT, which negated national unity and integration. In another resolution, the conference appealed to the Centre not to ignore the Dravidian languages while extending financial assistance to living Indian languages. It was further demanded that Tamil, the oldest of the Dravidian languages, be declared a Classical language in view of its historicity and hoary past.