Mystery of Indus Valley Script

Indus Valley Script

The Tamil Nadu Government has announced a one million dollar prize for cracking the Indus Valley script.During the last century numerous attempts have been made on the language it represents.Even its character had been a matter of debate since it is found on goods traded in and transported to distant and sometimes foreign lands,it has been argued,the signs are likely to indicate the nature of those goods and their quantity.Or may be the place of their origin.But it cannot mean that it was restricted only to trade.In one Indus Valley site a long board,possibly some kind of a signboard of a shop or factory,has recently been found apart from hundreds of one inch square brick tablets in most sites .That seems to indicate that the script was not restricted to commercial use.And it was rather likely to be syllabic or phonetic rather than pictographic or ideographic.Particularly because the lines of signs at times do not stop at the end of line but it spills over to the line below.The script is written from right to left as with the Arabic script.

But the most controversial point is the identity of the language group it represents.The ‘indigenous Aryan’ theorists belonging to the saffron camp  are stubbornly attached to the notion that it was of Indo-Aryan origin,and that it was most probably Sanskrit.

It is important for the Hindutva school to establish that Sanskrit is the fountain of all knowledge in India as it clinches the claim that India is essentially Hindu.For having eliminated Buddhism with its corpus of Sanskrit texts after a millennium of its dominance from the arena it now enjoys sole unchallenged authority as the medium of India’s spiritual wisdom and heritage.

Now Sanskrit is a magnificent language in its own right But it certainly is not the mother of all Indian language.Though modern Dravidian languages have borrowed many words from it over centuries, especially through Brahminical links they are of a different origin and different language family.And there are strong claims especially from epigrapher Iravathan Mahadevan and Finnish scholar Asko Papola that the script belongs to the Dravidian family.Further the origin of Sanskrit from Indo-Aryan dialects through the attempts of grammarians trying to systematize and codify them to a uniform set of rules is of comparatively new origin.This incidentally puts paid to spurious attempts by cryptographers and computer wizards to decipher the ancient language as Sanskrit.

Though the languages spoken over areas once dotted with the Indus valley cities today are not Dravidian they are likely to be of historically more recent origin.It was  arguably the preponderant language in the region,and there is at least one language of Dravidian origin in the Northwestern origin there,Brahui.That must be the last remnant of a once dominant language in the region.

But why is its presence in the region so scanty today? It is probably the outcome of a massive exodus from the region.A language does not exist in regions where its speakers do not reside.

What then is the reason for that supposed exodus?First the region became uninhabitable for the autochthones there as climate change made the way of life(based on crops grown through plough cultivation) unviable in that region while new Indo-Aryan migrants from the Steppes found it more suitable to theirs.

I had suggested in an article on this portal about a year ago that the new archaeological finds in Dwarka Peth bearing Indus Valley signs indicated that it was a stop on the migration of a culture from Indus valley down to the South.In course of time it became a major settlement in its own right and its monuments are now under the sea.Its engulfment by the sea tantalizingly recalls the story of sinking of Krishna’s country in the sea in the MAHABHARATA.Krishna was vaguely non-Aryan in origin in his complexion and associations, though the Yadus are supposed to be impeccably Aryan.

Both these cultures and their ethnic bearers might have mingled in the South and subsequent use of the Brahmi script all over India out of both commercial and political needs seem to indicate the rise of kingdoms in the South where both  languages co-existed.Perhaps different sections of the population these two languages and both might have been used officially.

Hence the existence in newly  excavated antique sites like Keelazhi signs of both languages are found on potsherds.These could be relics of attempts to communicate in both languages. Some official claims,proclamations and records of royal administration or temple management.


Therefore in stead of treating them as insignificant heaps of rubble I believe efforts must be made to collect out of ruins as many such fragmentary finds as possible.Eventually these might turn into the Rosetta Stone of the Indus valley script.For it is not improbable that signs of both Tamil Brahmi and Indus valley scripts had been used to denote the same objects or convey the same meaning.

Hiren Gohain is a political commentator

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