Hyderabad: Kamal Haasan, the legendary South Indian actor-turned-politician, made a bold declaration that sent shockwaves through the linguistic landscape of the South: “Telugu, Kannada, and Tulu,” he claimed, “are all derived from Tamil.”

His comments sparked widespread outrage. In Karnataka, protests erupted, and academics along with cultural advocates labelled his words inaccurate, bordering on a “supremacist ideological slur”—a colonial echo masked in modern identity politics.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, Kamal Haasan, preparing for his likely Rajya Sabha debut under the DMK banner, stood firm in his convictions and refused to apologise. Despite receiving significant backlash from the Karnataka High Court for making insensitive comments, he is moving forward with plans to release his upcoming film, “Thug Life,” on June 5.

Supporters among pan-Dravidian intellectuals and politicians rallied behind him, claiming Tamil’s recorded antiquity ranging from 3,000 to 10,000 years and asserting that it predates Sanskrit.

They further argued that Sanskrit, Kannada, Telugu, Tulu and other South Indian languages were not even around when the Tamil language with its script was flourishing.

However, far from the noise of television studios and political rallies, the quiet village of Jwalapuram in the Kurnool district of Rayalaseema tells a different story that makes the claims of Haasan’s pan-Dravidian ideology topsy turvy.

Experts indicate that archaeological excavations at this site uncovered tools and evidence of life that date back significantly further than any of the modern languages: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Tulu. This archaeological site indicates that people lived there 75,000 years ago, right after the eruption of Mount Toba, a cataclysmic event in Sumatra that nearly eradicated humanity. Only about 3,000 to 10,000 human beings are reported to have survived the eruption.

At Jwalapuram, however, it is known that a small group of humans endured and adapted to the aftermath of Toba’s catastrophic impacts. In the shadow of modern Karnataka-Andhra Pradesh border areas, these survivors lived long before any known script existed. Additionally, the words “Jwala” (fire), “Puram,” “Pura,” and “Pur” (which mean village or town) are prevalent in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Tulu. This raises the question of whether these terms are remnants of human memory from the post-Toba era.

It further points out that the people currently residing in Tamil Nadu may not have been native to that region but could have migrated from the borders of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Their language may have originated from a common tongue spoken by those who migrated to present-day Tamil Nadu.

However, Hassan’s supremacist remarks come from ‘Dravidian’ – an umbrella term coined by the British Christian missionary Robert Caldwell, who published a seminal work on the comparative grammar of South Indian languages in 1856. This raises the question of whether the film star-turned-politician’s claims are based on 18th and 19th-century colonial studies, ignoring later developments, archaeological findings, and human migration studies.