The story so far:

On January 5, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin announced a $1-million prize for experts or organisations in the event of their success in deciphering the scripts of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). He made the announcement at the inauguration of an international conference to mark the centenary of the IVC discovery, which was disclosed through an article published in September 1924 by the then Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) John Marshall. That the Chief Minister of a southern State in the country had made such an announcement was due to the possible Dravidian connection with the IVC. Notwithstanding the political dimension of the Dravidian concept, historians, archaeologists and linguistic scholars have been debating over the Dravidian hypothesis ever since the publication of Marshall’s article.

How do scholars define the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC)?

The IVC, also called the Harappan Civilisation, spanned 2,000 sites across 1.5 million sq. km. in the territories of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan during the Bronze Age (3000-1500 BCE). It had a wider geographical area than the combined areas of its contemporary civilisations — Egyptian and Mesopotamian. Talking of the IVC’s importance, Pakistan’s veteran archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani, in the December 1973 issue of UNESCO Courier, observed that the Valley lies across “ancient migration routes from central and western Asia to India.” The IVC introduced urban life for the first time in the valley when similar civilisations had developed on the banks of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates valleys.

Why is deciphering the Indus script important?

Other scripts encountered in the contemporary Mesapotomian and Egyptian civilisations had been deciphered in a more satisfying manner, But, the non-decipherment of the Indus script prevents scholars from providing a complete picture of Harappan culture, which is why scholars tend to call it a “mystery script.”

What is the Dravidian hypothesis?

The Indus script carries proto-Dravidian references — this is the position of scholars including Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Father Heras, Yri Valentinovich Knorozov, Walter Fairservis, Iravatham Mahadevan, Kamil Zvelebil, Krishnamurti and Asko Parpola — which can be found in the latest study on Indus signs and graffiti marks of Tamil Nadu.

The IVC “is non-Aryan and pre-Aryan,” argued Mahadevan in his article published in The Hindu on May 3, 2009. Attributing “solid archaeological and linguistic evidence,” the scholar, who passed away in 2018, emphasised that “the Indus script is a writing system encoding the language of the region (most probably Dravidian)”. Ruling out Aryan authorship of the civilisation, he hastened to add that this did not automatically make it Dravidian. Yet, “there is substantial linguistic evidence favouring the Dravidian theory: the survival of Brahui, a Dravidian language in the Indus region; the presence of Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda; the substratum influence of Dravidian on the Prakrit dialects; and computer analysis of the Indus texts revealing that the language had only suffixes (like Dravidian), and no prefixes (as in Indo-Aryan) or infixes (as in Munda),” Mahadevan wrote. As the Dravidian models of decipherment had still little in common except certain basic features, “it is obvious that much more work remains to be done before a generally acceptable solution emerges,” according to him.

What does the latest work have to offer?

Commissioned by the Tamil Nadu government’s State Department of Archaeology (TNSDA), the study, which is morphological in nature, reveals that nearly 90% of the graffiti marks found during excavations at archaeological sites in the State have parallels to those found in the Indus Valley Civilisation. “…the exact shapes and their variants found both independently and in composite forms vividly indicate that they were not accidental. It is believed that the Indus script or signs would have not disappeared without any trace[s], rather they would have transformed or evolved into different forms,” concludes K. Rajan, formerly professor with Pondicherry University and academic-research advisor to the TNSDA, and R. Sivanantham, joint director in the department, who carried out the study.

Defining the terms “graffiti” and “script,” the duo, in a monograph, explain that all the recognisable scratches engraved on the ceramics in south India and, to some extent, on Indus ceramics are identified as graffiti. The ones engraved on seals and other metal objects of the IVC are designated as script. Even though both were written by the same people, they were differentiated and documented as script and graffiti. “However, the extensive comparative study of graffiti marks and Indus scripts evidently suggests that both are undeciphered signs,” the two scholars observe.

Which project has preceded the work?

The findings of a two-year-long project of the TNSDA, called ‘Documentation and Digitisation of Graffiti and Tamili (Tamil-Brāhmī) Inscribed Potsherds of Tamil Nadu’, have formed the basis of the monograph.

Aimed at documenting, compiling and analysing the graffiti bearing potsherds and Tamili inscribed potsherds unearthed in archaeological excavations of the State, the project, launched during 2022-23, seeks to compare those graffiti marks with the Indus script to explore whether any cultural relationship existed between the two.

The datasets from the project suggested that 15,184 graffiti-bearing potsherds were reported from 140 sites in the State and nearly 14,165 sherds were documented. Of them, nearly 2,107 signs had been morphologically categorised within a group of 42 base signs, 544 variants and 1,521 composites. Any additional strokes added to the base signs were considered variants of the base signs while a group of signs containing more than one base sign was regarded as a composite sign. “Several signs encountered in Tamil Nadu had exact parallels in the Indus scripts. Likewise, some signs had near parallels. These signs probably evolved from the base signs. Out of 42 base signs and their variants, nearly 60% of them found their parallels in the Indus script,” the document explains.

How has the question of cultural contact between the IVC and south India been explored by the work?

The monograph talks of a “possibility of cultural exchanges.” Even though the occurrences of identical graffiti marks in south India suggest a kind of cultural contact, one needs more material evidence and tangible data to support or strengthen the view.

The recent chronometric dates indicate that when the Indus Valley experienced the Copper Age, south India experienced the Iron Age. “In this sense, the Iron Age of South [sic] India and the Copper Age of Indus are contemporary.” If that is so, there is a “possibility of cultural exchanges either through direct or intermediate zones,” the authors of the monograph point out.

The document goes on to state that the occurrence of a large number of carnelian and agate beads and high-tin bronze objects, particularly from Iron Age graves, give a clue about the contact, as carnelian, agate, copper and tin have to come from the north or elsewhere. Besides semiprecious stones and copper, a few more cultural items are required to prove the existence of contact “convincingly,” the authors state, calling for future explorations, excavations, scientific investigations and historical linguistic analysis.