Why is that woman sitting on a tree branch? What is she signalling with her left hand to a tiger, standing on the ground? Why is the tiger’s head turned backwards? What do the signs of a script — a fish, a jar with two handles, two vertical strokes and so on — inscribed above the woman, seek to convey? How did the engraver accommodate all this within the cramped space of a seal, measuring, say 3 cm by 2.5 cm, found in a trench at Mohenjo-daro?
Hearths, where beads were made, in one of the trenches at Rakhigarhi. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
On April 6, 2022, inside a tent near the trenches at the Harappan excavation site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana, Shiv Kumar Pushpakar, photographer from The Hindu, senior epigraphist V. Vedachalam and this writer were shown a tiny masterpiece of glyptic art. It was a sealing, not a seal. Within a circular piece of unbaked clay not more than 1.5 cm in diameter, a master engraver had carved with clarity and precision a realistic motif of an elephant. Above the elephant were seven signs/ characters of what is called the Indus Script.
A tiny piece of glyptic art clearly showing an elephant and Harappan script. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
More questions than answers
“In 1875 at Harappa, Major-General Clerk, who was the Commissioner of Awadh, discovered the first seal which had the engraving of a humpless bull and six signs above it,” says a post titled, “The Indus Script — Introduction,” published in November 2009 on the website Varnam. The post adds: “One hundred and thirty-four years later, we don’t know what is written on these seals; there are many decipherments but no consensus. While papers are coming out, applying various statistical methods to find out if the Indus seals encode a linguistic system, there is another debate over whether these small... steatite seals with random-looking inscriptions represent Indo-European, proto-Dravidian, Munda or some other language...
“When it comes to the Indus seals, we want the answers to these questions: What is the script? What is the language? What is the subject matter? Were the Harappans Vedic people or Dravidians?”
Unfortunately, the signs of the Harappan script are mute. We do not know what they seek to convey. Multiple languages would have been spoken over the 1.5 million square kilometres of the Indus empire. But all these languages died with the Harappan Civilisation.
Professor Asko Parpola, a leading scholar on the Indus script, said in a lecture: “Since the 1920s, ceaseless archaeological research has revealed some 1,500 Harappan sites in Pakistan and north-western India. The Harappan realm in the Greater Indus Valley is one of the earliest cradles of civilisation. Its urban culture is among the first four in the world to possess a script of its own. Some 5,000 short Indus texts from more than 50 sites are known today, and much other data as well has accumulated.
Underlying language
“But the decipherment of the Indus script has remained the most intriguing problem pertaining to this impressive city culture that initiates Indian civilisation. The Indus Script vanished together with the Indus civilisation, which collapsed many centuries before hymns composed in Vedic Sanskrit begin the historical period in South Asia around 1000 BCE.”
“The identity of the Indus language is perhaps the most important puzzle about the Indus civilisation,” says Parpola in his magnum opus — The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. He adds, “In the third millennium BCE, it is quite likely that many dialects, and perhaps even languages were spoken in the Indus. But we may be sure that just one language was used in writing the Indus Script, because the sign sequences of its inscriptions are repeated throughout the Indus realm.” Several Indus Script scholars, including Parpola, agree that the language underlying the Indus Script is Dravidian.
The Wonder that was Harappan Civilisation; Curated by T.S. Subramanian, The Hindu Group, ₹3,999.
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