Another scholar claims to have cracked Indus script

Another scholar claims to have cracked Indus script
SANTWANA BHATTACHARYA

NEW DELHI, JAN 28: It’s clearly a season for auspicious events. As multitudes surge to the Mahakumbh to establish a ritual link with the past, almost on cue, a Sanskrit scholar takes a dip in the invisible Saraswati. And the yet-to-be deciphered ``Indus script'', as it appears on Harappan seals, is cracked.

In two recently published books and a website, Sanskrit scholar and linguistic Dr Madhusudan Mishra puts forth the methodology he employed to crack the undecipherable Indus script. And he has concluded that the much-disputed script is nothing but early representation of Vedic Sanskrit in its infant stage.

Simply put, Mishra says the Harappan script -- a collection of individual signs that stands for syllables -- indicates that the language spoken in the Indus valley was of a simple, ``isolated'' type with no grammar. That is, the presumed earliest stage of development of any language.

He believes this to be the mother of not only Sanskrit and its numerous offshoots, but for all Dravidian and Austric tongues of India, and for early Iranian and also European Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic et al.

This comes close on the heels of the lively controversy generated over a book The Deciphered Indus Script by engineer-turned-historian N.S. Rajaram and palaeographist N. Jha.

Their thesis -- which identified Harappan civilisation with early Vedic culture -- was hotly contested by western Indologists led by Harvard scholar Michael Witzel.

A lot of dust was raised by derisive media write-ups that Rajaram's model was nothing but crude Hindutva married to a computer hoax -- claims that were met with ringing silence from the duo. Even a $1,000 reward to any scholar willing to endorse their theory went abegging.

Dr Mishra's model differs from previous bids to ``Aryanise'' Harappa, but treads the same terrain in spirit. The ex-lecturer from Sitamarhi -- a veteran of books on Sanskrit, Pali and Apabhramsa grammar -- has delved into his reading of Panini's phonetics to crack the riddle.

The ``primitive'' language of Indus, Mishra infers from evidence provided by the corpus of seals, was developing into the ``agglutinative'' stage (when compound words crop up) when a mysterious calamity dispersed the population.

Blending linguistics with a bit of climatology, Mishra says the branch that went south and east (Dravidian, Munda, etc), ``under unfavourable conditions of hot sun and hilly forests'', limped along at that early stage.

Whereas the branch that went west -- to the ``land of Soma plants'', i.e. the Iran-Afghan border -- prospered under salubrious climes and evolved into the third stage of language development, ``inflectional' (marked by sophisticated grammar).

This group, Mishra writes in his sweeping narrative, returned later to join the original settlers around Saraswati -- and spawned the great culture that gave to us the Rig Veda.

In a way, the interpretations reclaim the most ancient known Indian culture for the ``neo-Aryan'' brigade, putting their origin in the Indian heartland (barring a breezy visit to neighbouring pastures), and also neatly subsumes the Dravidian strain into it without so much as a hiccup.

Mishra's website (www.indusscript.net) offers many more details on his intuitive arrival at his conclusions, with clues to decipherment and an Indus dictionary to boot.

To be sure, the Indus script is a notoriously contentious field -- it represents the ultimate jigsaw puzzle for both professional historian-linguists as well as interested amateurs.

A recent attempt was reportedly made by a banker, and one is not sure that Mishra won't be the last in a long line.