New Delhi: The ambiguity associated with the context and usage of the Indus signs has made the problem of the Indus writing system more challenging. But this has not deterred scholars worldwide from attempting to decipher it.
“The day this script will be deciphered, the history of India will go back a minimum of 3,000 years. Therefore, it is one of the most significant issues as far as the history of this country is concerned,” said Alok Tripathi, additional director general, ASI at the Gyan Bharatam International Conference at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan.
Tripathi chaired the session titled ‘Decipherment of Ancient Scripts: Indus, Gilgit and Sankha’, where seven scholars across the world presented their research on the Indus writing system.
Tripathi was joined by ASI director general YS Rawat, Union culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal, and senior ASI officials on 11 September, the first day of the Conference.
“The disappearance of the script is an unresolved issue in Indian archaeology and the world over,” Rawat said.
The Indus script is one of the most fascinating puzzles of Indian history.
Tripathi said that the British initially taught that the history of India began with Alexander’s invasion. “In the 1920s, when excavations were carried out at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, things changed,” he said.
Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, there is no Rosetta stone for the Indus script. In January this year, Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin announced a million-dollar prize for decoding it.
The puzzle of the Indus script
For the last two decades, astrophysicist Nisha Yadav has been working on the Indus text. People across fields are taking an interest in deciphering the script, and everyone has their method.
“The main problem is that the texts are very short. The average number of signs is just five, and the longest single–line text consists of 14 signs of the Indus script,” said Yadav during her presentation.
A researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), her paper, titled ‘Understanding the Indus Script: How Far Have We Come?’, delved into patterns in the script.
The Indus Valley Civilisation spanned an area of about 1.5 million square kilometres, covering the entirety of Pakistan, the northwestern parts of India, and some parts of Afghanistan and Iran.
Yadav said that there is no answer to the question of what the Indus people wrote. “But scholars infer the probable usage of the Indus script based on archaeological context and parallels with other ancient scripts,” she said.
Yadav used computational tools and techniques to identify the syntactic framework of the script. She found the frequency of signs such as pairs, triplets, and quadruplets in the Indus text corpus.
“The major conclusions of our study so far were that the script has unique syntax with an underlying logic in its structure,” said Yadav, adding that we can look into the stratigraphic aspects of where the object was found. The process involved analysing rock layers to make to make inferences about the Indus script.
Bahata Mukhopadhyaya, a software engineer, focused on the script’s structural nature and mercantile origins in her presentation.
“The Indus script is not spelling-based but meaning-based, and the use of the script was for administration, commercial, taxation, and licensing purposes,” said Mukhopadhyay.
She added that the structures on the seals are not phonetic and are logographic—individual symbols represent different things.
Generally, the main rival claims to the Indus script are from the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian language families.
“There is a prevalence of ancestral Dravidian language in the Indus Valley Civilisation [IVC], but it doesn’t mean that the other [Indo-Aryan] language group did not exist in IVC,” she argued, adding that Sanskrit was not the corresponding language for the Indus script.
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Claims on the Indus script
Karuna Shankar Shukla claimed that the language of the Indus Valley Civilisation was Vedic Sanskrit and Prakrit, and the script is old Brahmi or Vaidiki.
Some people in the audience visibly smirked.
Shukla claimed that the text on seals found from Indus sites forms words such as ‘Lord Ganesha’, ‘Sri’, ‘Panca Patra’, ‘Sri Rama’, ‘Padma Sri’, ‘Padma’, and ‘Krishna’.
“The nature of the script is ideographic and syllabic, which evolves into an alphabetic form. Indus belongs to the Mahabharata period,” Shukla said. His paper is titled ‘Decipherment of the Indus Script: A New Approach’.
Bharat Rao aka Yajnadevam studied the script through the cryptogram approach.
Rao, who started working on the Indus script during Covid-19, claimed that it corresponds to post-Vedic Sanskrit. However, his research paper, ‘A Cryptanalytic Decipherment of the Indus Script’, has not gone through a peer review yet.
Although the Indus script has been studied for decades, there is no consensus yet on the total number of symbols in it. Based on recent excavations, corpus expansion and digitisation have become a necessity.
“Not only will it help in having a central repository, it will also improve the estimates when we do any kind of statistical studies,” Yadav said.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)