Interview
The Madras Indus scholar
Interview
BY I Sundar Ganesan
What first propelled you to study the Indus script?
Early
in the 1960s, I began working on the cave inscriptions of Tamil
Nadu. They are the earliest records of not only Tamil but of any
Dravidian language. So I spent several years visiting the caves,
copying the inscriptions and published a number of papers. In
between, I spent a dozen years in New Delhi, and became enchanted
with the Indus script specimens I saw in the National Museum.
Soon thereafter, I began working on it. In addition to the concordance*
that I ultimately prepared in cooperation with computer scientists
in Bombay, I have published a series of papers at three levels.
First,
there are about half a dozen papers on the statistical analysis
and such linguistic features as can be recognised without reading
the language. Second, I began working on the meaning of some of
the obvious ideograms. These are pictures of objects which can
be recognised directly as representing a subject like a
man carrying a bow and arrow, who can be an archer. A human being
with two horns may represent an important person or god, and so
on. The other method is called rebus, that is, the
transfer of sound from one picture which can be easily recognised
to another word with the same sound but different meaning. The
well-known example of this is the Dravidian min, which means fish,
but also means star. So a fish can be drawn to indicate a star
considered as a deity.
The
concordance you created seems to have required a Herculean effort.
Do you see any scope for further expansion?
The first concordance in the pre-computer age was made by Hunter,
an Englishman in India who was in the Indian Educational Service.
He aligned all the signs from their outward form and prepared
the concordance. But subsequently more seals have been found at
Mohenjodaro, Harappa and other new sites. [Finnish scholar] Asko
Parpola and his colleagues have published a concordance; and in
India, I, with the help of computer scientists at the Tata Institute
of Fundamental Research, published our concordance. The first
healthy sign is there is a lot of common ground between these
three concordances. While more seals have been found, they only
confirm what has been found earlier; the concordance shows that
there is an underlying order. This order can come only from an
underlying language.
I
have gone further in my analysis, and I claim to have isolated
two kinds of suffixes in the language nominal suffixes
at the end of names, and suffixes which indicate what are called
cases. We also know that the adjective appears before
the noun it qualifies. Then, we know the numerals. Progress has
also been made in discovering the direction of writing, which
is mostly from right to left, with some exceptions. We can also
segment words and phrases. Well, that is good progress. In my
view, the Indian tradition, mythology, religion, history, folklore,
art, etcetera form the Rosetta Stone for decipherment. We can
apply what we know of the Indian tradition to the pictorial figures
in the Indus seals and try to work out what they could have represented.
There
are periodic reports of Indus script being deciphered. Are there
standard methods to test the validity of claimed decipherments?
The best summary and evaluation of the work done so far is Gregory
Possehls book, The Indus Age: Its writing. I myself have
reviewed five claims to decipherment two based on Sanskrit,
two on Tamil and one claiming that the script is merely a collection
of numbers. My conclusion is negative that none of the
decipherments has been successful.
The
first test is the direction of the Indus script. The one fact
on which most scholars agree is that the Indus script reads generally
from right to left. So this is the first test, which can eliminate
non-serious attempts. The second test comes out of the progress
achieved in segmentation of words. An Indus text can be segmented
into separate words and phrases. Any decipherment will have to
conform to these segments.
Another
method is to match the frequency-distribution analysis of the
script with similar analysis for the candidate language. The two
frequency-distributions should match. To give an example, in English
the letter e has the highest frequency, of about 12
percent. If I say that the Indus script is written in English
and there is one character which occurs with 10 percent of total
frequency, then that must be e. There are other restrictions.
In some languages, certain sounds do not occur in the beginning.
There are other languages where certain combinations of consonants
are not permitted, and so on. Applying these three tests, I can
say that none of the decipherments so far have passed all the
tests.
Is
research on the Indus civilisation active at the moment?
There is very little interest in the Indus script in the West
there are very few people working on the Indus script around
the world. The one exception is India, but research in India has
gotten inextricably mixed up with politics: the Hindu nationalistic
scholars claim the language is Sanskrit, while the Tamil nationalistic
scholars claim it to be a form of Dravidian. Both claims have
become suspect because of their political background. Any claim
from an Indian scholar becomes suspect because one immediately
asks what is the mother tongue or political affiliation of the
scholar. A scholar from another country is happily free of this
problem. I envy that freedom, but I too have an advantage: I am
a son of the soil. The traditions of India, its mythology, its
religions, its culture, its art, are in my blood, and therefore
I may have insights which people who are not the inheritors of
this culture may not have. This is a subjective reaction, but
such resources as we have must be put to best use.
Does
the 2006 discovery of the Neolithic stone axe at Sembiyan Kandiyur
in Tamil Nadu extend the area of influence of Indus civilisation?
Let me first say that this is the greatest epigraphical and archaeological
discovery made in Tamil Nadu in the recent past. Two stone axes
were discovered accidentally by a school teacher who was digging
in his backyard to plant banana saplings. One of the axes is incised
with four graffiti-like marks. Fortunately he gave the axes to
his friend, a trained archaeologist. The inscribed stone was brought
to me, and I was immediately able to identify the four characters
as being in the Indus script.
But
one can have differences of opinion in interpreting the signs.
As the axe was found in the lower Kaveri Valley, where there are
no hills, it could not have been made locally. So it must have
come by trade. The nearest Neolithic centres in Tamil Nadu are
in Dharmapuri District, adjoining Karnataka, and it is known that
Harappans were in contact with Karnataka because the gold in the
ornaments of Mohenjodaro is supposed to have come from there.
And we also know about the existence of Daimabad, a Harappan site
in the Godavari Valley, in Andhra Pradesh. So it is not farfetched
to think that late Harappan influence could have spread to Tamil
Nadu also.
One
thing I would like to emphasise is that it is only in Tamil Nadu,
and nowhere else in India, that the particular sign which I have
identified as muruku occurs continuously. With the exception of
a single seal found at Vaishali in Bihar, nowhere in India has
this particular sign recurred in the post-Harappan period. Therefore
I do think it is a continuation of the earlier tradition, and
it is likely that a religious symbol would have survived. It is
quite possible that after the Indus script was forgotten and was
no longer a system of connected writing, individual symbols, particularly
those which were considered to be divine, have persisted
such as the swastika and the muruku symbols.
Will
Pakistani experts who are working in the Mohenjodaro and Harappa
regions be welcomed at the Indus Research Centre?
Why not? I think our colleagues in Pakistan should be invited
to deliver talks on their latest discoveries and share their experiences
with the people here. Similarly, there are people in Sri Lanka
who are interested in the Indus script. There is also the question
as to whether the Brahmi script, which is the parent script of
all Southasian scripts, is itself derived from the Indus script.
The idea is not far-fetched, and requires looking into. Scholars
from countries like Sri Lanka, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia
would all be interested to join in the investigations. What is
required is a truly free academic atmosphere free of bias,
nationalistic or linguistic, and with a commitment to get at the
truth wherever it may lead.